Tim has a chat with Imperial Teen, who are very confusing even on a good day.
I spent the summer of ‘96 working in a factory that made wine boxes. All day, from 8:30 until 5:30, I would staple wine boxes together, whilst listening to the dross pumped out by Radio One’s daytime playlist - The Spice Girls, Alanis Morissette, Mark Morrison. Occasionally, there would be something I didn’t object to too strongly - Baby Bird, Space or, if I was lucky, ‘You’re One’ by Imperial Teen.
‘You’re One’ is the Imperial Teen song that you probably know, but probably don’t know who did it; three minutes of perfectly executed guitar pop, complete with angelic harmonies and the killer chorus hook from hell. The perfect song to chant along with your pissed-up rugby mates, until you realise you’re singing “Take it like a man boy/kiss me like a man boy”
“That tune’s a real gender-fuck sort of thing,” elaborates guitarist / vocalist Roddy, sitting in a grotty dressing room area in Paris’s Chesterfield Café. “You know, it’s saying that ‘macho’ isn’t necessarily one way or the other, and ‘feminine’ isn’t either....so it’s really satisfying to get that kind of a reaction.”
“I don’t think it’s a calculated thing,” adds Will, who shares the lead guitar/lead vocals with Roddy. “I don’t think we wrote that thinking ‘ha, we’re going to fuck with these people’”.
“No,” replies Roddy, “but it’s satisfying to see the big football thugs singing along. Anything that breaks stereotypes is a good thing”.
This statement should come as no surprise from the man who, in his other life as keyboard player for difficult-to-pin-down-bastards Faith No More, made stadiumfuls of Guns ‘n’ Roses fans jump up and down singing “I swallow, I swallow” and forced the testosterone-soaked metal world to open its eyes a little when he came out a few years back.
Imperial Teen are a contradiction in themselves. A boy-girl 4-piece (the aforementioned Roddy and Will, plus Joan - bassist and queen of the punk-rock snarl - and Lyn, who is OFFICIALLY the sexiest drummer in the world) built from the San Francisco punk scene, they switch around instruments both live and on record, so Roddy plays drums, Joan plays guitar, Lyn plays bass, and all of them sing.
“It’s fun to play drums,” says Roddy, with a childish grin plastered across his face, “I’d never done it before and it feels really good, and it’s different.”
“It’s to keep things interesting for ourselves,” adds Joan. “It keeps a freshness. I want to play drums too, but I can’t right now, I can’t play at all.” It seems that the only purpose behind it is because, as always seems to be the case at every band rehearsal I’ve ever seen, everyone wants a go on the drumkit. Joan agrees, “but also Lyn wants to get out from behind the kit, to be up front.”
‘Seasick’, the band’s debut, is by no means a masterpiece, but on it lurk some moments of purest post-Pixies pop-punk, from the Eddie Cochran / Nirvana / Pumpkins collision of ‘Balloon’ to the sexual identity confusion of ‘Butch’. And over the whole album hangs the ghost of Kurt Cobain.
“He was a friend of mine and some of that stuff was coming in when we were writing it,” says Roddy. “But even if he hadn’t been a friend, it was a heavy thing for the music world, the whole Kurt thing, and it was at that specific time right after he died that we made the record, so there were bits of that in the air”.
But whereas Kurt was appalled to see the local rednecks pogoing along to ‘In Bloom’, or the MTV slackers singing “Here we are, now entertain us”, Imperial Teen look like they will happily mislead their audience. The new material in the live show, which is apparently to be recorded for the second album in the next couple of months, looks like it will continue this trend. “It’s great,” muses Roddy, “straight boys identifying with queer ideas. Anything that breaks stereotypes is a good thing”.
Imperial Teen were talking to Tim, in May 1997.