Millionaire Cash In

Tue 27th Sep, 2005 in Features

Tim Vanhamel loves his rock and roll. You can tell just by the sound in his voice. The other way you can tell is that he is doing promotional interviews at 1:20am local time. Local for Tim is his home town of Antwerp, Belgium, where he is currently relaxing at home. Vanhamel has decided to have quiet night in before his late-night interviews, because the night before he went out drinking and partying before the interviews, and they reportedly didn’t go so well. See? Very rock and roll.

Vanhamel’s band Millionaire is back with a new album, Paradisiac, and this new album was produced by Josh Homme (of Queens Of The Stone Age fame). This is far from Homme’s first association with the band, however. When their first album, Outside The Simian Flock, was released, Homme praised it’s virtues the world over, calling it one of the best albums in years. And he wasn’t just saying this to the press either. “He was calling us up, kept telling us constantly that it was a great album,” says Vanhamel. “And he organised for us to go on tour with them as well. We had a great time, and got to know him really well. So when it was time to produce the album, and we were on tour together, we were hyping each other up. We knew it was gonna be great, we knew it was gonna rock, it was simply going to be awesome.”

And as for the rumours that Homme can be hard to work with? “Well, no album recording period is entirely perfect. But we were friends before we worked together, so that helped. It all worked out in the end, because we were working hard to make good music, we were working for higher cause.” I point out that he is talking about music almost as a religion. “Absolutely. Music is a very spiritual thing, Josh believes that too. Agreeing on things like that meant we were able to get past the small stuff and get this album complete.”

Millionaire’s first album was a mashing together of styles. It had a synthy, ingrained sound, often incorporating loops and beats. Imagining Homme producing these kinds of tracks for a new album is a bit of a stretch, but by all reports the new album is more rock based. “This time we really wanted to make a well known album, something you could listen to and just know who produced it. We wanted to not confuse the listener, but we also kept some of those synth sounds, just more on a sublayer vibe, below the main music. We wrote the album with that in mind, we wanted to have an album which we recorded the instrumentation live, rather than using a lot of computers. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love making albums that way too, but this was something different to try.”

The Millionaire live show has definitely changed now too. “On the recent shows, we’ve been playing mostly stuff from the new album, and just a couple from the old album. We really wanna get this album out there, get it known. That was another thing we had in mind when we wrote the album. When it came time to play these songs to a live audience, we didn’t want to be struggling to rehearse, and figure out how we were going to get the same sound from the studio.”

Recently, Millionaire pulled out of the Antwerp Wonderfestival, but Vanhamel says there are no hard feelings. “The organiser is a local guy, everyone knows him, and he just tried to sign too many bands which he wasn’t ready for; he bit off too much The organisation was bad, a total fuckup, they didn’t have enough money, they didn’t sell enough tickets, so we had to pull out, but we would consider playing it in the future, if it was organised properly.”

Vanhamel prefers, however, to play the club shows. “You can have a proper soundcheck at a club show, its loud and sweaty and intense. Festival slots are over too quickly, its all rushing and stress, no soundcheck, you just have to hope you sound good. Although I like festivals too, because you can go and watch other bands, and hang out with heaps of bands.

Millionaire’s plans for the future are firmly focused on the new album. “We start playing a massive Europe tour next month, all over the place. We’ll mostly be getting local bands to support, but we may be doing some shows with the Dandy Warhols, and we’re supporting the Foo Fighters at some stage too. Then early next year the album will come out in the States, so we’ll probably be heading over there to try and represent the album properly. We don’t have any direct plans to tour Australia, but we’ll be in Japan at some stage next year, so we may be able to get down then.” We can only hope, because a man who thinks music is a religion, and gets up at one in the morning to do interviews, will surely put on a show to remember.