INTERVIEW BY ANDY CAPPER, PHOTO BY PATRICK O’DELL
Despite playing arena tours, having supermodel girlfriends and owning bars all over New York, the three remaining members of Interpol have just made the saddest album of their career. We have known their guitarist Daniel Kessler since before he had to shave so we had to call him up to see if everything was okay.
Vice: Dan, are you okay?
Daniel Kessler: Yeah, I’m fine, thanks for asking, though.
Err, cool. How’s everything going? You’re playing with U2 and stuff now right?
They just asked us. We thought about it, and were like “Why not?”
Did you get to hang out with U2? Have you met Bono?
Just a couple of times very briefly.
I remember having an hour-long argument with Spike (Jonze) once about whether Bono was good or evil. By the end of it he had broken me down into saying: “OK, maybe he isn’t EVIL, per se.”
I definitely don’t think he is evil. But it’s funny that people have that stance.
I remember in like 2001 or so you gave me the Interpol demo tape. I lost it.
It’s probably propping up the table, man.
You were living in New York at the time.
I moved to New York from London in ’93.
And now the band is huge. How has your world changed since then?
Its hard to make a general statement. It’s a big country. I mean, there was a period of a few roaring years before the downturn, and I think people took advantage of the real-estate and then when it hit you have all the skeleton buildings that are half-built. It just baffled me that they tore down all these nice old buildings to put up glossy, cookie cutter buildings. Even the brick they use now you can see that there is no class to it, and its not going to age well. It feels very cheap.
And a lot of technological advancements these days are the same; gimmicky crap.
We’ve had thousands and thousands of years of living without all these new things they make, but if you removed them now from us, it would feel like we are missing something we never needed.
What do you think you are dependent on?
I had a BlackBerry but without email or internet access. I don’t wan that access.
My friend has a mandolin tuner on his iPhone. You can get anything you want by clicking your fingers. Making everything so available just cheapens everything, I think.
When you have something very specific in mind that you need its good to find it so easily. But generally we’re at a time when people are taking it all rather than being specific. People are taking everything all of the time.
It’s the “tsunami of information” theory that Ian Hislop from Private Eye told me about.
I think its time to take a step back and think, “Do you really need to be involved in all these things?” I was at Grand Central Station and you look at the train times and it has a Facebook address, and I’m like, “Grand Central Station has a Facebook?”
I bet there are hotdog stands and pizza slice shops that have Facebook.
I bet, man. And they probably have hotdog stand Twitterers too.
If people like Ashton Kutcher are the most popular Twitter guys out there, then I don’t want any of it.
What does he write about?
I have no idea. Like: “Check out my favourite hotdog seller on Facebook”?
Information like that is vital.
Interpol’s new album Interpol is out now on Soft Limit. Watch out for them soon on the Creators Project website.
