INTERVIEW: Public Access T.V.

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Photo by Kristen Lay

Public Access T.V. recently began their tour in Boston with Splashh and The Britanys on Thursday, Jan. 19 at the Great Scott. Before the show, WTBU DJ Kristen Lay spoke with the band about Brooklyn, social media, and their show in D.C. on Inauguration Day.

Kristen Lay: The last year and a half or so has been pretty exciting for you guys. You’ve been doing lots of touring—I actually saw you in October 2015 open for Hinds here—you’ve played at Governor’s Ball, and releasing your new album, so a lot of exciting things have been going on. This is the first date of your tour, so what are you looking forward to in the next couple of weeks?

Xan Aird (guitarist): I’m looking forward to surviving; there are eleven of us in the van, and we’re on tour with our friends Splashh—they came over from Australia. We’re playing in D.C., so we have to get through that without any of us getting arrested.

KL: Do you guys run into a lot of trouble on tour?

XA: Eh, just that we happen to playing in Washington [D.C.] on the day that that man, whose name I will not say, is being inaugurated as our next president. So we leave [Friday] at 7 a.m. and we’re gonna be driving into the—

Max Peebles (bassist): The eagle’s nest.

XA: [laughing] Yeah.

That’ll definitely be an interesting day in D.C.

XA: My mom said no Molotov cocktails. That’s what she said.

That’s a good piece of advice.

XA: [To the band] What are you guys looking forward to?

MP: I’m looking forward to going to Detroit.

XA: This guy loves Detroit.

MP: I love it there.

XA: Can you believe this? He went on his honeymoon with his wife, not to fucking St. Bart’s or fucking Europe; he went to Detroit. That’s how much he loves Detroit.

MP: Love Motown, love The Stooges, love the MC5, love that town, love everything it has to offer.

John Eatherly (singer/guitarist): Lot of great history in Detroit.

MP: And I have a lot of friends there. [To John] You?

JE: I just feel very fortunate to be on tour with friends. It is crazy all being crammed into this little van, but if it was with anybody else I think it would be really hard. We know everybody, we’re all close, so it’s just a really good vibe. I’m looking forward to everything. I’m looking forward to the drives even. I like a mix of people, and when you travel a lot with the same people, it’s nice to change it up and have a conversation that you haven’t already had a thousand times with a new person.

KL: That’s good to hear. So early on you guys have gained a lot of popularity—I saw NME wrote about you guys three years ago when you’d only just released “Monaco”. Do you feel like your relatively quick popularity is by chance, or do you think there’s a reason some people got so hooked onto your music?

JE: Well it wasn’t necessarily a quick popularity. It was more of just a quick hype, and because of that—coming on so strong in the very beginning—we had to play a lot of catch-up the next two years I’d say, touring and becoming a tight band. Before that song came out, we’d all played together in other projects and stuff, but this was a new thing for us so it wasn’t like we’d already been playing shows for six months, then we were tight and then it came out and we were able to go tour. It was like, that came out and then we had to get our shit together and learn how to play the songs. We had to play catch-up a little bit.

XA: I’ll tell you something about music journalists. Music journalists, they just wanna hang out. Like they all used to be in bands and they failed, so they just want to hang out with the rockers, the cool kids. So if you know how to show them a good time, they’ll write nice things about you, right?

JE: Yes, that’s basically the name of the game I think: take them out for a couple beers and become their friends, and maybe they’ll write some nice words about you.

XA: That’s really how it works. That’s professional advice for you.

KL: As far as advancements in social media, it’s easy for lesser known bands to get their music out there, but it also means there can be an overwhelming amount of music on the Internet. So would you say that it’s easier now than say twenty, thirty, forty years ago for bands to spread their music, or would you say that the Internet has made it more difficult?

JE: I think beyond being a talented band, because now anybody can do it, it takes a lot more work and a lot more persistence of just staying busy and putting out music. I think maybe if you were one of the lucky bands that got signed that was talented forty years ago, a lot of that work was a little more done for you. You’d come out and you were in every magazine and people would read about you before social media. Now it’s kind of like, if you’re a band that’s worthwhile—hopefully you are—you just gotta do it all. It’s a lot more busy shit you got to do I guess.

MP: I would say it’s harder because of that, because there are so many bands now. Social media just works for you.

JE: It’s very overly saturated.

MP: In the old days, there were DIY labels started—even those got big now even, so it’s harder. Everyone wants to be in a band, and it’s not hard to do if you have an Instagram or Soundcloud. Whether you’re good or not is another question. You’ve got to put up videos and stuff like that, get people interested.

JE: Maybe in another sense it’s harder to connect with other people now. Because there’s so much that, as a band, it’s hard to actually get a following going. Like you were saying [gaining a following] happened in the beginning and it was this sudden popularity, but we’re still, three years later, with like five thousand Instagram friends or whatever, so it’s just different. I think I would prefer the old—nah I like it this way. It’s just going to take some time. And work.

KL: I’ve noticed a lot of people, when they talk about Public Access T.V., make comparisons to a lot of popular New York City bands, namely The Strokes. While I’m sure you guys find these as compliments, what do you think of these comparisons?

XA: They’re lazy. Like, yeah we live in the East Village. And we play guitars. And we wear leather jackets. Well, he does [pointing to Max].

MP: Yeah it is lazy.

JE: Of course, I think it’s clear that we were all like thirteen years old when The Strokes came out and we loved that band. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we were all down with them.

XA: Yeah man, I was driving down Beacon St. when they came on WBCM 104.1. I’ll never forget it.

JE: But it’s how many years later now?

XA: That was 2001. September 2001 that record came out.

JE: Right so I’m saying, you know, we’re not sitting around in our rehearsal space talking about them and referencing them or anything. I think at that age it was like an introduction to rock ‘n’  roll, in a way. MTV was only playing pop trash, and then a band like [The Strokes] I found out about on MTV, which is pretty crazy. Then that introduced me to a lot of other shit.

XA: You’re probably too young to remember, but I used to watch TRL after school and it was like fucking Kid Rock and Britney Spears, and I have no problem with any of those artists, but there were no rock bands. Yeah, of course we like The Strokes.

MP: But to compare us to them is lazy.

KL: Right now it seems that there’s a lot of focus on music coming out of Brooklyn—a hotspot for New York City bands I suppose—but you guys are kind of changing the game a bit being from Manhattan, specifically the East Village, right in the heart of Manhattan. Does it feel exciting to be shifting the focus back to this area or do you not see Brooklyn like this?

JE: I don’t know, I think the game’s kind of changing on its own anyway. I think that whole Brooklyn wave has kind of changed and maybe the wave isn’t as big as it used to be like eight years ago or five years ago. For us it’s exciting being in Manhattan I guess—we all live there—but it’s not like we’re a part of a scene there. There are not a lot of other bands that we know; it’s just where we live. As far as Brooklyn goes, I don’t know how do you guys feel? I feel a little bit out of the loop with Brooklyn.

XA: I think it’s just an issue of economics, like bands come out of Brooklyn because bands can afford to live and rehearse in Brooklyn, and we’ve always figured out a way to live and rehearse in Manhattan, and that’s pretty much it. But now Brooklyn’s fucking as expensive as Manhattan, so you don’t really hear about a lot of new bands coming out of Brooklyn; I haven’t heard of any.

JE: We’ve just stuck it out for a really long time and figured out how to live cheaply for eight years now, and the only way to do that is to stick around and try to survive. If you were a kid moving from someplace else, I wouldn’t move to Manhattan to try to start a band. You wouldn’t be able to do it. To afford it—it’s ridiculous.

KL: And definitely in Brooklyn you have a lot of DIY venues and spaces that perhaps make it easier for other bands to come together and play together, but in Manhattan you don’t really have that—or at least you probably don’t find as many DIY spaces in Manhattan.

JE: No, and even the ones in Brooklyn have kind of changed neighborhoods at least.

MP: A lot of them have closed and a lot of new places have opened up. But talking about Brooklyn bands—I don’t know if you’re speaking specifically of bands that were using laptops and wearing day glow and nylon. Like that fad has kind of gone. It has run its course. Right now I think in Brooklyn there are more punk bands than anything that is very DIY.

XA: I fuck with punk.

MP: Things go in fads. But it’s true, like you said, Brooklyn is just as expensive as anywhere, so it’s hard. Queens, really, is where people are moving to and there are a lot of DIY spaces in Queens.

XA: And The Ramones come from Queens.

KL: I’d say many would say you kind of give off a ‘70’s vibe—at least with “Evil Disco” you give off that vibe. Obviously style isn’t always intentional, but was it something you were leaning towards or was it something that just came naturally?

JE: Style is always intentional in Public Access T.V. [laughing].

MP: We like it. Style we like.

JE: We like a lot of bands from that period I guess. It’s a fun way to play dress up and make a video—you know videos can be pretty, I don’t know, stupid I guess.

XA: We’re not taking it too seriously but we like a lot of bands from the ‘70’s. It’s a good decade. I don’t think it’s intentional. It just kind of happened.

JE: Yeah it’s in a lot of our roots and music that we grew up listening to. In the defining years in high school with your friends, when sharing records and stuff, there were definitely a lot of classic ‘70’s albums in the mix. If you were to cruise in our van to the next city I’m sure there would be a lot on the playlist.