Birds of Tokyo

Fri 28th May, 2010 in Features

Birds of Tokyo’s ever talented Adam Spark recently spoke to Fasterlouder about their recently completed third album, and latest single The Saddest Thing I Know, as well as dropping a few hints as to what the fans can expect from both the release, and their upcoming tour.

Hi Adam, first off, congratulations on your recent WAMi award wins!
G’day mate, Oh yeah! Somebody just told me about that, I had no idea! (laughs)

It’s been a huge past year for Birds of Tokyo, with the Broken Strings and your new album, a hugely anticipated release. After the massive success that Universes had, how did you guys follow it up with album #3?
That’s a very good question, I don’t know if we have followed it up yet. I find with this band we find out place as we are going along, and we did that last one and it became what it became, a bit of a rock thing, and it sort of hit people in a certain way, and turned a lot of people off in another way. Then a couple of years later we find ourselves in this album, and it’s certainly a different beast. You wouldn’t really say it’s a rockin’ record at all, so it’s going to be interesting to see what people make of it. It’s a slightly different path for us, it’s a lot more colourful, a lot prettier. If your into the There Goes My Baby and those kinds of things of our last record, it’s not going to be found on this one. (laughs)

I’m very interested to hear about recording in Gothenburg, Sweden. Did the location have an influence on the sound of the record?
I don’t think the location had an influence on the sound per say, I think it had a massive influence on us as people making it, and we needed to get away to make a record like this. I guess in a way, it’s a record that’s kind of throwing us out to the wolves a bit, it’s very exposing and it’s very raw.

Kenny (Birds of Tokyo’s vocalist) let’s his entire fucking soul out on this thing, and he was only saying to me a couple of nights ago when we were still in London, he’s a little scared of what people will think. And with that sort of mindset, being in an environment like that, which was so foreign and so removed, and -20 degrees every day, and snowing, we lived in the studio for nearly two months and didn’t leave. We wouldn’t leave for 3 or 4 days, and that all I guessing coming together, an accumulative effect of all that stuff really affected us greatly while we were working on it.

I think that affected it, sonically as such, was more to do with the fact of us wanting to try different textures and tones and, Scott, who we were working with going for really crazy heroin guitar sounds. Who knows, maybe it did in the end, but I don’t think so. I think it just put our brains in a really weird spot.

Speaking as a fan, I think that the lyrics to your latest single, The Saddest Thing I Know, are easily some of the most powerful and raw moments every produced by Birds of Tokyo. Would you say the influences you mentioned earlier impacted the writing of this song?
Oh absolutely, you’ve got no idea about what’s to come. It’s really fucking heavy, lyrically this one. It’s weird, because we went into it, and we’re always talking with Kenny, and encouraging him to go down the right path I guess, and it’s something we all resonate with, and you naturally find your path. I think when we started this record out, we were hoping, maybe even wanting to find him pushing down a little bit of more of an ambiguous path, but it turns out that he just basically ripped his heart out of his chest, and is just holding it to people now (laughs), so it’s just super heart on the sleeve kind of stuff, but not in a cheesy way.

You know, people are always going to find it in a cheesy way if they want, but it’s basically the raw exposition of a thirty year old guy who is just living a very unique life, letting it all out. A lot of which a lot of people won’t understand, or can’t understand and think it’s heartfelt for being cheesy, but we could give a fuck man, we’ve got a pretty extraordinary life, especially Kenny, he’s letting some shit out. It’s really real, it’s really pretty and it’s really dark, and we hope it’s really going to hit some people.

Sounds like truly amazing stuff. The music clip for The Saddest Thing I Know was officially released this week. It’s a really surreal concept, what’s the actual meaning behind it all?
We wanted to keep away from the whole guy and girl thing, but it kind of ended up being like that anyway. The directors, these French-Canadian crazy men, they just had this idea of this guy who is pretty fucked up, a bent slant. It’s an exposition of his soul, which is kind of representative of us.

You get to a point where there is nothing left to say, there is nothing left to do really, other than be honest and let it all out, so that what we wanted to do, show this guy who is just fucked. He’s got nothing. He’s just infatuated with this stripper kind of girl, and is fucked up on drugs, I guess. He just sits back and floats in his little blue clouds of goodness, and just has this massive trip. We really liked that, and now the clip has to be edited for TV, which is kind of lame. I don’t think it’s a controversial clip, but apparently you can have smoking or drug taking on TV.

Reaching the overseas audience has been a big part of Birds of Tokyo, especially in the last year. You’ve been in London recently, and played the Great Escape Festival. How was that for an experience?
The Great Escape was good, we played with about three or four other bands from the UK. They are weird ones, we get short half an hour sets, but good crowds, so it went down really, really well for us, and we achieved our desired result, getting to play some of the new material, and coming to London we’re we’ve done a two of our own shows in the last couple of days. It’s good man, it’s always good fun to go and play it at other places, a lot of people don’t get to do it, so we love the chance when we get to do this kind of thing.

Returning back home to Australia now for The Saddest Thing I Know Tour, what can Birds of Tokyo’s diehard fans expect?
Well, we’re going to be playing probably four, maybe five new ones and a lot of the time, you’re always told not to play too much new stuff, but we’re really digging it, so we want to give it out there, and give people a listen.

As always, we want to have a really forceful light show, so we’ve got that going on. It’s going to be a bit of a long set, we’re trying to revisit a couple of things, put a new slant on them, so hopefully they can work. It’s feeling really good at the moment, we’re rehearsed, and it’s very fiery to play at the moment, the last few shows in London have been pretty intense, so it’s going to be good fun.

The Broken Strings tour saw you cover Marvin Gaye’s Heard It Through The Grape Vine. Have you ever considered releasing some B-Side cover songs? I’d be interested to hear you cover something by Radiohead.
Yeah! I mean, so would I to be honest, but how do you do justice to a band like that though (laughs). We would, it’s always a tough thing. There are so many songs that we love, and so many that we’d like to do, there are plenty we doodle around with in the rehearsal room but we’ve never really done anything with, even song’s we’ve cut off the records that we’d like to do B-Sides with.

The cover thing, it’s tough you know, we’re all just great students and respectful of students of music gone by, we want to be careful. We’d never want to do a cover, put something out there and not do justice to it, or have people really soured on it. It happens a lot, people say “Yeah we can cover this, we’re a fucking great band. People dig us, we’re gonna cover this, it’s gonna be rad.” We just don’t really have that mentality, unless it’s going to offer something new, or something completely different, and be very respectful of it. I think that’s why we’ve held off on doing anything like that for now.

So finally, any chance of a Fasterlouder exclusive? An album release date or even a title?
I can’t unfortunately reveal a release date, but I can tell you that the album has no name, it’s just Birds of Tokyo.

Self titled? Very cool, I like it!
Yeah well it’s this thing, we spent a lot of time working on it, and pushing it in a direction to get stuff out of songs, and it’s always come back to the organic answer. And we’ve sort of found that with the record title as well. We’re really proud of it, but we think it’s going to lose a few of the rocky fans, despite what The Saddest Thing I Know says.

We’re really proud to stand by this, what we feel is probably the culmination of nearly seven years as a band. It’s kind of the first one we feel like stamping and say this is us, we don’t want a title for it. And it’s nothing cheesy, we just didn’t want to do all this sort of stuff for the record, and then sit there and manufacture this grand title or theme. It’s not what this record is or what we’re about these days.

Birds of Tokyo tour:

Friday 28th May – Hi-Fi, Brisbane
Saturday 29th May – Ripe Fest, Noosa
Sunday 30th May – Uni Bar, Hobart
Friday 4th June – Palace Theatre, Melbourne
Saturday 5th June – Enmore Theatre, Sydney
Sunday 6th June – The Gov, Adelaide
Thursday 10th June – Metro City, Perth
Saturday 12th June – River Sessions, Mackay