Labour of love

>>The Kills weather hurricanes,
new-age hippies and tabloid
hell to make Midnight Boom

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

It’s been quite a year for the Kills’ Jamie Hince, an independent musician whose courtship of Kate Moss propelled him from the pages of NME to the even lowlier British tabloids. Now, prying reporters try to extract gossip and goad him into bashing the ex-boyfriend, Pete Doherty (who’s currently in his own hell, in prison), while ubiquitous fleets of paparazzi unleash a strobe-light blitz.

Rarely is Hince afforded the chance to discuss the Kills’ excellent third album, Midnight Boom, which nearly never happened.

“We’d done loads of drugs,” he jokes, “no, we’d done loads of sessions, and when you’re in that absurd mindset of being obsessed with music, to the point where it’s life and death, sooner or later it catches up with you. We just did a runner, really. Didn’t tell the record company, just booked a flight and left.”

He and cohort Alison Mosshart fled their Michigan studio for Mexico, with hot beaches and cool mojitos in mind. Instead, they were met with hurricane season. And this was after another failed experiment, working in L.A. with a problem producer who, says Hince, “had a lot of different things going on, which I won’t go into.” The city was an alien landscape to the London-based pair (even Mosshart, a Florida native), but they hoped that tension would spark creativity.

“It was extremely laid back,” Hince reports. “You turn up to the studio and everyone’s pumping themselves full of vitamins and high vibration food and yoga nonsense to calm themselves down, but when I’m making a record, I’m not really bothered about being calmed down.”

To the rescue came Spank Rock’s Alex Epton, aka Armani XXXchange, who bounced ideas around and tightened up beats in post-production. Moreover, a chance viewing of a documentary called Pizza Pizza Daddio, showcasing the schoolyard songs of American inner-city kids in the late ’60s, influenced some of Midnight Boom’s best moments, such as “Cheap and Cheerful.” Lyrically grim and rhythmically hopping, it was the kind of stripped down, blues/funk direction they’d been waiting for.

“It’s like Edgar Allan Poe put to happy clappy music,” says Hince, “and I love that.”

With Telepathe at Cabaret
juste pour rire on Sunday,
May 4, 9 p.m., $17.50