The Kids Are Alright Page #4

The first major American tour

was by bus.

We traveled from coast to coast,

and from Miami we'd go up to Canada.

It was pretty awful.

We used New York as a springboard.

We used to play for Murray the K.

We used to do five shows a day there,

and we had three minutes

to do our show.

First you'd have one and a half minutes

of kind of explaining

and one and a half minutes

Of "My Generation,"

smash your guitar, and run off,

you know.

Five times a day, seven days a week.

In those days,

your performances used to end up

with you smashing all your equipment.

There were stories about you

smashing hotel rooms on every tour.

All lies. Not a word of truth.

Well, according to people at the time,

it certainly was true.

Why was there all that violence

surrounding you?

Well, this was only last week, wasn't it?

What made us first want to go

to America and conquer it

was being English.

Not because we cared monkeys

about the American Dream

or about the American drug situation

or about the dollars or anything.

It's because we were

English kids, right?

And we wanted to go to America

and beat it.

Pop music is crucial to today's art,

and it's crucial that it should remain art,

And it is crucial

that is should progress as art.

I saw you.

Girls came to see you mainly

to look at the clothes you wear.

Don't you think that most of them

come for a certain sexual thrill

they get out of your performance?

Our group is probably one of the most

unglamorous on the stage today.

I mean...

No, really, I mean, this is one of our

big problems, you know,

and probably still is, you know,

is that the group

didn't have enough glamour.

It was all these clothes

and smashing things up

it was all mechanical things.

It was bricks and stones and things

and not enough of, sort of,

normal group things, you know.

We made our second album,

which he produced,

and it was during that album,

which, as I said, Kit Lampert produced,

that we really realized

what making albums was all about.

You know, we had great fun,

and it was very creative.

And Kit was learning

about record production

and doing crazy things

like recording the group

from a microphone down the corridor

and all these things which are

very commonplace nowadays.

Using incredible amounts

of compression

and squeezing the sound up,

squeezing cymbal sounds up

to make them sound

like steam engines

and various, sort of,

twiddling knobs

as the recording was going.

The engineers

throwing their hands in the air.

"It... coated knobs, mate.

You can't do that."

And all this was going on

in the studio,

but unfortunately we had

ten minutes on the album to fill

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