The Thousands

The Flip Out Festival is the best thing to happen to Sydney since ever. This year there’s something like 13 bands, and a record fair. Before we get on to the interview that will inspire a kind of suicide impulse inside your credit card as your clickety fingers type the numbers into the Ox Tix page, here’s the line-up: Eddy Current Supression Ring, Pink Reason (USA), Goodnight Loving (USA), James Arthur’s Manhunt (USA), Ooga Boogas, Naked On The Vague, The UV Race, The Stabs, Super Wild Horses, Slug Guts, Deaf Wish, Royal Headache and Zond. And now, the amazing Jimi Kritzler from Slug Guts interviews Joe Sukit from our new favourite band Royal Headache.

Jimi Kritzler: Your song ‘Girls’ kills us. It is one of the best tunes of the year by a long way. Are all your songs about chicks? Do you score heavy being amember of Royal Headache? Did the mention in Pitchfork help? Being a member of Slug Guts has yet to get any of us laid.

Joe Sukit: You guys need to easy up your stage personas. Stop being so dark and moody. Girls just want to have fun DUH! PLUS your best looking member is stuck behind the drums. Move Lee up front, I swear many more doors and legs will open.

JK: You are playing both Sydney and Melbourne Flip Out fests. What other band on Flip Out is most likely to fight a member of Royal Headache for wearing shorts and smiling on stage? My money is on Naked on the Vague because they are goths and hate smiling and shorts. Who is your money on?

JS: Naked on the Vague are total sissies! Don’t you know anything about goths? They get beat up! I heard Falco [Slug Guts guitarist] throws down. He’s a good dude though. Fuck it let’s just start a beef with one of the American bands. Those pussie sin Goodnight Loving are going down!

JK: Do you have a pre show ritual to shed any nerves? Tripstacy? Tech-house? Beat mixing as a band? Discussing the pitfalls of techno in an industrial society? Comparing how many cardigan-wearing bitches you each get now that the band was mentioned on Pitchfork?

JS: We just count our money.

JK: Flip Out should be pretty wild. Who are you looking forward to on Flip Out fest?

JS: Zond!

JK: Royal Headache are coming up to Brisbane soon. I think people are genuinely excited, but fuck it’s Brisbane, we literally get excited knowing it’s only 14 hours to Canberra. We are awful people. What do you expect from Brisbane other than a throng of Pitchfork virgins offering themselves to the band?

JS: We have crew now that just scan the crowd for the best Death Cab for Cutie pins on girls and they usher them backstage to our giant coke filled dressing rooms. We expect they will do a good job. You guys had a really good op shop last time I was in Brisbane, I got Tone Loc – Loc-ed After Dark, Fleetwood Mac – Tusk, The Waitresses S/T, a solo record by the keyboard dude from Can and a Cabaret Voltaire LP for 33 cents each. It’s right near Matt from Kitchens Floor’s house. Oh there was an antique store there too with killer Nazi helmets and shit. Brisbane really sucks though.

JK: What are the top five tunes Royal Headache will listen to whilst driving to Sydney Flip Out? For some reason I can’t shed the purely mythical image of you all jamming to ‘End of the Line’ by the Travelling Wilburys and all taking the different vocal parts.

JS: On the last drive to Melbourne I’m pretty sure the top five went something like Flo Rida – ‘Low’, the Veronicas – ‘Untouched’, the first track of a Bone Thugs album I’d ever heard of before, which went for like eight minutes and had a verse from Eazy. I dunno, we’re all massive music nerds and can never decide on good music we all feel like listening to. We were all pretty pumped on ‘Naïve’ by Public Zone. Last tour I was meant to make a best-of-Kiss mix, but ran out of timebefore we left, Shortty and Law have yet to understand the greatness of that band.

JK: I really didn’t mean for this interview to take the tone it has. True or false?

JS: False. Now I am interviewing myself.

JK: Was the tone horny and Pitchfork obsessed?