THë Eighties Matchböx B~Line DisaStêr - An Interview With Marc Norris
Readers! Which ‘Morning Has Broken’ do you prefer? Both have something fairly nebulous to do with He who always has the first letter of his name capitalised, but that’s where the similarities end. There’s the “Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden / Sprung in completeness where His feet pass” one, sung in dulcet tones during earnest strum-a-longs at Church Camp. Or then there’s THë Eighties Matchböx B~Line DisaStêr one, which features Guy McKnight hollering “He was born on Christmas dayay / He’s comin’ to getchoo whether you like it or not” over brain pulping, fist-pumping speed surf guitars. If you picked the first option, Sorry Hans, wrong answer – would you like to go to the next level, where the scores can really change? If you picked the second option, a Valhalla of rock decadence and madness awaits you. Madness, or psychosis? “I try and use psychosis as a positive force”, says TEMBD guitarist Marc Norris in a Brighton accent so thick you could cut and spread it on a chip buttie, “in that a lot of the songs were written during periods of absolute shit, and then the songs that came out of that [period] were actually pretty positive, so even through psychosis you can create music [that inspires] positive feelings. I guess it’s just psychosis rock… I don’t know how else you could describe it, really”. The band’s name and motivation sprang out of an entrepreneurial desire to stage the kind of explosive rock show slash chrome shredding speedway not seen since Maximum Overdrive enslaved AC/DC to provide the soundtrack to the annihilation of Emilio Estevez’s family. “We had this idea for like a racer rock & roll concert, an idea where there’d be a cross between something like Live Aid and the Wacky Racers. And our car for that would be like the ‘80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster – which is the car we have – and that’s the car we’re going to race in when we finally organize this racer rock & roll concert”. Materializing during the death rattle of the flu rock movement when Coldplay and Co. had reached their inevitable Band-esque zenith, TEMBD formed out of a desire to create the kind of live shows that they felt were a lost art. “At the moment it seems quite trendy to go ape-shit on stage and things like that, but when we started the band, we wanted to create the kinds of things that we wanted to see and hear, because there wasn’t a lot of that about [at the time]. But at the time, the big bands were like Coldplay and Travis, and things like that, and it wasn’t very exciting.” And if brevity is the soul of wit, then the whiplash inducing speed of TEMBD’s debut record, Horse Of The Dog [clocking in at 26 minutes, each one of them gruesomely fascinating] must surely have had the journaljism pumping into overdrive – was it a conscious decision to keep it wham, bam, thank you ma’am? “Not really”, says Norris, “it was just a snapshot [of the band] at the time. We didn’t sort of think ‘oh right, we’re going to make this really short album’, it’s just that our set was only about twenty minutes at the time of recording, so we just tried to capture what we did live on the record”. The inevitability of their incendiary debut was the pants-creaming UK music press and their inescapable hype machine, which did its best to suck TEBMD into the New Rock Revolution tsunami. Norris is philosophical about the hyperbole in a typically Presuming Ed way. “The press think there is one, I’m not so sure if there is. There are a lot of bands creating a kind of generic ‘rock’ sound, and we’re definitely not a part of it. No press is bad press [though]; it’s never really that harmful because the really good bands will always shine through”. |