Cairo Knife Fight: Ready To Rock (Interview)

With their first album in the can and ready for release, Cairo Knife Fight are ready to make a big noise in 2015. One way they will achieve that goal is playing alongside their friends. Shihad, on what promises to be THE rock & roll tour of the summer season. Joining Shihad and Cairo Knife Fight are Airbourne and I Am Giant as they play 7 dates from December 27th to January 3rd, including a New Years Eve show in Christchurch. Cairo Knife Fight’s Nick Gaffaney sat down with The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda to talk about his band’s upcoming album and the Fivey tour which recently took place in Australia.

Click here to listen to the interview with Nick Gaffaney:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: Hello Nick, welcome to The 13^th Floor, glad you could make it.

NG: Hello.

MD: So you’ve got this Fvey tour happening, which, somewhat of a version happened in Australia as well. So maybe we can start by you kind of telling me how that all went and then we’ll take it from there.

NG: That was actually pretty amazing. I didn’t realise until I got there they were playing the whole Fvey record in its entirety and that’s all they do and then leave the stage and then they come back for their secret encore of 40 minutes of hits. They’re just in rare form, they’re totally back and it was exhilarating to be a part off actually to be honest.

MD: And was it Shihad and you guys, were there any other bands?

NG: We were first and then there was an Australian band called High Tension, who were kind of, I guess sort of a punk/screamo kind of vibe, It was totally different than us, it was a really interesting bill.

MD: And how do Australians deal with you guys? Are they familiar with you, they know who you are?

NG: There seem to be people in the audience who knew who we were because, you know, they were responding to some of the older songs and particularly the new single, most recent one before this current one, Rezlord, they were responding to that. Then we did notice that every night, you know, we’d get off the stage and we were getting tweets and comments from people who were new fans, who’d just discovered us. So it was really rewarding that way, it was an immediate reaction.

MD: So now the tour moves over to New Zealand, end of December I believe it starts, kind of over the holiday time, and you have quite a line up. So tell me who’s gonna be on the tour.

NG: Last line up I heard, which it may expand, you never know with these things,  it was us, I Am Giant, Airborne and Shihad. I’ve never seen Airborne but I hear they’re a hell of a party. So I’m looking forward to that.

MD: It sounds like it’s gonna be a party, I mean you can’t ask for much more than that over the holidays, is that how you look at it?

NG: Yeah, that particular tour, we did it a couple of years ago with Shihad and Naked and Famous and it’s brilliant. You’re out of the city, you’re just going to these holiday hotspots and everyone’s relaxed and it’s just a great time to be on the road.

MD: So tell folks a little bit about the status of Cairo Knife Fight now. Who are you playing with, what kind of, I know you have an album in the can. Are you going to be playing most of that? What can folks expect from you guys?

NG: Well the band’s kind of evolved to a collective really cause’ I’m living in Los Angeles now, I’ve got my little version over there that I’m building. I’ve got a guy in Australia who plays with me and he’s gonna come do these ones in New Zealand, it’s sort of a collective that evolves and revolves around as I go. So we’re probably be playing about 30 minutes here and so we’ll definitely be playing the two new singles and maybe then something else new of the record and then 3 or 4 of the old ones that people know.

MD: It’s amazing. I couldn’t believe the fact that you actually didn’t have an album out yet. I was kind of thinking there must be some kind of hole in the internet. But there’s been a couple of EPs and singles and that’s about it. So the album is in the can, it’s waiting to be released. What can you tell me about it?

NG: Everything’s done, artwork’s done. Everything’s ready to go. I believe it’s just that the label want a better run in to release it, which makes sense we’re getting towards Christmas now. As I was saying the band as evolved a little bit, so theres several writers on this record. I wrote this song, you know, the songs with Mark Lanegan, some of my other L.A friends, Fournames and John Anderson who are great writers based there and then in New Zealand theres Laugton Koraand and Joel Haines, obviously Aaron and I wrote some songs for it and another unknown guy called William Knapp from The Bonzai Birds, who are really cool. But the brilliant thing about it was it was produced by Justin ??? who is based now in New York and he mixed and produced it. So it’s got a thread running through it thankfully because all those writers you could imagine maybe it would get a bit hodge podge but it isn’t like that at all, I’m very proud of that and it’s the thing I’m most excited about, to be honest.

MD: How would you describe the thread that runs through it?

NG: I think the last EP we had, EP 2 was pretty chaotic and full on and loud and smashy. This one I think has, it definitely wears some of my other influences a little more, it’s a little more songwriter influence, it’s not just big jams and things, it’s extended songs but they’re more kind of constructed than they were kind of just jammed out.

MD: You kind of just dropped the name Mark Lanegan in amongst that and he’s been a busy guy, I mean he seems to be putting out a new album every 6 months or so. How did you hook up with him?

NG: He was just someone that was just on the dream list along with Alain Johannes who I’ve been trying to get in with but he’s even busier than anyone else, so I’m communicating with him a bit but I can’t get in a room with him but that will happen at some point. Mark was just one of our guys we wanted to get and my U.S manager Kirk Hardin just sent an email, he happened to know Mark’s manager and Mark listened to it and agreed to do it and the remarkable thing was he’d done 2 other song writing sessions in that previous year, he agreed to 2, one of them was Gin Wigmore and the other one was Queens of The Stone Age. So it was a real honour to just get in the room with him and then to have him actually want to do it when he’s there and to write one of these songs for me and yeah it was incredible.

MD: Gin Wigmore and Mark Lanegan?

NG: Yeah. I heard about that at the time and I completely forgotten about it, but he’s a big fan of hers. I don’t know what it was for, I think it might have been for that record that had that song about going black and stuff, Black Sheep or whatever it was. I think it might have been that record.

MD: Interesting, alrighty. So when you’re writing with him, how does that compare to writing with anyone else? Did you have to kind of take cues from him or how did the collaboration work?

NG: It’s terrifying for the first 15 minutes until you play hima few of the things and he starts, well in my case, he starts to warm…then he was saying, ‘I love this, I really like this, this is great’, then all of a sudden he’s totally a different person cause’ he’s kind of, he’s a little bit sort of cold when you meet him because I guess he’s, you know, he meets a lot of people and he’s seeing what you’re like. He warmed pretty quickly though and now he’s someone I’d sort of consider a friend, you know, we have dinner and we hang out and I’ve met his girlfriend and his little foo-foo dogs that he has at home and it’s really cool and in the writing sessions, he only works on arrangements, lyrics and melodies, that’s all he wants to do, so you bring him in things and he works with you with that. So luckily we were right at the point where we had a lot of demos that were in bits and pieces. So, I opened the Pro-Tools session and we moved things around and he actually wrote some lyrics for me in one of my songs and we co-wrote some stuff and it was one of the best days I’ve ever had as a writer, definitely.

MD: Of course folks know that you were also an in demand session guy around New Zealand and I was wondering, you know, how much since you’ve been playing behind so many other song writers and musicians and performers,  what do you pick up sitting back there in the drum set watching all these other folks in the studio working?

NG: I was thinking about that the other day actually that when I started making this record I had made so many other records with other people and I’ve seen some incredibly talented people like Jol Mulholland and characters like that make records that it just gets in your ears and in your brain and when you’re having a bit of trouble with something maybe you have these flashes of memories of things that other people have done, you know, ways they’ve gotten through things. I guess it’s like osmosis, it just kind of sits in your head and you pick up on things just by working with those kind of characters and then playing  all those songs with Anika has got to affect your sense of melody from hearing some of those beautiful things that she writes just in your ears and, you know, you playing them every night, it’s got to affect you.

MD: And do you take anything away as far as the performing side of things as well?

NG: Well I think, looking back at my career as a session guy, I’ve mostly been the soup-de-jour of female singer song writers, which is nothing to do with what I do and the performances are nothing like I do, so actually, no. I don’t think I’ve ever played with a band since I was a teenager who would be remotely similar to what I do now. So to be honest, I’m not funny enough to do Anika’s schtick and like…

MD: I don’t think anybody is!

NG: Yeah and I don’t have that Westie panel beaters daughter thing of Jan Hellriegel or you know, I’m not like, I’ve played a bit with Homebrew, maybe that’s closer that, you know, I’ve seen the kind of frenzy that goes on with that kind of thing. But rock is, there’s not a lot of rock going on at the moment so I haven’t really played a lot of it with anyone else.

MD: I wanted to ask you about that, what the kind of status of rock is in New Zealand, especially, there’s a few bands around. Devilskin did a fairly big tour, but is rock in a good healthy state do you think? This is a huge rock tour that you guys are going to be on, I guess you’ll find out.

NG: I mean that Devilskin thing is amazing, they’ve gotten huge. I think, I’ve only been away 6 months but I don’t remember them being as big 6 months ago as they are now, so maybe they’ve kicked on, looked at the rock charts the other day, I think they had four in the top 10, which is amazing. I did notice this year’s rock category at the Tui’s, not talking about the bands that are there in terms of are they good bands or not but I noticed that none of those bands seem to have broken through and become big anyway. So you had, I think it was 3 rock bands, they were all kind of a little bit like my band, there were sort of doing their thing but they hadn’t exploded like Shihad did or even the way I Am Giant got quite big reasonably quickly. So I thought that was interesting, there wasn’t an obvious break-out success story there.

MD: And when you’re overseas, you say you’re based a lot in Los Angeles, being a Kiwi over there, do people expect you to sound like Lorde? I mean, do they, are they looking for a specific sound from this country now that her and Broods are kind of doing similar things and are they kind of surprised to find that theres rock and roll out here as well?

NG: I don’t think so, I think that we obviously spend a lot of time thinking about Lorde and Broods and that but I don’t think Americans do, she’s just another famous person, so I don’t think they really know where she’s from a lot of the time. It’s just, you know, they hear she’s from New Zealand, they go oh right yeah, hobbits and electro-pop and stuff. But I think there’s obviously whole sections of America that still remember Flying Nun and still remember Split Enz and things like that. So to be honest in L.A, I think probably most people are interested in what you know about them more than what they know about you.

MD: Well that’s kind of interesting. Yeah, I mean, me being from The States I remember when I told folks I was moving here they thought it was going to be cold because it was in Scandinavia somewhere so yeah.

NG: That was quite a long time ago, right?

MD: It was 20 years ago. Yeah, there have been movies since then so that’s helped. But still, you‘d be surprised at how many people have no idea where the country is.

NG: I’m not surprised at all. I mean, there’s plenty of people over there that you meet who would just, oh that’s amazing, where is that, what happens there, like you know. I remember I was somewhere around the time that Mt. Ruapehu exploded and I remember seeing a thing on the news and they were talking about the local villages around it, local villages having to flee and I’m like oh that’s very interesting, you know, the local village, the local like..

MD: The natives are running.

NG: Leaving their multimillion dollar skiing industry behind, you know.

MD: Alright, let’s get back on the tour a little bit. So when you have, you know, you and Shihad and I Am Giant and all you guys together on the road, do you hang out together? Is it kind of like what people kind of fantasize who are not in bands think it must be amazing, you know, just having a great time from beginning to end?

NG: Yeah, absolutely, it is. Often on those tours, like the one that we did with The Naked and Famous and Shihad, that’s my reference for this one because it’s the same venues. You generally are all staying at the same hotel because there aren’t many hotels around there so, you know, you do end up just being in hotel bars and hanging out and someone is usually in the pool with their clothes on at some point, that kind of thing. It is a bit lot of comradery and it’s long enough for that to occur, you know, like 10 days long or something. So it’s pretty exciting in that respect.

MD: Should the hotels be concerned?

NG: Well they keep letting them come back, so I guess the fact that there’s, I don’t know, 25 people showing up, plus another 10 crew and everyone, so they’re getting 35 rooms taken for the night, every year must be nice.

MD: I guess it all balances out in the end, they’re probably having a good time anyway. What about music-wise, do you guys kind of check each other out and you know, see what each other’s doing?

NG: I think on this trip, everyone’s gonna be interested to see what’s going on with each other initially, maybe not Airborne so much because they’re not obviously involved with the other 3 bands. Well I know Shihad will wanna see what I Am Giant are doing, they already know what we’re doing and obviously I’d really love those I Am Giant guys,  I’ve toured with them separately, a year or two ago and Shelton and Paul, they’re just lovely guys. So there would be a little checking out there and everyone’s gonna wanna see Airborne for obvious reasons and then Shihad as well, like, yeah. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun this one, it seems like a bunch on like-minded people together.

MD: And speaking of like-minded. Is there any kind of political overtone to the thing, I mean, Fvey thing has gotten its own roots in, you know, conspiracies and all that and your song No Longer Silent has a little bit of that going along with it. So is that part of what is driving this thing?

NG: I imagine there’s a bit of that, like watching them on this tour in Australia, John doesn’t do any preaching about what he’s talking about, he lets the songs speak for themselves, it’s obvious what they are about. But I guess in some respects, everyone’s a little too old for knee-jerk kind of shouting matches about things, so I think it’s a more subtle approach that everyone’s doing now and the record is strong enough to speak for itself on their behalf, so I don’t think they need to do any more than they are.

MD: What about your record, Is there more of that in there?

NG: There’s a little bit of that in there, but I don’t think there will be any sort of overt kind of preaching mechanism operating from me either to be honest, I’m usually too busy trying to keep everything together on stage, I’m not quite good enough at everything yet to be free in between songs and try to recalibrate my brain.

MD: I think I just saw somebody wrote a reaction to one of your shows, I think it was in Australia and they were just completely blown away that you were able to do all these things, various things at the same time. So what is going on in your head when you’re actually doing all that?

NG: I’m much better now than I used to be. When I used to be, it sometimes, it was a little bit of binary code going on, it was, you know, all 1s and 0s and you were just, things were on or off. Whereas now I’m actually able to, the older songs especially, I’m able to play them without having to think too hard and I can actually focus on what I’m communicating because that was always the hardest thing was, someone who plays guitar and sings often can communicate, can focus on what they’re doing as a performer rather than the technical action they’re creating. It’s a bit harder for me to do that with all the stuff I’m doing, plus I’m landlocked, so I can’t jump around like Jonny can and that kind of thing. So I’m finding a way of communicating now, probably through my face and my eyes that it’s happening because I’m a little free-er, you know, I’m not so tied down to remembering what’s happening next.

MD: Do you think that some point you will emerge from behind the kit and kind of get up front?

NG: I do a little bit of that now in certain things but I realise pretty quickly there’s a huge difference between running around on a stage when someone’s playing drums and running around on a stage where theres loops playing, it’s not quite the same thing, there’s that power that comes… say like using Jonny as a great example… when Tom is just laying down a beat in the middle of, say The General Electric and Jonny’s not playing guitar and he’s able to just wonder around and do his thing and communicate directly with people, there’s a level of energy there that you can’t fake and I’ve tried to lay down drums and kind of wander around but the guts just dropped out because you were playing and now you’re not. If you’re a hip hop act and you go out there and there never was anything then you’ve set the bar there and you can go up and down from there but I’ll just be going down on my bar so it’s, yeah.

MD: But I think even hip hop acts have a similar same problem, I think it’s difficult for some of them to get that energy level up because so much of it is electronically generated and there’s no visceralness to it, you know what I mean, like you say theres a different between somebody actually hitting something on stage and somebody pushing a button and hoping that it sounds like it.

NG: Yeah I guess that’s why theres so many live hip hop bands floating around. I remember playing a bit with Home Brew, Tom, he would really always push to have the band there even if it meant losing money because it just wasn’t the same experience for him.

MD: I went to the Soulfest thing a couple of weeks ago and I think every act had a live almost, everybody but maybe Mos Def had a live drummer.

NG: Who did it for you?

MD: It was interesting. I really enjoyed Angie Stone, she was the one I wanted to see and, but she was first on and there was so much more going on afterwards. I really, well D’Angelo was pretty interesting because, I mean he was all over the place, he was doing this like weird Funkadelic stuff and then all this, so, but it was kind of uneven but it was interesting. So and Anthony Hamilton was much better than I had expected him to be as well.

NG: Cool, yeah, that would have been a good watch, that whole show, I mean I was like getting the updates on Facebook. I wondered about the D’Angelo gig, I wonder what that would have been like cause’ really I mean, everyone just wants to hear Voodoo and that’s what everyone’s going for because it’s the thing that everyone remembers and everyone loved and it’s incredible like record, so I wondered what he was gonna do with the rest of it, sounds like he just forced all that other stuff in the set too, right?

MD: Like it opened with a Parliament-Funkadelic song and he had Pino Palladino the bass player, so he was there as well so the bass was turned up.

NG: He’s amazing that guy, absolutely amazing.

MD: So it looks like you’re all set, your summer is pretty much set. You’re gonna have a good time one way or another. Do you expect, I mean, is there indications that people are excited about this, is there gonna be a lot of folks out there?

NG: I think so. I haven’t been in touch with the promoter about what’s going on . It’s not my business.  I’m the first of four bands, but I imagine that things are going okay. I’m looking forward to Christchurch for New Year because we haven’t played down there in a while, my mum and dad can come which would be great, they can come backstage, it’s in The Square. It’s the kind of gig that I used to, when I was at high school there used to be those New Years Eve gigs in The Square and it was the kind of thing that every local band was like that’d be so amazing to do that kind of gig and although we’re not the headliners we’re not gonna be on at midnight, it’s still gonna be cool to just play that gig that I’ve always wanted to do.

MD: Seems like a good excuse to be on at midnight. I think everybody should be on stage by then.

NG: Yeah I mean that would probably, something like that would probably happen I imagine. I’d grab a cowbell.

MD: There’s always room for cowbell. Alright well thanks for sitting down and talk to me and I think you’re gonna have a good time and I hope everyone will get out there and join you.

Click here for more information about the Shihad, Airbourne, I Am Giant, Cairo Knife Fight summer tour.