Ugly Kid Joe

Interview date

23 Novembre 2013

Interviewer

Blaster of Muppets

I N T E R V I E W

Interview Klaus Eichstadt (face to face)


Hi and thank you for taking some time to answer a few questions for the webzine Aux Portes du Metal.

Thank you, merci.

You were here, in the exact same venue, last year and gave an excellent sold out show. What memories have you kept from it?

Well, honestly, I remember it really well because it was the first… no, actually it was the second club show we did since we reunited that was completely packed, sold out. And it was maybe my favourite show on the tour.

It was the first show you sang Mr. Recordman, wasn’t it?

Yeah, it was… I didn’t remember all the lyrics, so someone in the crowd helped me. I remember that really well and I remember everybody at the show singing along on most of the songs, which was amazing. It was a great show, I’ll never forget it. And I also remember it was the first time we had that sit-down catering here, that was almost like a family dinner, everyone, the bands, the crew, in the same room, having dinner together. It’s really nice.

Since then, how have things worked for you?

Well, we’re lucky enough to have had four tours since then. We did the Alice Cooper tour, we did Brazilian shows, we did a two week run in Europe… and then this tour. We released the EP in the meantime, different versions of it, we were even offered to release a vinyl, which is great. Finally, in a couple of days, we’ll have a little time off but we’re already starting writing ideas for the next release that will hopefully come out next year.

When you decided to get back together after such a long break, did you expect such enthusiasm from the music fans?

Well, really, I guess we had no idea… We had been away for so long, we never were a giant band so we knew we wouldn’t sell tons of records right away and do sold-out shows everywhere. We knew it would be a kind of battle to get back in… So we didn’t expect huge success but at least we expected to be able to tour. So we said “OK, we’re gonna do an EP and then a tour”. And we’ve done five tours until now. To me, it’s more than I expected.

You've just said that there was new music coming out next year, can you tell us more about it?

We’re not in a situation where we have a record company which is telling us “You need to have twelve songs ready by April” or something like that. We don’t have any pressure and it’s cool. But we do want to come back in the next year sometime and we want to have new music to play, so we’re talking about it and we agree that we want to do it the sooner the better. We have some ideas, a couple of good ones already, we need to develop them and get the songs together. We have all the personel to do it, we’ve got our friend Dave Fortman to produce it… I’d say that in the next three months, we should have the songs and then we’ll have to go to the studio and record them.

Are you going to release more EPs just like Skid Row, your road companion, is doing or will you go for a full length album this time?

What happened with the last record is that we actually recorded thirteen or fourteen songs and then we picked the six we liked the best. We threw everything we had, just because we hadn’t done it for so long, and we just started playing but this time I think we’re going to focus more on the songs themselves and discard things that are not really songs you know… and just keep the tracks that have the possibility to become really good songs. We’re not gonna push for fifteen songs for the sake of it, you know. If we come up with fifteen good songs, we’ll probably make an album with twelve songs and bonus tracks, b-sides. If we come up with six songs, then we’ll have an EP. Like I said, no record company is pushing us so we’re free to do what we feel like. If it’s an EP, it’s fine, if it’s an album, it’s fine. It’s as simple as that.

How fun is it to tour with Skid Row?

It’s great. You know, we knew the band obviously but we had never met them before, it’s actually the first time we hang out together. At first, we wondered how it would be like to tour with them and thank God it’s been great because we’ve been forced to share the dressing room for the entire tour (laughs)! It’s fun, we wouldn’t have it any other way. And there’s Dead City Ruins too, funny guys from Australia, they’re much younger and it’s fun for us, the older bands, to see that young hunger, you know.

Since the reunion, it seems that Dave Fortman and Shannon Larkin are not always in the band. Can you explain the situation?

Yeah, it’s simple. Dave is our producer and that’s his bread and butter, that’s his day job so to speak, he’s just a busy guy. He said right from the start that he’d be happy to help and produce us but that he couldn’t do long tours. So we’ve got Sonny Mayo to take his place, we’ve known him for twenty years and it’s great that it’s working so well. He’s such a great guy and a great guitar player. He’s really professional. Dave and him are friends too, it’s really cool. And Shannon, well, he plays with Godsmack and that’s his job too, his priority. So he said the same thing, if that’s a short tour, no problem. He actually played with us in Brazil, just like Dave. He almost got to do the last tour but finally he couldn’t because Godsmack had a tour too and there was a week with the two tours overlapping… So we figured that we had to find another drummer because obviously we knew that Shannon would be very busy. So we found Zack Morris, through Sonny, who is a great drummer. He’s pretty cool and also very young, he’s only twenty-four or twenty-five and he gives us that youthful energy that helps.

Let’s talk about the new songs now… What is the Devil’s Paradise exactly?

Well, hmm… (He clears his throat and hesitates)… It’s really about… Ok, hey, I’ll just say it… it’s about the red light district in Tijuana, Mexico. It’s fun, it’s crazy but there’s also a dark evil side to it, you know, obviously. You never really know what’s around the corner, if it’s going to be something good or something bad. There’s a lot of bad elements there but there’s also a lot of fun to be had too, if you keep it on a certain level. So yeah, it’s about Tijuana which is an infamous city and has quite a reputation.

The second track “You make me sick” is quite a hostile declaration to someone you’d actually like to kill… Who made you sick like that?

Honestly, this one is a pretty old song. “Devil’s Paradise” is a new song but this one is a song that we demoed at the time but never used. Thinking about it, at the time, I really loved Megadeth and Dave Mustaine’s angry and sarcastic lyrics… so I wanted to write an angry song, lyrically, a bit like one of Mustaine’s songs, you know.

One of your trademarks has always been album titles that are parodies of famous cultural references. Did you have other titles in mind for this EP or previous albums that you didn’t use?

Yeah, of course… we’ve got like twenty unused titles… Let me think…”Youth Gone Mild”, for example (laughs). I don’t want to tell you other ideas because we might end up using one of them (he smiles). I don’t want to give it our next album title away.

Anything you’d like to say, a message, a thought, something I didn’t ask you and you wish I did, this is your chance:

If people want to know about us, they can go on our facebook, we’ve also got a website www.uglykidjoe.net if they want to keep up to date on what we’re doing, selling, etc. And Vive la France, je t’aime, merci beaucoup… well, that’s all I know (laughs). Au revoir. Something else, that’s the second time we come back to France, next time, I really hope that we can play in France and not just Paris. I remember, back in the day, we played in Lyon, Dijon… it was really nice. I’d personally like to see the French Riviera, I’ve never been there.


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