VNV Nation: You’ll have your Suicide Commandos, Covenants, Assemblage 23s, VNVs, Clinics, you know, Fixmer and McCarthy, everybody’s been on that stage. It is huge, I mean seriously, you would melt if you went there. Mera Luna, the bigger, kind of like the big stage festivals, they're more kind of, they mix all the Goth metal and everything on to one stage, and I don’t know if it works. That's the evolution of things, to drive people apart from it because a lot of festivals are loosing money because people don’t feel there's enough of their own style of music, whether they come from a Goth metal background or not.
In Europe we’ve got bands like The New Temptation and Night Rich and Him, and they formed their own scene and they're bringing in a whole other crowd which doesn’t have anything to do with us, but the dark scene in Germany is considered to me everything from black metal down to like noise down to synthpop. It’s a bizarre thing but everything’s lumped into one big genre, and in general people seem to stand by each other. Because we played a gig once where we were playing before two Goth metal bands, because that's how the festivals are balanced. And we had Blutengel on the bill, SITD were on the bill who I love, and they played live because they're real stompy-stompy stuff, you know. And everyone’s stomping around, and that's great. And it was not really aggressive kind of like, I think it’s more the put your hand on your head and dance around like a frog screaming about how your parents don’t understand you, and having horror movie samples or samples from Hell Raiser as the ring tone on your cell phone. I cliché a lot.
I make jokes with the clichés, because I’ve always found clichés bad. It’s like guys walking around in suits going I’m a future popper, you're a what? Is that like a kind of a jalapeño popper or… I mean I know people need an image to play it to music but…
Star: They don’t need that, and then the more you expect people to be people, the more they will be people.
VNV Nation: Yes, I like people to just be themselves and come along to the shows and enjoy it, and I see people at our shows who are emo kids obviously, they look like extras from Napoleon Dynamite. And then you’ve got people who are general college kids and then you’ve got all the Goths and then you’ve got the EBM kids and all these sort of industrial people…
Star: All that energy that's rolling up at you…
VNV Nation: Yes.
Star: So you just… oh, that's great.
VNV Nation: We get like AFI fans at our shows, we get like punk kids, we get like hardcore kids, we get kids from dance scenes, people from colleges wearing college T-shirts and baseball caps and whatever and they're just, they're all having fun, they're all enjoying the show and they're under 21, and I love that. But yes, I see over here, one thing that's very much changing in north America is like you’ve got this indie rock scene… well if you want to call it an indie rock scene, which has got a band like Seigler Ros who are mainly popular in the UK, because that scene in the UK is very similar to North America, and this whole underground sway of bands with ‘the’ at the beginning. They rose up. The second generation of them are vastly experimental, we don’t want rules, we don’t want borders, we’re just going to do what the hell we want. It’s pretty much like the late seventies/early 80s again. And I love that because it’s just absolutely refreshing blast of new music that may be weird to some people and may not be. You’ve got a band like The Postal Service, put it in a category, you can’t, you know. I love The Faint for that reason, I love Interpol for that reason, I still do, I think Interpol are one of my favorite bands in the world.
Star: And Birthday Party…
VNV Nation: Oh yes.
Star: All of them, yes.
VNV Nation: There was so much music in the 80s, there wasn’t a title for this, you just liked alternative music. You picked the bands you liked and you didn’t call yourself anything, you just said I am into alternative music, that was it. And I like that, I mean it doesn’t mean our clubs are going to go away, it doesn’t mean our genre is going to go away. Our genre is really bloody strong, and you can see that in the… the amount of records that are sold in this genre every year in America, the amount of people who attend the concerts in the genre in America every year, there is no way the scene is actually going to anything but grow, and I don’t think people get that it’s changed.
