Holy Fucking Fuck
It’s sometimes hard to get past a band name, and with one like ‘Holy Fuck’, that task doesn’t get any easier… once you do though, you’ll find a top quality Canadian band with an influx of cool sounds that make even the worst day seem a little better.
We had a good old chat with the guys ahead of their show in Tokyo, and found them to be every bit as nice as their music…
For any of our readers that don’t know Holy Fuck, please tell us who you are and what you are about…
Brian: Sure, we’re a Canadian band based out of Toronto, Graham and I started the band about 5 or 6 years ago. It’s really hard to tell exactly when though, because we kinda started in a way where we were more of a concept than anything, where for instance we played with different members quite often, it was usually Graham and I but often with a different drummer or bass player, and we were making up a lot of music in a very spontaneous way. We did it that way for a number of years before it ended up becoming far too difficult to maintain, and we sort of developed into a real band… and I’d say that was about 3 years ago.
So do you guys still have the same mission that you set out with?
Brian: Yeah, I think one of the main things for me was that I wanted to try to put something together that would sound a bit weird and different… a bit out of phase with what happens around us with our contemporaries and stuff. It wasn’t based so much on songwriting as it was based on sort of trying to use these very limited, rudimentary, busted-up, broken things, like little toys and mixers, and to use them to their fullest capabilities to try to make something really cool out of it. As oppose to the other way round, which was to take computers and really high tech equipment that is limitless, and whittle it down into one single thing. So we were trying to do the other, we were trying to explode one little thing into being so much more. That was what I wanted to do, and I knew of Graham because we had mutual friends, and I knew that he was one of those guys who approached things all about sound, at least that’s how I observed him. In-fact he was in one band where they called him ‘The Wizard’ and he wore a wizard hat. He was this guy, the guy who made all the trippy sounds. He was the guy who you could go to who would make all this crazy-lush stuff. I had this thing I wanted to do with Casio’s and old film tape and stuff, so I went to Graham and said “Do you wanna do this thing with me?” And that’s how we got started, but we really didn’t know what it was gonna sound like, so for the first time ever we were starting a band that didn’t already have song ideas. It was more like “let’s just get up on stage and perform this experiment” and low and behold it slowly started to develop. It took a couple failed shows though, where we made asses of ourselves. But it was just one of those things that came together. At first it was all about fun; we had no set-list or songs, we were just going up and messing around. We thought we were very punk rock because we were playing these festivals where other bands were going up and they had everything customized, they’d rehearsed their banter, they had a real polished sound and look, and we’d just get up there and be like “whatever”. We thought it was a lot of fun, and we still try to keep that spirit a lot. Even though it’s sort of changed, we’re not that polished band that we were making fun of, but we are a little more polished none the less. Because we have a set-list and an album that we wanna try to re-create as best as possible, and a lot of fans expect that from us, so we’ve sort of become something more than that original experiment.
Graham: Do you have a red pen by the way? [Graham was well into drawing a picture for Modern Fuss at this point!]
Okay, so how did you get your name? Does it stop you from getting TV and radio play? Has it caused any problems?
Brian: So here’s the thing, the band started purely out of fun and experimentation; our first shows were at the experimental night on Sundays at Playdo’s in Toronto. We were just opening for our friends’ bands in shitty bars in Toronto and stuff, so we didn’t put too much expectation on the band. It just looked funny on the flyers and stuff, but low and behold we started getting more shows and playing more. I think there was maybe one time where we thought we should change our name, but we were like nah.
Graham: We were gonna change it to Holy Fucking Fuck!
Brian: We’re just following the path as it unravels, and here we are like 5 or 6 years later. There’s definitely been opportunities lost because of our name, like playing on Conan and other shows, but we also thought that the type of music we play wouldn’t exactly lend itself to those kind of things, it’s not exactly pop music. Like Walmart isn’t gonna put our CD in their store, but they probably wouldn’t anyway, because you wouldn’t see something like our kind of music in there. I can think of maybe three definitive things that have happened based on our name; like we were invited to do this cool iTunes thing, but it got cancelled at the last minute because they didn’t like our name.
Graham: There was another thing when we were unsigned, where we were supposed to play Trafalgar Square in London for Canada Day, on the same trip as our first Glastonbury appearance. At the last minute the Mayor of London saw that we were on the line-up and we got pulled a week before… even though we were promised flights and hotels and stuff! But, we were like we have to go play Glastonbury, like crap! And we had to suddenly come up with all this money to fund our flights and stuff. That was like one big fuck over. Of course we were mad that we got pulled from the bill, but I was more mad that they didn’t figure this out from the beginning. People think the name is offensive but we’re not out there doing anything to offend anybody. People that get offended by our name probably have a lot more issues and baggage, whereas people that don’t get offended are probably a lot more open-minded and happy! I don’t wanna challenge anybody out there, we just wanna have fun.
How is it going in Japan so far? Done anything cool?
Brian: Well, we got into Shibuya yesterday morning and we’ve just been hanging out, this is our second time here, cos we were here for Fuji Rock, but we were only here for the weekend. It feels like there’s never enough time. We’re just walking around and seeing as much as possible, it’s so fun here!
What do you have planned here apart from the shows?
Brian: For me it’s a struggle, because you wanna see everything- the history, some cool nature, I wanna go shopping, I wanna go to record shops and crazy guitar pedal shops and stuff, but I haven’t really had a chance to do that. The thing with touring is that you go to places you really wanna go, but you don’t get enough time to do things, so it becomes a good old challenge. We just hope to get a really interesting overview of what Japanese cities look like and what the people are like, but we’re not gonna get enough time to customize what we do- like all the stores and parks, but… we’re still gonna have fun! We have a day off so we might go to Kyoto.
You released a split vinyl with Foals in 2008, and now you’re touring with them. How do you know Foals, and what’s it like touring together?
Brian: We toured with them in the UK about 2 years ago, we didn’t really know them too much before that, we knew of them, and they knew of us kinda thing. Ever since then we’ve been really tight friends, and we see them at festivals and hang out, they’re good guys.
How was your recent tour of Australia and New Zealand?
Brian: Probably the best tour ever, we’ve been touring pretty consistently this past year and as far as doing one last tour before our little break, that was kind of IT, for many reasons. You know it’s really cold in Toronto now, so we wanted to go away to get away from that. It was beautiful. We played awesome, well-attended festivals with enthusiastic crowds, which was great. We were travelling with a whole bunch of bands, like Foals, Deerhunter, Blonde Redhead and !!!. Bands that we’d been friends with and toured with before, people we see every once in a while at festivals, and you meet up and pick up from where you left off. There was a lot of mutual friends there that just hung out and it was very poetic. Like for a last tour, it was great to see all your mates again and hang out, play these great shows, and now it’s the punctuation at the end of that; these Japanese shows with Foals, its great we get to play 3 shows with them here, it awesome!
How was your most recent album, LATIN, received here in Japan?
Brian: I think it just came out, I dunno. We just got here so this is kind of the kick off tour, it’s not like we get to come here so often, so it’s a new market for us, but we feel good about it and we’re optimistic that we’re able to build a fan base here and continue to come back.
Are you going to be at Fuji Rock again this year?
Brian: No plan yet, but we hope so!
As a band, what does 2011 have in store? When will you be getting back in the studio?
Brian: We hope to be in the studio pretty soon, but we have a lot of personal stuff to do, which is all good, but this is gonna be the first break we’ve taken since we started. We just need to be normal people for a couple months and then we’ll start working on a record, maybe in spring.
Any messages for your Japanese fans?
Brian: Stay in school… no.
Graham: Just stay metal, have fun!
Thanks a lot Holy Fuck! We hope to see you back on these shores in the near future!
Check out Holy Fuck’s website and follow them on twitter. Also, buy their album, LATIN, available here. It’s a bloody good’un!
Stay tuned as we have a cheeky little TOKYOHEADS interview with Brian coming soon…
Special thanks to Naga Chozaemon and Niles Lienhart for doing the interview in our time of need. Thanks also to Kristen Heneage. Respect!
