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The Vibrators recently completed a seven week tour of the US where their highly energetic stage presence and unique sound have left gig-goers across America wanting more. With a career spanning 28 years this February, the Vibrators boast a musical C.V. that shows why many people consider them to be one of the bands that spawned the original UK punk movement in the mid-1970’s.
| Vocalist/guitarist Ian “Knox” Carnochan, bassist Pat Collier, guitarist John Ellis, and drummer Eddie originally formed The Vibrators in February 1976, playing their first gig in North London, supporting The Stranglers. This was followed shortly thereafter by the Vibrators supporting the Sex Pistols and playing at the legendary 100 Club Punk Rock Festival. This same year The Vibrators released their debut single "We Vibrate". In 1977 The Vibrators supported Iggy Pop on a UK tour and released the classic favorite “Baby Baby” single and their first album |  |
This dynamic beginning ushered in nearly three decades (and counting!) of prolific music-making that includes 15 albums and intense tours with dates in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. During their illustrious career, The Vibrators have toured with Iggy Pop. Ian Hunter, and The Flaming Groovies to name a few bands. Their songs have been covered by The Exploited, UK Subs, GBH, REM, and Die Toten Hosen, among others. It’s easy to understand why The Vibrators have remained white hot for so long- they continue to make great music and they give 100 percent in the studio and on stage. This devoted musicianship and their infectious energy make this band’s sound transcend the label of punk. The Vibrators are rock ‘n roll alive and in action.
For this latest US tour, The Vibrators line-up included vocalist/songwriter Knox on guitar, Eddie on drums, and Pete from Finnish band No Direction on bass. The following are parts of a conversation with Knox before the gigs at Brick By Brick in San Diego and Showcase Theatre in Corona, California.
Lan: How’s the US tour going?
Knox: It’s been going very well. Occasionally we have some quiet nights, as our drummer says, there’s only one Friday or Saturday in a week. If we go to play somewhere on a Tuesday, instead of taking the night off, it’ll be quieter. But generally it’s very good… It’s surprising that people still come out to see us, you know!
L: Why is that surprising?!
K: Well, I just think these kids, they probably ought to be more involved with music from people of their own age or something. But we enjoy playing, I think that’s the main thing that matters.
L: Obviously you do! You’ve been playing 27 years or something right?
K: That’s right, yeah.
L: Do you see an end to songwriting and touring, short of, like death say?
K: Umm…yeah, well if Eddie died or I died it might be rather difficult! But, no not really, I mean I think if you’re a musician it’s not a big deal. You just carry on, like the old jazz musicians. I think what we do is probably quite a lot harder physically than what jazz people do. You don’t really know how you’ll be doing. You have to kind of train up for it, writing songs and touring, like an athlete- then it becomes like second nature, you see.
L: And how do you keep trained up for it? How do you keep the inspiration and the energy going?
K: Well, we just like doing it! It’s not a big deal. I think though sometimes, on these longer tours, this one [the US tour] is seven weeks, after a while it’s sort of mental as well as physical. We can get tired. But once we get on stage all that disappears, you see.
L: How many times have you toured the US anyway?
K: Umm…I would think about seven times. We did two tours in ’99, we did 2000, 2001, and 2002, and we’re here now. And also we’ve been here…let’s see, we were here in ’84 and ’92, so we’ve been here quite a few times.
L: Do you drive to all the gigs, from city to city, then?
K: Yeah, we drive, but I personally don’t drive. I’m a passenger- but I’m a very experienced passenger.
L: When you play in different regions of the US, do you find the crowds very different or are they pretty much the same?
K: I think generally they’re the same. You get different kinds of clothes styles, there are often places where… Well, like where we are tonight (San Diego), there are lots of well dressed girls, well dressed guys too I suppose. That’s not necessarily the case in other places. We went to one place where they all had masses of black and white paintings on their jackets, like much more than you would normally see. I think in that town that’s what they decided they were going to do, they were following each other and that’s what they ended up doing. And then like, New York, when we play there we see a lot more Mohicans. Like tonight, I don’t know if we’ll get any Mohicans at all, whereas other places, you might get quite a lot. It does vary, but generally I think the crowds are quite similar, usually though if they can’t be seen, like it’s dark in the venue, we’ll get a lot more enthusiasm. Like there will be a lot more jumping around.
L: What, like the crowd might be self-conscious?
K: Yeah, they get self-conscious you see.
L: I saw the Exploited not too long ago. When they played “Troops of Tomorrow” everyone loved it. But it’s actually your song, isn’t it?
K: Yeah, it’s actually my song. On some of their albums it says “all songs by The Exploited” but that’s not actually true, you see, it’s my song, and some people come up to us and say we do a really good version of that Exploited song. It’s actually kind of funny, I don’t really mind. Eventually they’ll find out we did it first, but I think people can’t really associate that song with The Vibrators. We don’t really seem to be that sort of band, if you know what I mean.
L: A lot of your songs are like love songs…
K: Yeah, we do have lots of like love songs.
L: But there’s a trace of black humor in some of them too. How important is black humor in your lyrics?
K: Well, this may sound contradictory, but there’s got to be something reasonably intelligent in the music, or else it’s got be completely moronic. It’s got to be that sort of thing, but then people say, “Well what about that song there?” then we have to say, “Well, yeah…” I was very influenced by people like Lou Reed and Bob Dylan. I think I was most influenced by Bob Dylan when he was first around, I never realized how good the words were until a bit later though.
L: And Lou Reed?
K: Yeah, I was very influenced by Lou Reed. And I actually think Lou Reed probably seems to be becoming more straight in his old age. I respect him, I haven’t seen any of his shows recently but I think he’d been better to kind of…well not exactly go back on drugs… but something like that! Get a kind of younger punk band, or even someone like us, to go on tour with him. Make a lot more noise. He’s becoming this intellectual, like…
L: His music has become more like theory than rock ‘n roll.
K: Yeah, I really like Lou Reed but I liked it when his music seemed to be much more out of control. But I can’t really criticize him, he’s not exactly twenty years old anymore, when he wrote the earlier stuff, is he? And anyway, his stuff’s always been much, much better than my stuff.
L: When you were twenty, was your songwriting very different than it is now? Or when you were thirty or forty say? How has it evolved?
K: I think I’ve become more self-conscious. I think maybe I’ve deliberately looked for things to make the songs more clever. But I don’t know really, I just sort of write the songs.
L: So you don’t go into it thinking there’s a certain structure. They just sort of come out then?
K: They just come out. Mainly, I’ll write some words, and sometimes I’ll have some music to go with it already then I go back and forth between the words and the music. The best thing is if you have a title like “Troops of Tomorrow.” That came about because a friend of mine was talking about the situation in Berlin, and how we ought to be writing songs about that kind of stuff. In a space of a week I wrote quite a lot about that sort of stuff, you see, like “Destroy”, “Troops of Tomorrow”, “Frontline Europe” or something. I do write songs that have that kind of background- war zones and that. So I was influenced by that friend too.
L: You’re quite a prolific songwriter. And you paint too, is there a relationship between the two?
K: Umm…I don’t think there is really. Basically I’m just sort of a creative person. And I need to do that kind of stuff. I do paintings but lately I’ve done stuff like the Joe Strummer portrait…Joey Ramone too. I was talking to this dealer and he said he couldn’t sell any paintings of my landscapes and stuff, but if I did a painting of Joe Strummer, he could sell that tomorrow, so then I started doing that. But that’s very recent, just the last couple of months or so before coming out here. But I think I’m going to continue to paint when I get back to London, because it makes money. And also I can paint sort of reasonably well. And when you have that gift, though it’s only a small gift, in a way you suddenly feel you have a responsibility towards it, to produce stuff. Hopefully I’ll just go on producing lots of paintings every year. I did stop for about ten years because suddenly I was able to make some money with the music.
L: Do you feel you have a responsibility towards your fans? The Vibrators have been around a long time, you’re often called one of the original UK punk bands, and people have sort of high expectations.
K: Well, we just play. And we are different from how we used to be. Now we’re a three-piece and we’re a bit more intense than we used to be. I’m always surprised, when we’re finished playing, when people come up to us and say, “You were really good!” and everything. We’re just playing, you see! I’m fifty-eight years old now, and I wonder what they think when they’re looking at me! People say we’re quite good still. The trouble is with the fans, in a way, they make the band. But like if we did everything the way they wanted us to, we’d just be playing the first album and a couple of other songs!
L: Yeah, people love Pure Mania.
K: That’s sort of the main album, yeah. Whereas we’ve made fifteen more albums since then! They ought to listen to some of the other stuff. I actually think our newest album Energize is better than the first possibly- it’s a very good album, the new one.
L: Tell me about the newest album.
K: Our latest album is called Energize, and is released on Track Records in the UK, which is the old Track Records which used to have Jimi Hendrix, etc. I think this is probably our best album in a way. We get e-mails and people telling us what a great album this is, which is nice after you’ve been playing for so many years, as you know you haven’t lost the power. The album’s got good songs on it, and the sound’s good. My favorite songs on the album are “Animals” which is anti-eating or experimenting on animals, “Moonlight,” a spooky sort of waltz, and “No More,” a Scottish sounding unrequited love song. We play three off this album in our current set.
[The set list for the US tour included Automatic Lover, Fading Away, Kid’s a Mess, I Need a Slave, Tired of Living With You, Politically Correct, Troops, Hot For You, U238, New Brain, So Far Down, Baby Baby, Disco in Mosco, London Girls (Pete Dee from The Adicts joined them on guitar for this song at the Showcase Theatre gig), and Judy Says. The encores included Brand New Cadillac, Petrol, and Yeah Yeah Yeah.]
L: Tell me about The Vibrators’ biography.
K: I wrote a book about the band a few years ago, which we sell at our gigs and over the Internet. It’s called The Vibrators: 21 Years of Pure Mania. It’s like a giant fanzine, pretty punky looking and is around 100 pages long, over 50,000 words. It’s not a sex and drugs kind of book as we weren’t that sort of band. I tell people it’s more like a manual, and as well as a day by day account of the band, it lists every gig we ever did, who was in the band, what equipment we used, that sort of thing. I’m in the process of updating the book as it was only the first 21 years. Now it’s 27 years. I may have a proper publisher for it, I’ve been getting it printed myself, there’s always talk of this every now and again.
L: And what’s this about a science-fiction type book that you’re working on?
K: I’m trying to finish my science-fiction horror-type book. It must be about 70,000 or 80,000 words now. I write bits of it on tour, and it’s actually quite good. But I don’t really want to say that, in case when it comes out people think it’s terrible! And also, I think people can put their writing in these software packages and it’ll tell you how old the person writing the stories are…I’m sure it’ll say I’m like twelve or something!
L: Are you also working some sort of video compilation of The Vibrators in concert?
K: Yes, we’re starting to get material together for a DVD. Lots of bands seem to be moving up to having themselves on DVD, so we’ll have to as well.
L: Do you get homesick for London on these long tours?
K: I don’t get that homesick on long tours. I think in some ways you have an easy life on tour, you don’t have to go shopping much, or pay bills, etc. But when I’m on tour I think I have an unrealistic view of life back home and how I am going to get millions of things done when I get back. But of course when you get back, life is a lot more complicated than you realize, and you get hardly anything done, even though you work all day! When I’m at home I’m sort of a recluse, I just stay in working a lot of the time. I don’t go out anywhere except to the pub and occasional gigs. I have a nice cat called Gizzmo, who I miss on tour, and worry about. When I’m on tour I’m public property, when I’m at home I’m very much a private person. I’ve got lots of friends back home and on tour. The big problem I have on tour is remembering people, especially their names. I have a real problem with this, especially if people are out of context. It’s like if you see the guy from your cornershop in a bar in another city, you know you know him, but from where?
Here in the US we will certainly not have problems remembering The Vibrators! Since this interview the band has returned to the UK and launched a UK tour in December with the UK Subs. They are also preparing for a European tour in January which includes gigs in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and France, plus more dates in the spring and summer. For more information about The Vibrators, including gigs, news, bios, merchandise, discography, lyrics and pictures, check out www.thevibrators.com. For details on Knox’s solo gigs and to view his paintings, go to www.knox76.com. We can’t wait to dance to the music when The Vibrators return with the pure mania!
Interview and photographs are from October 16, 2003 at Brick by Brick (San Diego) and October 18, 2003 at Showcase Theatre (Corona). Interview by Lan Do.
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