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Cult punk band the Fire Engines talk to Dazed about how their music influenced the likes of omnipotent angular-indie bands such as Franz Ferdinand and why they have ventured into the limelight this year to play their first and last festival at Connect in Inverary, Scotland.
Dazed Digital readers can win tickets to see this rather special performance - click here for details.
Why have the Fire Engines got back together?
We were offered to play with Captain Beefheart's Magic Band about two years ago, and it was a very difficult decision – it would have been easier to say no, but then you would have been saying no to sharing a stage with Rockette Morton and John 'Drumbo' French and people like that, who were our heroes when we were children. Then we were asked to play with Sun Ra's Arkestra, and we couldn't turn that down, because they're a guiding light for us. I steal from them constantly.
And why is this your last gig?
I don't write new songs for the Fire Engines and I don't want it to go on forever and forever, but we've never played a festival before so that's why we're playing one more concert. It'll be the first time we've played in daylight. I've got other things to do than be in a band I was in as a teenager. That was nearly thirty years ago, which is bizarre. This is definitely the last time.
What about if you got the chance to play with another one of your musical heroes?
James Brown? That's impossible. Jackson Pollock?... Surely they're all dead. Maybe if Boards of Canada asked us, we'd do it. Or if Jean Luc Godard wanted to play with the Fire Engines, sure.
What was it like doing a split single with Franz Ferdinand?
It was a strange experience: we didn't have much contact with them, it was all phone calls and emails. I thought it made Franz Ferdinand sound like the Fire Engines.
And then you supported them?
Yeah. We thought it was going to be a tiny gathering for close friends and family in a club, but actually it was in the Scottish Exhibition Centre which holds five thousand people, so it was quite a shock for us to walk out in front of five thousand Glaswegian teenagers and get bottled.
They were that hostile?
That's what we need in this world, baby. More hostility.
How does it feel to have people getting excited about your music again after it fell out of sight for twenty five years? Are they excited?
They may be excited when it's siphoned through their contemporaries, but I don't think people are excited about the original thing. Maybe people who work in press circles can trace some lineage, but I don't know if it will translate into sales! Things come round all the time. I listen to records that were made forty years ago, like Os Mutantes or Pink Floyd or Lee Hazlewood, that sound brand new.
What do you remember best about the early days of the Fire Engines?
When we were first all living together in a flat in Canonmills in Edinburgh, signposted by an old roast beef salad sandwich above the door, dropping lots of substances. We were thinking of just being a live band and not recording any material at all, but we wanted to get on Top of the Pops. We were looking for glory. But once it becomes recognised it becomes too real.
Has it been fun being a full-time musician since then? What's fun?
I've forgotten what fun is. Fun is cheap acid, and that went out in 1983.
What are you up to with your new band the Sexual Objects?
We're just trying to see if we can make records as good as the records they made in 1962. Make them really quickly: rehearse for half a day, go into the studio and record batches of two songs. We've done some vinyl singles, and the idea is for someone to put them out as a vinyl album but only press one, and maybe someone will buy it as an art object for £175 or £175,000. We don't know whether to number it as 000 or 001.
