Last month Punktastic met up with Ben Weinman of The Dillinger Escape Plan. We talked about how the music industry has changed, the good old days, when you can expect to see them back in the UK and their new album, which comes out on Monday. Get stoked!
HOW ARE YOU?
Good. Punktastic, thank you. Yeah, I’m feeling punktastic. That’s gotta be your thing now, get people to do soundbites for you. Those things suck for me because I have a horrible memory. I need cue cards to even just function in life. I walk into walls. I can’t do two things at once. That’s a male thing, but I’m even worse. Females are better at multi tasking, I don’t know why. If you’re talking on the phone and someone else talks to you, I bet you don’t malfunction like I do. I’m just like ‘power down’. I’ve powered out.
HOW’S YOUR DAY BEEN?
Fine, yeah. We’re here in the UK, in London, and we’re just over here doing press. That’s odd. When you’re a kid and you start a band you don’t think that anyone would ever have heard of you in England, let alone that you’d just go over there to talk to people. We don’t take it for granted. It’s pretty cool. We’re just over here to get some Paddington Bear gifts from the airport, you know.
HOW ARE THE INTERVIEWS GOING?
They’re not bad. It goes up and down. I like the personal ones but I hate the phone ones. Talking on the phone is such a waste of time to me, in any shape or form. I wanna be with people. I wanna sit here like this. I wanna hang out. This is the second day of press in London and we’re going to Paris tomorrow morning on the train, the underwater train.
SO WHEN ARE YOU PLAYING SOME SHOWS?
Well, the US is big man, and we’re covering the US first. And we’re pretty much doing smaller places, not even major cities, and then we’re coming to Europe to do some festivals and we’re going back to do a major market tour of the US for the summer and then we’ll come back to the UK in the fall and do a full banger of a tour. We’ve been doing this a long time. Since 1997. You weren’t even born then.
DO YOU STILL GET THAT BUZZ FROM PLAYING EVEN AFTER ALL THAT TIME?
Yeah, I mean it’s cool. I still feel nervous all the time so it’s kind of stressful. It’s probably slowly killing my insides because I get so nervous every time we play. We’ve been doing it so long and we’ve got 150 shows booked right now, so yeah, it’s stressful. But I think you should never be comfortable. You’re not gonna do anything important if you’re not pushing yourself and you’re not pushing other people into uncomfortable territory.
SO THE NEW ALBUM COMES OUT ON MAY 20TH OVER HERE. WHAT CAN WE EXPECT?
Yes. Expect another Dillinger record. Dillinger fans will be happy. If you don’t like our band then you probably won’t like it. It’s not gonna sound like Rihanna, but yeah, it’s really hard to be objective about these things. We just make it and we can’t really tell what the deal is so we step away from it and put it out there. It’s cool to listen back a few months later and you kind of get a retrospect into where your head was at when you made it but it’s kind of hard to do that straight away.
ARE YOU EXCITED TO PLAY IT LIVE?
Sure. Yeah, it’s definitely cool to introduce new stuff into the mix, and it’s cool for people to hear new songs and we’ll see some new faces hopefully.
IT’S PRETTY IMPRESSIVE THAT YOU’RE STILL HERE AND STILL RELEVANT AFTER ALL THIS TIME.
I think it’s important for us to be here as a band because we are coming from a time before there was this internet access. There was internet obviously, but Youtube didn’t really exist and there wasn’t Facebook and stuff like that so it took a lot more work to get into music. You had to really seek it out and go find it. You had to travel to see bands and people appreciated that you worked that hard and there was a lot more unpredictability because you never knew what you were gonna get and people absorbed it a lot more, whereas now you can look it up on Youtube and see the band play in every city in the world before actually seeing the band play. That’s really bizarre for me because I used to take so much time exploring and investigating music, and then seeking it out, travelling and finding people to carpool and drive hours to see a band that we never even saw before, just to see what they were like. That was a really special time so I think it’s important for bands from that time to still exist and stir things up, and I really, to this day, think there’s nothing predictable about what we do, so we have to be here.
IT’S ODD WITH THE INTERNET AND THINGS LIKE TWITTER, BECAUSE IT MEANS THAT FANS HAVE DIRECT ACCESS TO THEIR IDOLS AND IT RUINS THE MYSTERY A BIT.
I don’t like the idea of rockstars and people feeling like they’re better than someone else, but I like the idea of having these mysterious people creating art for you, and I like that you only know what they let you know. The mystery to it has gone now. I enjoyed that, not that as someone in a band I want people to think I’m some mysterious creature, but I liked with the Chili Peppers that Flea was this crazy bass player and you only saw him in Bass Player magazine or on MTV on a music video, and you saw little promotional things that were out there, and you made up your own mind what this band was to you, instead of knowing what they ate for breakfast. I liked having that in my life, these bigger than life characters, so I think it kind of sucks that people don’t have that same kind of mystery.
DO YOU THINK THINGS HAVE CHANGED A LOT SINCE YOU STARTED?
It was definitely an interesting time to be making music then, because there weren’t many people who were doing what we were doing. There were all these sub genres, like in anthropology when you’re talking about a tribe that isn’t affected by all these cultures around it, there were all these little scenes that weren’t that heavily affected by the outside. The mainstream pop world was the same everywhere and everyone was listening to the same pop songs and hearing them in the same way, but all the underground stuff was very divided and compartmentalised and it was very cool because when something blended, it was magic and new stuff came out of that, but now it’s all blended together. I mean, when we came to Europe for the first time, everyone looked different and reacted to music differently and it was drastically different. I mean, you’d go a few hours away and the culture would be drastically different. Now everyone looks exactly the same and raises their fist at the same time and they’ve all experienced it at the same time and in the same way on the computer. It’s cultural depression, because while we’ve become more together in a lot of ways and it’s great – I wouldn’t trade it, I love technology – but there is this homogenised blend of everything now. There’s not a lot of individual things happening. It’s not even me complaining as an artist, it’s me being bummed for people not having that experience. It was so cool.
ANY LAST WORDS?
We’re looking forward to putting this record out and playing some shows. The UK is our favourite place. You’ve always been supportive of us. We’re stoked. The rock scene is very loyal. The UK and Australia are our favourites. There’s something about the loyalty here. They stay with you. Everyone should come out to the shows when we come back in the fall.
LAIS MW