Interviews - Old Interviews - NME Magazine 1997

Roger Morton interviews the Sneaker Pimps in DAYTON CONFUSED!
NME Interview - 16 August 1997

Wet and wild, she's a typical '90s child. At least, if you were drawing your inferences from the lyrics to the new Sneaker Pimps single `Post Modern Sleaze', that's what you might presume Kelli Dayton was. Some kind o' tattooed wild child X girl, chemical gen, artificial sweetheart thug of a late-20th century archetype.

Her photos have just the right amount of pouty exotic amalgamated hip style.
Her backing beats are slow and lo enough to imply the requisite rejection of the old indie ghetto. The words she sings, dangling amidst the limber, alien, gothfolk-trip-pop of the Sneaker Pimp sound web, are all wistful, spun out, dysfunctional sensuality. "She's wet and wild, a typical '90s child... " Well, not really folks. The only wet things round here are the terrapins swimming chaotically in an overcrowded tank trying to communicate telepathically with the petite, sensible, matter-of-fact, Birmingham girl
who has her nose pressed up against their glass cage.

"Aren't they weird?" says Kelli. "I used co have terrapins myself, but they grow a lot bigger than this if there's more room."
A bit like pop bands really. We are in a multiplex photo studio in London. Just down the corridor, Jake from My Life Story is being nagged into taking his shirt off. Further along, some unknown wannabes are getting press shots done. A framed Bryan Ferry stares moodily down from the wall. It's a busy day in the tank, and if you think that Kelli and her boy Pimp cohorts are in any way typical, then maybe that's down to the overcrowding.

"There's something bad about the music business," says Kelli, pausing to ponder the downside of her current situation. "A lot of the people who are in the music business, especially in America, they seem to lose whatever got them to this point. A lot of them seem to lose their soul. Lose their
spark."

So are you saying you're different, that you've got principles and integrity?

"I wouldn't call it integrity. I'd just call it taste."

PUSH your face up close to the Pimps and what can seem like an easy-to-file hybrid of trendiness, styling, kitten-clawing vocals and contemporary syncopation starts to separate out. Step up closer and they're not just types out of the stereo. They are real, striving, confused, arguing, individual specimens. If you've heard 'Six Underground' and 'Spin Spin Sugar and decided that they are a mere dry twig on the same tree that's given us Garbage, Portishead, Moloko, Lamb, Republica, Tricky and, erm, Dubstar, then
you've done them an injustice.

"Our only similarity with Dubstar is that we use the same vocal microphone," says Liam Howe.

Sneaker Pimps, see, are as kooky as free-range terrapins. As a coherent pop entity they are a mess. In the photographer's studio, founder members Liam and Chris Corner peep awkwardly in the mirror. Liam is tall and masculine. Chris is slight and feminine. The former gets his musical thrills listening to avantgarde composer John Cage. The latter gets his make-up tips from Nick Rhodes. Chris had his first shag to The Sugarcubes' 'Birthday'. Liam's first shag music was Landscape's 'Einstein A Go- Go'.

And that's only the start of it. Two supplementary Pimps (drummer Dave Westlake and bassist Joe Wilson) have already legged it after being told (not entirely inaccurately) by the photographer that Dave has the look of a psycho in his eyes. There is, in fact, a haunted look in the eyes of all of them.
"I remember talking to this reporter in America," says Chris blearily. "And I was at a particularly low point and it turned into this ridiculous therapy session not talking about the music at all, almost crying on this woman's shoulder. I fell in love with her because she was helping me on a really bad day."

The Pimps, see, have been in America big-time, and it has accentuated their various oddities. Where once there was a fully functional pair of Hartlepool buddies who got together because Liam started going out with Chris' sister and ended up doing smoky beats dance tracks as FRISK/Line Of Flight, there now slumps a pair chewed-up remnants.

"It seems like we are clinging on to sanity," says Liam. "Unless you're Status Quo, some hardened gigster, the boredom and excess is very odd. We were kind of put in the deep end when we started to do live music, we always knew we wanted to do live, it's an integral part. But we didn't expect it to
be like this. We didn't expect to be Japanese salesmen."

Where once there was a fresh faced fusion of Shirley Bassey-loving James Lavelle fans and a ex-punk singer from Birmingh: with psychobilly leanings, then now quivers three dollops of post-tour micro-psychosis squeezed from the giant toothpaste tube of Electronica in America. In the new digital rock climate, the Pimps have been shifting US units. They've schmoozed at the LA premiere of The Saint ('Six Underground' figured on the soundtrack). They've been 'checked out' by REM in New York. And they've stumbled back home via Euro gigging to wonder what-the-tripped- out-terrapin happened.

"Chris did a Reginald Perrin-style run into the sea in San Diego and gave himself to the waves," says Liam. "He was in his suit and tie and everything, in he went and I had to fish him out. It was a humbling moment, we walked back in the moonlight hand in hand."

" I got back and rang me mum and cried for about an hour," sniffs Chris.

Pop, see, has got them by the scruff. Starting off with the idea that it'd be a laugh to dive deep into the absurdity of it all, they're now feeling the damage. Chris keeps asking for interview therapy. Liam blabbers endless conceptual tautologies. Kelli mutters about her cold and breaking-down
tourbuses.

Dayton should, in fact, be the best equipped to cope. Her half Irish-Indian background in Bartley Green was stable and suburban, yet she was hanging out with the city-centre scuzz kids and singing in bands from the age of 16. She carries none of the hyper-analytical introspection that ensnares her
colleagues.

Do you reckon you're a typical '90s girl?

"No, I don't know, I've never known a typical person, so I don't know. I don't think I could really describe myself."

Do you like the idea of being an icon in a pop band?

"I just don't really think about that. If you knew what shambles we are as people I'm sure people wouldn't even follow us."

Do you feel exotic

"Sometimes. But not today".

Within the Pimps circuitry, Dayton is the enabling factor. She's what makes their selfconscious `now' styling lovable. The Prozac-flavoured ennui of the lyrics to their'Becoming X' debut album are written by lan Pickering - a journalist from Birmingham. The listless beats and magpie'd tinctures of the tunes are constructed by Liam and Chris with half an eye on cultural theory ('Post Modern Sleaze' is digital folk). Then Kelli comes along and sings the sensuality into it.

"If you get a sensual person singing sensual songs then it all becomes a bit obvious, like an angry person singing angry songs," she says. "So I like that combination. Because as a singer you couldn't be as numb as the music suggested. The music is about the middle ground, the grey area of not even thinking consciously but even that grey area to me is pretty strange and sensual."

That sounds very '90s. Very end-of-the-century.

"Yeah, I guess without really knowing it I suppose we are. We have no interest in repeating the past. And we have no interest in pretending to be pioneers of the future, so I think we are best placed in the now.
"But I think that we are different in that we are not about blabbering on about things that people have been blabbering on about forever. It's not just about love. There are a lot of real seething numbers, real anger. And I think when you really take those emotions out and look at them they are so much more interesting and humorous to sing about.

"I find love very hard to write and sing about without sounding like an absolute prat. It's a shame, but I think it's true. I do believe in monogamy and I'm very much in love with the person I'm with, I've written songs about him in the past but I can't understand people who write about love in its
birthday card form.

"I think if you look at the people who do write about that sort of thing, usually they're screwing 14-year-olds and taking cocaine up their ass. They're certainly not the puppy dogs they make themselves out to be in their songs. It's a way of making money. So at least you can try and be honest in what you do."

Kelli is not Celine Dion. She is a vocaliser of the grey truths about our lives. Roll-on roll-off sex ('Roll On'), drug hangovers ('Wasted Early Sunday Morning') and muddled emotions (everything else on the bleeding album). Not a frosty-style chick poseur then, but a real human being, with a real cold, shuffling off towards her "nervous breakdown in two months time".

That's Kelli, then. Rock tattoos. Backing vocals on Brian Ferry's next album. Sensible enough to talk about terrapins. Gets drunk in Marco Pierre White's poncey West End restaurant, and tells the visiting american music biz bigwigs to "F**k off, you American c**ts!"

"She's Jekyll and Hyde when she drinks," says Liam.

She was telling the waiter to 'suck his c**k' and pointing to me," says Chris.

Kelli might be responsible for the odd drunken outburst but the mangled behavioural contradictions which make the Pimps kind of charming are substantially down to Liam and Chris. We are, after all, dealing with a man (Liam) who confesses late into the interview that his greatest fear in life is of turning into Bill 'KLF' Drummond "because it would be the obvious thing to do," he trembles.

Liam, see, did art at Reading Uni. Having decided that all painters were traditional farts, him and a mate once cemented speakers playing a looped sample of Boney M's 'Painter Man' in the rafters of the uni painting area.Then they went away for a week.

From messing with the heads of the oil daubers it's a short absurdist hop to collaborating with Marilyn Manson on a track for the Spawn soundtrack album even though "generally speaking goths can burn in hell for all I care... it was a typical Sneaker idea of playing with fire and getting burned."

The Liam'n'Chris section of today's discussion comprises two hours of Liam accelerating into a hyperlinguistic gonzo cultural dissection. Meanwhile, Chris holds his head in his hands asking for help, struggling to keep his ex-Astrophysics student-from Hartlepool brain from melting down.

It's part of the wonder of the Pimps, and it's another thing that separates them from Dubstar, that they've just released a single which clearly displays full-on postmodern musical attributes while touting a lyric which slags off people who get into a bit of mix 'n' match lifestyle postmodernism - "She must be a Thelma or Louise / She must be a postmodern sleaze."

"I think it's self-critical , only last night we were saying that we were characters in our songs. Our songs are about middle-class people who buy into problems and think it's really chic to be f**ked up," says Chris.

So you're sleazy too?

"Yeah. We've bought into it, we've bought into sleaze. That's all part of the fashion label thing. We know it's sh*t, we know we're stupid, we know we are being had by corporate powers, but it's fun! That's what it comes down to: basic hedonism! "In a song like 'Six Underground' we can be arrogant but we can be totally humble. It goes, 'Don't think because I'm talking we're friends' which is a bit of a nasty line, but then it's saying, 'Jesus Christ! There is nothing, nothing at all that I'm interested in in my head! My head is just a pile of shi*e! There's not a single thought which entertains me!' It's just a struggle between confidence and total self-deprecation."

An hour later Liam is getting to the end of one long rant, taking in Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, street-chic furniture designer Tom Dixon's chairs, the chilling art school horror of Gene, and irony, sludge and the death of postmodernism, rounding off with a look at what it's like to be turning into willing- victim cliche magnets and selling your soul to 'the pop devil'.

It's been a stunning impersonation of Bill Drummond hijacking the rhetoric of the early Manic Street Preachers after a week in a cupboard with the texts of Jacques Derrida. And it's all cool stuff, but the pop photo factory around us has not spontaneously burst into flames and Jake from My Life
Story has not been saved from taking off his shirt.

The achievements of the hour are, however, twofold: a) Liam has made an incontrovertible case for the Sneaker Pimps not being just another brainlessly platitudinous style bauble that you can lump in willy-nilly with Dubstar and b) Chris has nearly scratched off the Nike symbol hand tattoo which he had done on a last afternoon in Arizona.

"So there is this absolute eclectic approach to commodity," continues Liam. "There's something extraordinarily important about following the discourse of the moment. And if that means you don't seem to have any innate pleasures or likes, then I think that's just the way forward! Confusion is our staple diet."

Taraaa! Chris looks up for the first time in 20 minutes. "You are talking b*****ks. He could stitch us up so badly with this rubbish."

Liam pauses to reassess.

"Yeah, but it's just today's talk," he concludes. "Some days we talk about drugs and f**king people. We just change and flip. It's not as if we sit around after a gig and discuss tonality. It's more a case of trying to get the birds."

In the crowded terrapin tank of post-postmodern (sic) pop, there is definitely room for a fusion as brilliantly confused as the Sneaker Pimps.