Every-so-often, you get to see a band that totally blows you away. You can’t even explain it. It’s just so primal that it hits you in the gut, just like that satori moment. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to happen quite so often these days which is either because there aren’t so many truly outstanding bands anymore, or because I’m a jaded old git who thinks I’ve seen it all before. (It’s probably somewhere in between…) But there are still such moments to be had and the most recent was when I saw HO99O9 for the first time. The set was incredible, the music was an amazing and original mix of different styles, the performance was spontaneous and exhilarating, and the band had something to say for themselves. I enthused about them to other friends but finding a way to effectively describe them was not easy. They’re obviously into Hardcore, but there are no guitars onstage (only sampled.) They’re clearly inspired by the harsher edges of Hip Hop and Rap, but at the same time, it’s not unusual for the two frontmen to be seen onstage wearing Cro-mags t-shirts or even a wedding dress and instead of drum machine beats they use a live drummer who sounds as if he would be just at home in Slayer ! There are also big chunks of industrial noise and experimental music in there, but the gigs are more like a party getting out of control than some sort of serious avant-garde statement. So it’s not easy to persuade people to go, because it isn’t straight-forward, even within supposedly alternative genres. At the end of the day, you just have to go and see them because that’s the way you’ll find out for yourself. And I can quite honestly say that everyone I know who has seen them so far has totally loved it.
  They’ve been back to the UK several times since I first saw them and it’s been great every time. The set has gradually developed but their spontaneity has remained just as potent. No two gigs are the same, but the energy levels are always high.
  I’d been trying to set-up an interview for some time, but for various reasons (usually my own inability to organize things on time) it wasn’t until their recent gig at Camden Underworld that I got to talk to them. Their album, ‘The United States of Ho99o9’ has just been released so they’re on a pretty tight schedule, but we eventually meet-up backstage and I get the chance to ask for some details. The two frontmen, Eaddy and TheOGM (aka Jean) are surprisingly relaxed and helpful, a direct contrast to the chaos they invoke onstage…
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​Firstly, I believe the band actually started playing together in New Jersey, before making the move to Los Angeles, where they are now based…

TheOGM ; Yeah, that’s where the band started. We began making and recording music while we were still in New Jersey, back in 2012. We didn’t move out to LA until about 2014.

  Why did you decide to relocate ?

The OGM ; It was the music. We had an opportunity to work on our music full-time, so the only decision we had to make was, did we want to stay on the East Coast and have to get jobs at the same time we were working on the band, or did we want to move out to LA and  just work on the music full time ? That didn’t even require a thought process ! We were like, Yo, we’re outta here !

  I can certainly understand that, but it still seems like such a pretty drastic move when you compare it to bands in this country. Over here, a band might move a couple of hundred miles from their hometown to London to improve their chances, but you moved nearly 3000 miles !
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TheOGM ; Well, in our case it was such a good opportunity that we just had to treat it like it was going to be no problem. But in other cases, moving from New Jersey into New York can be a really big deal. People from home would be surprised if they found out that you’d moved to New York, so that’s a thing in itself, but moving to LA is obviously a much bigger step. You’ve really got to have your plans in order because you’re going to be so far from home and there’s nobody there to help you. It’s not like being at home, where you can just go around the corner and tell your friends if you’re broke and they’ll help you out with twenty bucks… 
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​You’ve got such a mix of styles in your music now, was it always that way ?

Eaddy ; Well, he was already doing music and rapping but I’d never really rapped or anything before this. I was just a fan of music in general and I went to a lot of shows, so I’d see other bands and it made me want to play my own music. But I couldn’t really give out specific names to what I wanted to sound like because I didn’t want to sound like anyone else. I just wanted to sound the way I was and it wasn’t until I started playing my own stuff that I got a real idea of what I sounded like. I actually thought my voice was pretty bad at first, so I tried to avoid what other people might be saying or thinking about it, but I was always very grateful if I ever found out that somebody else liked it. I suppose when I first started, I used to use a deeper voice, but as time went on I became more confident and was able to be more comfortable with the way I wanted to sound…

TheOGM ; It’s all about confidence, you know ? I had started out rapping before we played together, but even then, I didn’t have the confidence to do what I wanted to do, which was probably more like what we’re doing now. I was very shy onstage and I almost didn’t even want to do it, just because of my nerves. I wasn’t until we started doing the band and making this sort of music, with this kind of energy, that I was able to break out of my shell. I just realised that if this is what it’s going to be, we’ve gotta be fucking badass and fucking radical. I mean, this motherfucker was already radical… we were both radical in our own ways, but just not onstage. He was already that kind of person, definitely, but just not onstage. He’d be going to shows and he’d be thrashing around or jumping off shit, boozing and getting drunk… He was already that kind of person, so I knew that all we had to give him a microphone and it would be like, aww shit, this is it !

  Have you always worked with a live drummer ?

Eaddy : We’ve always had a live drummer. It’s another thing that brings a real heavy, heavy force to what we do.

TheOGM ; We could have gone out with just the beats playing, but that shit would just have been like, another rapper with a DJ kick…
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Eaddy : Which is not a bad thing, necessarily, but for us and what we want to be doing, the drums give it an extra fucking heartbeat. You can feel it in a way that you don’t feel a machine. Plus, Ian is an amazing drummer. We’re lucky to have him and there’s no way we could replace him with beats !

  
​You’ve also developed an almost theatrical approach to your stage presence, dressing up in masks, wedding dresses or whatever… It’s hardly what anyone would expect if they had only heard your record…

TheOGM : Well, that’s exactly why we do it. No-one would think that you’d have a dude coming onstage in a wedding dress and then playing this heavy-ass music. Where we come from, you can’t walk outside your front door wearing jeans that are too tight and you certainly can’t wear nail polish in public. You can’t do certain things in the ‘hood, so when we’re trying these things out onstage, it’s just like we’re going against the grain and saying, there’s no barriers in what we’re doing. Unfortunately, in Hip-Hop there are barriers and it’s expected that rappers should look a certain way. He should be wearing expensive jewellery, sagging his jeans and wearing this, that and the other. And that also happens in Punk Rock or rock’n’roll… If you’re a rocker, you’re expected to dress up in leather jackets and big boots or whatever…

Eaddy ; But it really should just be down to you and you should dress however-the-fuck you want to dress. That’s why I’ve always looked up to people like Iggy Pop or David Bowie or The Damned or Devo, you know, because they wore costumes or just did things that were out of the blue. You could only look at them and think, man, they look cool onstage.
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TheOGM ; It’s like Andre 3000 from Outkast, he was the same way, especially in his early days. The music was good and it was also visually captivating. I mean, sometimes a guy can go onstage and just look regular and the music will still be good and he can still do a good job. But we have this thing that’s almost like Performance Art. What we do, it’s not just the music, it’s almost like an Art thing onstage as well. When you see us, you see what we’re wearing and you see what we’re doing, so you can see that we really mean this shit.

​  It seems to become a problem with every new style of music, that it starts out being fresh and different but too many people end-up adopting a certain style of dress or look because that’s what they think they should do…

Eaddy : The same thing happened in Hardcore punk, where you had fans of some bands showing up and they’ll all be wearing sweats and shorts, but then you’ll have another band and their fans will be more like regular punks who turn-up wearing the leather jackets with studs. Or you’ll have the post-punk and goth crowd where everyone will be dressed all in black and wearing eye-liner… There’s all these different ways that the fans decide they have to dress, but at the end of the day, the music is all in the same realm.

  You’ve been releasing videos online rather than putting-out regular singles. How involved are you with the making of the videos ?

TheOGM ; We have a friend back home in LA called Behn Fannin and he’s worked on a couple of the videos for us. He did the video for ‘Hellboy’ and he also did the video for ‘Horrors of 1999’. We already knew him really well and he’s really smart, so when we went to him with the title of the album and explained the kind of message we were trying to say, he already knew in his mind how he could take our ideas and put them into a story-form. Sometimes, that’s what we need because we’ll have a bunch of scattered ideas and we need someone who can put them together neatly. We’re not always neat when it comes to that, because making a video is a thing where you need to have scenes and you need to know the area where you want to shoot and the angles that you’ll need. So we have to find someone who really knows what they’re doing, which is where that dude Behn is really awesome. We’ve worked with other directors in the past and we’re open to work with other people even now, but Behn is great because he knows that our ideas always come first. We’ll explain our ideas and then the directors have to work from there.

  The videos tend to reference the more violent aspects of horror movies. I assume you must be fans of that genre ?
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Eaddy ; Oh yeah, definitely ! I grew up watching the Freddie Kruger and Jason movies, all those classic horror films. Everything from ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ through to ‘American Psycho’. That shit is really special to me.

 
 Funnily enough, the first time you played in London, at Electrowerkz, the show started with all the lights turned out apart from a strobe flashing on and off really slowly. Jean walked onstage in the wedding dress, while Eaddy was wearing a suit and a paper bag over his head, kinda looking like 'Leatherface' himself… As we could only see glimpses as the strobe flashed on and off, it was pretty sinister, almost like a creepy film…

TheOGM : Yeah ! It was almost like a movie scene, like, you’d look up onstage and think, this is like a  happening ! It’s a whole part of the experience. I don’t want people to come and see us as if it’s just another rock show, I want it to be a full-on experience.

  Each time I’ve seen you play, you seem to take a different approach and it seems to be very spontaneous rather than just repeating stage-moves. Now that you’re touring so much, does it become harder to maintain that spontaneity ?

Eaddy ; We have to try and stay focused, stay healthy and stay in shape… We have to grind it out and don’t let anything else get in the way of our path.
TheOGM : We just have to try and stay creative. There are still a lot places that we haven’t been, so however we play the set, it’s going to be new to them. But there are places like London where we’ve played quite a few times so we do have to think, how do we keep this exciting for people who might have seen us ten times already ? You just have to be creative and find new ways to interact with the crowd and new ways to make it fun for yourself. I think if you’re still having a good time with it, then the rest of it will just come through.

  When you played at the 100 Club last year, Eaddy said something onstage about feeling good to be playing at a club with so much musical history… Are those the kind of things that you pick up on as you tour ?

Eaddy ; Oh yeah… it’s always fun to find out if any bands that I’m interested-in have played on the stage that we’re going to share. That’s almost as cool as being on the same bill as a band that you really like. I would have really loved to play at CBGB’s for the same reasons, but obviously that closed-down some time before we even started playing. I guess I’d love to play at Madison Square Gardens !
TheOGM ; Shit, that’s just what I was thinking about ! Can you imagine what it would be like to play at Madison Square Gardens ? It’s huge… That kind of shit would probably freak me out and I’d faint onstage…
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Eaddy : Yeah, I’m sure I’d just lose my mind at something like that...

 
You’ve already supported some pretty popular bands, though, like Faith No More, Slaves and Dillinger Escape Plan. How do you feel when you’re playing to someone elses’ audience, especially when it’s on a much bigger scale than the shows that you usually play ?

Eaddy : Well, I suppose we feel like the underdogs and that sets it up as a competition, right there. It just makes us want to raise the bar higher. If we go out there under another band, then it makes us feel that we’ve got to do even better than them. I mean, most of the people in the audience are just going to be thinking that we’re nobodies, because they’re just standing around waiting for the main band…

TheOGM : So we’ve got to really stick it to ‘em !

Eaddy ; Whether they like it or not, we’ve got to go full throttle, even if there’s a hundred-million people there.

TheOGM : Even if they hate it, we still want to make sure that they remember seeing this fucking brutal band. Maybe they didn’t like us, but they’ll remember it. There’s no way that that we’ll let them see us and just think, Whatever… Maybe they’ll like us or maybe they’ll hate us, but either way there’s going to be something specific about us that they’re not going to forget. They’re going to talk about it, regardless. It is a challenge when you open up for bigger bands, but like he said, it’s a competition and we want to fucking stick it to ‘em. We’ve actually got some shows coming up where we’ll be opening-up for Ministry and then we have a few shows with Avenged Sevenfold. Those are going to be huge, massive rooms, but we’ll just treat it like a challenge. 
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​Your new album ‘United States of Ho99o9’ has recently been released. Some of the recorded versions of the songs are pretty different to the versions that you play live. Do you approach the two things in different ways ?
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Eaddy : Yes and no… Yes in that, we approach some songs the same way as we would play them live because when we play them live, we know that sonically they sound good and we think about them that way. But there are other songs that we probably don’t think of as being played live and are more like things that are only meant for you to listen to at home. We have to think about all of these things when we’re making our music. Personally, I mostly concentrate on the music that we play live because I love the energy that it creates. I like to think of things almost as if I was a fan and I would be listening to the record at home and thinking, Oh my God ! I can’t wait to go to a show to hear this shit ! Because that’s how I am when I love a particular song… I just can’t wait to go out and hear that artist actually play that song. I want to hear it with even more energy than you hear from the recording. Fuck yeah, that’s the kind of shit I think about !

 
​Unfortunately, we had to end the conversation at this point as they still had another interview scheduled and the doors were due to open for the gig itself. But it was great to talk to them at last, and I hope it won’t be the last time.
  I wonder upstairs to get some fresh air (it’s already very warm in the venue, even before the audience fill the place – apparently, it was actually one of the hottest days of the year !) I bump into an old friend, Glen, in the pub and we have a few drinks before returning downstairs. The first band, Nova Twins, turn out to be an interesting and very appropriate support act. Fronted by two girls, they’re maybe what The Slits would have sounded like if they’d been informed by Rap instead of Reggae. They still have that chaotic, punky attitude, but there’s a lot more going on than the old three chord trick. This is the first time I’ve come across them but I certainly intend to find out more.
  Ho99o9 are heralded onstage with a deep, overpowering bass sound. ‘It’s going to be a loud one’, says Glen and, indeed, he’s proven to be right. It’s already sweltering in the club (recalling gigs at the old Fulham Greyhound, in fact, and that place didn’t have any air conditioning…) but as soon as the band launch into the first number, it seems as if the whole place is bouncing-along with them. The audience is really mixed. Older and younger fans, punk, indie, metal, but all adding to a great atmosphere. There were no highlights as it was all one big highlight, with Eaddy seemingly spending as much time crawling over the heads of the audience as he did onstage, while TheOGM prowls the stage making it seem even smaller than it is, pausing only to keep the sampler on track. The amount of energy that these guys create is incredible and the interaction with the audience is effective and real. This isn’t about breaking down barriers, it’s about not even having them there in the first place ! There are very few bands you are ever likely to see that can make the audience such a vital part of the show in the way that  Ho99o9 achieve.
  At the end of the set, Glen emerges from the crowd, grinning. He takes off his shirt (he’s always had a habit of doing this) but this time there’s a good reason. He wrings it and the sweat pours out ! Not a pleasant sight but as an indication of just how hot and compelling this gig had been, it serves its’ point.

The album, ‘The United States of Ho99o9’ is currently available via Toys Have Power. For further info ;
 
www.ho99o9.com
 
www.facebook.com/ho99o9
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