TAiS are beyond pop-punk renovation

It is the afternoon of The Apples In Stereo’s London date and band members are busy with interviews before a soundcheck. Songwriter/singer/guitarist/leader Robert Schneider is still busy with his previous promo engagement and, as he appears to answer questions in depth, and we have to direct our questions to the Denver, Colorado, based band’s drummer lady, Hilarie Sidney, or forego the encounter. But then, who can know the outfit’s inner workings better bar the mainman’s missus?

The band is promoting their fourth album, ‘Velocity Of Sound’, an album that sees them exploring pop-punk raw-sphere for the difference of the previous outing that tended to be more of produced, lavish affairs of the airy, ethereal, psychedelic inclined melodies…

The Schneiders are a strange couple that is conspicuously anti-rock and they do not stand out at all in the hotel lobby. No surprise that no attention is paid to them nor to the two of us having to relocate few times, further away from a television set no one is watching; when we finally settle down we start with a talk about audio transformation and long-standing fans’ reaction.

“There is definite change of musical direction on our album and a lot of things caused it: we had a bunch of songs we had written a couple of years ago and were already playing live, before Robert and I had a baby… For the first time, this album sounds the way we do play live, actually. A lot of people, coming to our shows, would ask ‘Why don’t you sound like your record, lovely production, harmonies…?’ Well, it is only four of us onstage and we’d need another ten people to recreate our studio sound.”

“We can’t afford it and what else could we do? We’ve always been against using tapes and when I see bands playing with them I feel they are restricted and really cheating, I think it is boring… We love to rock, we love to play loud and fuzzy, our first single (‘Apples’, 1993) sounds like that and we wanted to get back to it. We finally decided to translate our live performance into a recording.”

A child’s new world

With son Max, “he’ll be two years old on Christmas” Sidney proudly announces, taking the centre-picture one expected the sound to get even more mellow, more emo and mature really but it appears to have awaken a rebellious teenager in Schneider.

“You might be right,” Sidney smiles, “it could have unlocked his inner, secret child. I don’t know but it might be that having a child influences you to recall a lot of your childhood memories. I’ve been thinking a lot about things that happened when I was a child… And Max, who travels with us – he’s upstairs with a nanny – loves music and his favourite track on the new album is ‘Baroque’, he calls it ‘Ba-ba-bah’… He wants to be a drummer, like all kids!”

“We, the band, are very happy to be playing and doing what we want to. When it comes down to is you are making music for yourself first of all and I don’t give a s**t what others think. If you like it – cool, if you don’t – we’ll still play it! If people don’t like it, it doesn’t hurt. I don’t understand politics but it has no effect on our creativity.”

Circuitously fantastique

Robert Schneider has recently collaborated on songwriting with the XTC’s legendary leader, Andy Partridge, for a side-project named Orchestra Fantastique, and they are due to enter a studio for proper sessions while the Apples are in Europe.

“No, we haven’t met yet,” Sidney sighs, “because Andy doesn’t travel. If you want to see him you have to go to his place in Swindon. So, when we finish this tour we’ll go his studio and record together. I’m going to play drums on the album, as well… We share a label here and Robert said he’d love to work with him; after the label sent him our records, Andy gave the OK for Robert to call and when he did – they wrote two songs!”

“And, every time they were on the phone they’d write a couple of more songs and now they have about 30 songs in the works. I’d say that album is not going to be finished before the end of 2003.”

The Apples In Stereo proffer one version of collective stream of neurones and all those dumbed down into the corporate pop-funfare – should seek cure within these tunes, urges our resident Medic.