Brighton experimental post-punk outfit DITZ has released their sophomore record Never Exhale. We caught up with the band at the backstage of their Berlin Lido concert on February 10, to engage in a lovely chaotic chat.
How’s the tour going, guys?
Cal Francis: Very good so far, though we only just started. Could all go tits up from here.
Jack Looker: Unexpectedly busy in the first three shows, and they went down really well. They were all equally good, but Madrid was probably the highlight. It was sold out.
Sam Evans: Which was surprising, we weren’t expecting that.
Caleb Remnant: It was crazy.
CF: We had only ever been there once before as well.
You have a pretty busy schedule too, right?
SE: Yeah. We started the first bit off without our van, our amps, our drum kit… It was just flying out to different shows. So I guess we didn’t all feel fully comfortable at first because it’s not our own gear and stuff. Today weirdly almost feels like the start. But those first three shows were amazing. And we went from warm countries to freezing cold countries. So we’re also trying to adapt to that. (laughs)
CF: Let’s not slag them off too much because it’s exactly the same temperature in Brighton right now.
SE: Is it?
CF: Yeah, The whole time, totally matched up.
Hopefully you are taking care of yourselves. No one has caught a cold yet, right?
All: Yeah, yeah.
JL: I take vitamins every day.
As a band who always tours and “never exhales”, what practices do you do to relax when you have spare time generally?
JL: Saunas and spas are amazing for that. Went to a sauna yesterday, which was incredible. And after that, loads of drinking. It’s usually the drinking and then when we feel bad, we’re going to a spa. German spas and saunas are great.
SE: I’ve bought, for the same ever, a bicycle, which is up there. (points to the bike that is there with us backstage) Best decision ever today. I was just cycling around Berlin, went to a music shop, then to a bike shop. That’s good for me. To get out, be alone for a bit, have a little bit of a cycle.
CF: I just go for a run every time, did the same after we did the soundcheck today. It’s nice. It’s the best way to get a little bit of time to yourself and also just feel a little bit better after the general punishment that comes with being on tour, you know?
CR: I love a little wandering, just getting lost in the city, trying to find your own way back, exploring something new.
Let’s speak about your sophomore record, Never Exhale. If you were to think of two tracks from the record, one easiest and one hardest to create, which two would they be?
JL: (thinks) I don’t know, I was going to say “Taxi Man” for the easiest, but-
CR: It was easy when we started.
CF: Yeah. But for the hardest, I’m saying “The Body As a Structure”. The second to last track on the album. That was one that we sat unfinished for a while.
JL: It wasn’t right for ages.
SE: There was a part missing for so long.
CF: When it did emerge, it became sort of our favorite track collectively, but it just took so long.
SE: I think “Senor Siniestro” might have been the easiest one, because we played it live for so long before the album. The whole year before we were playing that song. So when we went to record it, we were all like, “Yeah, we know exactly what we will be doing and we know exactly how”.
CR: The same was true for “18 Wheeler”. We had toured it for about a year before.
CF: I’d say “Four” was quite easy as well. It just kind of fell together quite quickly. Gave us a bit of a nightmare because that one pedal issue for a while, though. But that was a post recording thing.
What was the pedal issue?
CF: It wasn’t doing the thing it was supposed to do.
JL: Did one thing, then it just decided it wasn’t going to do that.
CF: We’d recorded it doing that thing and then it continues to just not do it, yeah.
You guys strike me as people who would love David Lynch. Would you like to elaborate on your personal connection to him, if there is one?
CF: Yeah, my favorite David Lynch is Mulholland Drive. I remember sitting there in silence for hours after the first time I watched that.
JL: Eraserhead is also a great one, isn’t it?
SE: You know what? During the album, we did look a little bit in that direction for inspiration in terms of our videos.
JL: What’s the film with that weird mate where he’s like, “Answer your phone,” and he’s in front of him, but then he rings his house phone and he’s talking with the same guy?
CF: Oh, that’s Lost Highway.
Yeah.
JL: That film had a huge uncomfortable feeling.
CF: Do you know Barry Adamson, Deniz?
Yeah.
CF: He lives in Brighton. He’s a friend of ours, and in the jazz bar scenes in that film, he did some of the music bits.
He also played in The Bad Seeds, right?
CF: Yeah.
SE: Also a great band.
Do you have an active dream life? Do you think those dreams ever influence your songwriting in any way?
JL: As a kid, I’d always wanted to be on stage playing in front of busy crowds with people watching us kicking off. So every time you have a show like that, the dream’s kind of been made.
CF: Wait. Are you talking about hopes and dreams, or dreams you see when you go to bed?
Dreams when you go to bed. But you can talk about hopes and dreams if you want. (all laugh)
CF: I actually don’t dream that much. I had a terrible one the other day though. I had dreadlocks and I had to cut them off because it was just awful. I’d been growing my hair for so long and I had to cut off the dreadlocks. I woke up and I was pretty glad that it was over. That was a very vain nightmare. Do you reckon I can get away with that? I doubt it.
SE: My dreams are really weird, and they make little sense. If I remember them.
CF: That’s the other thing, I forget them so quickly. Unless it was traumatic enough that you’d remember the exact thing.
SE: On the IDLES tour last year, on the way back at the very end of the tour, they said, “Oh, if you want, you can get a lift in our van to London.” So I went on the tour bus and I was going in and out of sleep when I had the most vivid dream. We’d all got out the bus, gone to the border check and there’s this whole drama, all this stuff kicking up. One of the monitor techs was going crazy, drinking and stuff. It was so vivid. That was the last time I had a really intense dream.
JL: On that tour, at one point, I kept dreaming that you were all coming back to the van. Everyone else was at an afters party in Paris, and it was only me and Caleb in the van. I was also going in and out of sleep, and I kept waking up as I kept dreaming that people were coming up inside, and when they eventually came in, I was like “F.ck, that’s another dream!” And it wasn’t. They were really loud and I got pissed, that woke me up.
CR: I don’t have anything.
Name one performance you have witnessed that really shook you.
CF: First off, Death Grips in Brighton.
Did you hear that they broke up? It’s very fresh news.
SE: What?
CF: How fresh?
It circulated yesterday (February 9).
CF: We haven’t been on our phones that much for the past few days.
SE: Crazy!
CR: I didn’t know that. Wow.
It’s not officially confirmed, but it seems pretty certain.
CF: I mean, they haven’t done anything for a while, and they’re quite elusive in terms of their online presence, and didn’t really do interviews much, do they? But yeah, one of my favorites was Death Grips in Brighton. They played a nightclub, it’s not usually a venue and it was oversold. No lights on apart from one UV light on stage and it was just carnage. Absolutely. It was f.cking great.
SE: There was no support. It was just one tone playing in the background before they came in.
CF: It’s the Shepard tone. It’s an audial illusion where it sounds like there is one sound that just constantly rises. The science behind it is that it always introduces something new underneath so you don’t recognize it before ’cause it’s so low. So that starts going up and as something gets too high, it disappears. The consecutive sounds are always really close and they never end.
SE: Yeah, that brought out a lot of suspense ready for them when they finally played.
CF:I saw them on that tour in Village Underground, and they had the same thing, which was just ridiculous.
Death Grip’s last concert was pretty eventful too. People were throwing bottles and glow sticks at them all the time, and they actually left the stage early because of that.
CF: Oh wow.
SE: Where was that?
I’m not sure, it was some time ago. There were multiple tweets and social media comments telling what transpired. (Disclaimer: This actually happened in the second-to-last show by DP, at Fayetteville Arizona on October 13, 2023. -ed)
JL: There is one video of them playing Paradiso in Amsterdam on YouTube.
CF: That’s a great one.
JL: If I ever need inspiration to play a show, it’s perfect. It starts with the f.cking sound check. And in the sound check, everyone’s just going mad. Then when they start properly, it’s absolute f.cking carnage. It’s one of the best handheld camera videos ever.
CF: One of the first tunes of that is that “Black Paint” tune, which is super underrated. That’s one of their best songs.
JL: My favorite memory is with Pixies. When they reformed in 2011, I saw them in Manchester and they just did 39 songs. Didn’t say a word from start to finish. They had gone full Batman, you couldn’t see their faces. They came on, stayed for two hours, just went off, and that was it. It was sick. Banging all the way through.
CR: For me, probably the first time I saw Refused at The 2000 Trees Festival.
JL: Yeah, I was there, that pit was crazy. I think someone managed to bring in a gazebo from the other side of the festival into the pit, and we were all under this gazebo while this circle was going around. Dennis Lyxzén jumped into the ground as well. It was crazy. Such a big influence of a band for me as well.
CF: I reckon I’ll also go with the first time we played with The Psychotic Monks.
All: (sounds of approval)
CF: We all watched it. Did you hear that band?
Yeah. I’ve never seen them, but I’m very curious.
CF: Greatest live band on the planet.
CR: Just amazing.
JL: It’s unbelievable.
SE: There was no one there. Like, probably 20 people?
JL: It was upstairs in a pub in Hastings.
CF: We jumped on the show last minute. They did the sound check and we were all there like, “What the f.ck?!” They went on and played and we just stood directly in front of them at the front in awe. They played for like an hour. No boredom, just sheer suspense the whole time. And we were like, “This is the best band in the world!”
JL: The musicianship and the songwriting are just incredible.
CF: They are such a unit.
SE: We’ve played with them a few times since and it never gets old.
CF: We played with them just a few months ago.
Now I’m super curious to see them.
CF: You have to!
JL: They’re also really good on records, don’t get me wrong, but live is a whole different thing.
SE: They’re also really nice people.
CF: They are lovely! They are quite meek in a way. And then they go on stage and it’s just the most fierce thing you’ve ever seen. I’m also going to put on The Jesus Lizard gig as well. We all saw them in January. It was one of the best things we’ll see for a while, I think.
Have you seen Xiu Xiu live?
CF: Yeah. Xiu Xiu is one of my favorite bands, actually.
Jamie is a very sweet person, by the way. He actually lives here in Berlin.
CF: I think Anton, our other guitarist, wrapped a show for Xiu Xiu before.
Anton Mocock: (calling out from the other side of the room) Very nice people! I was very impressed at the last concert when they remembered who I was from the previous time.
JL: They write the most terrifying music in the world. (all laugh)
SE: What’s the album with the bat on the front cover?
CF: Ignore Grief.
SE: Yeah. Absolute banger.
CF: That is genuinely one of my favorite bands. I think they were my top Spotify band for the past two years, and probably will be this year. I went on a run in Lisbon the other day on the first day of the tour. It was two Xiu Xiu albums back-to-back, and on the plane the day before as we were flying over, I did four Xiu Xiu albums back-to-back for.
SE: Cal introduced them to me on the plane saying, “Download this album, trust me!”, and we had a 2-hour fight or something. I was like “What the f.ck?” The whole time I was just looking out the window.
JL: Traumatized. (laughs)
SE: Yeah. It’s an experience.
CF: Genuinely one of my favorite bands in the world.
Let’s imagine we’re at a Musicians Theme Park 100 years from now, where every artist or band featured has their own memorial stone with a certain lyric by them written on it. Which one of the lyrics would you like to see written on DITZ’s stone?
JL: We don’t write them though, Cal does, so… (all laugh)
CF: I mean, you could still have an opinion though.
Of course, you’re all entitled to opinions.
CF: In the song “Senor Siniestro” on the new album, the opening line is, “I feel like death. I wonder if he feels like me too.” I think it’s one of the best shots. I don’t really do many quick little lines, I think that’s the best one.
SE: Remind me, did someone once recognize the book it was from?
CF: No, they said it reminded them of something. I haven’t read the book. I’ve read that author, but-
SE: Oh right. They were like, “I love this exact lyric, and it reminds me of this.”
CF: It was José Saramago, but I don’t know the book they mentioned. I read Blindness by him though, which is a very good novel. On the plane over to Lisbon, I was reading Fernando Pessoa as well, because I thought I’d get myself in the mood for Lisbon, you know? Lisbon is quite a hotspot for literary influence, so it felt right.
You can check out DITZ’ Bandcamp profile here.
