Interview: Ricky Gervais

The A.V. Club, Jan. 10 2007 Link

This one's long, so just click the link for the whole thing, but here are some highlights.

AVC: Do you think people sometimes laugh at things for the wrong reasons?

RG: I just don't think there's any pleasure in getting an easy laugh. There can be no reward. You stand at the back of a chain comedy club, and those guys come out and they're going, "Ha! What's going on with Scooby-Doo? A talking dog!" And I want to shout, "It's a kids' program!" What vein of comedy gold have they really hit upon there? Then some other guy goes, "Ugh, the '70s, haircuts were different, weren't they?" I want to go, "Well, yeah, but I don't know what you've done there." I don't get observational comedy. It's observational, but they've just left out the comedy bit. And these people are cracking up! They couldn't laugh any more. So you think, "Why would I try and make those people laugh? I don't need to make them laugh. They're happy enough. I'd probably just spoil it for them." I'm aiming at someone else. I'm not uptight about it. I don't want to close those comedy clubs down, I just don't want to play them.

....

AVC: Is Andy's disastrous sitcom, When The Whistle Blows, your nightmare show?

RG: I just wouldn't do it, and I know that I wouldn't be happy doing it, because it's too easy. There's nothing wrong with it. Those shows still exist in England, they have for 30 years, there's no change there, but you know what? On one side, there's people wearing wigs and doing smutty innuendo and shouting a catchphrase, and on the other side, there's Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development and Larry Sanders and Christopher Guest. I don't sit through shows and go, "Damn them, why do they put that on?" I just don't watch them. It's not a crusade. It's a source of comedy for me. That those shows exist is better for me, I think. That's great. Long live them!

Unfortunately, I'm compared with The Office. I can't win. That's what's unfair. I want Extras to be compared to When The Whistle Blows. For every wacky postcard, there's a million people waiting to buy it, and for every $10 million of those things, there's one Rembrandt. Purposely, I think I want to aim at doing something that a lot of people won't like. You want a door policy on your club. It's as simple as that. I'm just worried that it looks like I've compared my work with Rembrandt. "Gervais says he's better than Rembrandt!"

AVC: Don't worry, this isn't the British press.

RG: Oh, fuckin' tell me about it. There's not a day goes by when I don't go, "You fuckers!" And I've had a really good ride with them. And The Office is better than Shakespeare as well, by the way.

...

AVC: You didn't have any problem getting Diana Rigg to get a condom thrown on her head?

RG: That's a day's work, isn't it? I remember it. It was a really hot day on the bus, and I remember laughing while I was going, "Can you just hang it over the right eye a little bit more?" And I was thinking, That's a weird job. Asking Dame Diana Rigg to wear a condom hanging over her eye a little bit more. "What did you do at the office today?" "I hung a condom off Diana Rigg's head. What did you do?" But no, she was fine. It was in the script. She was a good sport.

AVC: One of the funniest scenes in season two is when David Bowie writes a song about you in a bar. Did he write that himself?

RG: He wrote the music, [but not] the lyrics. I sent him the script and I said, "We thought maybe it could be quite retro, something off Hunky Dory, with an anthemic chorus, like 'Life On Mars.'" He went, "Oh, sure, I'll just knock off a 'Life On Mars.'" And I laughed and went, "Oh, yeah, that did sound quite insulting, didn't it?" He knew what to give us. He gave us über-Bowie. [Sings.] "See his pug-nosed face…" The crew was singing it for about a week.

Frank Black

(A.V. Club, Madison print edition, Nov. 2, 2006 Longer online version here.)

If Frank Black’s solo work isn’t as beloved as that of his former band, the Pixies, it might just be because there’s so much of it. Pixies’ output is easy to think of in terms of five convenient studio packages, but since the band’s 1993 breakup, Black has released an unwieldy sprawl of 11 solo albums. He’s currently touring behind 2006’s 27-song double album Fast Man Raider Man, much of which he recorded on a day off during one of Pixies’ recent reunion tours. For that album and 2005’s Honeycomb, Black traveled to Nashville to record with a cast of veteran session players that included Steve Cropper, Spooner Oldham, and Al Kooper--which sounds like a recipe for an all-star genre exercise, but actually yielded some of Black’s most distinctive songs. Black recently spoke with The A.V. Club about rock nostalgia, some recent recording, and why he hates Cracker Barrel.

The A.V. Club: You’re touring with a four-piece rock band right now--without any of the horns or slide guitar of your last two albums. Are you trying to replicate those albums’ sounds in concert at all?
Frank Black: No, we’re just trying to find our own sound, whatever this band is. I think we’re starting to do that. [It’s] Kind of loud. Songs that are slow, we play them even slower. It’s loud and muscular. We’re not going to try and sound like a Nashville record that had 10 guys playing on it, including pedal steel and Hammond organ and everything else. So it didn’t seem worth it to go there. I don’t think the audiences that I’m playing to right now are expecting that. I’m still playing the same nightclubs to the same crowd. It’s not like I have the alt-country crowd coming out to see us now.

AVC: There are a few interesting cover songs on these albums, especially “Dark End Of The Street” and “Dirty Old Town.” What are your favorite versions of those songs?
FB: People associate it with a couple of different R&B versions [of “Dark End Of The Street”]. And here I am, mister white college-dropout dude from Massachusetts. Who the hell do I think I am? [Laughs.] How dare I touch that? To be fair, my reference point is another white guy with probably more country-rock credibility than I have: Gram Parsons. That’s the one I know. When I heard the song, it really moved me. I didn’t know who wrote it, I didn’t know the history of the song or anything, but I remember being obsessed with it. “Dirty Old Town,” I just needed a song to do, ’cause it was the last day of the session and I didn’t have any more songs, and I happened to know that song. For me, the definitive version is the Pogues’. People are always saying, “No, no, you can’t do that. You’re gonna be like this. You were in Pixies. You’re alternative-rock music. Don’t do anything else.” And I don’t believe that. I realize that if you’re not a reggae dude, you might make some shitty reggae if you try to do it. But you know what? Go for it. Who cares?

AVC: What do you think of covers of your songs, like David Bowie’s version of “Cactus,” or TV On The Radio’s version of “Mr. Grieves”?
FB: I’m pleased when people cover my music, obviously. It’s a thrill. I don’t know that I can quite get as thrilled as someone might want me to be…. [People say,] “Frank, Kurt Cobain said that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was a rip-off of a Pixies song. How does that make you feel?” I’ve been asked that question so many friggin’ times that I don’t even know what to say anymore. “So, Kurt Cobain said he liked you! Woo-hoo! Come on, Frank, did you get an erection?” I’m just so sick of all that. The whole culture is like that. The whole sense of nostalgia is crazy. I had breakfast the other morning at Cracker Barrel. Ugh! “Country, just like momma used to make.” Number one, it ain’t like my mom used to make. Yours sucks. Yours tastes like it was boiled in a fuckin’ plastic bag. [Laughs.]

AVC: You mentioned you’ve recorded a couple of new songs. What are they like?
FB: I like to think they sound… kind of Clash, kind of Rolling Stones, kind of old Rod Stewart--they’re not aggressive, but they’re loud. Kind of a laid-back loudness.

Craig Minowa of Cloud Cult

(A.V. Club, Madison print edition, Nov. 9, 2006)

Minnesota’s Cloud Cult can lurch from childlike to sinister in seconds, switching just as quickly between funky electronic beats and spare acoustic passages. That variety brings out the sweetness and trauma on the band’s 2005 album, Advice From The Happy Hippopotamus. The band recently finished recording its next LP, The Meaning Of 8, due out in late February. Happy Hippo is still a pretty fascinating listen, so The A.V. Club talked with leader Craig Minowa about how it came together and how the band ended up touring with live painters (now a staple of a solid live show that drew a respectable crowd when it last came to Madison in September).

The A.V. Club: How is the new album going to be different?
Craig Minowa: We worked with a lot of studio musicians with this, and there are a lot of strings and horns on it. It’s a really thick, layered album. I feel like it’s gonna go over pretty good. My biggest concern with it is trying to figure out how the heck we’re going to play it live [laughs]. There’s probably two or three songs on there that I think we could pull off as a four-piece, and the rest of it, boy, there’s just so much going on [laughs].

AVC: You’re still planning on releasing it on your own label, Earthology, and you’ve turned down some label offers.
CM: Back with the first couple offers that we had, we made it really clear that we had to have the environmentally friendly CD replication as part of any kind of release that we would do. They just weren’t open to that, because it would cost more per unit. Now, the offer that we’re discussing right now, which would end up being ultimately a Warner deal, it looks like they would put out for that. It’s kind of surprising. But it’s also surprising [that] in finding out that they’d put out for that, we realize that we’re still not really interested [laughs].

AVC: You’re constantly referred to as an eco-friendly band, but you don’t do a lot of political or environmental songwriting. Why?
CM: Ninety percent of the time, the songs have nothing directly to do with that. I think that it’s just because there’s a lot to be said about living by your ethics. It takes a lot of energy to operate Cloud Cult the way we want, particularly environmentally ethically, and through our activist work we’re really focused on specific things in politics and whatnot. After doing all that, I’m not necessarily inspired to write lyrics about that.

AVC: How did you start having a painter onstage?
CM: I had a friend from high school and we played in a band together. Our first year in college, we played in this band in Minneapolis, and he was going to art school, and it just kind of seemed like his time focus was more on painting than it was on playing guitar in the band. And I said, “Hey, why don’t you paint on stage? That would be really super-cool.” He was kind of resistant to it at the time. I think he kind of took personal offense to it. “What, you don’t want me to play guitar?” Years later, Cloud Cult started to come together, and after [the band’s 2003 album] They Live On The Sun, it became a live-band thing, and it seemed like the kind of project that required a really elaborate show. So we started bringing painters on board and we rotated whoever we knew who was a painter that was available. Over time, [ex-wife] Connie [Minowa] and Scott [West] proved themselves to be the most long-term dedicated. There are occasions where they haven’t been able to do a show, and the crowd really misses it, especially people that have heard about the painters being there or people that have seen shows in the past, we hear them feeling gypped a little bit.

AVC: Who’s the hippo in the song “Happy Hippo”?
CM: The hippopotamus is something that pops up in my dreams a lot. I would have these dreams with the hippopotamus in them when I was at some sort of transitional time in my life, or there was some type of thing that I needed to understand, and the dreams were always pretty much the same. In the dream, the hippo never actually spoke, but it left impressions or ideas. That song is the introduction of that and you have a lot of transition in it, where it’s a playful sort of situation of crossing sleep with this hippo and moving into this really intense emotional understanding of the preciousness of life.

Headlights

(A.V. Club, Milwaukee print edition, Oct. 5, 2006)


For a band that divides its time between the road and a farmhouse near Champaign, Illinois, Headlights is pretty easy to mistake for a Milwaukee act. The trio recorded much of its first LP, Kill Them With Kindness, here, and recently finished a month of tour dates with Milwaukee’s Decibully. (They’re now headlining a tour of the Midwest, East Coast, and South.) While the term “shoegazer” comes up nearly every time someone mentions Headlights (even on the band’s own MySpace page), Kill’s rhythms and arrangements run from symphonic ballads to jolly rock shuffles. The only constant is the breathy vocal interplay between keyboard player Erin Fein and guitarist/bassist Tristan Wraight. Fein, Wraight, and drummer Brett Sanderson recently spoke to The A.V. Club about (sort of) rural living, what’s good about Donovan, and why they’re not cute.

The A.V. Club: You play a lot in Milwaukee. Any reason?
Tristan Wraight: We have a lot of friends there, and they’re all in really good bands and let us play with them.
Erin Fein: We’ve played with New Sense, and The Championship…
TW: And The Mustn’ts, who broke up, I think.
Brett Sanderson: Obviously Decibully. Def Harmonic, Sport Of Kings.

AVC: You recorded your album with Kristian Riley, which seems kind of appropriate, because he also produced Maritime’s last album.
EF: He plays in New Sense, and we were friends of his for a long time before we recorded the record, and we just started talking about it and he started talking about it, and we wound up doing it there.
BS: It’s good to record with somebody you’re comfortable with.

AVC: You live and do some recording in a farmhouse. Have you had any difficulties with that?
TW: Yeah, it’s a real piece of crap. [All laugh.] It’s a total dump.
BS: It’s potentially haunted.
TW: It should probably be condemned. “Farmhouse” paints a romantic picture, but it’s really just a big, shitty house near a cornfield and a soybean field.
EF: And it has weird, lingering smells that come from the walls, and we’re pretty sure there’s some dead animals in there. [Laughs.]
TW: It’s a charming place to live. A fixer-upper, if you will.

AVC: How far away are you from people?
BS: You can see the mall from our window.

AVC: Nick Sandborn from Decibully is playing with you on this part of the tour. Do you prefer playing as a three-piece or a four-piece?
TW: I think it’s more fun to have a bass player, but it’s weird because there’s two versions of Headlights. The four-piece, we can fly by the seat of our pants, and the three-piece is very precise.

AVC: One review of the album described your vocals as “cute enough to pinch,” but you don’t sound like you’re actively trying to be cute.
EF: I think that there’s something about this boy-girl band phenomenon that the media has coined as something really popular right now. A lot of bands that have male-female vocals get described as cutesy or cuddly even if it’s not necessarily the case. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Maybe it means they think it sounds pretty or light.
TW: We really don’t try to sound cute. We just try to sing the best that we know how. [Laughs.]

AVC: The album is all over the place stylistically, from symphonic tracks like “Your Old Street” to straight-up rock songs like “Lions.” Did you make a conscious effort not to settle on any one sound?
EF: I don’t know if that’s necessarily intentional. We draw from a lot of different influences, and I think that’s something that winds up happening. We’ve always had all these different kinds of songs; we want to be able to have the freedom to experiment with different sounds. We don’t want to say, “Does this sound like a Headlights song?”
TW: There are records that we really love that are very consistent, but we also really get excited when we listen to a record that takes you to a bunch of different places.

AVC: What are some of your favorite all-over-the-place bands?
TW: Take any Beatles record, and dare I say Pink Floyd? I thought the “Mellow Yellow” guy, Donovan, was always really up for having a really good time. [All laugh.]
EF: Mercury Rev is a good example of that. And they’re a huge influence on us, I think.

AVC: Before you got picked up by Polyvinyl Records, you were distributing The Enemies EP by burning people copies of it on the road.
TW: Wu-Tang style!

AVC: Is it nice not to have to do that anymore?
EF: It is awesome, but I also really like when bands do stuff like that.

AVC: When you’re trying these different kinds of arrangements, are you perfectionists, or do you just try and let things happen?
EF: There is a moment in “Your Old Street” where I can hear this little note that I’m singing a little bit flat, and maybe no one else can hear it, but we didn’t really have time. We just slapped it on, and I kind of like that.
TW: That’s the fun thing about recording—you never really know what will happen, or what mistake will turn into your favorite part on the record.

AVC: One of the songs from the EP, “Everybody Needs A Fence To Lean On,” was used in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy in February. What was the scene like?
EF: A husband and wife are breaking up, and then it switched over to this other room where this kid who had some sort of disorder had died.

AVC: That’s cramming a lot of pain into one scene.
EF: [Laughs.] It is!
TW: Which is why our song was perfect for it.
EF: I think I shed a tear.

Lisa Lampanelli

(The Onion A.V. Club, Madison print edition, Nov. 30, 2006)

A slightly different version of this piece later ran on The A.V. Club's Web site.

Hope for Lisa Lampanelli’s sake that her current tour of theaters like the Barrymore works out, because she says she’ll end up “Xeroxing my twat at Kinko’s if I ever have to go back to [comedy] clubs again.” Lampanelli has pursued her brand of warm-yet-abrasive comedy for 16 years, but her recent gigs slamming celebrities (most famously Pamela Anderson) on Comedy Central’s roasts have made Lampanelli a go-to insult comic. (Though she’s happily respectful of nearly every other successful comedian out there, from Larry The Cable Guy to Patton Oswalt.) She says she’ll be branching out a little in material from her new Comedy Central special and CD, Dirty Girl, both due out in January. Lampanelli went pretty easy on The A.V. Club for a talk about the finer points of offensive humor and her former career as a journalist.

The A.V. Club: Do people ever think you’re joking when you assert yourself in earnest?

Lisa Lampanelli: Yes! Dude, it happens all the time, which is good in one way because you don’t lose fans. But it’s bad in one way ’cause they don’t respect you. I’m really nice. I sign stuff after the show, every single thing. I will stand there for three hours, how Larry The Cable Guy did it—it really helps your fans feel a connection. And it’s fun, too. I don’t give a fuck. I think it’s fun to sign shit and have people take your picture. But sometimes somebody will be drunk and push too hard and just won’t leave and move along, and I’ll be like, “Move it along, fuckhead.” And they’ll go, “Ha ha ha, great!” And they’ll stand there, and I’m like, “No, you’re a douche-cock and everybody hates you. Die of cancer.” “Aaaah ha ha! She’s so funny.”

AVC: What was your journalism career like?

LL: Right out of college, I was a feature reporter for this newspaper in Connecticut, and they pissed me off, so I quit and said, “I want to work for a magazine that’s interesting and that everybody knows so I can brag about it.” Subconsciously, I’m sure I said that. I worked at Popular Mechanics, and it sounds so gay, but it’s famous, so I said, “Fuck it.” I was a copy editor there, and I got a job as an assistant at Rolling Stone. I didn’t want to stick to it long enough to pay my dues to become a writer at Rolling Stone. I was writing freelance, so I started writing for all these heavy-metal magazines because I love writing about the music business and those longhairs, and it was the ’80s, so I was interviewing heavy-metal bands and Bon Jovi for Hit Parader and all this stuff. I just loved that. And you got all these free records and you could sell ’em the next day. Then I decided my life had no meaning, and I decided to go to Harvard for a publishing-procedures course, where they teach you how to be a hardcore publishing magnate. And I continued to do a little journalism and this and that. But then I was like, “My life’s meaningless again, so why don’t I be a teacher?” I have these weird, emotional decisions I used to make, ’cause I was like, “I need warmth in my life, I’ll teach and touch children’s lives.” And then I went to Columbia for that, and decided I hated kids after half a year of student-teaching. Then somehow, thank God, I decided to do comedy and that’s the one thing that really hit right in my heart.

AVC: The insult-comic thing is working out pretty well for you, but are you trying other kinds of material?

LL: [The new special is] 100 percent different. I was really scared that the audience was gonna say, “Why isn’t she calling us spics and chinks anymore?” I was so angry in the last year, ’cause I had this breakup, and I was so angry with my dates and so angry with how my life was going, except for my career.

AVC: You often pronounce “Arabs” as “A-rabs” and “whore” as “hoo-uh.” Is that natural?

LL: No, I just fuck with words a little bit, and I use bad grammar on purpose because I was a journalist and I had the best copy-editing and English skills in the world. I’m just anal about all that, so I know if you know all the rules, you can break them. I have a joke about a kid being in a car accident, and I go, “Come on, the kid’s one years old, how attached could you really be?” That’s just part of the joke. I say “one years.” I know it’s not “one years,” but it sounds funnier to me.