The Mint Chicks had fairly good years in 2006 and 2007 with releasing the highly acclaimed Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! album to scoring 5 Tui awards, before losing one member and then shipping off to Portland, Oregon in the U.S. of A. Mammoth catches up with guitarist/bassist/vocalist Ruban Nielson on their comings and goings…

MM: Portland, Oregon seems a far away destination to go somewhere to concentrate on your music. What drives the Mint Chicks to make music and relocate overseas?
RN: I’m not sure what drives us to make music, I’m racking my brain and I can’t really think of an answer for that half of the question! Relocating overseas was just about trying to find new challenges out in the world. It’s a rite of passage, maybe even a cliché, for young New Zealanders to have this wanderlust. Being away from New Zealand has been great for us getting back to the point. We’d had a little more success than we had ever expected in New Zealand so it felt like it would be weak of us to stay in our comfort zone.

What kind of sound or experience would you ideally like to create for your listeners?
Personally, I want it to be rich and colourful for people. At our best, we’re about a positive kind of noise and violence, like an explosion of colour and noise amid all the bullshit and boredom of life. But in a sense, it’s more important what people do themselves after discovering us. I want to be one of those bands that people discover and think ‘fuck it, I can do that’ and are encouraged to do what they want to do because they feel like there’s nothing to lose. In that sense we’re just another reminder that you can do whatever you want.

I really like the almost confrontational aspect of your live show. It surely makes it an experience rather than just watching someone play some songs. Was your live show approach a reaction to the stereotypical (Auckland) audience ambivalence?
Maybe. A lot of what we did when we started was to purposefully do everything ‘wrong’ as it was at the time. Which is often the best approach I reckon! It was a rule back then that you only play a show every 3 to 6 months, the prevailing wisdom was that it would be more of an event and lots of people would come. We thought that was stupid because you wouldn’t get any good because you’d never play, so we played every week, often three times a week, just around Auckland.

We got very tight very quickly doing that and we never had a problem with getting a crowd because we’d play every single show like it was the last one we’d ever get to do, so in that sense it was always an event because we made it into one, and we never had much trouble with the so-called ‘Auckland semi-circle’ thing. We’d beat them into submission.

This changed the trend very quickly and then it was cool to overplay in Auckland a couple of years later and everyone was playing every week. So many bands in their early stages play live shows like it’s a rehearsal. That’s bullshit and it’s no wonder most of those bands fail. You have to bring the full intensity to every show. If you’re a metal band the drummer has to play the double kick like it’s the Slayer tour even though there are only 10 people there and half of them are your mates. If you’re a folk singer you have to get emotionally invested in your songs even though some of the people might laugh at you because they’re dead inside. In that sense, our live show is a reaction to the ambivalence of most people, really.

If you had the knowledge you have now back when you were doing your first EP Octagon Octagon Octagon, would you do anything differently?
I would’ve listened to my Dad’s (Chris Nielson) technical advice. He helped us make Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! and we’ll probably fly him out here to help us mix the next thing too. It would’ve made the record stronger from a engineering point of view. Given it a thicker bottom end. Crazy? is better from that point of view, I’ve heard people say that boy racers play that record because the subs are so fat! Having said that I know that at the time we didn’t want him involved in our stuff because we were being all punk and nobody could tell us anything. Also we had an album’s worth of material then so Octagon should really have been our first album.

Speaking of Octagon Octagon Octagon, on Fuck the Golden Youth you did a hyper-speed redux of “Licking Letters” and just recently you’ve done a psychadelix-noisefuzz redux of “Opium of the People”. Are these re-dos a dissatisfaction of the original sound or just having fun with your old songs in a newer style?
The newer version Licking Letters was just something we thought would be worth doing. On Fuck the Golden Youth we re-recorded a few things to kind of summarise the E.P’s. Now that I look back on it, it was a bit unnecessary I think, but it was a way of trying to capture what the song sounded like live. The new Opium Redux is the result of playing as a trio and trying to play old songs even though we are short one member. Some songs sound fine and others, like Opium, are kind of impossible without the extra member, so we played around with the arrangement to suit what we sound like right now as a trio. None of the re-arranging is any kind of rejection of the original version, it’s just that when we record a song, there may have already been three versions of that song anyway, and it’s tempting to keep messing with things after the fact as well. It’s definitely more about having fun than any kind of dissatisfaction. The same thing happens with lots of our stuff. I re-designed the website recently, which I do whenever I have time, and I often think about doing new artwork for a fuck the golden youth vinyl L.P. We’ve even talked about completely re-recording Octagon from scratch, or re-recording it backwards.

The Mint Chicks with The Transistors and Damsels
Sat 10 May, 9pm @ Yellow Submarine – Tickets from CDs4Nix

themintchicks.com
myspace.com/themintchicks