INTERVIEW WITH NICK 13 FROM TIGER ARMY

5TH June 2006
The Scala, London

How’s the headlining tour going?
Great, it’s going quite well thanks.

Are you looking forward to the London gig tonight?
Yeah definitely.

It was very busy the last time you played London!
We played at the Underworld last year and that was a great show, it wasn’t just the best show that tour, it was one of the best shows that year.

Where did the name ‘Tiger Army’ come from?
The words just sort of came to me a little over 10 years ago. I had been trying to come up with a band name for a couple of years. A lot of associations have developed from there.

And ‘Tiger Army Never Die’ it’s such a statement and so well known.
I wanted it to be simple, elemental, to the point that it’s not even grammatically correct. It expresses a lot of things about the band. I personally had to go through quite a lot to keep it going through the years. But it’s not just about the band, it’s a way of looking at life, if you will what you want, something will happen.

We first heard Tiger Army on the Give ‘Em The Boot cd compilations, how much of a help have Hellcat records been?
Getting signed to Hellcat records was a great thing for the band. We have had people say you are only where you are because of Hellcat but even in the early days in California we were getting 200-300 people come to see us, which was good for a band without a record out. So something would have happened anyway.

Yeah it probably would have happened without Hellcat.
It was good though, it really did speed things up. Places like UK, Europe, Japan and Australia, a lot of people checked us out because of the Give ‘Em The Boot compilations.

It’s cheap as well!
[Laughs] Yeah!

Last November we went to the Speedfreaks Ball and my friend was wearing a Tiger Army t-shirt and some Meteors fans gave him some shit about it. What do you think about that?
As a band we have always been fans of the Meteors. From what I’ve gathered they (Meteors) don’t have any problems with what we’re doing. We’ve never claimed to be pure psychobilly. Rather what we are doing is much like they did with rockabilly music. They were doing completely their own thing with it and at the time a lot of people didn’t get it. We’ve drawn from rockabilly, early punk and a lot of stuff - including the Meteors – and gone our own direction with it and some people get that and some people don’t. We did meet a lot of old school psychobilly fans that were there at the day on this tour who quite like what we do and then there’s those that don’t so you know those that don’t can get fucked. I don’t care.

What’s the best gig you’ve played?
We’ve done over 400 at this point. I will say that the gig at the Underworld was one of the top ones.

Do you have a favourite tattooist who you go back to? Do you get tattoos whilst on tour?
I haven’t really got tattooed on tour. Scott Sylvia is one of my favourites, he did my back piece and chest piece which goes up onto my throat. I like Jason McAffee’s stuff a lot, but haven’t really gotten much work lately. They’re both in the Bay Area.

Guess you’re running out of room too?
[Laughs] Yeah!

Are there any particular UK bands that have influenced you or were you more influenced by home grown talent?
Some people do tend to either favour UK or US bands but I always listened to both. I like most UK punk from the early stuff like The Clash and Sex Pistols through to later faster stuff like GBH and also a lot of UK post punk stuff like Joy Division and The Cure, but we are definitely influenced by a lot of US music. At least half if not more of our influences are from the UK.

You can kind of hear that sometimes as well.
Yeah, my mom is actually English so it seemed natural to draw from both sides.

Guana Batz or Meteors?
[Points to arm] Well I’ve got this Meteors tattoo! Meteors, Guana Batz, early Sharks, Torment, The Long Tall Texans….

We saw The Long Tall Texans at the Speedfreaks Ball, they were really good!
That’s one of the few bands I’ve always wanted to see but never have.

There has been a psychobilly scene here in the UK since the 1980s and right now it’s having a resurgence, even in the clothes and tattoo styles as well as the music. In the US it was more the early 1990s…
Not even the early 1990s! I would say it really started around 2000.

Really?
Yeah. When some of the UK bands started coming over in the 1990s the first European psychobilly band I saw in the states was The Meteors. In the years following a lot of bands came over and we’d be seeing these shows in San Francisco and there was such a low turnout I was really angry at how there were only 30-100 people at these shows. In the 1990s I basically knew or knew of almost every psychobilly in the US there were so few. When I moved to California in 1999 very few people knew what psychobilly was and even fewer were into it.

That’s quite strange considering how steeped in Americana and American imagery the psycho scene is and also how the very early rock’n’roll which was a massive influence is also mostly from the US.
There was quite a big rockabilly scene in the 1990s. Big in a kind of underground way. The punk thing has always been pretty strong. The fact that nobody had got into psychobilly was pretty strange. But I think that’s finally going to change. I think it’s moved on a lot in the last 5 years but it’s still kind of underground.

10 years of Tiger Army! Congratulations!
Thankyou.

What do you see for the next 10 years?
As far as the next 10 years, gosh who knows? We never thought we’d make it this far.
I try not to look that far ahead. But we will be making our 4th album this year which is something we’re really excited about. We’ve currently got about 70% of the songs written and if all goes well we’ll be back in the UK in 2007.

Thanks for the interview, we’re looking forward to the gig tonight!
Thankyou and hope you enjoy the show.

http://www.tigerarmy.com
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