Doesn’t anyone else marvel at how rare it has become to find a band brave enough to be creative without obsessively keeping an eye on their bottom line at the same time? It has become so rare, in fact, that sometimes when a band first starts, it’s difficult to believe in it. Tokyo Police Club was such a band when its debut EP came out; offering textural and tenuous guitar licks far more aged and accomplished than singer David Monks’ skinny little voice and his rather sophomoric lyrical bent (‘sophomoric’ as in bad high school poetry—not doody jokes), the band was initially received very well on the strength of songs like “The Nature Of The Experiment” and “Cheer It On,” but the question of staying power still hung heavily in the air. Was it a fluke? Elephant Shell has proven that it wasn’t, but in conversation with guitarist Josh Hook, he says that while the notion of being able to deliver a record that could succeed as A Lesson In Crime did cross the band’s collective mind, they refused to let it impede the creative process.
In fact, a conversation with Hook offers the discovery that the band doesn’t read its own press, tries not to take interest in the business end of their music. Instead, the individual band members are content to follow their muses unconditionally wherever they may lead and attempt to weld each of them into music that, with Elephant Shell, has become remarkably polished and cohesive. It’s a very attractive prospect: Art for art’s sake that yields positive results? What a concept.
Bill Adams vs. Josh Hook, guitarist of Tokyo Police Club
BA: Hey Josh, how’re you doing? How are things?
JH: Not too bad—as good as you can be when you’re driving.
BA: I was going to say—you’re driving your fool heads off today, where are you?
JH: We’re somewhere in rural Quebec.
BA: I guess I should re-phrase that given you’re on the road. I assume you’re headed to Toronto, but where were you?
JH: We were in Quebec City.
BA: Really? That’s one hell of a drive.
JH: It certainly is. We’re about halfway right now.
BA: That’s unfortunate, especially when all you have to do next is jump on stage….
JH: We don’t actually have any show tonight, I think we’re in Waterloo on Saturday.
BA: I stand corrected. So how’re things going? People have been falling over themselves to praise Elephant Shell….
JH: Have they?
BA: Yeah, it’s hilarious because I remember first hearing about you guys when you were still working through Paper Bag Records and the difference between then and now is pretty amazing.
JH: Yeah. When you stop to think about it, a lot has happened since then; I guess the best way to put it is that we’re just doing the best we can and it has lead us to this level.
BA: What was the difference between writing, making and recording the first EP versus Elephant Shell?
JH: Every band says this, but it really is true that you have however long you want to write the material that you put out first so the songs that we released on A Lesson In Crime were written well before we recorded them. We’d had time to practice and perform them and everything but—and I think this was the case with Elephant Shell—we were far more aware of the fact that what we were writing was going to be released on a label. We weren’t aware of that when we wrote the first batch of songs and it really made a psychological difference; you’re faced with a scenario where you might start thinking about things a little too much. I think the biggest obstacle for me when we started making Elephant Shell was to get back in the Lesson In Crime state of mind where we were doing whatever you want to do and whatever makes you happy and then put it on the record. That really is the approach that helps me and a couple of the other guys get over the hump of thinking about it a little too much.
BA: So ostensibly the difference was a matter of being in a brand new band when you did A Lesson In Crime and no one had any expectations of you.
JH: Neither did we.
BA: …And that did really well. I’m not sure how many expectations there were leading up to Elephant Shell, but goddamn man, there are going to be a whole lot of people expecting a few particular things from you.
JH: Yeah [laughing] and the biggest and most important thing for us is to make sure we don’t let it bother us and just keep doing what we like because that’s what we’ve been doing and at least some people like it—I think….
BA: I’d say that’s true because I’m not going to lie to you, I was pretty skeptical walking in. I wasn’t huge on A Lesson In Crime; that’s the truth. But it was within two or three tracks of the beginning of Elephant Shell where I was trying to figure it out. It was obviously the same band, but the methodology had changed fairly dramatically.
JH: Yeah? What would you say are the differentiating characteristics? I’m just interested.
BA: Honestly? The thing that I found with A Lesson In Crime was it seemed like you had your vocalist, and then you had the band—like they were mutually exclusive entities and they tended to clash. It seemed like the music and the lyrics were written separately, and then you got together to see how you could make them work together. This time around, it felt like you wrote the whole thing together; like you sat down with an acoustic guitar and your singer and hammered them both out at the same time. I might be totally out to lunch on this, but that’s the way it felt to me.
JH: [sounding a little surprised] No, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head with a lot of the songs on Elephant Shell. A lot of them were written by Dave [singer Dave Monks –ed] who developed the skeleton and the lyrics by himself on an acoustic guitar and then he brought it to us and then we took out the acoustic guitar and reworked it in the fashion that works for this band. In that way, I’d say you’re perfectly right in saying that it flows together better on Elephant Shell.
BA: Am I right in assuming that the music got written by the band for A Lesson In Crime and then you got Dave to figure out what lyrics he had that might fit and you sort of finagled the two together?
JH: Yeah, that did happen several times. We’d be fooling around and jamming together and come up with something we’d like and then take the lyrics from some other song that didn’t really work and try to fit them in. I think you got that one.
BA: So I’m not out to lunch!
JH: [laughing]
BA: With that said of course, how has the record been received? I don’t know how much of your own press you read….
JH: Not much. I’m not really sure what we are or how we’re doing in comparison to other bands.
BA: Have you had people walk up to you at shows and tell you what they thought?
JH: We’ve been fortunate enough to play to some really great crowds—especially lately. We played Ottawa Blues Fest and it was great! We’d pretty much been off for two weeks and to come back and play a show with a crowd like that was just great.
BA: Did you find that reception for this record was almost readymade? Do you feel like you’re really still trying to work and win the audience?
JH: I guess it really depends on where we’re playing. Again, we’ve been really lucky in that we’ve been able to just go our own route and play headlining shows even if they’re tiny rooms. When we do that, at least we know that the people that came out came for us. We’re really open to the challenge of going and trying to win crowds too though; we did a few shows about a year ago where that was the case—we were out with a very different sort of band—and we really liked the challenge.
BA: I know that now you’re doing some stuff with Will Currie and The Country French, is that kind of in that vein? Have you noticed the difference from years and tours prior and what‘s happening now?
JH: We notice the difference when we go bacvk to somewhere. Quebec City’s a great example of that. It was the second time we’d played there and the first time was with Beirut. The crowd was great the first time, but to go back now—a year after—and have twice as large a crowd that’s twice as enthusiastic, it shows that we’re grown.
BA: And now you’re in a position to do things a little differently. Like, for example, you’ve got the myspace.com “secret show” that everyone knows about.
JH: Yeah, those things are never much of a secret.
BA: I just figured that everybody knew the show was happening but didn’t know who was playing. Is it a one-off or is there a whole tour like this?
JH: We did Waterloo for that and we’re doing some other promotional things around Ontario; a couple of things for The Edge in Toronto as well as an iTunes session, then the Roger’s picnic, but after that we’re starting our full–on tour.
BA: Is that Canadian only? North American?
JH: Actually, it’s overseas. We’re going to LA, and then we’re going to Australia for the first time, then Japan and then from Japan to the UK.
BA: Oh god, lots of frequent flier miles…
JH: If I had a card, yeah it would be. I don’t have one yet though.
BA: That might be a wise investment.
JH: Yeah, I think our manager’s banking them.
BA: Nice. Now, before I forget, there is one other thing I wanted to ask you about Elephant Shell. You said that you did write it together , when did the writing process start? I mean, was it right after the EP that you started working?
JH: We did the EP and that was basically just all the songs that we had at that point and then, in the two years between the release of the EP and the release of the album, we wrote ten songs. We sort of had “Your English Is Good” written right around the time of the EP and after that we just said, ‘Okay, we’ve got around eleven songs, let’s put them together and call it a full–length. It wasn’t really all that premeditated.
BA: I’ve gotcha. So none of it was really a conscious decision. Has the band’s career been characterized in that fashion? I don’t mean to make it sound like you’re a bunch of idiot savants, I’m shooting more for the fact that you haven’t paid that much attention to your “career” so much as just making music.
JH: I remember that there was talk about it because we were constantly writing. We can’t really write on the road—it doesn’t work for us because we don’t travel in a bus—so we were talking about just releasing another EP and keep doing that for a while because it was fun and easy. In that way I can say that we didn’t pay that much attention to the career part of it. We just had music and we wanted to put it out there.
Artist:
www.tokyopoliceclub.com
www.myspace.com/tokyopoliceclub
Album:
Tokyo Police Club—Elephant Shell is out now. Buy it NOW on Amazon.
Downloads:
"In A Cave" from Elephant Shell – [mp3]
"Juno" from Elephant Shell – [mp3]
Related articles:
Elephant Shell – [Album Review]
Tokyo Police Club w/ Dappled Cities – [Live at The Troubadour]
Smith EP – [Album Review]
