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Glastonbury Special: Interview - The Drums

Fresh off the stage after their crowded gig in the John Peel Tent, The Drums talked to Q about their first Glastonbury festival. The group also proclaimed themselves to be the most unoriginal act in the last ten years. Read on to find out why.

Q: It's an expansive site. What have you seen while you've been here?
Adam Kessler:We saw some pretty wild things last night. We were up in that Shangri-La land and it was just another planet.

Q: What is the festival about to you?
Jacob Graham: To me a festival starts with a love for music and I'm really drawn to festivals that have a true feel for music. I have a hard time with big festivals that have something for everyone like this. It kind of just overloads your senses. To us here it feels like there's so much to feel that we just can't feel anymore. [laughs]

But that said we're so glad to be here and to be playing . Those people who just saw us play were so sweet and they really made us feel better about ourselves [laughs]

Q: It sounds like you guys are building quite an ego
AK: It's not even ego because we go in there so down that it almost just brings us up to feeling normal. We go on and it stops us feeling depressed. We've been a band for just over a year. We played our first show last May, so going on-stage in front of 15,000 people I think they said it was, is for a band like us is a privilege. 15,000 people is more than the population of my town.

Q: You probably couldn't see how many people were watching from outside the tent
Connor Hanwick: These people really have a passion for music. It's the last day of the festival and they still have enough energy to come see us and to cheer and give back to us. I think it's really cool when people make it a point to come and see you because in a place like this there's a billion other things you could be doing.

Q: The England match was on at the same time as your set so for people to still come out really means they were passionate about seeing you
Jonathan Pierce We're sorry for your loss. . It was virtually the worst set time you could have so we felt a lot of love.

Q: Have you seen footage of the festival in the past in which it's been muddier than the battle of the Somme?
AK: We've heard loads of gross stories like that and we're thankful for this weather. It's lucky that this one is so sunny really because we don't really have many clothes so we just have to wear what we've got.

Q: Who do you want to see while you're here?
CH: Well we're friends with this band Scissor Sisters. We live in New York around the corner from them so they became our friends off the street and we managed to catch some of that the other day. We wish those guys the best and we're gonna go and see MGMT and LCD Soundsystem too.

Q: What do you make of this being the last LCD Soundsystem album?
CH: I love it. Why drag everyone through the mud? Say what you've gotta say and then get out. That's the coolest thing you can do as a band. If you look at U2 for example it's just like why are you tormenting your fans? Just make a quick bold statement and get out.

Some people pull it off though Michael Jackson was setting up another tour when he died, I would have gone to that if I had money. That's because he never grew old and never dropped his sword. But some people like the guys from Muse it's a different story.

Muse showed up to our second, third and fourth shows in New York City in this tiny club called The Annex. There were like maybe 50 people there each night and they kept coming and offering to buy us drinks which was weird. We'd never hear their music before. I would just like to say that Muse are the most original band in the last ten years.

Q: Irony doesn't come across well in print.
CH: That is a quote, Muse said that they were the most original band. That's an interesting thing to say about yourselves, and I'm not going to elabourate other than to say we are the most un-original band in the last 10 years. We just want to write simple pop songs, we're not interested in doing something new just because it's new. This is not a new idea and it's an idea that never should have been lost in our opinion.

Q: I guess being unoriginal could be original
JG: People might put a negative connotation on being unoriginal but where does that come from where that's everybody's goal? That's the only reason you make music? It's a sad sentiment for you as a person, if you're that self-conscious that you need to prove that you're an interesting thing. We're just a band making songs because that's our job you know? Everyone else in the world is trying to be the weirdest, most experimental avant-garde band around so we're doing a very tried and true thing. If you sound so weird no-one will be able to hear your personality through the music. We all live on earth and we all have to breathe air in the same way. We're not learning a new way to breathe air, music doesn't need to be constantly reinvented.

AK: People try to make music into fine art or something like that but even fine art in pretty boring and unoriginal.

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10:40 AM | 02/07/2010