Invasion Of The Tyrannosaurus Hives
It was a special day indeed at Yahoo! Music when spectacularly monikered Swedes Howlin' Pelle Almqvist, Nicholaus Arson, Chris Dangerous, Dr. Matt Destruction, and Vigilante Carlstroem--collectively known as the almighty Hives--arrived at our studios. Resplendently clad in their white ice-cream-man suits, spats, and blindingly shiny shoes, they were certainly the snazziest dressers to visit Yahoo! Music since, well, Interpol...and when they cranked their guitars to 11 and unleashed their monster performance of their new single "Walk Idiot Walk," they sounded as just good as they looked, proving the Hives are a band with style and substance.
After finishing their manic set--miraculously, without a single bead of sweat sullying their spic-and-span matching uniforms--brothers/bandmates Howlin' Pelle and Nicholaus sat down with LAUNCH editor Lyndsey Parker to discuss everything from James Brown to Def Leppard to their mysterious Svengali, Randy Fitzsimmons. And boy, did they have a lot to say--all in thoroughly charming Scandinavian accents, of course. Here's how it went:
YAHOO! MUSIC: You once famously said that you were going to break up after three albums. And here you are, on album number three, Tyrannosaurus Hives. So, is that statement about quitting still true?
HOWLIN' PELLE: That's kind of been misquoted, actually. The entire quote was like this: "No band that we know of has made more than three good records in a row. So let's try to make a fourth one, and if it sucks, we won't release it."
NICHOLAUS: We probably did say, though, that we were going to release three records and then quit. 'Cause we felt that it would be us quitting while we were ahead. You never know...
HOWLIN' PELLE: We might. You never know how long you have us, so enjoy it while you can!
YAHOO! MUSIC: What do you think of this new record? Do you think it is your swan song or ultimate statement?
NICHOLAUS: Every record that we make is kind of our last record.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, every record feels like the last will and testament of the Hives. We just have to make it as important as we can for ourselves. It all has to mean a lot to us--otherwise, there would be no point in doing it. There's so many records put out every day that you have to really concentrate on one record. The climate is not the same as it was in the '60s, when bands would put out a record every six months, every two months, or whatever. It doesn't work that way anymore 'cause you can't concentrate on a band that much. You have one shot every two years or something. And that's when you have to make a good record.
YAHOO! MUSIC: You must be happy to get new material out, because when your last album came out in the U.S., it actually was a couple of years old already.
NICHOLAUS: I think it was maybe six months old or so. But then...
HOWLIN' PELLE: Nobody bought it.
NICHOLAUS: Yeah, nobody bought it. And then it was re-released on another label.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, it's been a long time since we played new songs. 'Cause we didn't want to, because: A, we don't write on the road, and, B, if we have new songs, we don't want to play all the new songs that we have before the record comes out, 'cause it would spoil the surprise. So it took us a really long time, 'cause we toured for Veni Vidi Vicious for three years, almost. I don't know, it just seemed like we got big in a new country every month! And we had to go there and play to them. At least, it seemed that way to us. The first pressing of that record was, like, 500 copies. And now it's sold a lot more, you know? Every person that bought that record probably saw us twice [laughs].
YAHOO! MUSIC: Was America the country where you wanted to break the most?
NICHOLAUS: We were never out to break in America. We were never out to break anything, really.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Except stuff.
NICHOLAUS: We never expected it. The bands that were popular at the time, when we kind of started out, didn't sound like us. So we never really figured on that. And we weren't really interested, either, in making it big or anything. We just thought that if we toured, that's good.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, we played to people 'cause that's what we liked to do. And it wasn't really a matter of working to break, anyway. It was just 'cause we liked playing. We just figured, that's what bands do. You play as much as you can. We were never really after breaking anywhere. We didn't really play that much in America. We got popular very fast without playing here very much, which was weird 'cause everybody said that we had to play here a lot.
NICHOLAUS: Yeah. There probably is kind of a pattern for how to break America, but I don't think we followed it.
HOWLIN' PELLE: We didn't follow it at all!
NICHOLAUS: It just happened anyway!
YAHOO! MUSIC: Still, I think people really do have to see the Hives live to appreciate them. Could you describe what kind of a band you are onstage?
HOWLIN' PELLE: It's kind of hard to explain something that you'll see in a little while, though. It kind of spoils the surprise! I know we just do what we always thought rock bands did from seeing them in pictures and seeing them on TV. But apparently, moving on the stage went out of fashion in, I don't know when, the mid-'80s or something.
NICHOLAUS: Probably the late '80s.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, the late '80s. In the mid-'80s, they had the hair and metal bands, and they were running around a lot and all that. But in the late '80s/early '90s, it got really popular to just not do anything else other than play your songs. And we always thought that was a bit of a drag, actually.
NICHOLAUS: We were used playing proper road shows--in front of no one, really. We were touring sometimes, and people didn't really show up to see us play. No one knew who we were.
HOWLIN' PELLE: We played to nine people, but the thing is you just got to pretend that there's a million people there. Or you got to give those nine people everything you have. There's no point in putting on your mopey face, like, "Oh no, there's no one here!" You don't really do that. 'Cause we do it for ourselves, mostly, so the people that would feel the worst if we did a bad show would be ourselves! So it doesn't matter if it's two people or 200,000 people. It's the same thing.
NICHOLAUS: People are used to seeing bad shows, or they wouldn't really care like we care.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, exactly. Our lowest level is still so high that most bands are left behind. So that's what we've been working on: a high lowest level.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Do you think that kind of showmanship is sort of coming back--that people aren't wanting to see bands that are depressing and gloomy, but want to see more showbiz and more rock 'n' roll?
NICHOLAUS: Yeah, I think so. For a while, even, people went out to see bands who didn't really do anything--you know, they would put on a DAT tape and leave. I think people might want a bit of both, actually. Sometimes I like going to see bands who'll put on a DAT for you, 'cause sometimes I like the sound that comes out of speakers. But we were always very much into kind of primal rock 'n' roll stuff.
HOWLIN' PELLE: With the music we play, the only thing you really can do is dance to it, or move around or whatever. We can't stand still when we start playing, and neither can the crowd! But for some music, you're supposed to stand still, so that works. It's just that energetic rock music with people standing still never really appealed or made sense to us. But if you play very calm music, standing still has a place in music--but not really in our music.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Can you talk a little more about some of the things that influenced what you thought a rock show should be like?
HOWLIN' PELLE: I guess it was from seeing pictures of rock bands, mostly. You'd see a picture of a guy jumping up and down that was in a rock band, and you'd think that's what they did all the time. Maybe they did, or maybe they just took the picture on the only occasion that he jumped! But we just figured that they did that all the time--so that's what we should do. This is just our idea of what we thought it was, so that's what we did.
NICHOLAUS: We saw different punk bands and rock bands that have played around, and there were bands coming to our town as well. We went to see those bands, and if they weren't as good as the pictures on the back of the records that we had at home, we thought they were pretty bad. But otherwise, if they moved around and they looked cool, we would buy into it.
HOWLIN' PELLE: We would also see stuff on TV, like archive footage of James Brown or the Who...
NICHOLAUS: We would just go for anything that we felt was exciting, and if we felt that James Brown was more exciting than maybe what was popular at the time--I don't know, Def Leppard or something--we would go for James Brown.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Def Leppard could actually be pretty exciting sometimes...
HOWLIN' PELLE: Oh, it probably wasn't Def Leppard though.
NICHOLAUS: Yeah, they never came to Fagersta.
HOWLIN' PELLE: They never played in our town. James Brown didn't either, though, to be honest. But...
NICHOLAUS: He looked better in the pictures.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Tell me about the town you grew up in.
NICHOLAUS: It's a small town. It's in the middle of the woods.
HOWLIN' PELLE: It's a place called Fagersta, and it's a small mining town with, like, 12,000 people and really not a lot to do. It has beautiful nature but nothing going on, basically, except for the industry. That's about it, and that's what people do: They work in the industry and they work weird shifts, so they would like work at night, sleep during the day. The weird thing is that it's a city that you can walk around in for two whole days and not meet a single person. Which is very weird. But this is a good thing if you tour a lot and there are people everywhere and then you come home and there's nothing there. It feels kind of good, actually.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Are there any other rock bands from there? How did you drift towards doing rock in a town that doesn't really have a rock scene?
NICHOLAUS: There was kind of a small rock scene at the time.
HOWLIN' PELLE: There's always been punk bands in Fagersta, actually.
NICHOLAUS: There have always been punk bands, ever since, like, 1976 or something. Punk kind of died in the bigger cities, but in Fagersta, it still lived on. You would inherit punk music and rock 'n' roll from older brothers and sisters or the older guy who lived down the street, you know?
HOWLIN' PELLE: It kind of simmered down through the generations.
NICHOLAUS: Yeah. And at the time, when we were young, there were some bands, even American bands, coming to our town to play.
HOWLIN' PELLE: There were hardcore punk bands from our town that got pretty popular elsewhere. So when they got popular, even though we didn't really play the same type of music, we figured that it could be done--that you could, as a band, even from the tiniest little town in the middle of the woods, go and tour Europe. You just have to go there and put the stuff in a bus and leave. I think there are a lot of places in the world where you don't really think about that in the same way: You think you have to have a record deal and blah, blah, blah. But you just got to go play.
NICHOLAUS: We figured if the older guys could put together a band and tour, we might as well probably do the same.
HOWLIN' PELLE: We heard this story about Husker Du, how they would just go to a town when they toured and ask, "Do you have punk here?" And then somebody would say, "Yes, we do, one Tuesday every month, we have it over there." And they would wait there until that night came, and then they would go there and say, "Can we play?" You know, you can still do that. We sort of did. We just booked tours that were sort of semi-booked and slept on people's floors and all that.
YAHOO! MUSIC: What do you think it is about Sweden? Sweden used to have a reputation for pop bands like ABBA and Roxette, but now it seems like there's a lot of punk and garage music coming out of there.
NICHOLAUS: I think that there was always kind of harder music around.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Sweden has always been doing every kind of music.
NICHOLAUS: It was just that ABBA is probably the most famous band to come out of Sweden ever, that's all.
HOWLIN' PELLE: It's because pop music is usually more popular than punk music! [laughs] This is just a fluke that punk's popular now. But there is always good music from Sweden.
NICHOLAUS: And also, when one band becomes kind of popular, people tend to say, "Where did they come from?" Of course, maybe it was kind of exotic in a way; like maybe in the mid-'90s, there was one kind of Scandinavian rock thing going on, which was like, the Hellacopters. Everybody would follow them. You know, if bands start doing well, other bands will follow, I guess.
HOWLIN' PELLE: I think it's a media thing, mainly. We got popular doing this in America, and then American magazines started looking for bands that were like us: "There has to be more!" And then they found it. So that's why you heard about more Swedish bands, I think. There are tons of good ones, though, so that's a good thing, but I think that's the way it usually works. Like, if an Icelandic band would get popular a few years ago, people would go look there. It can't be isolated. There has to be more where that came from.
YAHOO! MUSIC: I do want to address the Randy Fitzsimmons thing, the guy you say assembled you and discovered you and wrote all the material on your first two albums. I see he has writing credit and production credit on this new album too. But I thought it had been uncovered that Randy Fitzsimmons was a fictional character--actually, that he was your alter ego, Nicholaus!
HOWLIN' PELLE: Oh, really? Why couldn't he be me?
NICHOLAUS: What about Randy Fitzsimmons? People just seem to find it very hard to swallow that it's a guy who wants to remain anonymous, you know?
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, 'cause it's very unpopular in our culture to remain humble. In a culture that's based on reality TV shows, people don't really understand that there's a person that does something of value and doesn't wanna take credit for it. He's the opposite, basically, of people on reality TV. He's a guy who does something and doesn't wanna be famous for it, as opposed to being someone that doesn't do anything and wants to be famous for it!
YAHOO! MUSIC: For those who don't know about Randy Fitzsimmons, can you explain who he is?
HOWLIN' PELLE: He's the guy who had the idea to form the band, and it was his idea that it would be these members. He comes up with a lot of the ideas. But nowadays, it's more like it's six people [Randy plus the five Hives members] doing everything. It used to be more him, more his ideas. And...I don't know, I can't really tell you a lot about him, because he wants to remain anonymous!
NICHOLAUS: He doesn't want us to talk about him, so we talk about him as little as possible. We can't go into any detail.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Where did the rumor come about that "Randy Fitzsimmons" was actually Nicholaus's alias?
NICHOLAUS: It came from [British music tabloid] the NME. Well, it came from various places before that. I think journalists were phoning up Swedish rights organizations to see who collected the money for the Hives, and I collected the money, so...
HOWLIN' PELLE: ...So they figured it has to be him. Nicholaus gets the money, it has to be him. But they don't really think about the fact that the dumbest thing for Randy Fitzsimmons to do would be to have his name on there, so people can just call and ask, "Where does he live?" and find him!
NICHOLAUS: Yeah, they can contact the one who's kind of collecting the money. So if you put your address on there, you're not really anonymous anymore.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, so Nicholaus takes the money home from the bank, and divides it six ways between us and Randy.
YAHOO! MUSIC: It seems in general that you like to have a mythology around your band. Your whole website is about the mystery of your supposed disappearance, for instance. Do you try to create that kind of mystique?
HOWLIN' PELLE: I think it's more the fact that we're pretty bored with stuff being done the regular way. Like, you would have a website, and they all look the same, basically, so we just wanted to do something else. And also it's the fact that we have been missing, and we haven't really done anything with our website.
YAHOO! MUSIC: So you were missing? Where were you?
HOWLIN' PELLE: We were lost.
NICHOLAUS: Lost. We were in seclusion.
HOWLIN' PELLE: We were making a record and digging in the backyard basically.
NICHOLAUS: Pretty much exactly the same way that we did things before. Whenever we make a record, we can never concentrate on more than one thing at a time, so we have to spend time in seclusion. It takes us always about a year, or a year and a half, to finish a record.
HOWLIN' PELLE: 'Cause we always start with a blank page, sort of. We don't really have a set way of doing it.
NICHOLAUS: We're very slow when we make records, but for us, I don't think we could do it any other way. We just go into detail.
HOWLIN' PELLE: I think it's 'cause we'd rather make a good record every four years than two bad ones every two years. I think that's it, really. Everything we do has to be important.
NICHOLAUS: We were never in a hurry, either. You know, the best thing for us, maybe, would have been to release a new record a year and a half ago, while we were kind of popular still. [laughs] We are kind of popular now, but maybe that would have been the best thing--but it wouldn't have been a good record. So it didn't feel important to us to make a record to remain popular, and ride the wave.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Do you think there is a wave? Like a wave of garage-rock popularity right now?
HOWLIN' PELLE: Well, we were sort of more waiting for the wave to ebb out!
YAHOO! MUSIC: What wave are you talking about?
HOWLIN' PELLE: The new rock revolution, or whatever they call it. It's us, basically.
NICHOLAUS: We're kind of waiting for the second wave. The biggest one.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Exactly. The old rock revolution, the second one. The sequel to that.
YAHOO! MUSIC: The name of the Hives is often brought up in association with a lot of other bands that came out when your last album came out--not bands you sound like, necessarily, but bands with "The" in their names. How do you feel about that categorization?
HOWLIN' PELLE: That's also a media thing, really.
NICHOLAUS: Yeah, there you go again--like, if people can't see beyond "The" in a band name, what do you do?
HOWLIN' PELLE: It's kind of sad about the state of humanity, isn't it?
NICHOLAUS: "Oh, they all have 'The' in their name. They must sound the same!"
HOWLIN' PELLE: There have always been bands named "The" and with an "s" at the end of their name, from the beginning of time. I think we just thought that all the good band names were plurals, pretty much. It's just a media thing. Like I said about Sweden--"Oh, there's a band from Sweden that are good, so we have to go look in Sweden for more good bands." That's the way record companies work, and magazines work. And then when they see a few bands get popular called "The Somethings," they just have to find more of those, and they'll sign every band that's called something with an "s" at the end. So what are you gonna do? It's just the way it is. I mean, we'd be compared to the Strokes and the White Stripes, and they'd say that we sound alike. I might have even heard people say, in explaining what a band sounded like, they would say, "You know--the Strokes, the Hives, the White Stripes..." How would that band sound? I'm just curious. It's totally impossible!
NICHOLAUS: I think maybe we shared some of the influences with a band like the White Stripes or something, like we liked a lot of the same things, but it's not like we came from the same town or anything. Detroit's pretty far from Fagersta; so is New York, I guess.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Well, we've compared to worse bands, so that's fine.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Like who?
HOWLIN' PELLE: We've been lumped in with everything, really. We've been lumped into straight-edge, hardcore, all kinds of stuff. Anything that's popular, we're usually lumped into.
YAHOO! MUSIC: A lot of times the media writes about how you dress, too. Do think the attention paid to your image deflects attention away from your music?
HOWLIN' PELLE: Well, the clothes and what we do apart from the band are two things. Basically, it's because we thought that there's so much more you could do besides playing music. Obviously the music is pretty much all we do. The rest of it takes five minutes, while the music takes about a year to make. So it kind of works as an idiot-filter for people that can't see past what we're dressed in.
NICHOLAUS: You really want them to listen to your music...
HOWLIN' PELLE: ...Exactly. If you only hear clothes, then you don't have to pay attention, that's fine.
NICHOLAUS: But I think we always kind of hated bands who had to wear a jeans and T-shirt in order to make their music sound "real." At the time when we started out, it was kind of grunge days, and I thought it was so damned pretentious to wear a torn T-shirt and torn jeans.
HOWLIN' PELLE: 'Cause, you know, it was the best torn T-shirt and the best torn jeans they could find! It's not like they spent less time dressing up, it's just that they tried to act like they didn't care.
NICHOLAUS: It's not like people couldn't afford buying a clean T-shirt, either.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, most of these rock bands were f--king rich as well! [laughs] And they'd be wearing a flannel shirt that was supposed to look like they got it from a charity shop. But it was, like, a $700 torn flannel shirt.
YAHOO! MUSIC: When did you come up with the idea to wear the black and white and the suits and all that?
HOWLIN' PELLE: Maybe 1996. That's when we started wearing the same clothes, because we thought that it would separate us from a lot of the other bands that we played with. We always that was a good idea: to try and be as separate from everything else as possible. Even though there are tons of bands that we like and that we listen to, we just wanted to be sort of isolated.
NICHOLAUS: I think we enjoyed playing with the punk bands and the hardcore bands that were popular at the time--we liked their company--but we always felt like we were a different band. We enjoyed separating ourselves from the other bands.
HOWLIN' PELLE: It was very, very fun doing that. I guess it was the end of grunge or something in '96, or towards the end, and people weren't supposed to think that you were separate from the audience. You were supposed to be just a guy playing guitar.
NICHOLAUS: But we always thought that we were better than everyone else!
HOWLIN' PELLE: We thought it was a drag to just not do anything else but play music. So dressing up was good 'cause it annoyed exactly the right people. The right people would get pissed off at us, kind of like the people that can only hear our clothes. So it worked to our advantage...plus it looked cool.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Have you always had this confidence? Where does this confidence come from?
HOWLIN' PELLE: I think it's more like we think that's part of what a rock band is. You have to be confident at what you do. If what you do doesn't sound good to you, you have to practice. And we've practiced for 11 years now, and it's starting to sound pretty good, so...
NICHOLAUS: We practiced for almost four years, I think, before we even thought we were that good, before we appeared on recorded material.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Just one more question--about your album title, Tyrannosaurus Hives. How did you come up with that?
HOWLIN' PELLE: Our last record was called Veni Vidi Vicious, because it was the record that we were gonna use to conquer the world. So we made that record and then we toured forever until it was as popular as we thought it should be. And now we're huge--like a dinosaur. You could also argue that the dinosaur is, or would soon become, extinct, so the title is kind of a double-edged sword. But, mostly it sounds cool.
After finishing their manic set--miraculously, without a single bead of sweat sullying their spic-and-span matching uniforms--brothers/bandmates Howlin' Pelle and Nicholaus sat down with LAUNCH editor Lyndsey Parker to discuss everything from James Brown to Def Leppard to their mysterious Svengali, Randy Fitzsimmons. And boy, did they have a lot to say--all in thoroughly charming Scandinavian accents, of course. Here's how it went:
YAHOO! MUSIC: You once famously said that you were going to break up after three albums. And here you are, on album number three, Tyrannosaurus Hives. So, is that statement about quitting still true?
HOWLIN' PELLE: That's kind of been misquoted, actually. The entire quote was like this: "No band that we know of has made more than three good records in a row. So let's try to make a fourth one, and if it sucks, we won't release it."
NICHOLAUS: We probably did say, though, that we were going to release three records and then quit. 'Cause we felt that it would be us quitting while we were ahead. You never know...
HOWLIN' PELLE: We might. You never know how long you have us, so enjoy it while you can!
YAHOO! MUSIC: What do you think of this new record? Do you think it is your swan song or ultimate statement?
NICHOLAUS: Every record that we make is kind of our last record.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, every record feels like the last will and testament of the Hives. We just have to make it as important as we can for ourselves. It all has to mean a lot to us--otherwise, there would be no point in doing it. There's so many records put out every day that you have to really concentrate on one record. The climate is not the same as it was in the '60s, when bands would put out a record every six months, every two months, or whatever. It doesn't work that way anymore 'cause you can't concentrate on a band that much. You have one shot every two years or something. And that's when you have to make a good record.
YAHOO! MUSIC: You must be happy to get new material out, because when your last album came out in the U.S., it actually was a couple of years old already.
NICHOLAUS: I think it was maybe six months old or so. But then...
HOWLIN' PELLE: Nobody bought it.
NICHOLAUS: Yeah, nobody bought it. And then it was re-released on another label.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, it's been a long time since we played new songs. 'Cause we didn't want to, because: A, we don't write on the road, and, B, if we have new songs, we don't want to play all the new songs that we have before the record comes out, 'cause it would spoil the surprise. So it took us a really long time, 'cause we toured for Veni Vidi Vicious for three years, almost. I don't know, it just seemed like we got big in a new country every month! And we had to go there and play to them. At least, it seemed that way to us. The first pressing of that record was, like, 500 copies. And now it's sold a lot more, you know? Every person that bought that record probably saw us twice [laughs].
YAHOO! MUSIC: Was America the country where you wanted to break the most?
NICHOLAUS: We were never out to break in America. We were never out to break anything, really.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Except stuff.
NICHOLAUS: We never expected it. The bands that were popular at the time, when we kind of started out, didn't sound like us. So we never really figured on that. And we weren't really interested, either, in making it big or anything. We just thought that if we toured, that's good.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, we played to people 'cause that's what we liked to do. And it wasn't really a matter of working to break, anyway. It was just 'cause we liked playing. We just figured, that's what bands do. You play as much as you can. We were never really after breaking anywhere. We didn't really play that much in America. We got popular very fast without playing here very much, which was weird 'cause everybody said that we had to play here a lot.
NICHOLAUS: Yeah. There probably is kind of a pattern for how to break America, but I don't think we followed it.
HOWLIN' PELLE: We didn't follow it at all!
NICHOLAUS: It just happened anyway!
YAHOO! MUSIC: Still, I think people really do have to see the Hives live to appreciate them. Could you describe what kind of a band you are onstage?
HOWLIN' PELLE: It's kind of hard to explain something that you'll see in a little while, though. It kind of spoils the surprise! I know we just do what we always thought rock bands did from seeing them in pictures and seeing them on TV. But apparently, moving on the stage went out of fashion in, I don't know when, the mid-'80s or something.
NICHOLAUS: Probably the late '80s.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, the late '80s. In the mid-'80s, they had the hair and metal bands, and they were running around a lot and all that. But in the late '80s/early '90s, it got really popular to just not do anything else other than play your songs. And we always thought that was a bit of a drag, actually.
NICHOLAUS: We were used playing proper road shows--in front of no one, really. We were touring sometimes, and people didn't really show up to see us play. No one knew who we were.
HOWLIN' PELLE: We played to nine people, but the thing is you just got to pretend that there's a million people there. Or you got to give those nine people everything you have. There's no point in putting on your mopey face, like, "Oh no, there's no one here!" You don't really do that. 'Cause we do it for ourselves, mostly, so the people that would feel the worst if we did a bad show would be ourselves! So it doesn't matter if it's two people or 200,000 people. It's the same thing.
NICHOLAUS: People are used to seeing bad shows, or they wouldn't really care like we care.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, exactly. Our lowest level is still so high that most bands are left behind. So that's what we've been working on: a high lowest level.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Do you think that kind of showmanship is sort of coming back--that people aren't wanting to see bands that are depressing and gloomy, but want to see more showbiz and more rock 'n' roll?
NICHOLAUS: Yeah, I think so. For a while, even, people went out to see bands who didn't really do anything--you know, they would put on a DAT tape and leave. I think people might want a bit of both, actually. Sometimes I like going to see bands who'll put on a DAT for you, 'cause sometimes I like the sound that comes out of speakers. But we were always very much into kind of primal rock 'n' roll stuff.
HOWLIN' PELLE: With the music we play, the only thing you really can do is dance to it, or move around or whatever. We can't stand still when we start playing, and neither can the crowd! But for some music, you're supposed to stand still, so that works. It's just that energetic rock music with people standing still never really appealed or made sense to us. But if you play very calm music, standing still has a place in music--but not really in our music.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Can you talk a little more about some of the things that influenced what you thought a rock show should be like?
HOWLIN' PELLE: I guess it was from seeing pictures of rock bands, mostly. You'd see a picture of a guy jumping up and down that was in a rock band, and you'd think that's what they did all the time. Maybe they did, or maybe they just took the picture on the only occasion that he jumped! But we just figured that they did that all the time--so that's what we should do. This is just our idea of what we thought it was, so that's what we did.
NICHOLAUS: We saw different punk bands and rock bands that have played around, and there were bands coming to our town as well. We went to see those bands, and if they weren't as good as the pictures on the back of the records that we had at home, we thought they were pretty bad. But otherwise, if they moved around and they looked cool, we would buy into it.
HOWLIN' PELLE: We would also see stuff on TV, like archive footage of James Brown or the Who...
NICHOLAUS: We would just go for anything that we felt was exciting, and if we felt that James Brown was more exciting than maybe what was popular at the time--I don't know, Def Leppard or something--we would go for James Brown.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Def Leppard could actually be pretty exciting sometimes...
HOWLIN' PELLE: Oh, it probably wasn't Def Leppard though.
NICHOLAUS: Yeah, they never came to Fagersta.
HOWLIN' PELLE: They never played in our town. James Brown didn't either, though, to be honest. But...
NICHOLAUS: He looked better in the pictures.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Tell me about the town you grew up in.
NICHOLAUS: It's a small town. It's in the middle of the woods.
HOWLIN' PELLE: It's a place called Fagersta, and it's a small mining town with, like, 12,000 people and really not a lot to do. It has beautiful nature but nothing going on, basically, except for the industry. That's about it, and that's what people do: They work in the industry and they work weird shifts, so they would like work at night, sleep during the day. The weird thing is that it's a city that you can walk around in for two whole days and not meet a single person. Which is very weird. But this is a good thing if you tour a lot and there are people everywhere and then you come home and there's nothing there. It feels kind of good, actually.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Are there any other rock bands from there? How did you drift towards doing rock in a town that doesn't really have a rock scene?
NICHOLAUS: There was kind of a small rock scene at the time.
HOWLIN' PELLE: There's always been punk bands in Fagersta, actually.
NICHOLAUS: There have always been punk bands, ever since, like, 1976 or something. Punk kind of died in the bigger cities, but in Fagersta, it still lived on. You would inherit punk music and rock 'n' roll from older brothers and sisters or the older guy who lived down the street, you know?
HOWLIN' PELLE: It kind of simmered down through the generations.
NICHOLAUS: Yeah. And at the time, when we were young, there were some bands, even American bands, coming to our town to play.
HOWLIN' PELLE: There were hardcore punk bands from our town that got pretty popular elsewhere. So when they got popular, even though we didn't really play the same type of music, we figured that it could be done--that you could, as a band, even from the tiniest little town in the middle of the woods, go and tour Europe. You just have to go there and put the stuff in a bus and leave. I think there are a lot of places in the world where you don't really think about that in the same way: You think you have to have a record deal and blah, blah, blah. But you just got to go play.
NICHOLAUS: We figured if the older guys could put together a band and tour, we might as well probably do the same.
HOWLIN' PELLE: We heard this story about Husker Du, how they would just go to a town when they toured and ask, "Do you have punk here?" And then somebody would say, "Yes, we do, one Tuesday every month, we have it over there." And they would wait there until that night came, and then they would go there and say, "Can we play?" You know, you can still do that. We sort of did. We just booked tours that were sort of semi-booked and slept on people's floors and all that.
YAHOO! MUSIC: What do you think it is about Sweden? Sweden used to have a reputation for pop bands like ABBA and Roxette, but now it seems like there's a lot of punk and garage music coming out of there.
NICHOLAUS: I think that there was always kind of harder music around.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Sweden has always been doing every kind of music.
NICHOLAUS: It was just that ABBA is probably the most famous band to come out of Sweden ever, that's all.
HOWLIN' PELLE: It's because pop music is usually more popular than punk music! [laughs] This is just a fluke that punk's popular now. But there is always good music from Sweden.
NICHOLAUS: And also, when one band becomes kind of popular, people tend to say, "Where did they come from?" Of course, maybe it was kind of exotic in a way; like maybe in the mid-'90s, there was one kind of Scandinavian rock thing going on, which was like, the Hellacopters. Everybody would follow them. You know, if bands start doing well, other bands will follow, I guess.
HOWLIN' PELLE: I think it's a media thing, mainly. We got popular doing this in America, and then American magazines started looking for bands that were like us: "There has to be more!" And then they found it. So that's why you heard about more Swedish bands, I think. There are tons of good ones, though, so that's a good thing, but I think that's the way it usually works. Like, if an Icelandic band would get popular a few years ago, people would go look there. It can't be isolated. There has to be more where that came from.
YAHOO! MUSIC: I do want to address the Randy Fitzsimmons thing, the guy you say assembled you and discovered you and wrote all the material on your first two albums. I see he has writing credit and production credit on this new album too. But I thought it had been uncovered that Randy Fitzsimmons was a fictional character--actually, that he was your alter ego, Nicholaus!
HOWLIN' PELLE: Oh, really? Why couldn't he be me?
NICHOLAUS: What about Randy Fitzsimmons? People just seem to find it very hard to swallow that it's a guy who wants to remain anonymous, you know?
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, 'cause it's very unpopular in our culture to remain humble. In a culture that's based on reality TV shows, people don't really understand that there's a person that does something of value and doesn't wanna take credit for it. He's the opposite, basically, of people on reality TV. He's a guy who does something and doesn't wanna be famous for it, as opposed to being someone that doesn't do anything and wants to be famous for it!
YAHOO! MUSIC: For those who don't know about Randy Fitzsimmons, can you explain who he is?
HOWLIN' PELLE: He's the guy who had the idea to form the band, and it was his idea that it would be these members. He comes up with a lot of the ideas. But nowadays, it's more like it's six people [Randy plus the five Hives members] doing everything. It used to be more him, more his ideas. And...I don't know, I can't really tell you a lot about him, because he wants to remain anonymous!
NICHOLAUS: He doesn't want us to talk about him, so we talk about him as little as possible. We can't go into any detail.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Where did the rumor come about that "Randy Fitzsimmons" was actually Nicholaus's alias?
NICHOLAUS: It came from [British music tabloid] the NME. Well, it came from various places before that. I think journalists were phoning up Swedish rights organizations to see who collected the money for the Hives, and I collected the money, so...
HOWLIN' PELLE: ...So they figured it has to be him. Nicholaus gets the money, it has to be him. But they don't really think about the fact that the dumbest thing for Randy Fitzsimmons to do would be to have his name on there, so people can just call and ask, "Where does he live?" and find him!
NICHOLAUS: Yeah, they can contact the one who's kind of collecting the money. So if you put your address on there, you're not really anonymous anymore.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, so Nicholaus takes the money home from the bank, and divides it six ways between us and Randy.
YAHOO! MUSIC: It seems in general that you like to have a mythology around your band. Your whole website is about the mystery of your supposed disappearance, for instance. Do you try to create that kind of mystique?
HOWLIN' PELLE: I think it's more the fact that we're pretty bored with stuff being done the regular way. Like, you would have a website, and they all look the same, basically, so we just wanted to do something else. And also it's the fact that we have been missing, and we haven't really done anything with our website.
YAHOO! MUSIC: So you were missing? Where were you?
HOWLIN' PELLE: We were lost.
NICHOLAUS: Lost. We were in seclusion.
HOWLIN' PELLE: We were making a record and digging in the backyard basically.
NICHOLAUS: Pretty much exactly the same way that we did things before. Whenever we make a record, we can never concentrate on more than one thing at a time, so we have to spend time in seclusion. It takes us always about a year, or a year and a half, to finish a record.
HOWLIN' PELLE: 'Cause we always start with a blank page, sort of. We don't really have a set way of doing it.
NICHOLAUS: We're very slow when we make records, but for us, I don't think we could do it any other way. We just go into detail.
HOWLIN' PELLE: I think it's 'cause we'd rather make a good record every four years than two bad ones every two years. I think that's it, really. Everything we do has to be important.
NICHOLAUS: We were never in a hurry, either. You know, the best thing for us, maybe, would have been to release a new record a year and a half ago, while we were kind of popular still. [laughs] We are kind of popular now, but maybe that would have been the best thing--but it wouldn't have been a good record. So it didn't feel important to us to make a record to remain popular, and ride the wave.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Do you think there is a wave? Like a wave of garage-rock popularity right now?
HOWLIN' PELLE: Well, we were sort of more waiting for the wave to ebb out!
YAHOO! MUSIC: What wave are you talking about?
HOWLIN' PELLE: The new rock revolution, or whatever they call it. It's us, basically.
NICHOLAUS: We're kind of waiting for the second wave. The biggest one.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Exactly. The old rock revolution, the second one. The sequel to that.
YAHOO! MUSIC: The name of the Hives is often brought up in association with a lot of other bands that came out when your last album came out--not bands you sound like, necessarily, but bands with "The" in their names. How do you feel about that categorization?
HOWLIN' PELLE: That's also a media thing, really.
NICHOLAUS: Yeah, there you go again--like, if people can't see beyond "The" in a band name, what do you do?
HOWLIN' PELLE: It's kind of sad about the state of humanity, isn't it?
NICHOLAUS: "Oh, they all have 'The' in their name. They must sound the same!"
HOWLIN' PELLE: There have always been bands named "The" and with an "s" at the end of their name, from the beginning of time. I think we just thought that all the good band names were plurals, pretty much. It's just a media thing. Like I said about Sweden--"Oh, there's a band from Sweden that are good, so we have to go look in Sweden for more good bands." That's the way record companies work, and magazines work. And then when they see a few bands get popular called "The Somethings," they just have to find more of those, and they'll sign every band that's called something with an "s" at the end. So what are you gonna do? It's just the way it is. I mean, we'd be compared to the Strokes and the White Stripes, and they'd say that we sound alike. I might have even heard people say, in explaining what a band sounded like, they would say, "You know--the Strokes, the Hives, the White Stripes..." How would that band sound? I'm just curious. It's totally impossible!
NICHOLAUS: I think maybe we shared some of the influences with a band like the White Stripes or something, like we liked a lot of the same things, but it's not like we came from the same town or anything. Detroit's pretty far from Fagersta; so is New York, I guess.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Well, we've compared to worse bands, so that's fine.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Like who?
HOWLIN' PELLE: We've been lumped in with everything, really. We've been lumped into straight-edge, hardcore, all kinds of stuff. Anything that's popular, we're usually lumped into.
YAHOO! MUSIC: A lot of times the media writes about how you dress, too. Do think the attention paid to your image deflects attention away from your music?
HOWLIN' PELLE: Well, the clothes and what we do apart from the band are two things. Basically, it's because we thought that there's so much more you could do besides playing music. Obviously the music is pretty much all we do. The rest of it takes five minutes, while the music takes about a year to make. So it kind of works as an idiot-filter for people that can't see past what we're dressed in.
NICHOLAUS: You really want them to listen to your music...
HOWLIN' PELLE: ...Exactly. If you only hear clothes, then you don't have to pay attention, that's fine.
NICHOLAUS: But I think we always kind of hated bands who had to wear a jeans and T-shirt in order to make their music sound "real." At the time when we started out, it was kind of grunge days, and I thought it was so damned pretentious to wear a torn T-shirt and torn jeans.
HOWLIN' PELLE: 'Cause, you know, it was the best torn T-shirt and the best torn jeans they could find! It's not like they spent less time dressing up, it's just that they tried to act like they didn't care.
NICHOLAUS: It's not like people couldn't afford buying a clean T-shirt, either.
HOWLIN' PELLE: Yeah, most of these rock bands were f--king rich as well! [laughs] And they'd be wearing a flannel shirt that was supposed to look like they got it from a charity shop. But it was, like, a $700 torn flannel shirt.
YAHOO! MUSIC: When did you come up with the idea to wear the black and white and the suits and all that?
HOWLIN' PELLE: Maybe 1996. That's when we started wearing the same clothes, because we thought that it would separate us from a lot of the other bands that we played with. We always that was a good idea: to try and be as separate from everything else as possible. Even though there are tons of bands that we like and that we listen to, we just wanted to be sort of isolated.
NICHOLAUS: I think we enjoyed playing with the punk bands and the hardcore bands that were popular at the time--we liked their company--but we always felt like we were a different band. We enjoyed separating ourselves from the other bands.
HOWLIN' PELLE: It was very, very fun doing that. I guess it was the end of grunge or something in '96, or towards the end, and people weren't supposed to think that you were separate from the audience. You were supposed to be just a guy playing guitar.
NICHOLAUS: But we always thought that we were better than everyone else!
HOWLIN' PELLE: We thought it was a drag to just not do anything else but play music. So dressing up was good 'cause it annoyed exactly the right people. The right people would get pissed off at us, kind of like the people that can only hear our clothes. So it worked to our advantage...plus it looked cool.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Have you always had this confidence? Where does this confidence come from?
HOWLIN' PELLE: I think it's more like we think that's part of what a rock band is. You have to be confident at what you do. If what you do doesn't sound good to you, you have to practice. And we've practiced for 11 years now, and it's starting to sound pretty good, so...
NICHOLAUS: We practiced for almost four years, I think, before we even thought we were that good, before we appeared on recorded material.
YAHOO! MUSIC: Just one more question--about your album title, Tyrannosaurus Hives. How did you come up with that?
HOWLIN' PELLE: Our last record was called Veni Vidi Vicious, because it was the record that we were gonna use to conquer the world. So we made that record and then we toured forever until it was as popular as we thought it should be. And now we're huge--like a dinosaur. You could also argue that the dinosaur is, or would soon become, extinct, so the title is kind of a double-edged sword. But, mostly it sounds cool.
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