Wild Flag are breaking out of the Nineties

Wild Flag are breaking out of the Nineties

08 December, 2011
by: Domzig

Portland's finest can still show the kids a thing or two...

Wild Flag is a band that has indie pedigree running though it like jam runs through a Victoria sponge. Spiritually based in Portland, a tiny city in America’s north west that has already given the world bands like The Wipers and The Exploding Hearts, the band itself is made up of members of such titans of the '90s indie scene as Quasi, Sleater-Kenny and Helium. Hell, even lead guitarist Carrie Brownstein’s original guitar teacher was the lead singer of Sunny Day Real Estate.

With everyone digging on everything ‘90s at the moment, it was perhaps inevitable that the Portland scene would raise its head once again. However, if you thought that Wild Flag was just going to be Sleater-Kinney mark II, you’d be wrong. A supergroup of sorts made up of guitarist Brownstein alongside fellow Spells member Mary Tipton, ex-Minders drummer Rebecca Cole and drummer Janet Weiss (who has played with everyone from Conor Oberst to Stephen Malkmus), almost nothing about this band feels nostalgic. Keeping things far more straight-forward than any of the protagonists' former bands, their self-titled debut that came out earlier this year sounds closer to bands like The Vivian Girls or Wavves than it does to the Minute Men or Pavement.
 
Due to play their first UK show at The Lexington tomorrow, I met up with Rebecca Cole at Islington’s Premier Inn for a brief chat and a cup of tea.



How you finding this Premier Inn? Everything’s premier but the price, right?

It’s not bad. The room is clean, the staff are really nice and the location is really neat. There’s plenty of stuff we can walk to, and there’s tons of good food places and coffee shops in the neighbourhood. So far, Premier Inn thumbs up!

Anyway, seeing that you were all in moderately successful bands back in the '90s, I was wondering why you decided to form Wild Flag? It’s not like you have anything to prove.

I think timing was pretty crucial really. I had quit the Minders and hadn’t played in a couple of years, Carrie and Mary were doing solo things, but weren’t that busy with it. We all ended up working on a soundtrack together and it suddenly dawned on us that this was the right time to start a band. It felt good, no one was too busy and it sounded great. It was like a convergence.

Is there a pressure in Wild Flag to do things a little bit differently to your old projects?

In a way. I’m sure we are just following on from our old projects a bit, because that’s how music works – you just build on your knowledge – and I do think that even though there wasn’t any external pressure to shake it up and try new crazy things, we had a goal to push it in new directions.

One of the great things about playing with such talented and smart people is that it kind of forces you to up your game a little bit. I think we all challenge each other in that way, so I think the pressure for change comes from us wanting to do things differently. We wanted Wild Flag to be a thing where we can do our own thing, go at our own pace and generally have a good time.

You guys are all a bit older now – what’s it like playing to a room of kids?

I’ve definitely noticed that our crowds have become a mix of younger people and older people. Maybe it’s always been like that, I just hadn’t noticed. Rock is weird, a lot of mythology in the sixties is that music is a younger person’s game, but I really don’t think that. Maybe one day, we’ll go, “this is ridiculous”, and jack it in, but if Stephen Malkmus and Wilco can put out important records, I don’t see why we can’t.

It does feel like there has been a lot of nostalgia for the ‘90s recently. Are you not worried about being lumped in with that?

Yeah, I have noticed that a lot of bands you hear nowadays sound like they come from 1996, and I can see why we would feed into that. We all started making music in the '90s and take our influences from that time. I mean I love the Beatles and the Kinks for drum parts and harmonies, but I grew up with Pavement, so I can definitely see why someone would listen to us and think back to 1998 or whatever.

I do think that these things come in cycles and it’s just the '90s' turn to trend again. I mean it dropped for me when I saw tailored flannel shirts in Urban Outfitters, I was like, “oh look the grunge look is back”.

Yeah it’s weird. If I had asked someone that question five or six years ago, they would just shrug and say that nothing original came out of the '90s...

I think time is a great filter like that. I mean look at classic rock radio, they filter everything made in the ‘80s into fifteen songs. I’m like, “yeah The Cure were great, but what about Ultravox or Depeche Mode?” It’s almost like a lot of music gets airbrushed out over time.

I suppose it’s like art really. Think how many people worked in the Italian renaissance and now, a hundred of years later, you go to the museum and see maybe five pictures that sums it all up.

Wow that’s a good answer...

Thanks!

Wild Flag play The Lexington tonight and the Electric Ballroom on the 1st of Feburary 2012.
Click here to see more live music

Domzig