I had a feeling that interviewing Houdini Dax wouldn’t be like interviewing any other band. I knew this before I had even climbed to the top of the stairs that lead out of See Monkey Do Monkey’s office and onto an obscure rooftop garden surely crafted by either Alice herself or a feng-shui expert who fell down a similar rabbit hole. You see, Houdini Dax simply aren’t like other bands. They haven’t released a full-length album yet and have already gained a whopping fan-base in South Wales and the collected respect from fellow Cardiff musicians and radio DJs alike. It’s not difficult to imagine why, their reputation is justified by the tightly written and flawlessly played tunes that barely begin to explain why their live shows are so damn exciting.
But as I was setting up my recording equipment, the idea that this wouldn’t be like any other interview was confirmed. I simply sat and watched, as four impeccably dressed, monstrously talented bastards so much younger than me play and climb on the rejected Wonderland stage props and pour each other cups of rain water tea whilst hollering esoteric in-jokes that I could barely comprehend yet couldn’t help but enjoy. Houdini Dax are a bucket-load of fun and with their debut LP due this Summer are expected to become a major blip on the rock ‘n’ roll radar. Darling, you belong to Dax…
Interview: Stanley
Photography: Mission Photographic
Let’s start with the name, it was inspired by a youtube comedian, right?
Jack: Dave loves Dax Flame…
David: I just love him, he’s very funny. I emailed him to ask about using his name in ours, and he replied asking what we had in mind. I told him we were thinking of either ‘Dax Flame’ or ‘Houdini Dax’. So he got back to me and told me “definitely not Dax Flame, because that’s my name. You can go with Houdini Dax, or I’d prefer ‘Dax Flame Is A Very Smart And Handsome Boy Who Rocks Very Hard’.” So I replied saying we were going to go with ‘Houdini Dax’.
Your music has a lot of distinct influences from a slightly more golden era of music. Who are your main inspirations?
Jack: It definitely has elements from the past, it’s bound to as we’re not inspired by the future because it hasn’t happened yet. So what we do is take the good bits from the past and fuse them together.
Owen: Any examples?
Jack: Well The Beatles is the obvious one… Bowie, The Kinks, Dylan, and the late, great Lady Gaga.
Why were you kicked off the stage at CIA?
David: Because we were shit. Really, we were. (Laughter)
Jack: Well, there was this absolute cunt called Mr. Pascoe. He was this big burly man with cargo shorts and it was all down to him.
David: On our first gig in Taff’s Well there was this shady bloke sitting at the back kind of tapping his fingers, he approached us at the end and said ‘we do a beer festival and we need a band, do you want to do it?’. We were thinking ‘shit! CIA!’, I was watching a Nirvana gig and thinking ‘yeah, it’ll be just like this’, even though it was our first real gig and we had no fans, only our mums. Anyway, we played the gig, we were on the stage and there was this massive gap between us and a bunch of cider drinkers. We were playing and it was this really, really weird atmosphere…
Jack: It was just a gang of middle aged men getting pissed, they didn’t really want to hear music.
David: We came off our first set and Pascoe came and told us we couldn’t do anymore and we were pretty devastated.
Owen: He said it wasn’t really festival music so we were kicked off by the male voice choir they had in instead, and they rocked it so fair play to them. Thing is, when we walked around afterwards, loads of people were asking for demos and saying they really enjoyed the set, it was just him and his shorts couldn’t handle it.
David: We’re still looking for him now. We really want to hear the song we wrote about him.
Jack: Mr Pascoe! Third song on the EP!
How did you guys meet?
Jack: The first band we were in was called ‘The Meantimes’ and we had just finished our GCSEs and wanted to get a band together, it was just me and Dave at first, doing some covers here and there and then we started writing together.
Owen: I was brought in on stand-in bass, not because I could play well but because I owned a bass.
David: Yeah he was in a band before called ‘Bone Idle’… and when they said ‘We’re Bone Idle’ I said ‘Yeah but what’s your band called?’
Jack: You didn’t say that!
David: Yeah but I was thinking it…
Owen: So I came in as stand-in bass for about a year and a half before they finally decided to just leave me there.
Jack: No he’s still stand-in bass, we’re still looking for another bass player, do you play bass?
Hahaha. No, sorry. Well, what happened next?
David: The Foreshadows! Except that people kept thinking it was ‘4 Shadows’ because there was four of us. We played a gig as ‘The Foreshadows’ but whether or not the promoters didn’t know how to spell the name or just hated it, we were listed as ‘Boyband’.
Jack: It just wasn’t a well publicised gig, it was really just an hour of covers and then 4 or 5 of our own songs, then the bloke asked us to play CIA and that’s we were took off. (Laughter)
What’s the Cardiff music scene like right now?
David: A bit shit.
Owen: It’s really hard to get people to come out and see live music now in Cardiff.
David: It’s really cliquey too. And being so young means we’re victim to being patronized a lot.
Jack: I wouldn’t say it’s too much of an issue for us, because we’re just going out and playing what we want to play. There’s not really anyone else our age playing the same kind of music as us, as passionately as we do. A lot of people are in it for being in the scene, having the haircuts and being cool but we just really enjoy going out and playing music.
With that attitude you seem to fit on really well with See Monkey Do Monkey, how did you get involved with them?
Jack: We had a few tracks on our myspace, and Aimee got in touch with us and asked us to come down to the studio and play a couple songs. Me and Dave went down with a bass drum and two acoustic guitars and just pissed around.
David: We didn’t really have a clue what they wanted so we just messed around. We played ‘Bike’ by Syd Barrett and before we started we starting tuning our guitars like in the Flight of the Conchords, a-a-a-a, c-c-c-c , just totally taking the piss but it went down well and people danced so that was really cool.
How does recording next to a micro-brewery influence your work?
Jack: It’s tempting, sure…
Owen: It does help at this age that we’re all totally skint and couldn’t afford to go down that slope.
David: Yeah, we had a couple of the chocolate beers and they were nice and all but we’re not massive drinkers really. When it comes to coming in and recording the album you have to stay focussed so we’ll have a couple of beers maybe but we won’t let it penetrate our work.
What’s your favourite venue to play in Cardiff?
Jack: The Globe. It’s definitely my favourite for going to see bands, because it has such a nice and warm sound to it. Even if the band is shit they’ll probably sound good.
How did the BBC Sessions EP come about?
Jack: We sent a few demos to Adam Walton, and he got in touch with us asking if we wanted to do a live session with him. It was a great experience, we had a really fun time and afterwards we spoke with Aimee and just decided to release it as an EP.
David: It was something we had ready too, all the songs were there and we just needed to get our name out somehow.
Owen: Yeah, we weren’t trying to sell a record at that time, just get our name somewhere so this worked out perfectly. Thanks to Adam Walton we got some really supportive publicity and knowing that he was just playing our music because he liked it meant a lot for us.
David: The accolade of somewhere like the BBC helps too, a lot of band we really respect and like have had releases through the BBC, the Nirvana Peel Sessions and stuff… If you can say your first release was on the BBC, then you’re gonna be shit-hot.
So what’s the debut album going to be like?
David: Eleven tracks of pure rock ‘n’ roll electricity!
Jack: Electrified songs!
Who’s producing it?
David: Richie from The Method is producing it.
Jack: Richie was perfect because we’re so friendly with him already. Rather than going to a producer we don’t know and paying him, we don’t have to pay Rich, which is the best part, but just by knowing him we can get a really good group effort on getting the best possible sound, and have a good time doing it.
I heard from the notorious cesspool of knowledge and disgust that is the mouth of Johnny Alchemist that one of you said that if you were to have sex with a member of The Method, that it would be either him or Richie…
Owen: Or Matt!
David: Yeah, he could blow my trumpet!
If you had to have sex with anyone in your own band, who would it be?
Owen: What do you mean if?
Jack: If it was a serious one then Dave, Owen would just be for the comedy factor.
David: We kind of dry-hump him all the time anyway, he’s like our little stand-in bassist experiment.
Owen: It’s fun being in a band…
Finally, and most importantly, the Houdini Test. If you were in a sealed glass box, that slowly began filling with water, how would you escape?
David: Break out the box of course. Just smash it.
Owen: That’s sort of a metaphor for how we write music actually…(Laughter)
Any last words?
David: You belong to Dax darling!
Owen: Oh fucking hell…
David: It might be the album title!
Owen: But it might be ‘Lesbian Wednesdays’…
Jack: Or ‘Absolutely Flabulous’.