It seems fitting that terminal nearly-men and ‘band’s band’, Les Savy Fav should hit
Tim is busily working away on a customised poster for tonight’s show throughout the interview. Although being knee-deep in cut-out letters (spelling out the words “Man Chest Hair”), he manages to be erudite and charming, while drummer Harrison Haynes is able to pick up the slack when Harrington’s concentration starts to wander. Much minutiae is covered (TV comedy, the vertiginous effects of the dressing room wall covering) before the talk moves into more serious territory.
“There was a period (a couple of years ago) when I thought we weren’t allowed to be a band”, Tim muses, before
Pushed on how he thinks the landscape has changed over the years, Tim reflects, “Since we started as a band… it’s gelled up to be a kind of functioning industry. It’s now like, ‘My job is I’m in a band’ and that never occurred to us. We always had other jobs outside the band”.
Tim goes on to talk about the overriding influence of the internet on today’s music; “There’s more connoisseurship. More people have access to more music, which is cool, but there’s not as much of that kind of misunderstanding when you live in a town where there’s no good record shops and there’s no good music”.
Tim seems perturbed at the changes in how people are turned on to music today, having seen it evolve from “checking out the thank-you list in the liner notes and just buying them all, hoping that some of them would be good”, to “downloading a song off MySpace and deciding whether you like them or not”. He qualifies by saying “It’s great… for some kinds of musicians that years ago would have been in a punk, underground type of world, whereas now they can actually think of making a living out of it”.
There’s a refreshingly old-school sentiment at the heart of Les Savy Fav that could be misconceived as reverse-snobbery were it not for Harrington’s super-enthused, thoughtful manner. When ruminating on the instant fame some bands have thrust upon them these days, he comes to the conclusion that bands “need time to suck”, before breaking the whole of the music industry’s band nursery down into three types of band:
“There’s band that comes out of nowhere that people go crazy for, but it turns out that all they have is three songs and they suck. Then there’s band that comes out of nowhere and it turns out that they actually are a really great band, they just didn’t have to fuck around for five years before they got any attention. That’s awesome for them.
“Then there’s the band that suck at first and would’ve gotten awesome, but never get the chance because everyone saw their ugly first baby-steps and will have then forgotten about them and then you’re fucked.
“In the past, every city had, like, 50 shitty bands who’d play for each other and no-one got to hear of them outside of that. But it was like Darwinism, slowly but surely they’d be allowed to evolve into something that was really solid. Now it’s like, if you don’t get a hole-in-one, then you’re screwed”.
Les Savy Fav never had that hole-in-one but they’re making up for it now with arguably the strongest album of their career. The epithet on the band’s website reads “Missing out on cashing in for over a decade”, but if it doesn’t happen for them now, something tells me the band won’t be bothered too much, as Tim notes, “All the bands I loved failed. There’s something about being as good a band as you can be but not having to be professional. That’s why (we called the album) Let’s Stay Friends. The friendly thing is really critical to us. We can’t really picture the band any other way”.
Printed in the December/January issue of High Voltage magazine.
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