Strangling puppies… if only

Things could have turned out a lot differently for The Airborne Toxic Event’s lead singer Mikel Jolett, if three years ago he hadn’t had the worst week of his life. In a single week, while working on his novel, he found out that his mother had been diagnosed with cancer, his girlfriend dumped him and he was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease which left him with Alopecia areata and Vitiligo.

It was at some point during that week, or in the surrounding weeks, that Mikel turned his attention to songwriting for the first time, putting his career as a music journalist and novelist on hiatus.

“I think it sort of gets played up about what happened that week, as if it was some sort of lightning,” Mikel explains. “It was more like I had been playing a little bit of music, and then I kind of started playing a little bit more music and then I kind of started playing a lot of music. It really wasn’t an overnight kind of thing.

“I heard it differently in my head, I can’t explain why. I had spent a long time home recording and playing songs, literally years playing songs alone before I had that ambition [to record an album].”

While the band has already begun preparing songs for their next record, Mikel acknowledges the incredible differences between where they are now and when they were beginning recording on their first album.

“This record, we made over two years ago at our friend’s house and we didn’t have a label, we didn’t have a manager, a producer. We just went to our friend’s living room, like sat on his fireplace recording guitars or whatever. And you can even hear Korean radio in the background. We were just a local band who was playing shows and we recorded the songs that we were doing live. We didn’t have a whole lot of big plans for it.”

But for the band, their success has been almost overnight. By August 2008, they had released their self-titled debut album, and at the start of 2009 Island Records, who primarily sign hip-hop acts, took on the band.

Up until that point, the band had been on the Majordomo label, a small indie imprint label. But not much has changed with the move.

“Well, it was a lot harder to get hookers on an indie label,” he jokes. “With the major labels, every morning when you wake up you got three hookers and blow just waiting for you, so it’s rad, much much better. You get to strangle puppies and kill young children. And also, you think Satan is a dick but when you meet him he’s actually a pretty good guy.”

But being one of the only indie rock bands on a label that boasts names like Jay-Z and Kanye West has been surreal for the group.

“They’re sort of charmed by us, we’re like ‘the little band that could’. It’s like ‘these little indie rock fuckers, what the fuck’. Compared to, like, Beyoncé they’re just like ‘aw how cute they’re playing for 2000 people, how adorable. They just think it’s funny.”

The band take their name from the Don DeLillo novel White Noise, which explores the media saturation and consumerist culture of the mid-to-late twentieth century. It’s fitting then that Mikel is vexed, he says, by the focus of the media on unimportant aspects of musician’s lives.

“As much as people make hay about the Jack White/Meg White [of The White Stripes] relationship, whether they’re brother and sister or husband and wife or, you know, what goes on behind closed doors, and this thing or that thing. Or why The Strokes wear what they wear. So much ink is spilt about all these things which are just bullshit, it doesn’t matter. What matters is honest bands and worthwhile songwriting.”

This time last year, Pitchfork Media delivered a damning review to the band’s debut, awarding it just 1.6 out of 10. The band, Mikel says, don’t give much weight to reviews like this, and prefer to leave it up to the listeners to judge for themselves.

“Most of the press that we’ve gotten has been positive. Up until that point we were given the moniker critic’s darling. No one reads a critic and says ‘hey, that’s what that sounds like’. They go and they listen and they decide for themselves.”
The band have attracted fans such as U2’s Adam Clayton, who selected their single Sometime Around Midnight as one of his favourite of 2008. And Jolett is full of mutual praise for the Irish, but not so much for the English - or at least the English press culture.

“Irish people are more like Americans than English people,” Jolett declares. “In English culture, you can like change a keyboard or a guitar sound 3% and someone will write like a 10,000 word essay on why you made that decision and how it relates to the fall of you know, the British empire in India or some bullshit. It’s just like incestuous masturbatory press culture in England.

“In Ireland, people want to hear fuckin’ rock ‘n’ roll shows, and if you play a show, they want to hear it and they want to be part of it. I shouldn’t say that about all English people, but I mean English press are just fuckin’ stupid. Saying that is probably a good way to curry favour with Irish journalists, but I think everybody knows it.”

The band play Dublin’s The Academy on November 11, part of their international tour. Following the tour and the new album, or indeed at some distant point in the future, Mikel also hopes to complete his novel, which is “about halfway done” and has sat unfinished since the inception of the band in 2006.

“I really want to sit alone in a cabin and finish this novel. It’s up there in things I want do in my life like plant a tree, father a child, that kind of thing. I just haven’t been able to ‘cos we’ve been touring. I feel like I’ve been caught up in this whirlwind, a vortex just came and like picked me up and then like took me away, and my life suddenly is doing all this other stuff, you know.”

It’s been a busy year for the band in all respects, and like any new indie band, they have drawn comparisons to other similar bands at every turn. They are conscious, however, not to get bigheaded. Jolett, at least, holds bands like The Arcade Fire and The White Stripes on a pedestal, and considers any comparisons a major compliment.

“I don’t think we deserve to be in that bracket, at least not yet. Maybe we will some day, but it’s sort of like if you play like the lead in the school play when you’re nine years old and you’re playing the carrot. And you do a really good job playing a carrot, and someone says, ‘You’re going to win an Oscar!’ I mean, you might, but between playing the carrot when you’re nine years old and winning an Oscar there’s years and years of creativity, dedication and hard work required. We’re just a new band on our first record so I think it’s premature.”