Comme Des Power Electronics

Photo by Ben Rayner

Luke Younger and Steve Warwick met six years ago at a Trans Am show in London where a shared a love of hardcore and harsh power electronics led to them moving around the country performing together in various weirdly-named outfits but eventually settled as the Birds Of Delay. Cute eh? With a slew of CD-R, vinyl and tape releases on labels from John Olson’s American Tapes to Steve’s own Alcoholic Narcolepsy label, they have played throughout Europe and the US and only had the plug pulled on them once by some irate dancehall MCs at a street festival in Copenhagen where they had decided to play an impromptu show on someone’s balcony. Thurston Moore personally apologised in the programme for being unable to book them at last December’s ATP and their current seven-inch is an untitled live recording on Nate Young’s Aryan Asshole records. Vice: Seeing as this is the Fashion Issue, can I ask why so many noise dudes wear those weird shoes? Luke: What, the boots? Err… I don’t think they all do. Maybe some guys think it’s cool in a perverse way to invert people’s perception of what they should look like. You know, turn up on stage dressed really smart and then create something that is the antithesis of that on stage. Or maybe they just like dressing like that. Do you think that’s why Whitehouse ditched the trench coats for the Italian shirts and stuff? Well, with them, they’ve been doing it all since before anyone really. They completely changed my perception of music and its possibilities and the whole way I thought about a lot of things. The whole sense of confrontation is an integral part of their live performance. Changing the way they dress is just another means of fucking with the audience’s expectations, taking any sense of a comfort zone away from the people that turn up to see them. They got bottled off at SEOne when they played with Aphex Twin last year so it must still be working. Then on the other end of the scale you have the New Blockaders who basically exist to be anti-everything. No image, no identity, just some guys on stage whose faces you can’t even see. Is your music at all reflected in the way you dress? No. I don’t really think about how I dress too much. Maybe Steve does. He has a beard and lives in Berlin now, though, so probably not. I mean some guys, like all the Providence bands, their clothes are kind of an extension of the visual art they produce and I suppose Olson goes in for pretty crazy clothes. He goes for a new look every season. We’re never really sure how our music is going to come out or how we’re going to produce it in the studio or on stage. I’m not bothered what I wear and I suppose the only link is that we’ll make sound with whatever is there. We used to use guitars all the time but I lost mine so I just use cheap keyboards now, pedals, anything. We’d use a guitar if we had one. Do you have one? JAMES KNIGHT
www.myspace.com/birdsofdelay