TEETH
Generation LOL
Interview Josh Jones
Photography Sanna Charles
TEETH are Ximon a.k.a. Babes (laptop), Veronica So (vocals) and Simon (drums). Originally just Ximon and Veronica who were more performance art than band, they recruited Simon to be a bit more serious. From east London’s Dalston area, they’ve been compared to Crystal Castles because it’s easy to do that. They have supported CSS, Sleigh Bells and Tom Vek. They’ve also been described as chill wave, pacific-electro, and electronic dance. When I met them in a cafe in their homeland Dalston, we were all running late. We all had hangovers, but at least it was sunny. Ximon breezed in first and struck up conversation by telling me that they’d just come back from touring Europe in a bus that just before them had driven Public Enemy around. He’d found a USB stick on it and it contained the Twin Peaks film and Louis CK Series 1 and 2 ‘without the pilot’. TEETH bounce off each other and finish each other’s sentences and they prefer breakfast much more than me. But before we could talk about their debut album Whatever (Moshi Moshi, 2011), they started wondering when the MTV generation stopped being the MTV generation. Then we started talking about all the generations.
Simon: We were trying to work this out yesterday. He [points to Ximon] thinks he’s Generation X. How old are you?
I’m 32.
Ximon: I’m 31. Doesn’t that make us Generation X?
I thought that made us Generation Y?
Ximon: Aaaaaaah.
I dunno where the cut off point is between X and Y is though?
Veronica: I think 36/37-year-olds are Generation X.
I’d rather be Generation X than Y.
Veronica: Is it as in ‘Why are we here?’
Ximon: What are we in now?
We’re in Generation LOL now.
Ximon: Generation LOL is totally right.
Veronica: A big LOL of nothingness.
Ximon. Generation F. [long pause] for Fail.
[Then we had to take some pictures as Ximon had to run to Heathrow to get a plane. And the rest of us chatted about going on holiday.]
Veronica [Speaking to Simon]: What did you say when you went to America and they wanted to know why you were visiting?
Simon: I told them I was there for the food. The guy was like, ‘Huh?’ And I said I’d never had a biscuit before. The guy couldn’t believe it and got his friend over. They were like ‘What?! Never had a biscuit?’
Veronica: I love biscuits and gravy. You just can’t get it here.
I was in America for three months. I didn’t have it once. I’m not a breakfast person.
Simon [incredulously]: You’re not a breakfast person?
I have a cup of tea for breakfast.
Veronica: Are you a cereal person?
I hate cereal.
Veronica: WHOOOOAAAAAH.
People who eat cereal always have really bad breath. Didn’t you have teachers at school who’d breathe over you with that cerealy, coffee breath?
Veronica: That’s the milk!
If you eat cereal for breakfast, clean your fucking teeth afterwards.
Veronica: Are you, in any way, lactose intolerant?
No, I just don’t think I’m very hungry in the morning.
Simon: I threw up on the way to school once after having a bowl of Coco-Pops. But it wasn’t because of the Coco-Pops. I can’t remember what it was in particular that made me throw up, but I have a very strong memory of it. I could take you to Milton Keynes [town in England] and I could point out at the spot on the floor where I threw up.
What did it taste like?
Veronica: Sometimes I think there’s too much sugar and then it’s all milky and then, like, you’re just waking up. Maybe cereal’s not such a good thing to eat first thing.
Orange juice is meant to be pretty bad for your digestion first thing in the morning. Especially for girls for some reason. My sister’s a nutritionist and she told me that. It’s the acid or something on an empty stomach.
Veronica: I am not going to do that any more. I had two cups of orange juice for breakfast. What are we supposed to eat?
Porridge I guess. But eating porridge to me is like reverse vomiting.
Veronica: It is! It so is.
Simon: I like breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day. My t-shirt even says how much I like breakfast.
[We check. It does]
Veronica: I must say I like savory stuff in the morning. Hong Kong people like to have ramen and eggs and that kind of thing. It’s tasty. I’m kinda hungry now.
This is a food-based interview. We should ask about you guys. Do you worry about being pigeonholed as Dalston band? Is that even a genre or scene?
Simon: It’s kind of waning a little bit now.
Veronica: I think it’s just a way of geographically tying something to the music. But if you think about it, that whole scene isn’t really around any more. People can’t really reference it any more and it being relevant. All the people we used to play with aren’t here any more. The only reason we were even called a Dalston band was because we practiced in a squat on Dalston Lane, where we could always practice for free. It had a great community there. The stuff we were all doing was called Dalston DIY, but you can’t call it DIY when we’ve all now pretty much turned professional.
Simon: If you think about what DIY means. DIY is what middle class people do when they don’t want to pay someone. DIY doesn’t make sense to us really – we had no other option than to do it ourselves, as we had no money.
Veronica: Plus, we were all doing it for fun. I guess DIY is a funny way of describing us doing it in a free way.
What do you think of Dalston with this mad regeneration?
Simon: It’s all been gentrified. I think that it will always have a tiny bit of the blade left. But it’s swept through London in waves.
Veronica: It’s weird. You know that Suzuki motorcycle shop round the corner from here? They’ve just opened a motorcycle cafe there. Like, who’s going to that? Are they rockers? Who wants to hang out there?
Simon: I don’t know where it’s moved to now. Somewhere in South London? It used to be in Manor House, with all those warehouse parties. But now I don’t know if they still happen. If they do I don’t know anyone who goes to them.
Veronica: Are we getting old?
Maybe. I had to ask to leave a lock in at a bar the other day.
Simon: I can’t tell you the joy of putting my ear plugs in after I finish playing on the last tour and just hearing a dull buzz.
Veronica: And we ended up giving our rider out to people because it hadn’t been touched! It’s weird, I think of Pens who were around when we were starting out – Steph had to quit the band because her parents told her to get serious about life and stuff. And I’m getting that kind of pressure from my ends. You start thinking ‘What am I going to do?’ You start this band as a kind of joke and it becomes kind of, somewhat serious and you’re not quite Male Bonding because they’ve been in so many bands and they seem to know how it all works. We’re in this band that’s started off as an experiment and we have a single and we don’t have quite enough money to quit your job properly.
Simon: And now you’ve got this team that are asking what we’re going to do next.
Veronica: And we say we have to go to work to earn some money to live!
Do you prefer to be in London or the US to be a band? You’re from San Francisco, Veronica, and you’ve played everywhere, and Ximon’s away.
Veronica: Now that Ximon’s not here so much it’s kind of weird. It’s a funny thing. The industry here and the industry in America are completely different. We’re currently riding this Moshi Moshi’s great in the UK wave. And we’re from Dalston and all that hype. Going over to America would be starting all over again. And they’d respect you because you’re an English band and not an American band. We’d have a whole different team over there
Simon: We’d have the same manager though. We’ve just got a new manager who manages Mike Skinner. He’s called Ted Mayhem.
What is more important to you guys – the performance or the music? Would you prefer to be known as live art performers rather than a band?
Veronica: Me and Ximon use to do this thing called Little Paper Squares and that was totally experimental. We came off a tour thinking that what we’d just done was a little bit crazy, and we thought we’d try doing something a little bit more serious. TEETH does have two different sides though. The recorded music is very different from the live experience. We still have that thing where people will want to pay to see us live.
Simon: We may play our record in order live, but it won’t be the same record that you can listen to on Spotify. Especially when Babes’ [Ximon] computer just dies live on stage. That happened in Amsterdam. We were taking around his PC tower and right at the start of ‘Care Bear’, which was the last song, it just shut down. Then there was an awkward silence. There are only two of us playing on stage so if one doesn’t play the other sounds weird and empty and lame. I got my laptop out as a back up and in the middle of the song he just lifted it above his head and threw it down into the middle of the crowd and everyone just kicked the shit out of it. And that has all our new music on it. So if the hard drive’s fucked then you’ll have to wait another year for a second album.
Veronica: That’s the thing. What I’ve noticed and as we’ve never been in a proper band before, so we’re just learning this stuff, is that the stuff that makes money is the recorded stuff. You’re never going to make money playing live. I know that sounds kind of at odds from what people say.
Simon: Everyone says that we will.
Veronica: But you don’t.
Simon: All of it is nothing compared to what you’ll get paid if someone wants to associate their brand with you. That’s where the money is.
Veronica: I wonder if it’s possible to be a band that just records and records and gets syncs all the time.
Simon: And just play the odd show. We were watching this program with Michael Stipe who was telling us it’s all about the album and not necessarily touring but doing a show that you can get everyone to come to. I find it hard to tell people about our shows. Especially when we’re on tour – without the Internet I’m powerless. For the album launch, we had three months to build towards it. But with touring there are so many shows we just have to let people figure it our for themselves. You can’t keep writing lists of where you’re playing.
Veronica: What it comes down to is that it’s impossible for a band to promote where they’re playing while they’re on tour. Because we’re so prolific online, promoters just presume that people will turn up. But that doesn’t always happen.
Simon: 3,500 people claim to like us on Facebook. Where are they all?
Tell us about the album? Did it really take three years?
Simon: Was our first song Pill Program?
Veronica: It was Dead Boys.
That’s my second favorite one.
Veronica: It was originally called Sippy and we made it on a computer after a tour with Little Paper Squares. We really liked dance punk from Detroit. I think it was when Gossip were blowing up and we were like ‘Ah they’ve been touring for nine years and now they’re famous.’
Simon [laughing]: ‘We wanna be famous too!’ We wanted to cut out the nine years and just do the last bit.
Veronica: We decided to write a song about politics and stuff. At the time it was all about Bush and Dead Boys was all about soldiers and stuff. No one fucking knows that all TEETH lyrics seem dumb but they’re like super whatever. The album’s just a mixture of songs that we’ve done that we can remember how to play. We have a lot of demos that we’ve released for free on the internet. Whatever is a collection of the songs that stuck and didn’t get destroyed on our laptop. That’s why we called it Whatever.
Simon: People have asked us how we sat down and started writing the album. As if we’d decided to do that. It’s not an album. It’s a big EP.
Veronica: The next album will definitely be more purposeful.
Simon: I think we want to make a small EP next. Just a small collection of songs. Our manager basically said to us, ‘I dare you to do better.’
Veronica: A lot of people seem to prefer the new stuff, like ‘Flowers’ or ‘See Spaces’, which is more commercial and more sophisticated and blah blah.
You shouldn’t listen to ‘Totally In My Way’ at 8.30am with a hangover. It made me feel weird. That’s what I had for breakfast.
Veronica: It made you feel weird? Cool.
Simon: That track is pure jam. We’d never played it before and we’ve never played it again. We recorded it on our laptop and that’s it.
Veronica: Something about it makes me want to do more of that.
Simon: That’s the problem with Babes being away is that we’re not so close to do stuff together.
Finally, the Care Bear video? What’s going on here?
Veronica: We were like how are we gonna do this video without us being in it? We basically assigned homework to all our internet friends to record themselves singing along to it. They’re just friends of friends. A lot of those guys aren’t gay either.
Simon: We got like two submissions of people trickling in per day and then I edited them all together. I separated them into ‘good lip syncing’, ‘fierce moves’ and ‘miscellaneous’. One guy sent in a whole narrative plot. He started it with a suitcase and was really misogynistic guy and then it cut to him in a bustier and the suitcase had turned into a Care Bear lunch box. He doesn’t even lip-sync in it. That was impressive.
(TEETH’s new single U R 1 (Moshi Moshi is out on 28th Nov)
