Famous for their floppy fringes, 90-odd T-shirt designs and their two
bassists, Ned's Atomic
Dustbin are making noise again after a silence of two years with a new
album called Brainblood Volume. Armed with a bottle of whiskey and a
packet of cigarettes, Matt Cheslin, one of Ned's Atomic Dustbins' two
bassists, spoke to TERESA BOLSTER from his hotel room in New York, where
the Ned's were about to embark on a two-month tour of the US.
At the fore-front of the whole `indie-kid' explosion of the latest 80s and early 90s, Britain's Ned's Atomic Dustbin found fame and success early and relatively easily. Their breakthrough single, the now classic Kill Your Television made it into the Top 5 in the UK and in 1991, the Neds released their debut album Godfodder - it sold over 700,000 copies. A similar success followed with Are You Normal, an album which received 9/10 from the fickle NME's album review page. "Things came together very quickly for us," says Matt Cheslin, "but a) we didn't realise it and b) we didn't appreciate it. We just didn't know what we were doing. Sorry! I apologise for not knowing what we were doing!"
The (possibly) inevitable fall followed the meteoric rise with the Neds suffering sever writer's block and a media-lead backlash against their music and even their appearance. "Sorry NME, but we were never into being cool!" Cheslin continues, referring to the magazine which first worshipped then crucified them. "There are always going to be more people that don't like your music than do - that's just the law of averages. You come to the point where you realise that the people who like your music are the ones that are important people, and if someone decides to print in a national magazine that you're an ugly cunt, you've just got to say, `I don't care. I'm not making those records for you anyway, so I'll forget about you.'"
An unusually collaborative band in the area of songwriting, all five members of Ned's Atomic Dustbin work on every song together. This means that for a song to be written, the five members must all be in the right frame of mind at the same time. For this reason, Brainblood volume, the Ned's third album, comes more than two years after their second, Are You Normal. "Everytime we write a song, it's a compromise between five different people's different attitudes and views," Cheslins says. "It took us two years to write an album - we didn't take any time out, it took us that long to do it. We went as high as you can go and as low as you can go in that time, but it all translated into the album, so I don't regret any of the bad times I had."
The eleven tracks that comprise Brainblood Volume cover quite a range from the fast and furious industrial sounds of the first single, All That I Ask of Myself Is That I Hold Together, to the melody of Stuck. The Neds' sound is both powerful and melodic, with interesting samples providing a rhythmic backdrop. Much has been made of the fact that the 5-piece includes two bass players but Cheslin is quick to dismiss it's importance. "We're just so boring that people think `ooh, what can we say about them? Oh yeah, they've got two bass players'. Well, a) it was a complete accident and b) I don't see it as being any different from having a lead guitarist and a rhythm guitarist."
The band chose to name their third album Brainblood Volume in reference to the practice of `trepanation' - drilling a hole in your own forehead and using the resultant extra blood that is sent rushing cranium-wards to achieve a higher state of mental awareness. "It's the sort of thing that MOMA's supposed to do to you, but a bit more drastic. We thought `Yeah, that's what it's all been about - all the pressure we've been under.' Finishing the album for us was finally getting through the last layer of the skull and it all just bursting out and us going `Oh God, it's over!' To sit down and listen to the whole album and think `yeah, it feels good to listen to that and I'm proud to have achieved that.' That's what it's basically about."
Beat Magazine Edition #454 (Melbourne), #33 (Sydney) Wed 14th Jun - Tues 20th June