The Ponys Interview

An interview with the Garage Rock band The Pony's for the Viceland.com Blog. One of them used to be in the 90 Day Men. Cool.

Bowling with The Pony’s

We had originally intended to meet with Chicago based garage-punk heroes The Pony’s in the lobby of their faceless Lancaster Gate Hotel but being true star-spangle blooded Yanks they all wanted to go bowling and drink beer. That sounded good to me so we headed over to the big bowling place on Queensway instead.

There is an Ice Rink here as well, are you sure you don’t want to go Ice Skating instead? I am really bad at bowling.

Nathan: Don’t worry dude, I will definitely suck more than you. I can guarantee it.
Jered: If you want this interview you gotta bowl man. No bowl, no dice.

OK, definitely no Ice Skating? I know bowling is a big deal in the US, are people into Iceskating too?

Jered: No, I’ve never been.
Brian: It might be hard to do an interview if we were all falling over. It looks like it will be painful.

Yeah, I bruised my coxix once. That really hurt. Wow Jered you just missed all the pins! I thought you were good at this?

Jered: That’s my spin technique. I should give that a name. It works really well back home. This lane is real weird. It should like, glide and swing and spin. I think they need to polish it with the buffing machine.

It’s kind of like playing on a sticky wicket and away from home.

Jered: I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Nathan missed all the pins as well! Maybe this will be OK!

Nathan; I told you I sucked dude, beware though Jered is actually good.

Hmm, yeah he just got a strike, his technique really is something. Melissa also has double my score already. Anyway, how are you finding England?

Melissa: It’s a cool place, we kind of had a bad experiences with it in the past though. On our first tour we were on a really small indie label so we had no money and on the first day of the tour we got booted three times in London.

Booted?

Melissa: You know, like the things they put on the wheels to fine you? Clamps? They were £150 each everything we made on the tour basically went on paying those of hahah.

Not so good. Apart from the clamps how do you find London?

Brian: We have met some cool people but it seems kind of like New York in that it’s a lot of style bands you know? We heard that band The Cribs on the radio on the way in, Jesus…
Jered: It’s cool that kind of underdog indie bands get to be these super-big stars over here and be on the radio and whatever but some of the music is just, ugh. I mean, we went on tour with Bloc Party and they were lovely guys, lovely people but the music… I dunno man.

Ok, what bands are you into?

Nathan: We have been really lucky in that all of the bands we dig we really dig we have gotten to tour with. Deerhunter, The Black Lips…
Melissa: Black Lips are super awesome, they are our bros.
Jered: Yeah, we had such good fun with them, me and Cole spent all day looking to get hold of some crack in Baltimore just cos we thought it would be like that show The Wire.

Did you find any?

Jered: Nah we just got drunk instead.

What is your favourite on tour tipple:

Melissa: Beer.
Brian: Whatever they give us that is free.
Jered: Well we appear to be drinking 1664 in this bowling alley but in the UK there seems to be a lot of Stella. That’s like the universal UK house beer. Ok by me.

We have Stella at our pub, you wanna come play a show there?

Jered: Sure!
Melissa: It’s a date!