Piece of Cake

Touring hard, changes in their line-up and now on their fifth album, US rock piece Cake have yet to break the UK mould. Stopping in London for the final leg of their European tour, uk-fusion sent Mr Tom to raid Cake’s mini bar and throw some questions at front man John McCrea and bassist Gabe Nelson

During tonight’s gig you talked about appreciation of having running water and how we should be aware of how lucky we are to be at this gig. Do you try to bring this political feeling out in your music?

JM: It’s in there somewhere, but you have to listen. Ultimately we know that we’re not experts on foreign policy and we’re not economists and we’re not really authorised to comment. As people though, these kinds of issues affect our emotional life and in that respect, we feel we have a right to include these kinds of things. Entertaining people is our prime directive.

Do you hope that people notice these references?

GN: Well it seems as if popular politicians don’t touch a lot of this stuff, they kind of avoid these slogans they throw out there. In America, we don’t hear a lot about foreign politics. What we realise when we come over to the UK that you people in Europe know a lot more about American politics than Americans know about it themselves.

What do you think about Bush’s recent re-election?

JM: Again, we’re just musicians. We’re just two steps away from being jugglers, or clowns or fire-eaters. We’re there to make people to forget about their week. That said, it’s a really sad day seeing Bush again. I actually spoke to my mother about it and she said that a lot of people were really sad when Nixon was re-elected and a lot suspected malpractice and that something was wrong. They couldn’t believe how mentally retarded the populous was to re-elect this guy. The silver lining of that situation was that right after he was elected came Watergate; all the cards just came tumbling down. The arrogant pushiness of that administration was bound to come to that sort of result and I feel that’s very similar in a lot of ways to the Bush administration. Having someone like George Bush in the highest office of the land really undermines that optimistic egalitarian dream.  

Do you have any idea why people re-elected him? Is it stupidity or something else?

JM: There’s a problem with the media. All those people in those red states who voted for Bush only get two AM radio stations with republican windbags repeating random blustery American propaganda and the newspapers in those states are just cut and paste versions of associated press stories. All the great newspapers are on the coast with all the award-winning journalists. A lot of these voters are not stupid, they are just not informed. All the people in cabinet in charge right now are the corporate elite and are all part of political bullshit.

So, tell me about the album Pressure Chief.

JM: (laughs) We like our new album. We feel go about because we did it by hand – it’s like a home crafts project which went a bit too far. We make our own records and videos and we feel it’s a very DIY effort. It’s somewhat apathetical towards a lot of other bands where a lot of highly paid professionals groom and manicure a record. We feel OK about that and it’s amazing we’re able to sell records. We feel like we’re getting away with murder.  

Was it recorded differently to your other albums?

JM: Yeah, we extracted ourselves from the conventional studios system and got an old house and some old microphones and a computer. It sounded ‘wrong’ technically, but I think we chose to keep a lot of things that were wrong. A lot of bands are scientifically designed to sound like ‘spring of 1972’ or the ‘late summer of 1968’ and we ended up sounded haphazard because we didn’t really know what we were doing. I think it ended up sounding OK and in a lot of ways sounded like our first album Motorcade Of Generosity. That was an album where we embarked on a trip and it went OK because we had guitar, bass and horn parts and went in there. 

Do you think it sounds more authentic this way?

JM: It sounds plenty authentic but it’s not really concerned with being authentic. It’s concerned with humans trying to sort things out and learning how to express themselves using technology. I don’t listen to music which a glossy sheen, so why would I want to produce it?

Cake have toured in Europe a few times now. What do you find is the high point of touring in the UK and what are your dislikes?

JM: The part that bothers me is the incredible sense of entitlement that the UK market feels about itself.  Artists have to tour here three times for every one time they play in a different country. It’s arrogant and that bothers me. Early in our career in a reactionary way I said ‘we’re only coming to the UK the same number of times we go anywhere else’. Fuck you. You have to understand that even a band like ours who are supposed to be this big commercial entity it’s unlikely we break even as it’s so incredibly expensive.

GN: London is particularly expensive.

JM: So yeah, we really feel like we’re coming to ‘play for the king’. We’re already fucking pissed and we already hate you in some ways.  It’s the promoters and the way the system works – it’s very ‘use and discard’. In Europe especially your culture in a way is wasteful and everything is here for a fleeting moment until you flush it down toilet. You want to bring things down so badly and it shows how insecure the emotional climate of your culture is in a way. You have this need to know about the secret lives of stars and there is no country other than the United States that’s so fucking nosey about celebrities.

That’s some of the intrusive things of the western media world surely?

GN: Yeah but the UK does it really well. Other countries eat a meal though – you are like the duck paté. We are a music product and we are consumed and discarded in a fleeting way. Whatever, I don’t want to critisise the UK and it’s a great place in lots of ways. There is a kind of self-awareness about the disposability of the media that perhaps doesn’t exist elsewhere. 

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Pressure Thief

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