Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats have pretty much become a household name in the world of stoner/psychedelic rock. Through relentless touring and releasing albums such as Blood Lust, Mind Control, and their latest opus, The Night Creeper
I recently had the opportunity to talk with lead singer/guitarist/songwriter Kevin Starrs and let me tell you. This guy is fucking awesome. I had an absolute blast talking to Kevin as we discussed his distaste for cell phones at shows, why he would love to be a member of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse band, and his love for the debut W.A.S.P. album. This was a really fun interview and I hope you all will dig getting to know this cool cat. Cheers and enjoy!
Kev, thanks so much for taking the time out to talk to me today.
Hi Don, how are you doing today?
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I’m doing great. Busy press day for you?
Yeah, but you’re the first.
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That’s great. It’ll just all be downhill from here my friend.
[laughs] Exactly. Yeah.
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So you guys have had quite a busy summer so far!
Yeah, we’ve been busy doing the summer festivals in Europe so yeah, we’ve kept busy.
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Speaking of the festivals, over there in your homeland, you tend to land these amazing festivals and huge shows but here in the states you play smaller venues and clubs. Is there one that you prefer over the other?
You know, it doesn’t really matter to me. We’ll play wherever really. We’ve done everything from dive bars to football stadiums at this point so at this point, it’s just a show at the end of the day. You’re there to play music and hopefully entertain people in some way. I mean, we play clubs in Europe as well. It’s just that at the festivals everything’s bigger. You’re on bigger stages at festivals but other than that, it’s the same in Europe. When we’re touring in Europe we play pretty small venues as well.
Being that your music is a bit more intimate, when playing on bigger stages, do some things get lost in translation of the music itself?
Sometimes. I mean, when the stages are so wide and you can hardly see the person next to you [laughs]. When you’re trying to create a musical moment and there’s such distance between everybody that can get difficult. Also, you’re so far away from the audiences a lot of times. With the club shows, they’re more intimate and more intense I think.
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You do a lot of interviews. What is one of the single most annoying questions that you get asked all the time?
Oh man, pretty much all of them [laughs].
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Well I’m sorry to be annoying you so much.
[Laughs] Just kidding. The one that does always get me though is, “Where did you get the band name from?” I mean, I can understand the mentality behind the question but it takes five minutes to look it up on Wikipedia. The answer is there already because it’s been told so many times. It just seems like a standard question a band gets. Does it really matter?
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Whenever I do interviews, I tell them, “There are two questions I won’t ask you today: ‘How did you get your band name’ and ‘How’s the tour going?’”
[Laughs] That’s perfect!
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I’ll be honest. I wasn’t sold on you guys until I really sat down and gave The Night Creeper a listen and I really dug the hell out of it. Would you say that this is probably an easy album for those that have never heard you before to get into?
Honestly, probably not. I wouldn’t have chosen this one as the sort of the gateway into the band. I mean, I’m glad that you like it. Everybody seems to have their favorite album for the band. Each album has a sort of a different feel to it and so it varies from person to person as to which one they prefer. I think it’s good that some people don’t get us straight away and they have to work at it and then finally, they understand it. I’ve been the same way with a lot of bands myself where I kind of wrote them off saying, “I don’t get it. I don’t like it” and then maybe a couple of years later I may hear something that completely changes my mind. Then I have to go back and revisit them.
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You guys have been spending quite a lot of time here in the US touring. What are some of your favorite things about touring in the US?
We are so used to touring in Europe that coming over to America is a completely different culture. Everything is open 24 hours. You’re never hungry [laughs]. In America, you can get food in the middle of the night whenever you want whereas in Europe, you just need to wait until the next day for them to open.
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What is your favorite food to indulge in while on tour in US? A lot of my European friends say steak which I always think is hilarious.
[laughs] Well, I’m a vegetarian so it wouldn’t be steak [laughs]. You guys do very good vegetarian food over there. Great mock meat or whatever. It’s just such great food places there.
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When I interviewed Purson, they were just in love with Whole Foods here.
[laughs] Yeah. It’s a bit expensive but it really is a great place.
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With four albums under your belt, looking back, do you have a personal favorite that you think represents everything Uncle Acid is all about?
I’m not sure. I kind of like all of them [laughs]. I’m kind of a selfish songwriter. I write songs to please myself and to hear the things I would want to hear so everything that I’ve done I’ve been proud of it. I guess I would have to say Volume I since that’s the first thing that we did and it was a good starting point for us. It shows quite a wide range of influences for us that maybe people wouldn’t expect.
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When Uncle Acid plays live, to you do the same setlist every night or do you try and change it up a bit?
Well, we’ll change it up every now and again. Some songs get tired and after playing them 3 or 4 times in a row they start to lose it a little bit so we’ll bring in another song to the set. We’ll also change the order of the set and stuff like that. We’re constantly trying to tweak things to make it flow the best it can.
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Do you ever write on the road at all and if so, do you ever road test new songs?
Writing on the road is pretty much impossible for me. For me, I need complete isolation and you can’t get that on the road. The whole band is there, the crew’s there, everybody’s on top of each other for months on in and there’s no way to really escape from anybody [laughs]. You’re just constantly doing something. You’ve got press, preparing for the gig, watching a film on the bus [laughs]. There are always distractions on the road.
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What is a misconception of Uncle Acid that you’d like to put to rest?
Oh, I’m sure there’s a lot [laughs]. I think that maybe some people kind of dismiss us as being some part of a big occult rock thing that we’re not really a part of. We’re not really a part of any scene. People keep calling us occult rock but hardly any of our music has anything to do with the occult or anything like that. We’ve been thrown into various categories like that.
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Like when they say, “Ooo, they sound just like Black Sabbath!”
[Laughs] Exactly. I can get that they’re a huge influence on us but I don’t remember a time when Black Sabbath had two singers singing harmony or when they had two guitar players or did concept albums. There’s more to us that just Black Sabbath. Of course, I love Black Sabbath but I think if you really listen to us, you should be able to pick out other points of reference.
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Do you consider yourselves a metal band? IF not, are you ok with being lumped in with metal bands?
I don’t think that we’re a straight up metal band. Obviously, we’ve got metal influences but to me, we’re just a hard rock band. If you’re going to describe us as anything that would sort of cover all the bases of what we do. You don’t get many harmony singers in metal and that’s one of the biggest parts of our sound. Everything is two and three part harmonies. There is that metal influence but there’s a pop influence, a folk influence, there’s so much more to it.
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Who are some of your favorite current bands that you feel like are doing some cool things?
Blood Ceremony. I love them. Danava, they’re a great band and probably the best band in America really. I love Graveyard. There’s a lot of really great guitar music out there which is good.
If you could sing/play in any band for just one night who would it be and why?
[laughs] That’s a good question! I would love to be able to sing and play with Neil Young or someone like that. .
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Wow, you really threw me for a loop there with that one!
[laughs] If I was a member of Crazy Horse for a night that would probably be the ultimate.
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In your opinion, what is one hard rock/metal album that nobody should be without?
I’ll give you one that is maybe not appreciated as much as it should be for various reasons but I would say the first W.A.S.P album is a record that I recommend that everybody owns.
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Damn, Kevin. You are blowing me away. That album is one of my all time favorites. It’s flawless but nobody ever mentions it.
[Laughs] From beginning to end, every song on there is a classic. They kind of got thrown in with the whole hair metal thing. Maybe they were too soft for the thrash fans and maybe they were too heavy for the more mainstream, MTV audience so they were just kind of languishing in the middle somewhere. Blackie is a huge influence on my songwriting that nobody ever sees. He’s always got the heavy riffs and the two part harmonies. That is the same thing that I try and do. I want to have that heaviness and that darkness and all these sort of sweet pop melodies and harmonies as well.
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So does this mean that someday we can look forward to Uncle Acid covering “Sleeping in the Fire”?
[Laughs] Yeah, I would love to do that. Why not? [laughs]
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Do you enjoy getting out there and meeting fans?
Oh yeah, it’s always fun. We’ve got a lot of crazy fans [laughs]. It’s always nice to hear from the people and to see that you’ve made an impact on them in some way. It’s nice to be able to do that.
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It’s such a huge thing over these last few years where bands charge a pretty huge fee for their fans to meet them. What’s your opinion on that?
I think it’s totally ridiculous. There’s no need for that. We would never do that. We will meet anyone and sign anything. That’s really no problem for us. I just think it’s really fucked.
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What would a dream tour be for you?
Honestly, the tour that we have coming with Danava and The Shrine. To me, that’s going to be a great tour. Its three bands we all sort take a different approach to the music. I’m really looking forward to that and the fans are going to really like the lineup.
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So many of Uncle Acid’s songs are so visual, especially with the conceptual themes. Have you ever thought of incorporating visuals into the live shows in order to add to that vibe?
Yeah, we’ve done it before with the big screens and the projector and things like that. It sort of has become played out. There are a lot of bands that are doing that; showing video clips and horror films behind them. When you’re playing to that, people kind of start watching the screen and not really paying attention to the music or what the band’s actually doing. They’re just glued to the screen like zombies and the music is just sort of an afterthought. That’s not really a good situation to be in. Besides, we don’t always play venues big enough to bring in all of those things.
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Well, the trash cans on stage on the last tour was a nice touch.
[Laughs] Yeah. I mean, it was just garbage; a couple of brick walls and garbage everywhere on stage [laughs]. There could be more of that sort of thing in the future.
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Do you have any kind of pre-show ritual? LIke, what do you do to get into the zone?
I don’t really do anything really [laughs]. I just sort of distract myself and not think about it and then we just go on stage and go for it. We get in the zone and I don’t like to be distracted by anything else.
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When you really get in that zone and are working it, do you ever get distracted and find yourself being pulled out of that zone?
The only thing that sort of breaks it a little bit is when you start seeing cameras everywhere. People are filming the whole show and looking at their screens the whole time. That’s a little bit disappointing and it kind of cuts them off from the experience. If the way they choose to live life is through an iPhone screen, then that’s their problem really.
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Do you ever call people out on it when you see this happening?
Well, if I see somebody filming for the whole show, I’ll just tell them to please stop and if they don’t, I’ll just kick a monitor into them and kind of scare them a little bit [laughs]. Normally, you can get them to stop by just looking at them a certain way.
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If Hollywood was to make a movie about your life, what famous actor would play you?
Maybe if Al Pacino went through a makeup job to make him look like me, I would say Al Pacino [laughs]. He is a bit too short to play me though [laughs].
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What is one song that every time you hear it you say, “I wish I wrote that?”
That’s another good question. Maybe, “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes. That is just one of the greatest songs ever written. Brian Wilson and Keith Richards both say the same thing. There’s just something about that song that’s just so well written and so well produced and performed. It’s just the ultimate song.
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If I wasn’t a musician, I would be….
I’d be a writer. I would like to sort of write short stories or something. I’d be involved in writing something even if I was just a journalist or something.
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That kind of ties in with the fact that you enjoyed doing the concept album thing. Have you ever considered maybe doing some sort book of stories?
Yeah, I have. I was thinking that because the Night Creeper is such a strong sort of narrative, I was thinking of doing perhaps a pulp kind of paperback detailing the events of the album and having the actual story that it’s based on. I think a lot of people listen to the album and read the lyrics but they’re not quite sure of what is actually going on [laughs]. It would be good to sort of have the story there for them to read it. It’s there in my head so it needs to be explained to the people. Maybe that’s something that could happen in the future.
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That would be awesome. Kevin, they read it here first!
[Laughs] Exactly, there we go!
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Kevin, thank you so much for taking the time out to talk today. It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know you. You’re an awesome guy.
This was a nice one. Thank you so much, Don. I hope to see you in Atlanta if you can make it out. Cheers, Don.
For more on Uncle Acid, head on over to https://www.facebook.com/uncleacid
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