Interview: !!! (Chk Chk Chk)

Chk Chk Chk have been around since 1996. For anyone in the UK that may not be familiar with your history, how did the band get started?
When many bands start there’s a bunch of rivers leading to that ocean, there was a lot of things that were happening. One of the main things was, I was on tour with a disco covers group touring with Mario’s (Andreoni, guitarist) post-punk group, and it was just a random accident that we kept playing together every night.

Everyone was responding to the disco music so well and it was so fun to play, and when I was playing guitar, I didn’t realise I could play music like that. I thought it was all a little out of my reach, so it was like let’s play songs like this but try and get lost in it and try and make our own sound.

I was in a punk group originally, but we were all into 70s soul and stuff like that, so we had kind of a different thing going on and we would cover James Brown tunes. The thing is with the punk band, I wasn’t listening to music like that, so why would I want to play the music I’m not listening to?

Which albums were you listening to when you were trying to find your sound back in ‘96?
The likes of James Brown, Chic, and the one album that was passed around a lot was Cannibalism by CAN. We were all like, you must listen to this! I listened to Soul Desert off that album when I was around somebody’s house on acid, and it was this amazing song! Lots of things were happening back then, people were digging up their Kraftwerk records and were going to see bands like Stereo Lab.

It’s like when I heard the first Daft Punk record, all the punks were like “I don’t know man” and it was controversial because we weren’t listening to any electronic music at the time apart from Kraftwerk and we were in a place where rock and roll thought drum machines had no soul. I looked in the cover and see that there’s a Chic record in there, and I’m like hey, if these guys know Chic then they must know what’s going on!

Your ninth studio album Let it Be Blue was released back in May, how is the band different now to how you were back at the time of your first album 22 years ago?
It all kind of changed slowly and gradually over the years, but it’s remained a family – the basic principles of post punk on which we were founded, always trying to move towards something new. The changing line-up has been an integral part into staying true to those principles – currently the band is Mario Andreoni, Meah Pace, Rafael Cohen, Chris Egan, and me, Nic Offer.

As the personality dynamic changes, that’s how we can find that new sound, because the sound is always made up of who was there at the time. The dialogue between the band creatively is always changing so were always going to be in new fertile territory.

Chk Chk Chk are coming to the UK at the beginning of October for fourteen tour dates, are there any standout differences between US and UK audiences?
Well, let’s say if you woke me up in a country and I didn’t know where I was and I had to go out, I’d be like are we in the UK?! It’s hard for me to put my finger on it, I know how different UK fans are as listeners but I’m not sure about audience members. It’s like when I was a kid and I’d look at the UK charts, I was like, how the heck are New Order in the top ten? It was crazy to us in the USA.

One thing I always remember too is when somebody from Warp Records was over in New York with me in some bar and they were playing The Pretenders or something like that, and he was like “all the music I hear over here is old music, why is that?” I think America is little more obsessed with past than the UK is, the UK tends to want to always keep up with new music, and that’s one the things I like about it.

The new album includes a fantastic cover of REM’s Man on the Moon, and you have previously recorded your own takes on Fast Car by Tracy Chapman, Magnetic Field’s Take Ecstasy with Me and even Irresistible Bitch by Prince. Which other songs would you love to cover?
You know it’s such an interesting thing, covers can go many different ways, but I wouldn’t want them to be useless. So, I’d want to reinvent it or make something new out of it or at least contribute something to the conversation with it. It’s like when No Doubt did the Talk Talk song, did we need this? No, but in a way, it was nice cause it probably turned a gazillion people, especially young Americans onto the song.

The other reason to do a cover is to learn something, like the Stereo MC’s Connected, we learnt a lot from playing that and had a lot of fun playing it live. I think we have been successful with the covers we have released because they were not contrived. I’d like to throw out a title to you, but everything we have done has been natural.

Back in 2000 we covered Grace Jones’ Pull up to the Bumper and that was a turning point for the band, as we started to incorporate more percussion elements, cause as we learned it and we knew that part of what was making this groove work is this woodblock or that cowbell. However, I will say we were jamming on a song by Cameo called New York, so maybe that one.

What can the people of Nottingham expect from a Chk Chk Chk gig?
Well, I think you can expect a dance party, a really energetic show. We’ve been known for a long time as one of the better live bands out there, we’ve never let that slide and we know that’s what we must deliver when we show up. There’s that dedication and determination to bring it every single time, we don’t want people to come to a show and then a couple of years later come again and we aren’t as good.

The last time you were in Nottingham was 2016 at the Rescue Rooms, do you have any abiding memories of the city?
What I remember of Nottingham is that we always talk about Nottingham slang with our tour manager. He would ask us if we knew what a croggy was? We were like we have never heard that anywhere else before or since. We went to the oldest pub in England (The Olde Trip to Jerusalem) and it was like half in a cave! We had some mental shows in Nottingham where people rushed the stage and started dancing. I definitely remember that, but what the hell is a croggy?

Do you have one final message for the Nottingham fans before your gig on the 5th October?
Be prepared to sweat, come to dance. We have been having a great time this year, so we're expecting the same out of Nottingham!

Chk Chk Chk (!!!) will be playing at Metronome on 5th October 2022, and their new album Let it Be Blue is out now on Warp Records.

@chkchkchk_og