Pitchshifter have completed a hectic festival tour and travelled the road with bands such as Gravity Kills. JS Claydon is offering his insights into life, the universe and everything, whilst on tour to promote Pitchshifter's electrifying "punk and bass" (a jungle/punk crossover) album "www.pitchshifter.com".
What do you think about cyberculture?
"I think cyber is a word like PC, a word that has become ridiculous. On the other hand, we can write a new album on the road in America; email t-shirt designs to people; get samples from the net and we'll do a net tour diary. Technology can be used in a good or bad way, and used in the right way, it's a fucking cool thing. It opens up avenues. I can do interviews with people in Japan and there is no way I could do that at home."
You put free samples on your CD. Didn't that make you rather unpopular with your publishers?
"They didn't like it, but we don't care. We do stuff because we can. We got paid rather a large sum of money to appear on the Mortal Kombat 2 soundtrack, and everyone called us sell-outs, but we took the money and built a website where we can give away samples and screensavers. If everyone did that, it would be so much more interesting. There's a myth that if you give out samples then everyone can sound like you, but if you and I sat down with the same 50 samples, you could write a techno song and I could write a love song. It's all in the eye of the beholder. We're a unique band."
You signed to Geffen, which was a bit of a credibility risk per your indie roots. How did the shift from indie to major label affect you?
"Well, we were starting to move in a direction where Earache didn't know what to do with the band and we didn't think that Earache could do what we wanted them to do with us. At the end of the day we are artists and we live from doing this, and it should be exploited to its full. And so Earache let us go, and we wrote this record with no label in a garage studio and we went there every day and said, right, there's no pressure from anyone as to what music we were going to write or when it had to be done, so we just had fun, every day in a garage for a couple of months. In a shitty part of Nottingham. Then we sent out three track tapes to everyone, and loads of labels wrote back and just said "No, this music's insane, I've no concept of what to do with it whatsoever. Write some better songs, see you later" and we were like, fuck you. So we kept playing them and a guy called Brian Long flew over from New York to see us at the Camden Palace. He just said "I think your band's amazing and I want to sign you."
There's this myth that you sign to a major label and the next day the Major Label Men In Black turn up with their suitcases and dark glasses and go "I'm gonna make you sound like Nine Inch Nails and this is the music you are going to make." It wasn't anything like that. The album was written before Geffen were involved. The last four songs that were written whilst we were on Geffen, they didn't change one note, or tell us what order the tracks had to go in. They've been far more supportive than Earache. There's quite a lot of pressure at Earache to be a certain way, like the other bands that are on the label, but Geffen have just been really supportive. Plus they're taking a chance on Pitchshifter, we're not guaranteed sales, we're not Mariah Carey - we're not instantly going to sell ten million."
Nine Inch Nails are doing a more toned down, more poppy version of your particular brand of jungle punk. Does the Stateside success of titles like NIN's "The Perfect Drug" bode well for Pitchshifter?
"Well I hope so. I'd like to buy me nan a present. She was 82 today. I think people are a lot more loyal in America. They don't pander to UK fashions - it's trendy to like The Chemical Brothers this week, not next week. In America, people who used to like Ministry still like Ministry. I have a lot of respect for that. I like the Dead Kennedys. I have always liked The Dead Kennedys, whether they are fashionable or not. I followed the career of the Jam all the way through my youth, even the bad patches, on to Paul Weller because I respected what Paul Weller was doing. Mods and punks we are! heheheh!"
