It’s the third and last date of Dot to Dot Festival 2011, and I’m meeting up with Colourmusic, a genre-defying fourpiece out of Stillwater, Oklahoma. Their newly released second album, mysteriously titled ‘My ______ is Pink’, is a musical exploration of the colour pink – just like their earlier releases were inspired by yellow, red, or orange. Being one of the very few representatives of harder music at Dot to Dot Festival, Colourmusic have prepared a mix of bass terror and eerie hooklines to throw at the crowd at Manchester’s Deaf Institute later today – along with some bodily liquids, as the music video for their song ‘Tog’ suggests …
I’m really looking forward to your gig, although the ‘Tog’ video scared me quite a bit … What can we expect from your gig tonight?
Ryan Hendrix: The same thing. There will be horrible graphic things done on stage.
Nick Turner: Just bring protection.
Ryan Hendrix: All we ask is that no one brings small children.
Nick Ley: We are usually not allowed to play the same place twice, so this will be the one and only time we get to play here.
That’s a shame, because I think you picked one of the nicest venues to play in Manchester!
Ryan Hendrix (laughs): It definitely is the name of where we are going in about ten years – ‘The Deaf Institute’ …
Your new album is a musical interpretation of the colour pink. What are your first associations with this colour?
Ryan Hendrix: We were talking about what heavy metal would sound like if Black Sabbath were made up of women instead of men. So I guess you could call this album ‘Pink Sabbath’.
So Ryan, was it your idea to write about the colour pink?
Ryan Hendrix: Well, he [Nick Turner] and I were really into the idea of the colour pink as an inspiration for the record, and we were thinking of pink as a very biological colour, so we used that as the emotional context of the record.
Why did you use the British spelling of ‘colour’ for your band name?
[All point at Nick Turner]
Nick Turner: I’m from Yorkshire, and when we first started a long time ago, we were gonna call ourselves ‘Colour’ after our idea [of taking a colour as their inspiration for each record] and of course there had to be the ‘u’.
Ryan Hendrix: Well, I think it looks cooler. Another thing is that he and I were really into these films, ‘Three Colours: Red, White, Blue’. That spelling always stuck in my head. I think that was a big influence on us.
Nick Turner: We were always thinking about soundtracks and things like that. You always need the visual element when you are writing music, and that’s how the colour idea came about. There was a band called ‘The Color’ in San Francisco, so we changed the name to Colourmusic, to make it slightly different.
How would you describe the sound of your new album to someone who hasn’t heard it yet?
Ryan Hendrix: Well, each song kind of has its own planet that it orbits. If it was my mother, I would just say: ‘It’s gonna be really loud and you probably won’t like it.’ (all laugh) Maybe that’s my answer: ‘Oh, you won’t like it.’
Nick Turner: One of the ideas of ‘… Pink‘ was trying to make something that was maybe not so pretty on the surface, but that you could consider as beautiful if you look deeper into it. It has perhaps a harsh sound, but there’s so many layers on it.
Ryan Hendrix: Sort of a beautiful ugliness.
Nick Turner: Our influence on this album is Iggy Pop’s ‘The Idiot’. It’s very ugly, but it’s also a really great album, and very sexual too.
There is a change in sound from your first album to this one. The first was a bit sunnier, happier … Did you want to have such a break in sound?
Nick Turner: Yeah, we had to. It was a purposeful thing. We wanted the first album to be as catchy as possible. At the time we were writing, there was a lot of sad, angsty music, and we really wanted to do something that was positive and upbeat. I think we’ve got that out of our system now. We wanted to do something a bit darker and more interesting, explore a bit more, sonically.
Do you think happy music isn’t interesting?
Nick Turner: Yeah, it is! The challenge that we had with the last album was trying to do happy music that wasn’t cheesy, because happy music always has a cheesy quality to it, whereas if you do sad, depressing music, people consider it poetic. It gets taken more seriously. So we were trying to do an interesting, happy record, and to a certain extent I think we did succeed, but no one else seemed to like it …
Ryan Hendrix: It was a total flop.
Nick Turner: That was another reason to change the sound as well. I mean, we always wanted to change sounds from record to record, that’s the idea of colours, so I think to do ‘… Pink’ was a way of saying: ‘OK, let’s go back to our nasty, dirty punk roots’.
Speaking of your punk roots, I read that when you two, Ryan and Nick, first met, you didn’t like each other’s music … What kind of music were you making back then?
Nick Turner (laughs): Well Ryan would probably say that I was making britpop, and I would say that he was making ambient U2 soundscapes …
Ryan Hendrix (laughs): Probably true!
Nick Turner (laughs): So, in a bizarre way, there is a mid-air mix/mash of those in some of the stuff we …
Ryan Hendrix (interrupting): No no no no. I think we’ve been very diligent in eradicating that out of each other. I mean, I know there’s some U2 influences in some of our music, but it doesn’t come across very obviously. Well, and the britpop stuff …
Nick Turner: I think that maybe ‘Tog’ has a minuscule millimetre of britpop in it, maybe the swankiness of it. It could be kind of a Manchester song. It’s always been in the back of my mind, because that’s the music I grew up on. I love the Stone Roses, the Charlatans, all those bands from the early 90s. That was the stuff that I was listening to when I was in school.
Do you agree that ‘My _______ is Pink’ sounds a bit frightening?
Ryan Hendrix: No, I don’t think it’s frightening, I think it’s energetic.
Maybe it only seems like that because some of the music videos are so gory …
Ryan Hendrix: The music videos are dark, but we’re trying to get attention. I actually don’t think the videos represent the music very well …
Nick Ley: They represent our fucked up sense of humour a little bit better.
In the video for ‘You for leaving me’, you slaughter teddy bears … Is that a vegetarian statement?
Ryan Hendrix: No …
Nick Turner: I’m quite surprised that a few people have interpreted it like that. I mean, if you eat a hamburger, that’s the same process. It’s great that it means different things to different people.
Ryan Hendrix: The idea for that video came from a friend of mine in Stillwater, Oklahoma. We were doing a concert where all the local artists can bring art to hang on the walls, and at the end of the concert we would rip it in pieces. So people brought this stuffed animal, and they gutted it right in front of me, and I thought: This is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen in a while.
Nick Ley: It’s all sort of unsettling. The record leaves an open-ended question with its title … In a way, it leaves you not quite knowing what’s going on.
Nick Turner: Interpreting the album, I’d say it’s not so much scary but mysterious. There’s lots of interesting questions brought up because of the music.
Ryan Hendrix: I like the idea of going into the abyss. You go into a dark place and you don’t know what’s in there.
All the reviews I’ve read of your new record were raving. Did you expect that?
All: No …
Nick Turner: The last album was difficult because it came out only in the US, and the label went bankrupt shortly afterwards … Hopefully not because of us!
Nick Ley: At that time, we really just wanted to be accepted. But when we finished the new record, we had a sense of power, because we didn’t give a shit if anybody liked it or not, because we loved it so much. So to see these great reviews is really absolutely nuts. We didn’t expect it at all.
Some of our readers may not be familiar with your music yet, so what would you tell them: Why should they buy your record?
Nick Turner: Cause Lauren Laverne says it’s her favourite album of the year! [laughs]
Ryan Hendrix: I wouldn’t say ‘buy it’. It’s not for everybody, and we didn’t make a record we were trying to sell. We made a record that we really believe in.
Nick Turner: I think it’s more of an artistic statement than a lot of stuff that you’d hear normal bands doing. I think it is an attempt to do something that’s a bit interesting and special.
Ryan Hendrix: At least for ourselves.
Have you had any funny experiences so far on your tour in Europe, or in England particularly?
Nick Ley: It was really weird that France doesn’t have toilet seats. You can have wireless internet almost everywhere, but you can’t have a toilet seat.
Ryan Hendrix: I’m trying to find a funny moment that happened, I’m just I’m so tired …
How long have you been touring now?
Ryan Hendrix: We’re almost a month in.
Nick Ley: That’s about the limit …
Ryan Hendrix: … before somebody’s gonna die. [all laugh] The funny moment would be when I cut off his head [gestures at Turner]. I have this secret desire to kill him.
Nick Turner: Here’s a funny story from before we started the band: He did try to kill me in his sleep.
Ryan Hendrix: Yeah, I did. I sleepwalk, and we were staying with a friend in the Czech Republic, sleeping on really big pillows, and I dreamed that the pillow was a rock, and in real life I took the pillow and I smashed it on his face! It didn’t happen on tour, but that was the funniest story of my entire life.
Nick Turner: Now I try not to sleep in the same room as him. Just in case he really does kill me.
So what do you guys do when you’re not on the road? Do you have normal jobs?
Nick Turner: Unfortunately we do. [laughs]
Nick Ley: I don’t know how normal they are, but we do have jobs. We all three teach at music school [pointing at himself, Colin Fleishacker and Nick Turner], we’re basically college professors for rock’n’roll. It allows us to keep all our work interest in line, but what we really love to do as well. Turner makes wedding videos, and Ryan works for his dad’s advertising agency as well, Colin teaches guitar lessons as well … we’ve only been doing this for a while, but we’re definitely very happy with what we’re doing right now. It would be nice to make more money off this, but we’ll see.
