funny article about a band not honouring killing jokes fire!!!!!! fao: alex in nyc.

The Boxer Rebellion
Guitar Magazine
March 2004

‘I used to be in a shit-awful covers band’, cringes the Boxers’ Aussie guitarist Todd Howe sitting in a pub wielding a double vodka and diet coke (if you’re asking). ‘We used to do a Sex Pistols medley. I was the one who said cunt in Pretty Vacant. It was that bad …’

Luckily, these days Howe’s getting more used to adulation than a surly ‘Rack off Mate’; as together with Tennessean singer Nathan Nicolson (looks like Davy Jones, sings like Liam Gallagher), bassist Adam Hewitt and drummer Piers Hewitt, the London-based band are definitely the right gee-gee to back. Indeed their Jesus and Mary Chain, Interpol and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club leanings got the attention of one Alan McGee, and their debut album is scheduled for September on his cultish label Poptones. News catches on fast, and these days a Boxer Rebellion gig is absolutely guaranteed to be jammed to the rafters.

While Nicholson writes his share of songs on a trust Takamine and contributes the rhythm, Howe is the head string-screamer, with a deadly array of effects at his feet that never fails to have the audiences gingerly holding their pint glasses at arms length. Although he’s very very conscious to make sure that nothing in our music sounds like a solo’, faffing around with feedback sure ain’t taboo…

I basically use the Epiphone Casino through a Fender Deville’, he says ‘which I’m going to start doubling up with an Orange for the heavier stuff. It’s a hollowbody and it feeds back all the time, which is great for the songs where the feedback is part of the overall sound, but it isn’t always the desired effect, so I limited it to the studio and use a Boss DD3 in the middle eights’.

‘I used to use a Getsch Tennessean on tour,’ Nicholson tells us, prompting a kind of ‘phoaar’ noise from his band-mate. ‘But I never really got the sound I wanted out of it because pretty much every one of our songs is down-tuned to C, so its a bastard to keep things in tune even if you use a heavier gauge string. So I’m going to play the Telecaster live.’

The two singles Watermelon and In Pursuit ride on brooding cyclic riffing that sounds like an unholy alliance between Killing Joke and My Bloody Valentine.

‘Actually, Killing Joke were rehearsing in the room next to us once,’ young pup Nicholson pipes up. ‘Jaz Coleman liked us and said that he would look out for us in the future. Then I asked him if he’d even played America, and he gave me this look …’

‘The squealing at the beginning of Watermelon is basically an E-Bow pressed up and down the pick-up of the Casino,’ Howe remembers. ‘And there’s about four inches of strings before the bridge where you can get some weird harmonics, so I use that on the metallic-sounding riff that goes along at the start, and I’ve got three distortions which I just crank up when it comes in’.

Live, the axeman keeps his head way down, clearly focusing on the smorgasbord of pedals. ‘I’m not being anti-social or a shoegazer,’ he insists, ‘I just have some many pedals that I have to concentrate… unless I’m doing the "sniff".

‘You know,’ Nicholson clarifies ‘when you pull a note and you sniff like there’s a small that’s really bad?’

‘Our bass-players pick-up snapped at King’s Tut in Glasgow, hit the strings and the whole bass came out of tune in the middle of the song’ groans Howe. ‘We just had to wing it; it was a fucking nightmare. Although that’s nothing - I had to guitar tech for my mate once who was on acid once and I must have tuned his guitar three times in one song; he was falling over constantly. It was one of those great old Aussie surf nights at a local RSL. Not advisable.’

Well, on that note, we’ll leave the lads to take to the stage.

‘Is that it?’ says Howe, demonstrating the ‘sniff’ once more. ‘I thought we were going to go out for a nice meal, some wine … maybe a kebab?’.