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Lovers Buggers & Thieves
understood by anyone in their own situation. If you say, ‘I hate you but call me,’ that could mean I hate you or be a song about being in love. It could be the modern love story.
EDDIE Hamburg they loved us. Munich they hated
LB&T The banjo is an odd instrument to have in a rock’n’roll band. How did that come about?
GARY If we were doing a bar it’d be a six or seven hour night — working seven days a week, six hours on stage a night, eight hours on Sunday. Sunday there would be a two-hour matinee, maybe three, Sundays were awful. Once we became the Monks we started to play different kinds of venues, a hall perhaps and we’d do four hours there.
DAVE Originally I was playing rhythm guitar — a Fender — but we got so loud with the organ and everything that you couldn’t hear me; I got drowned out. One of the managers said you ain’ t coming through, how about you play the banjo. I said I can’t play the banjo, but maybe a six string like a guitar. I went shopping around the German stores and found one. I didn’t know what to do, so I ended up taking the back off and putting two microphones in and that was the beginning of the banjo sound. It just fit right in with the rest of them. It stood out. A clickerty clack sound. LB&T How did the image come about? It was quite a severe thing to do. EDDIE Like any managers do, they talked to us about how we should look in terms of stage presence. They helped us with that. They were our Brian Epsteins in that sense. They decided that with the music being minimalist maybe a minimalist look was good. Maybe a strong image, like a Monk. GARY It was instantly identifiable by anyone who saw us on the street. We walked into this barbershop in Frankfurt as The Torquays and we walked out as the Monks. People were looking at us differently. LB&T When you weren’t performing did you walk around as the Monks? ALL Yes. All the time. EDDIE We walked around the streets like that. We
us. [laughs]
LB&T A typical show?
EDDIE There were days when we did three shows
in a day in three different towns — those would be one hour shows. It was a lot of work. We lost a lot of weight because of the stress and the long distances between jobs. It was a rough business.
LB&T How did you come up with lyrics? GARY Typically, we’d have some lyrical ideas that we’d experiment with in rehearsal. Managers would occasionally come to us with lyrical ideas and we’d say we like this one or we don’t like that one; we’ll try using this or we’ll try using that. It wasn’t a verses or entire songs on paper thing that you normally think of. EDDIE Sometimes we’d start with a full song and
deconstruct it to a basic meaning. The more we could take out of it the better.
LB&T You rhyme the word ‘constipation’ with the word ‘ complication’ in one song [Complication], which came out as a single. What were you thinking? EDDIE Constipation wasn’t a part of the original
lyric. In the studio Gary’s going ‘Complication, complication, complication,’ and Gary got tired of it.
lived the role. You know that thing about Method acting? We became it.
DAVE We were making a joke.
LB&T How did the audience perceive the Monks?
that kind of a reaction — just doing something and then saying ‘To hell with this. I’m just going to do something you’re not supposed to do.’
DAVE Scared of us at first.
GARY That’ s how a lot of Monks music is. It is