Monday 7 July 2008

Meeting of the Month: Midnight Juggernauts

If Australia’s Midnight Juggernauts seemed a bit frazzled when I met them, maybe it was because they had just come from a “really weird” trip to Scotland that involved cars bursting into flames in front of their tour bus and a huge fight with a budget airline over a £2,000 excess baggage charge! The stresses of touring…

JT: You’ve just been playing Rockness and you’ve got a bunch of other festivals lined up this summer: what are your best and worst festival experiences?

Andy: Playing Big Day Out, the biggest festival in Australia. The one in Sydney was the biggest show we’ve ever played – 45,000 people. The main stage was inside a sports stadium - we’re officially stadium rockers now!

Vin: Our worst festival experience would be last year, our first European festival, which was Eurockéennes – worst because we missed our time slot. We were driving from Paris to the festival grounds and we realised our driver was driving in the opposite direction. We got there three hours late or something ridiculous. But we thought we’ve come all this way, we’ll play at 3am: we don’t care. And the only people left were like the drunkards at the end of the night who didn’t know if we were a band or some blurry colours in the distance.

JT: This summer, at the festivals you are going to, what or who are you looking forward to?

Vin: We’re playing a lot of festivals, so we’ve been seeing a lot of bands we’re really into: It was great to see Portishead, both at Coachella and at Primavera. Prince was interesting.

Andy: I think we play a festival with Devo somewhere – is that Japan? Fujirock? That will be cool.

Daniel: All these bands you want to see all playing together over here - it’s so different from the festivals in Australia: it’s crazy.

JT: When I was having a few beers with a mate the other night he, very cleverly – he thought – said to me why don’t you ask Midnight Juggernauts if they run on Midnight Oil? [MJ laugh] What’s the best way to punish him for that appalling pun?

Daniel: Cover him with oil and burn him to death I think.

Vin: Or cover him with oil and give him a nice back massage.

Daniel: One of the two.

Vin: I’m the lover; he’s the fighter.

JT: You’re playing at the Botanique, which is a former botanical gardens, if Midnight Juggernauts was a plant, what plant would you be?

Vin: The Venus Fly-Trap: we mean business, we’re beautiful to look at, but if you get too close…

JT: On your North American tour, you [Vin] kept getting mistaken for Gaspard from Justice. Did you take advantage of this confusion?

Vin: I did at the beginning. It all started one of the very first nights of the tour, in LA - Justice were doing a DJ set and I turned up to the venue with Xavier, so people automatically thought I was in Justice. People were coming up to me with [Justice] records to sign; they took photos with me. I’m not saying I slept with any Justice groupies, but I did well out of it!
JT: You’ve got quite a space age, intergalactic thing going on in your music: when and if they have commercial space flights, would you go on one?

Vin: Oh yeah. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Daniel: Aren’t they doing that soon? Virgin Galactic? We want to be the first band that plays on that.

Andy: We got asked to play at the launch of this robot developed by Honda - Asimov.

Vin: I was excited, but then we went onto Youtube, saw him in action, and our hearts sank: he’s walking up these stairs and as he’s walking he just tips over.

Daniel: And all these Japanese people come running and put sheets over him …At least we’d stand out [if we did the show] – there wouldn’t be much competition.

Vin: I thought it was kind of nice seeing him fall over like that, because it reveals human frailty: he’s just like us, he’s not perfect.
JT: You just mentioned Japan – I was looking on Youtube and I found some footage of you playing in China last year – there were loads of people with weird masks and hats in the crowd: what was going on? What was it like playing there?

Andy: We did two nights at this one venue [in Shanghai] and one of them was a masquerade ball.

Daniel: We didn’t have any costumes, so we went into this mall that was full of illegal DVDs and clothes and we ended up buying this red t-shirt and cutting it and making Rambo headbands. What else did we wear? These animal t-shirts: Andy’s was like a hawk or a falcon; mine was a skeleton of Michael Jackson.

Vin: It was fun getting to play China - it was a good opportunity.

Daniel: It was like a holiday.

Vin: We came back with loads of DVDs.

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