Pitchfork

Between their currently winding down tour with Weezer and their yet-to-air appearance on "Desperate Housewives", Tokyo Police Club have gotten quite the national platform since the release of their debut full-length, Elephant Shell.

How does TPC keyboard player/vocalist Graham Wright feel about this newfound recognition? I asked him in a recent phone interview, and he talked to me about how "hilarious and awesome" it is that his band will be on a national TV show, the gastronomic benefits of being on a stadium tour, how to fake sports knowledge, and what's next for the Canadian foursome.

Pitchfork: The first thing I wanted to talk to you about was your appearance on "Desperate Housewives".

Graham Wright: Yeah, that's everyone's favorite topic of conversation these days, I think.

Pitchfork: Here's what I know: Apparently the "guys" on the show formed a band and were having a battle of the bands, and you guys were one of the bands but also maybe had speaking parts?

GW: Yes, that's all true. Basically, yeah, they form a band, enter a battle of the bands, and then are subsequently intimidated by a group of young hot shots. Then they all feel old and inadequate. We portray that group of young hot shots. But we're not in the show as Tokyo Police Club, even though we do play a Tokyo Police Club song.

Pitchfork: What's your name in the show?

GW: I don't know if I can say. I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to talk about before they air, so I'm erring on the side of caution.

Pitchfork: When does it air?

GW: The 16th of November.

Pitchfork: Were your speaking parts just you guys talking shit and challenging them?

GW: [Singer/bassist] Dave [Monks] and [drummer] Greg [Alsop] had the two lines. The "Desperate Housewives" guys come up and say,  "Hi," and then they say, "Hi, we're having a party later, and you guys should come," basically. It's a quick exchange, but I'm sure it'll be the highlight of the episode.

Pitchfork: Were you guys fans of the show before you did this?

GW: No, I'd never seen an episode in my life. I don't think I'm really part of their target demographic. I've never really seen it. But while we were on set, we watched one of the episodes, and it's pretty good. It's a little more ridiculous than I thought it was, but I would be interested to see where a lot of the story lines that they set up are going. Who knows? Maybe I'll be converted.

Pitchfork: Are you going to tune in for your appearance? I imagine you haven't seen how it came out yet.

GW: Yeah, we saw some of the dailies from the first day, but obviously that's completely different than seeing how it's all finished in the show. Absolutely, I'll watch it. I mean, just to see myself on "Desperate Housewives" will be pretty cool, and also, we were there for a couple of days, so we saw them filming a lot of it, putting it all together, and it'll be interesting to see how what we saw translates into a professional TV presentation.

Pitchfork: Did it feel like you were acting at all? Or were you just like, "Well, we're playing, and we're on the set of this TV show"?

GW: Yeah, basically it was like doing a music video where we weren't really the main focus. It was still just mouthing along to our songs, which we've done before, but this time there was a whole bunch of other stuff going on at the same time, and it was just better.

Pitchfork: How did this whole thing come about?

GW: We have a friend that works on the show, so I'm sure he probably talks us up to everyone that will listen, and he knows everyone on the show. So we popped up-- there was an episode a couple of weeks ago where Felicity Huffman was impersonating a teenage girl on the internet to set up her son, and one of her interests was Tokyo Police Club, so that kind of thing. They wrote this episode, and they needed a band. It's not like they wrote it specifically for us or anything, but they needed a band and we were probably the first ones that came to mind just because they had heard so much about us from our friend Paul, who works on the show. We were lucky to have that, and then it just all worked out.

Pitchfork: Did you have any run-ins with any of the actual housewives?

GW: Not really. Most of the scenes we were doing were with either just ourselves or the guys. So we talked to the actors that played all the guys in the band, but I didn't get to shout-out to Eva [Longoria] or Teri [Hatcher] or any of them. Maybe next time.

Pitchfork: Had any of those guys heard of you before, or was it just a professional working relationship that you had?

GW: Mostly a professional working relationship. I mean, we were there hanging out once before with our friend, and we met one of the actors, so he sort of knew all of us from before. I don't know that he's our biggest fan or that he listens to us. They were really nice, and everyone seemed to enjoy the song, which they heard repeatedly, ad nauseam, for three days straight.

Pitchfork: Did you get any neat swag or food or anything like that in your trailer?

GW: No, nothing like that. I don't know if they do that. I think [that's] more of an awards show thing. Or maybe they do it and just skipped out on doing it for us. But we ate really well. The catering is exceptional, so I think that I was well compensated.

Pitchfork: Speaking of exceptional catering, I wanted to talk to you about the Weezer tour. I read a couple of the blogs that you put up on the CBC Radio 3 site, one of which mentions the great food. What's the best meal that you've had on the tour?

GW: There have been a few really stand-out ones. Both the Canadian shows, Toronto and Vancouver, had really excellent catering. Just wide selection, fresh, delicious, huge dessert platter, which is always dangerous and wonderful. Where were we the other night? It was actually in San Jose. It tasted good. I don't know what they did or what the seasoning was or whatever, but it really just tasted like something with BBQ at the cottage or something, this big homey meal. I enjoyed that. It almost felt like I was not on tour.

Pitchfork: You also blogged about your attempt to become friends with Rivers Cuomo. What's the status of that friendship?

GW: As of today, still non-existent. But I'm hopeful. It's weird, people always ask, like, "Those guys cool? You guys buds with them yet?" We don't really talk to them that much. People think that they're ignoring us or they're jerks or something, which totally isn't the case. You know, they aren't really around that much, they're at the hotel or in transit or whatever, so it's not like we go somewhere to play a club show, and we get there at three in the afternoon, and we just sit around the dressing room until we play at 11 o'clock, and everyone's hanging out because there's nothing else to do. They have families with them, and they have way better things to do than talk to us, so it's not that they're being mean.

Pitchfork: It seems like a strange experience to go from the intimacy of touring clubs-- loading your gear with other bands and stuff-- to opening for Weezer, where it's people going straight from their dressing rooms to the stage. It seems like such a well-oiled machine.

GW: Very much so, yeah. It's just entirely the same exact routine every day. Their crew shows up at whatever time, and they bring all the stage and sound equipment with them, so that's all set up. And we get there at the same time, and it sounds the same every night on stage. We don't even really sound check. And so yeah, in that way it is very well-oiled, like you say. And that's what's necessary for the show to go well. I mean, the kind of thing where you're playing a club tour, and halfway through the show some amp stops working, or the PA goes weird, or a mic falls down or something bizarre like that-- that never happens to Weezer, because they're completely in control of every single variable.

It makes the show a lot better, but it does kind of make things boring for us, because it's exactly the same thing every single day, and you're at these arenas which are, more often than not, in the middle of nowhere, so you can't go out and go to the main street and see the cool part of town. You can go out and see the housing developments that they're building around it. That's really odd, so we have to come up with other ways to amuse ourselves.

Pitchfork: What sorts of things have you come up with?

GW: We just bought baseball gloves. That's our big recent thing. We went to Play It Again Sports and shopped for gloves, so even though we're not American, we've been engaging in a classic American pastime, and nearly hitting people with the ball. We were playing at San Jose, the show was like on campus, and Greg, [guitarist] Josh [Hook], and I were just hanging out, you know, in the middle of campus, just chucking this baseball around. But we really suck at it, so we kept on almost hitting people in the head.

Pitchfork: Just playing catch?

GW: Yeah, just playing catch. We don't want to introduce a bat into the equation. That would just be a disaster.

Pitchfork: Being from Toronto and with the hockey season starting, are you guys following that at all?

GW: Yeah, I'm doing my first fantasy hockey league this year, which is very exciting for me because, like any Canadian, I watched a lot of hockey when I was a kid, and then you know, I sort of got cool and into rock music, and I didn't watch sports because that was not what you did when you were into rock music, I guess. Or so I thought, when I was 14. So I stopped watching hockey for a while, and I recently just started again, but I don't have a grasp of it at all. So I made my fantasy team, then I found out that all the players I picked are like 40 years old and way past their prime, and half of them are injured for most of the season. So I just got all of the players that were really great 10 years ago. So I'm not doing so hot there, but I'm enjoying trying.

Pitchfork: Because you picked the names you recognized, and they happen to be--

GW: Yeah. "Chris Chelios, that guy's still good, right?" 46 years old...

Pitchfork: Have you followed the baseball playoffs at all, with your newfound interest?

GW: No, I haven't really. I like watching baseball, but I don't know. I don't understand how people can follow so many sports. Our sound engineer Mark and our manager Rich know everything about all these sports. I don't understand how people have the time and the energy to keep up with what's going on in football, what's going on in baseball, what's going on in basketball. They know everyone's names from all the teams, and they make all these jokes, and I pretend to understand them when they say something about a player I've never heard of. I'm having enough trouble concentrating on the hockey season; I'm just letting everything else go.

Pitchfork: Do you think that they can tell when you're just sort of nodding along to their jokes about dudes you don't know?

GW: Probably. I have a couple of strategies I learned from other people. There's one-- our manager has a friend who doesn't watch sports, so whenever someone says anything about sports, he'll just say, "Ridiculous!" And that's pretty good! Whatever someone says about sports, you can just say it was ridiculous. They think you're agreeing with them and you totally understand.

Pitchfork: The Weezer tour winds down pretty soon, and you have couple headlining shows at the end of the month, but what's next for you guys after that?

GW: We're gonna take a little vacation. We've been on tour more or less since March, non-stop, so we think it's time to sit back and hibernate for the winter months. We're going to try and start working on some new material, recharging our batteries. We're starting to crash. Basically, the plan right now is that there is no plan. It's been a long time since we've had no plan, so we're all looking forward to it.

Pitchfork: Before Elephant Shell came out, you guys put out a couple of EPs. It's always cool to see bands put out EPs, because it's sort of a lost art form in a lot of ways. Have you entertained the possibility of stringing one of those together anytime soon?

GW: Yeah, we've talked about it. I mean, we haven't talked about anything seriously, because we haven't been writing new songs yet. I agree. I love EPs. In some ways I would love to just keep putting them out because they're faster. I think it really suits our kind of songs up to this point.

But the problem is you can't really just put out EPs, because record stores don't want to sell them. They don't make much money, and people don't take them seriously. You put out an EP, and people are like, "That's an interesting curiosity." It's harder to tour off of it. It's harder, basically, to make a whole cycle out of it and, at the end of the day, to make money off of it. And unfortunately, that's a concern now: paying our rent and being able to sustain ourselves as a band. So business-wise, nobody is really encouraging us to put out an EP, and the other problem is that we write songs really slowly, or at least up to this point we have. It took us two years to write the 10 songs that we put on Elephant Shell, so at that rate, if we put five of those songs on an EP, it's going to take us another year to work up more material to put out a record again.

But at the same time, it's something that we would love to do if it worked out. If suddenly we got super creative super fast, and we knocked off a bunch of songs in the next two months, if we had four or five songs that we just wanted to record-- we always talk about just going in, recording them live on the floor, getting it really down and dirty, and just putting it out like that. Because when we're doing records, we like to play with the CD element, and produce stuff, and make it sound cool. But it's also really fun just to do a straight rock, sloppy, live-sounding thing. So we always toy with the notion of doing that, but it's entirely dependent on how well we do at writing songs.

Pitchfork: So basically, if your entire creative process changes from slow to really fast, then maybe...

GW: Exactly.

Pitchfork: Is there anything that you wanted to talk about?

GW: You can let everyone out there know that if they're writing for a television show, that Tokyo Police Club is now the hottest actor-band in Hollywood.

Pitchfork: Is there any show that you wouldn't appear on?

GW: That I wouldn't appear on?

Pitchfork: "Gossip Girl"? You'd be down?

GW: Nothing comes to mind that I would turn down. I don't have to like the show to show up on it. I think it's just so hilarious and awesome that we're going to be on this national television show, you know, that millions of people are gonna watch. It's sort of a ridiculous, stupid thing for four 20-year-old kids from Newmarket. Not that we will ever get another opportunity like that; it's pretty much once in a lifetime. But if we ever did, I can't see us saying no. It's too much fun.

Tokyo Police Club:

10-25 Atlanta, GA - Gwinnett Arena *
10-26 New Orleans, LA - Voodoo Music Festival
10-29 Philadelphia, PA - First Unitarian Church

* with Weezer, Angels & Airwaves