No Age Interview

Here is an interview I did with the band No Age for Vice Magazine.

No Age Like Now

No Age are these two guys who were in this band Wives that used to have fights on stage the whole time and do backflips into drum kits and stuff like that. You know. Now they play this cool twist on post-hardcore with all these mad build up’s and break downs that is pretty amazing live. Dean the drummer guy is so good at yelling into microphones that Wrangler Brutes got him in to sing for their final US show. For those of you that don’t know what I’m talking about this is like a kid who is really into football being asked to fill in for Ronaldo up front. Or something. I know fuck all about football.

So were you snotty little LA punk kids when were you were younger?

Randy: I wasn’t a punk kid at all, I played basketball and had more of a mid 90’s Philadelphia hip-hop thing going on. I was into Boyz II Men.

Dean: I went through that phase also, I had a ridiculous haircut, this fake high top fade that made my head look like a giant penis cos it had this centre parting. I was also inspired by Kriss Kross to wear my pants back to front. I went to the drive-in theatre with my folks with these backwards ankle length shorts on and really needed to go. It wasn’t easy.

Randy: He was the one that introduced me to punk rock though. We just used to jam in high school, do Living Colour covers and shit. I used to have to get the tablature to play the parts. It was pretty embarrassing.


So what’s with the name? Do you have aspirations of musical timelessness or is it just lifted from the SST compilation?

Dean: Yeah we took it from the comp. It’s this late 80’s compilation of SST guys doing instrumental stuff like The Process Of Weeding Out era Black Flag stuff but a lot if it is actually pretty crap. The name sounds good though and it seemed almost like the most punk thing to do releasing all this instrumental shit, like a big fuck you to any sense of expectation.

Randy: What we are trying to do with No Age is totally different to Wives where the mission was just to destroy stuff. With this we are trying to build something.

Dean: Yeah, with Wives it was the bull in a china shop thing, just get in the room and fuck everything up. This has an equal energy but it’s focused differently. It is more calculated, I can’t get all wasted and do backflips and shit.

You never played drums before this, how come you feel ready to play drums and sing now?

Dean: I just felt that I knew how I wanted the drums to sound in this band. Plus I’m actually pretty good you know! Also I always had this weird Husker Du fantasy where I wanted to be like Grant Hart and sing and play drums at once.

Sure it wasn’t a Phil Collins thing?

Positive.