WRITER -
DK GOLDSTEIN
R M U S I C THIS IS A CONCEPT BAND animal-esque ecstasy, while ‘The Little Death (In Five Parts)’ is angrier, with seriously scuzzy, Death From Above 1979-styled riffs and almost terrifying cries. The traditional song structures of their EPs have been replaced with a continuously evolving sound that doesn’t stop just because the track changes. It feels like one big audible progression, rather than 14 little ones. And as for the innovative title, well, that’s something that Hendrix describes best. “We spent quite a lot of time trying to come up with the name,” he begins. “The negative space is all about your interpretation of it. I actually wanted to call it ‘The Man Who Had Nipples’ because the male nipple is our only indication we could have been women, you know what I mean?”Turner informs us that Hendrix originally suggested ‘My Blank is Pink’ as a joke. “See, I never heard it as a joke,” admits Ley. “Anyway,” continues
Hendrix, “so, I was all about the male nipple, and everyone said, ‘that’s stupid’. But it’s got male nipples in the photos” – their nipples – “For me, ‘My Nipple is Pink’ is the title.” “I like the idea of leaving it blank,” adds Turner.“Each person interprets every song they hear, every film they see, everything in their own way. If somebody says to me,‘oh, I listened to your song and I think it means this’, I’m like, ‘fuck yeah! It didn’t mean that to me when I wrote it, but that’s amazing because you’ve taken it somewhere else.’ That’s probably the best compliment that could happen to your music.” One thing we’ve only touched the surface of is this idea of colour. Their collections may be themed, but how does it affect their writing process? “We have a vision of what we’re trying to create, sonically,” details Hendrix of their approach to music-making. “We start
with an idea of what the record is going to sound like.” Turner clarifies that they try and find a “common ground”, a colour and a way of being creative with music by thinking outside of musical terms. “We don’t sit down and try and write what a colour is,” explains Fleishacker. “We pick a colour and think about what it means to us. Then we come up with key words and go from there by creating those key words musically.” “It’s really not that difficult,” Hendrix assures us. “I mean, a lot of music producers do this. Asking what instruments we’re going to or not going to use, how we’re going to approach our view towards the songs. It’s just us producing ourselves, basically.” “It’s not like one of us comes up with lyrics to a song and a few chords that we flesh out,” Fleishacker throws in. “It just doesn’t happen that way.” And as for the concept, Hendrix puts it down to an old buddy of his who wanted them to change their name to something with the word colour on the end of it and suddenly the idea of writing music based on colour lit a match in his head. “It just makes sense to me as a musician,” he gushes, “how a certain sound has a certain colour to it. But also, certain emotions have a certain colour to them. Take pink, the colour we’re playing around with right now – for us, pink is a very sexual colour. Obviously you can interpret it in different ways, but for us pink represents a very savage form of sexuality.” Originally, Turner tells us, they wanted to call themselves Colour, but a band in California had already nabbed it.“I like our name,” Hendrix defends,“but I can understand how it doesn’t make sense to people after they hear our kind of ragged music. The word colour has happy, quirky connotations – qualities that we had, I guess, when we first started. But it’s not the kind of band we are now.” Having come from a fairly musical background collectively, the interesting thing about Hendrix as a frontman is that he’s never been in a band before. “The only public performance I did before I was in the band was when I was running for student council president in Piedmont, Oklahoma, and I played guitar instead of making a speech. I won by a landslide,” he beams, but at the mention of his hometown he faltered. “Piedmont, where I’m from, is in the headlines at the moment,” he starts, “because it just got completely destroyed by a tornado and my childhood home is smashed. It’s true. I’m really depressed right now,” he says to the floor.“I’ve actually been crying all morning thinking about it. I’ve never even seen a tornado – it’s always when I leave that really bad stuff happens.” Here, Hendrix reveals that in a way to avoid touring he’s thought about another group of people with beards posing as Colourmusic.“In a lot of ways I wouldn’t have a problem with it,” he ponders. “Especially in the States, because it’s so boring. Twenty-three hours of the day you’re not doing anything and then you’re on stage. Part of me would like to bypass that 23 hours and just get to the meat of it.” For now, however, they’ve got their minds set on the next album, which will be dealing with the colour purple. “We really want it to come out this time next year,” states Fleishacker, but this isn’t something that they intend to do annually. “I don’t know if we’ll be a band that people will want to follow forever,” interjects Hendrix soberingly. “Because when we finish, we’ll want to wipe the slate clean and start over as a band. I don’t know if fans will stick around for that. That’s the reason for the colour concept – we wanted to change colours with the records because it forces us to change what we’re doing.”With this in mind, you might want to hop on the Colourmusic wagon and see them while you still can, but be sure to check it’s not just any old group of men with beards.
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