Intervju - Scott Hill, Fu Manchu Fu Manchu tillhör den skara band som bestämt sig för at all form av utveckling är av ondo. Under de senaste tio åren har de levererat sin fuzztyngda stonerrock med överlag gott resultat, även om det kan tyckas att musiken mest är en konstant upprepning av föregående släpp. Med sitt tionde fullängdsalbum, "We must obey", hamrar bandet på som vanligt. Inget revolutionerade rent soundmässigt, men som alltid en del låtar som fäster sig mer än andra. Vi tyckte att det kunde vara läge för en liten pratstund och hade turen att bli uppringda av sångaren Scott Hill. Här nedan följer samtalet som bl a kom att handla om nya plattan, coverlåtar och Scotts personliga hjältar Black Flag. SH: Hi, this is Scott from Fu Manchu. Hi, how are you? SH: Good, how are you doing? Pretty good! Are you calling from California? SH: Yes I am. Right on! How´s the weather there? SH: It´s pretty nice. Sunny and 100 degrees. The new album sounds really good and my first impression of it was that it´s a bit heavier than the last couple of albums. Is there any truth in that? SH: It might be. I think the songs are a little bit more aggressive than what we´ve been doing. That might have something to do with the heaviness. We kind of pulled out the old fuzz pedals and the guitars are a little heavier, dirtier than usual, so... How did you come up with the title of the album? SH: I don´t know! It just came to me one day, the "We must obey" thing and I wrote it down thinking it´ll make a cool title. I don´t kow, it just came to me one day. Who´s been the main song writer in the band? Is that you? SH: Yeah, on this record I pretty much would come to practise with most of it. We all kind of work on the songs together, but with this record I kept coming to practise with ideas and we´d all work on them. So for the most part on this record I wrote most of the stuff. When you write songs, are there a lot that end up not being used or do you go into the studio with ten songs and that´s it? SH: For this record I think we wrote twenty songs and then once we got closer going into the studio we kind of narrowed it down to about fifteen and then once we got into the studio...we ususally record everything like demo wise, so right before going into the studio we kind of picked our favorite songs, the ones that are on the record. And I think there´s maybe one or two extra that we recorded, that we haven´t finished yet. But usually we have it set in our minds what songs we really want to focus on. How do you guys record? Do you do a lot of stuff live with the entire band in the studio or does everyone do their stuff and then you add it together? SH: Usually we all record the song live all four of us together in the same room playing the song. You gotta make sure the drums played perfect, or as perfect as we can get it. So usually we do the whole song live and if we gotta do any overdubs we go back and do it and usually I go back and do the vocals and add some guitar stuff. Cool! Did you produce this album yourselves or...? SH: Yeah, pretty much. We kind of had all the arrangements done, with the lyrics, vocals and all this stuff how we wanted it, before we went in and then we worked with a friend of ours, Andrew, who kind of got us the sound we wanted. It was pretty simple. What would you say is the major difference between producing it yourselves and having a producer doing it? SH: It´s good and bad. When you do it yourselves, everyones kind of happy with us four listening to it. Usually when you have someone coming in from the outside, that´s a fan of the band, they usually have other ideas or things you might not have thought of trying, and I do like that though. When we have someone like that, that offers ideas that we haven´t thought of or we haven´t heard...but with this record we kind of liked it like it was and that was it. Figured we could do it ourselves. Was it an easy or difficult album to make compared to the previous releases? SH: No, it was pretty easy. As I said, we really worked hard on the songs before we went in so we knew what we wanted to do before we got in the studio. We haven´t really had that much problems in the studio recording before, so they´re all fairly easy to record. How much does the choice of studio bring to the recording? Does that have any affect on your sound? SH: Sometimes it does. This last studio we went to, Grandmaster, we recorded our "In search of..." record and our "Action is go" record there, so we kind of were familiar with the studio. You get a certain drum sound. Yeah, it can affect the sound, but I think mainly to go in with a good engineer that can get the sound you want, than any studio´s gonna work out fine. Do you have a favorite track on the new album? SH: My favorite would probably be the song "Let me out" off the new record. I really like that one a lot. Cool! I totally love the second song "Knew it all along". It´s gotta really great riff in there. You do this cover of "Moving in stereo" by The Cars on the album and you give it a Fu Manchu make over, but I guess you can still hear parts of the original in it. Why that song? SH: Well, we´re big fans of The Cars and it´s a song we really like and I can´t remember if I ever heard someone do it before, so we just started playing it at practise one day and thought it was a fun one to play and I think we changed it around enough to make it sound like one of our own. Usually everytime we go in the studio we pick a cover song to do just for fun. We really liked that one and we liked playing it live, so we threw it on the record. You released and ep earlier, where, among other songs, you did Van Halen´s "DOA". Is that stuff you grew up with? SH: I think the other guys in the band like Van Halen a lot more than I do. I like that song a lot, but when I was a kid I kind of grew up with the old punkrock, hardcore stuff. That´s kind of my thing, but I do really like that Van Halen song and again, that´s a fun one to play and we changed it around enough to kind of make it sound like one of our own. How would you compare Fu Manchu today to when you started out, music wise and so forth? SH: I definitely, definetily think we´ve gotten a lot more aggressive, faster and angrier sounding. Usually as bands go on they get mellower and slow down, but I think we´re working in the opposite direction. We started slower and now we´re definetely faster and more aggressive. I definetely think that´s the biggest change, but you can still hear early stuff in us, the slower rock stuff. But I think the biggest change is that we´ve gotten a lot more aggressive. How did you end up on Century Media, because that´s a label with a lot of power metal bands and death metal and stuff like that? SH: Well, I don´t know. They kind of contacted us and we would like to sign with a label that knows what they´re doing. Even if we don´t sound like a lot of the stuff on that label, everyone there knows about us and they get us. They seem to have a lot of success with a lot of the heavy stuff and they´re local. They´re right in our area and everyone at the label is really cool and so far everything´s been really good. Did you sign of for just one album or several? SH: We signed on for three records and if things go well we can extend it. About the art work for the album. It was done by John McGill and hed did the ep as well, right? SH: Yeah, he did that and he did the last record. He´s a friend of ours and we kind of told him the title and a rough idea of what we were looking for and he came back with what´s on the "We must obey" record. It´s perfect! It´s what we were looking for. You´ve always had really really cool covers and mu favorite so far is "California crossing". I don´t know what it is. It´s just a simple picture, but it says a lot and there´s a great vibe to it. SH: Yeah, that´s actually my car. It´s my car and right at the beach where I live and that´s my wife, the blonde. That´s our daily life. That pretty much represents Fu Manchu. That picture is kind of the image I saw when I was a young kid going to the beach...I saw an El Camino, surf boards sticking out the back and I remember just looking at that car thinking "Man, I´d love to get one of those when I get older.". And I was finally able to get one and that is the perfect image for the title. Are all you guys into surfing and skateboarding? SH: Yeah, we all live down in southern California by the beach. We all grew up doing that stuff and I still do it every day I can. Going back to influences. How old were you when you picked up the guitar for the first time? SH: Let´s see...I think...maybe fifteen, in high school. And I definitely was influenced by punk rock bands. When I was young and got into it and finally managed to get a drivers liscence, I used to go see shows all the time. Just going to see punk bands that really got me into wanting to pick up a guitar and start a band. It looked like so much fun, you know. Was that Black Flag and stuff like that? SH: Yeah, I´d go see Circle Jerks, Black Flag and all that stuff. I just used to watch the guitar player in the band and it just looked like a lot of fun. I definitely wanted to get a guitar. Did you ever see The Misfits? SH: Yes I did. I saw them and Black Flag together at a show in 1983 and...I´m a big Misfist fan, but Black Flag is my all time favorite band. I was just blown away and The Misfits were really good as well so that was a great show. Where in California is it you live? SH: We´re about an hour south of LA, down by the beach. Do you know of Huntington beach? Sure! SH: Yeah, we´re a little bit south of there. It was an hour to go up to LA and there was a lot of bands that were playing in Orange County at the time, but I was a little young when all that was happening. But I had older friends and my parents were really cool and they´d let me go to the shows. Did you go to all those classic places like The Whiskey, The Troubadour and so on? SH: Yeah, all that stuff. I was young, but I was 6 foot three, as tall as I am now when I was like thirteen years old, so I could get into shows where you were supposed to be eighteen, but they let me pass. Were there any special guitarists that influenced you in any way? SH: Yeah, Greg Ginn from Black Flag! Favorite band and I remember just watching pictures of him and getting to see them live and videos of them. That´s why I´m playing the Clear guitar. I was like "Man, I really wanna get one of those guitars so bad!", because Black Flag has one. I got one and they´re just great to play. And now we´re sponsored by that guitar company, so it´s a good thing. About touring? Looks like you´re booked February through March with US tour dates. SH: Yeah, we start on the 27th of February and are out for about six or seven weeks, have a couple of weeks off and then we go to Europe for about seven weeks. So we´re coming to Sweden. The European tour starts on the 27th of April and goes to the middle of June. We´re busy. We come home from that and then go to Australia and New Zealand, come home and do the States again and then hopefully get to Europe again at the end of the year and then maybe do the States one more time and then hopefully get back into the studio and record another album. Does it ever get tiring being on the road that much? SH: well, my wife comes out to some of the shows. She´ll go on the first two weeks in Europe with us. I enjoy it. My favorite thing is playing live, so whenever we get a chance to turn up the amps and play live that´s a good thing. It never feels like a job or painful or anything. I´m always envious of all the rock´n rollers that get to travel the world and see all the cool places. SH: Yeah, I never thought I would´ve gotten to Europe, Australia...anywhere. I´ve pretty much been everywhere except Russia we´re working on that one as well. It´s great and my parents are very glad for me and that I get to do something I like doing. What´s the most exotic place you´ve been so far? Is it Australia or Japan? Placs like that? SH: Yeah! Anywhere in Europe. Japan was great. Australia we´ve been to about four or five times and that´s always good. Hell, even going to the middle of the US. Anywhere we get a chance to play is a good time for us. Are you bringing any bands along for the US shows and the European tour? SH: On the US tour there´s a band called Valient Thorr that´s gonna do the whole thing with us and they might do Europe. They´re working on that right now. If they can pull it off, we´ll probably be touring with them in Europe. They´re really good and I think you´ll like them. High energy rock band. Cool! Do you have any idea about Swedish music? SH: Yeah, I´m a big fan of The Hellacopters. Dozer I like a lot and a lot of the old hardcore bands like Mob 47. A lot of that early old hardcore stuff. Turnonegro. Are they from Sweden? No, Norway, but it´s close enough. SH: Yeah. Backyard Babies, there´s a lot of that stuff. Cool. Well, I got to see you on the "California crossing" tour when you played in Stockholm. I´m looking forward to seeing you guys again. SH: Cool, cool. We haven´t been to Europe in a while now. We´re itching to get back there. Ok,I guess that´s it! I wish you all the best with the album and the tour. Thanks! Bye, bye! Fu Manchu - Official website

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