Sauce

Before they started their tour of Australia, we talked with drummer Suzie of raw-rock troupe I Heart Hiroshima about the unwritten rule of making an album sound live … without a pedal or overdub in sight.

So Tuff Teef is your debut full length [album]. And one of the things that I picked up from the bio is this album is an album of, and I quote; twelve tracks that make rules. But I kinda get the feeling… I understand that you guys avoided using over dubs or pedals on this album.
Yeah, well we don’t ever use pedals. We don’t ever use over-dubs, we don’t ever use excess, so it’s kind of a continuation of the sort of beliefs that we have as a band. Which have been sort of concreted since we started playing.

So would you say this is sort of a rule that you’ve always abided by?
Well we just didn’t want excess, and we didn’t want things to be over the top, we are really happy with the way that things sounded, there was n o need to sort of go over the top with yeah, extra pedals and a big, whole drum kit and putting crazy over-dubs on recordings… cause, I mean I think the most important thing to us is to be able to recreate our live shows on our records. And you can’t do that if you’re putting all these crazy things on it. You know? Then people hear a record and then they see you live and it’s two totally different things. Yeah, I don’t know how much I agree with that.

So how true would it be to say that you feel that rock music these days needs to be rawer in general? Like it’s kinda lost it’s… it’s kinda become too…
No, I think sometimes it really works. Sometimes people enjoy being… maybe they like having those kind of two sides to themselves. You know, live and a studio, but in no way am I saying it’s a wrong thing to do, just in our case we want to be really totally a mirror image or what we are when you see us live. And I think that kind of raw, clean sound is exactly what it’s like when you see us play.

So I guess with that in mind, here’s a nice big question; what do you see as the most important qualities or rock music?
I don’t know. I’m a big hater or egos. I don’t like egos, I don’t like people taking… and of course I take this stand incredibly seriously, and I take everything that I do very seriously. But I don’t like taking music seriously to the point that it feels like a job, or a chore, or it’s so… I don’t like musicians being really, really business minded. I think that’s a detraction of what you’re doing music for in the first place. So, I suppose a sense of being really real as an artist, you know, just being yourself. If something’s fun, we do it. You know? We’re always laughing around, and just sort of… we don’t hate ourselves if we play crap. I mean, I’m sure our manager does! [Laughs] You know, we’re always getting warned not to get… I mean, we don’t always get massively wasted or whatever, but if occasionally we fuck up a bit if someone’s had a few too many drinks, and it’s just a laughing kind of thing, like, I’ve done way better than I ever could have expected in this band. So I’m not going to get angry at myself, or want myself to always be striving to do better because, I mean, I’m pretty happy where I’m going, and we are doing better, and we’re still having fun. Yeah, so I think the most important thing in rock music is not to have a big ‘gay rock ego.’ From my point of view I hate meeting people that are full of themselves. I’ve been pretty lucky that that hasn’t happened too many times, like just people who are chilled out, and just have fun with what they’re doing. And I suppose, yeah, just playing music that you like. Not doing it for any other reason.

So how did I Heart Hiroshima come together?
We just… it was kind of just a few friends, just wanting to be friends, wanting to play guitar together. And their other friend, Suzie, was a drummer, and they thought oh, yeah, she should come and play some drums. It was just kind of really casual, no intentions, but the electricity in the room the first time we played a song, or heard Matt song, our eyes all lit up, and I felt that there was really something special there.

I Heart Hiroshima play Sirocco’s in Burnie on the 9th of November, Club 39 in Launceston on the 10th, and Morilla Estate in Hobart on the 11th. All shows in Tasmania are with Regurgitator and New Pants.

Listen to an MP3 of the full interview Below