Onstage you’ve been rocking these massive “Stage Hands”,
placards with slogans such as “Silence=Death” and lyrics such as “Fuck Your
Best” and “Fuck Your Friends” printed on (and this is the clever bit) gigantic
cardboard hands. Who came up with the idea?
JD Sampson: I guess it came out of our first show in a
contemporary art museum in New York. Our premiere was super, ultra performance
art including some of our friends holding cardboard cut out signs that resemble
protest signs along with a lot of the other performance art.
Ginger Brooks: And that was the part that was portable so we
decided to bring it on tour.
JD: Oh my god DJ Lincent!
Who is that?
JD: She’s the Gossip’s biggest fan, she came to our show!
She’s from North England. She goes to every single Gossip show there is.
Do you have any fans like that?
JD: This one guy came from Melbourne Australia, to our show
in San Francisco.
GB: But I guess when you live in Australia you have to do
stuff like that because not everyone comes to you.
Do you think it’s more important for people to dance to your
music or listen to the lyrics?
GB: I think if you’re dancing to it you’re going to gain
some knowledge of it, I think it’s both. It’s different ways of experiencing
the song
JD: We have fans that like us because of the way it sounds
and we have fans who like us because of what we talk about. I don’t really
think that one is more important than the other, I think they’re pretty clear
though. You’re not not going to get what we’re talking about, especially with
the props. It’s part of the reason why we do it, even if you’re deaf you can
know what we’re talking about.
I heard you’ve been listening to the American gay sex
therapist Dan Savage a lot on tour, what questions would you ask him?
JD: Oh my god! That’s a really good question.
GB: He deals a lot about relationships, so I would talk to
him about mine, try to get more interesting advice. Because he’s really into
supporting all kinds of relationships.
JD: I would ask something similar about my relationship but
we won’t get into that.
Michael O’Neill: I’ve been really into online cruising,
websites or iPhone applications, so I’d be interested to hear his take on that.
We’ve been travelling and been in some remote places, where people who seem to
be 15 are on it which is kind of a scary world as much as it can be a fun
world, so wondering if he had anything to say about the safety versus the
pleasure of online cruising.
JD: It’s funny me and Ginger are all like lesbos, “we would
talk about our relationships” and you’re all “casual sex”.
Haven’t you been using Grindr to get people to come to your
shows?
MO: Yeah the other night in Brighton I was on Grindr and I
wrote to everybody I could see, “come to the show”. No one really came as a
result but they did learn about our band that way.
JD: We started doing it and then we made a band profile
because people kept asking “oh, what’s your band” and we can be in the smallest
town and people would be learning about our band. It’s so interesting because,
our part of gay culture – art queer radical artists – segment of the community,
is so small. So to see all these different kinds of people listening to our
music and going to our myspace page, it’s really interesting promotion. I’ve
never seen anybody else doing something like that before. Plus it’s really fun
to talk to people and look at people’s penises.
Can you see any other way of marketing your band like that?
JD: Well we talked about it, about making an application for
lesbians or queer people in general.
GB: And the other one about finding sperm.
JD: But kind of like in the same application, trying to
figure out what you want from this, if you want to have casual sex, do you want
a relationship, or do you want sperm for your babydaddy? A way more queer
radical version, more multifaceted. There was a woman on Grindr one time and it
seemed like she was getting a lot of abuse for being on it. It’d be interesting
to see if you could have something like Grindr but anyone could be on it.
Who do you think is going to be the first person in the band
to have a baby?
GB: JD.
MO: JD
GB: Maybe Michael. It’s between Michael and JD.
Maybe they could have one together.
JD: I think that would be…
MO: That would be kind of fucked up
MEN play Madame JoJo’s in Soho tonight (19 January) and
their EP is out now. myspace.com/men