Speed Freaks And Robots

So you start a band, right? If you call it something like The Jimi Hendrix Experience or, say, Chicks On Speed, then it logically follows that groupies will bring you lots of pure acid or freshly-cooked bathtub speed at your gigs. It’s called showbiz and it rules. If, on top of your catchy moniker, your band is made up of three intercontinental art-school babe-rahams (Munich’s Kiki Moorse, Sydney’s Alex Murray-Leslie and New York’s Melissa Logan) who snort tons of speed and dance around like new wave robots wearing dresses made of paper and shiny leather held together with gaffer tape, then your band is guaranteed to be super popular. It all makes perfect sense, really. It’s surprising that no one thought of this before, cuz speed usually makes people think of brilliant things. Take Dr. Charles Roberts, for example. Perhaps the world’s foremost authority on speed, the good doctor is best known for his role as a "vitamin guru" in the 60s. In between doses of LSD-25 sugarcubes, Dr. Roberts would poke huge booster shots of speed into the asses of New York’s top society darlings (from Edie Sedgwick to Cherry Vanilla and the Velvets) while elucidating his "thirteen-part plan to rejuvenate the entire earth." Of course, speed provided Dr. Roberts’ patients with tons of other brilliant ideas, like conceiving plastic Kabuki houses and redesigning the Boeing 707 with a psychedelic interior, but most of those speed-freaks ended up with syphilis before they could ever realize any of their grandiose plans. Chicks On Speed are totally different. They actually act on their genius flashes of inspiration and do things like write a trashy techno song like "Yes I Do!" with rhyming prose couplets like "Fashion victim on the air/ Shaved off all my pubic hair." Then they enlist techno stars like DJ Hell and Christopher Just to produce the songs on their fabulous new must-have album called Chicks on Speed Will Save Us All! and then the people in all the European countries go completely apeshit all over it. VICE met up with Chick Alex in Munich, at the office they share with fellow happenin’ electronic music labels Disko B and Gigolo Records. Although the Chicks have toured in exotic lands like Helsinki and Israel, they have yet to visit our shores because they say they haven’t been invited yet. Foreigners are so polite… even the ones on drugs. VICE: Tell us about your plans for world domination.
Chick Alex: We want to do everything. Music is just one tiny little bit. We’re not a band - that’s really important. We are an art project. There’s the music, the three labels that we run (Stop Records, Go Records and Chicks On Speed Records), the clothes that we make, graphics and record covers for other bands, and video and wallpaper. We want to get into architecture, too. We want to build a building, a Chicks On Speed headquarters in Berlin. You make wallpaper?
Yes. Also we’re preparing for a big exhibition in Barcelona, they’ve given us a room and it’s going to be called "Chicks On Speed Sell Out" and we’re building a paper house and we’re going to sell things. We’re going to sell out terribly. Every single little thing in this room will be for sale. You could buy the carpet on the floor and this wallpaper that we’ve made from news clippings. You know how there’s been all these journalists hyping us a bit? We’ve taken the hype and made wallpaper out of that, all these stupid slogans, like "Chicks On Speed make Atari Teenage Riot look like the James Last Orchestra" and stuff like that. What does your manifesto mean?
 We don’t believe in it anymore because it’s just a load of rubbish. However, there is one good bit that Kiki wrote that says, "The Chicks Machine will think for you. Add or don’t add or add and don’t add anything. Don’t even think or don’t add or don’t think or don’t add anything. The Chicks Machine will think for you." That’s a good bit. The Chicks Machine?
Yeah, we want to make this one-button machine that will do everything. We’ll use it for music as well. It’ll make strange sounds and do a lot of different functions. We want to get the guy who did the Kraftwerk machine. It’ll be white and metal and a triangle, and in the middle of this triangle, a single button. Umm…Ooh.
You’re getting confused, aren’t you? Buh.