Author: Urban Bolta, Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: England Pub / Ljubljana
Interview date: 20.03.2014
Elvis Jackson are merrymakers from Primorska whose years of club grinding paid off big time, and today they enjoy the status of one of Slovenia’s biggest rock bands. In terms of sheer touring mileage outside our homeland they might even be the biggest, and they’re definitely the busiest. But nothing happens by itself. Thousands of kilometers driven across Europe and hundreds of shows, including ones alongside the biggest names in alternative music, are the fruit of hard work, and the Elvises know that well, still staying sober and down-to-earth in their heads.
The Ajdovščina lads have a grueling year ahead. On April 7, after a five-year studio drought, they’ll finally release a new short-format album, »Window«, followed by an active touring period, starting with a two-night stand at Ljubljana’s Orto bar early next month. Before these Primorska live showmen fire up again, whose unburdened musical vocabulary has won over punk rockers and metalheads as well as the regional crowd, Rockline sat down with frontman David Kovšča – Buda and bassist Erik Makuc – Slavc to talk about the band.
Greetings, Buda and Slavc! You’ve got the new EP »Window« coming out, which kicks off a new promo cycle. Gigs will start lining up like on a conveyor belt, and there are also obligations like interviews and media appearances. How do you handle that last part, is it exhausting?
Buda: Yeah, now we have to get used to it again. We dropped out a bit, got a bit rusty, and now we’re oiling the gears back up.
I’m sure chats with journalists get on your nerves, you always have to answer the same questions. Aren’t you sick of this part of the job yet?
Buda: How we feel in these conversations depends on you, man! (laughs)
Slavc: It varies… you get all kinds of journalists, and our feelings about giving interviews vary just the same. I once did an interview in Austria where it was no problem to talk about how sometimes somebody farts or pukes. The nice ones are the spontaneous interviews, with no pressure, where the conversation flows like a chat between friends and you don’t have to force yourself to make stuff up.
Buda: Everything we say from now on will be made up anyway. (laughs)
Let’s get back to your upcoming release »Window«. Why did you decide on an EP, a short-format release?
Buda: It’ll fill the gap until the new, »real« album, which is already done and coming out soon. We went with an EP that will have still-unreleased tracks, including live recordings, which we haven’t done until now. There’ll be one new song, one acoustic, one remix. A pile of material built up over the last stretch, so we decided to fill the time and give Slovenian fans and gig-goers some new music.
Slavc: We actually approached this project in a special way. On our earlier albums we put all the songs that marked a certain period, and our trademark mood swings can bother some people, so this time we decided to draw a line through our genre-hopping.
Buda: The record will be much more unified genre-wise.
Slavc: The upcoming EP will be slower, while the album won’t be.
Buda, you said »Slovenian fans«. Does that mean we can expect a song in Slovenian, or will you keep clinging to English?
Buda: No. These will be nice songs that English fits perfectly. (laughs)
Slavc: We’ve actually never discussed the language itself, Slovenian just never came up.
So will Ni več poti nazaj stay your only song in Slovenian?
Slavc: Then there’s also Srow fižol…
Sure, but Srow fižow has English lyrics despite the Slovenian title…
Buda: No, the lyrics are in the Ajdovščina dialect: »Hej how, srow fižow…«. So it’s really not in Slovenian. (laughs)
The band’s history is already pretty hefty, your bio dates the start to 1997, which is already a fairly distant year. Did you ever think at the start that the garage band would turn into something bigger?
Slavc: At the start we weren’t aiming at anything… at the start we were just playing. Only later did we start holding meetings more seriously. (laughs)
Buda: We’d all played in all kinds of bands, and Elvis Jackson came about kind of by coincidence. The Ajdovščina and Goriška scenes came together, a band was born, and then things just rolled on by themselves. The wish was to play and go out into the world. We quickly went to Austria, Germany, Switzerland and so on, and we actually had almost more gigs abroad than at home.
How did you land that show with Offspring at Hala Tivoli? At the end of the nineties they were at the peak of their popularity, and you were still a small, unestablished band.
Buda: Corruption. (laughs)
Slavc: The manager had his fingers in it. Dunno, personally I’ve only ever dealt with the bass, still the case today. (laughs)
Was Sandi Maver already your manager back then?
Buda: Yeah, I think so. He came to us after about three years.
He also helped you with that mini tour with Faith No More in 2009, right?
Slavc: The collaboration with Faith No More came about via several routes.
The two of us were driving behind you to Bulgaria and Romania back then, we even bumped into each other at some gas station in Serbia.
Slavc: Well, I wasn’t there, I was just getting over my appendix. But I still went to a lot of Faith No More shows, I think about four.
Did you get to know Bill Gould (Faith No More bassist and occasional producer, editor’s note) personally at those joint Eastern European shows, or how did it come about that such a musical eminence produced your album?
Slavc: That’s what I’m saying, contact with Faith No More came from two sides: one was the manager, the other was Buda’s involvement in a project that in the end didn’t come to anything.
Buda: I was working with some Dane on a project. We were playing in Denmark with the Elvises, and after soundcheck a woman came up to me and said, you know, my boyfriend is putting together a new project and we just need one more singer. It was a real fluke, we’d only done a soundcheck and were messing around, but she told me anyway: »you’re the one«. I said I was interested, and then she started listing who’s in the band: Bill Gould (Faith No More), Dave Ruan (Lagwagon) on drums, and the guitarist is her boyfriend. I thought: »Whoa!« We got the project going and made about ten songs, but then because of the Faith No More reunion and some other stuff, the project fell through. So we’d already connected with Bill before the collaboration, and of course our manager Sandi helped with all of it too. He’d made contact with them way back in the late nineties, when Faith No More played in Ljubljana.
Slavc: He interviewed them back then.
Buda: Then Bill came to Slovenia again as a guest guitarist with the Germans Harmful. So really, a bunch of things lined up that eventually led to our joint shows in Romania and Bulgaria.
You’ve been famous forever for your energetic shows and fun twists on them. I remember a gig from about ten years ago where you cooked gnocchi on stage and handed it out to the front rows during the show.
Buda: I had this bit with the gnocchi, dunno why, maybe I was a gnocchi in a past life. (laughs) I teased the crowd at gigs a lot, you know, »have you eaten gnocchi«? In Ajdovščina we then even did a Njoki summer festival, and our buddy, a chef who does catering and stuff like that, came up with the idea of cooking gnocchi right at the gig. He brought all his equipment, and under the stress he actually cut himself during the set for the first time in his professional career. A professional chef cut himself, can you imagine? (laughs) It was at Rock Otočec, we liked the chef’s gnocchi idea, we pulled it off, and it was great.
So it was a one-off gag, you never repeated it?
Slavc: Yeah, it was only that once at Otočec in 2004. Since we’d been talking about gnocchi the whole time, we were like, let’s actually serve them at least once.
It must have been a quick recipe, I remember new portions reaching the front rows every two or three minutes.
Buda: Yeah, gnocchi were flying in all directions back then. (laughs)
Over the years, do you like to bring new elements into your shows and music?
Slavc: With the miles behind us come new experiences, which without a doubt influence our sound too, and our music keeps getting heavier. I dunno, some things just come by themselves, even if you’re not thinking about them.
Buda: We don’t make any grand plans. We’ve never made strategic plans about how we’ll dress for the stage, how we’ll play things and so on, it all just comes spontaneously. So these things come straight from us.
If we go back to the future, to the full-length album, which you two didn’t say much about at the start of the interview. Is there still a lot of uncertainty around finishing and releasing it, or why didn’t you say more about it?
Slavc: We’ll try with a label or maybe some booking agency, if everything lines up. This will be our fifth album, and if you release something into the void, that’s not it, we want to put together a logical story.
Buda: We’d like everything to line up, we’d like to release the album at the same time in as many places as possible.
Slavc: It’s been five years since the last one, »Agains The Gravity«, so we’ve missed the train anyway, and we decided to take our time and sort things out however it goes. But it’s not all up to us.
Buda: With the earlier albums we released them separately in Germany and Switzerland, every country was its own story, with a lot of work and investment.
Slavc: In situations like that, a lot depends on the musician himself, and then there’s the luck factor, which is either there or it isn’t. The material’s been around for a while, and we’ve been waiting for the right moment to release it for so long that it might even go moldy. (laughs)
Slavc, at one of your shows I noticed that the whole history of the band is trapped in your dreadlock. Is that still true?
Slavc: Not anymore, it already fell off, but if I had it analyzed it would probably reveal a lot.
Buda: Then the ice storm came and snapped it in half. (laughs)
Slavc: No, no, actually my dreadlock had broken a few times in between…
Buda: Slavc’s dread is like the rings of a tree, it holds a historical record. (laughs) You’d probably really find a lot of stuff in there, stories from German and Swiss squats and plenty more.
Slavc: It’s true though, this road of ours from the barn to the hall has been a funny one.
At festivals and your own shows you’ve played with plenty of big names. Do you have any interesting anecdotes about any of them?
Slavc: I’d say: Even stars pee in the sink. Big stars. When nature calls, you gotta go, that’s a fact even for the better-off folks.
Buda: There are at least a billion of these anecdotes. I always tell myself I need to have one prepared, precisely for a question like this, but there are so many… (laughs)
Slavc: But that’s how it is, what happens on tour stays on tour…
Buda: You should be with us sometime when a debate kicks off about how it was here or there, the stories just rain down.
Slavc: You come without a recorder, and off we go! (laughs)
As you say, you never thought you’d be big someday. What does it feel like now, looking down from the stage at people going nuts to your music? Only a few bands manage the jump from the club scene to bigger stages.
Slavc: I don’t have that feeling, really. Honestly. There were shows that lift you up and give you wind in your sails, but the reality is that you can’t play a big star when you can’t even afford a burek. That thought grounds me every time.
True, but you’re still among that handful of four or five biggest Slovenian rock bands.
Slavc: Believe me, it’s not hard to stay humble when I can’t even afford a burek. (laughs)
Buda: Every show is its own story, you never know how it’ll all unfold. When you step on stage, a new world opens up, and if you feel you’re on the same wavelength as the crowd below the stage, that’s it.
Now, for the grand finale, one of those obligatory, if silly, questions we talked about at the start of the interview. Any last thoughts for our readers, for your fans?
Slavc: Oh boy, now we have to be honest. (laughs)
Buda: Come to Orto bar! We’re playing there on April 2 and 3, we can have a drink or two together and chat a bit.
Slavc: I’d like to tell the readers that beer is better when it’s served cold! (laughs) That’s what I’ve learned in the last fifteen years.
Thanks for your time and the pleasant chat!
Interview by: Urban Bolta and Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos are from Elvis Jackson’s set at the 2012 Rock Music festival in Ljubljana (report here) – all rights reserved!
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