Revelry and Recklessness, Rendered With Relish
A frivolous and somewhat arbitrary title used to describe an interview with The Last Days of Jesus
~by Lucas Lanthier
(live photos by Uncle Nemesis, promo shots from the band's website)
 

My father always told me that the only reasons to go into the big city were to get a hooker, score some crack cocaine, or see the Last Days of Jesus play a concert.  I’ve followed dad’s advice staunchly and steadily, up to and including the third article, and I truly feel that my character and constitution can’t but have profited from such high moral and philosophical doctrine.  I’ve seen the Last Days play twice; once in their hometown of Bratislava, Slovakia, and the second time in Prague, Czech Republic.  It was at that second show that I posed a few questions regarding their megalithic entertainment enterprise, a venture that results in circus-sideshow stage manias and a hodge-podge of industrial-strength calliope music with a martial flair and a fairy-dust sprinkling of… the theater!  In other words, Magic.

SETTING: 
Prague, Czech Republic, backstage at the Futurum Club, after midnight, some time in November, 2003

Luc:  mary0, are we scoffing at the Bohemians by sipping wine instead of drinking beer?  Is your Moravian pride at stake, or do you simply prefer wine? 

mary0:  Well, we just use to drink anything what does not use to drink us. We prefer beer and wine. Anjou drinks wine only, Fessy is a beer drinker, and Vajco’s and my preferences depend on the instant condition of our stomachs.  So we like both good wine and beer. That’s it.

Luc:  Well, this is definitely good wine.  Do you drink before you play, or is it the reward after an evening of hard work upon the stage?  And speaking of the stage, your new material seems to have a crazy carnival edge, which I thought was great! Have you gone through a stylistic renaissance, or are you simply exploring new ideas?  It seemed quite a new musical direction compared to the last album.

mary0:  Our work has always been about trying to combine the classical atmosphere of bands from the early eighties with contemporary sounds. At the same time a typical part of our music is a huge portion of irony (also in the band name) and some mad schizophrenia, which is often confusing the listeners. The new circus-like moments are connected to this approach; it is a logical result to us. It reflects our state of mind and corresponds with the lyrics.

Luc:  Now you’ve been doing this for quite a while, I think.  You’ve been around for nearly ten years, or a bit longer.  What are some of the philosophical changes that have occurred for you during that time, as it relates to songwriting and playing rock and roll in general? 

mary0:  Some changes occurred for us, it is logical. We started when we were 17-20 years old after being just in small bands before. There is a shift. Our ideas have changed, we are more skeptical, ironical, our music is more aggressive. We do not want to beat about the bush anymore. Everything is more particular and straightforward but includes also some biting and sarcasm. We are not messiahs, even our name evokes it to some people, but that’s it, both the name and our work are still on the edge between seriousness and mockery. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish if we are serious or not, but it is up to anybody to decide. We are speaking to people who use to think about things. On the other hand, some people just do not care and would never bother themselves with thinking - such persons suck!!! At the end of the day we are just a rock and roll theater anyway. 

Luc:  I think Ye Olde Praha Towne was ready for your rock and roll theater, judging from the crowd’s reaction tonight.  Is Prague a fun city for you? 

mary0:  As you know, Slovakia was part of Czechoslovakia until 1993, so Prague was "our" capital city and we have a bit different relationship to this town and the Czech Republic as other foreigners may have. I like Prague very much, but in my opinion its magic seems to disappear in some way. But Prague belongs to cities I like in general because of their rich history, lovely narrow streets and small cafés, bars, vaults... We have many, many friends and fans over there and we love to come back and have a good time (and a good drink). But one thing has not changed - there are still many Russians in Prague. In the communist era they were soldiers stationed abroad, today they are... OK, next question please. 

Luc:  Ah, I see!  Let’s talk about your home city, then.  How is the local, Bratislava support for the Last Days of Jesus?  And what other cities do you like performing in? 

mary0:  We love Bratislava. We love to travel, too, but enjoy coming back home. That is why I like to develop the scene here. It is still underground of course, but maybe that is the best. We have a good fan base here, the concerts always have great atmosphere. But we like to play also in Poland, the Poles are very enthusiastic and open, the Germans for instance are a bit more reserved... Last year there was a great audience in Nancy… Brno and Prague are always OK, we love to play at the Beyond the Veil Festival in Leeds… we enjoyed our last gig at Cafe Transylvania in Birmingham... We have a good feedback very often. Paris was also great…

(At this point Anjou leans in, and with nostalgic reverence, speaks briefly, but poignantly, of the magical hills of Scotland before moving off to explore the possibilities of a half-empty bottle of a dry Moravian vintage of some sort.)

Luc:  Ah!  The magical hills of Scotland!  He’s right, of course.  But wait, what happened that made them magical for him? What was her name? Or was it merely the landscape? 

mary0:  Ha ha... We have a lot of nice memories of Scotland; the landscape really impressed us. Anjou cannot remember any femme fatale… I think it was really about the hills... During our last UK tour we spent some time with visiting various places and cities and we liked what we saw very much. The mystical city of Edinburgh or ruins of abbeys- everything was quite exciting. The Castle of Tantalon for example- a ruin at a high cliff- it kicks ass, everybody should see it... 

Luc:  In other words, the ideal place for rock and roll theater!  You guys have actually been involved with a variety of theater productions, besides your regular stage shows, haven’t you?  Tell me about some of these other projects. 

mary0:  GUnaGU is a well-known avant-garde theater here in Bratislava. The piece is called Gothic, but is not about Goths, just about weird relations between people, about pretence and chaos inside of us caused by the changing society after our velvet revolution in 1989. The play was written in the mid nineties but was put on the stage a bit later. Karol Vosatko, the director, knew our music and found the chaos of our songs would match the chaos of his characters, so he used our songs in the soundtrack. It is very exciting to co-operate with other artists and see how they interpret, transform and redesign the ideas of your music. The things get a new dimension and it is great if your work evokes something... Martin Gerboc, the director of our video clips, is working on something again, so we will see!

(Here, there was a very marked devolution in the collected party’s social antics, as rowdy debate was joined with raucous laughter, the linking of arms in dance and strength competitions and tender affection, and erstwhile barbershop quartets adopted new pastimes rather than contend with the natural acoustic consequences that arise from alcohol-induced merriment, romance, and combat, sometimes all at once… and so the conversation was there ended, to be resumed some time later on...)

SETTING: 
An undisclosed veranda, overlooking an undisclosed landscape, at an undisclosed time

Luc:  mary0, greetings again!  Now that we’ve had some months to meditate and reflect, I have a few more questions for you!

mary0:  OK ;-)

Luc:  The new album, Alien Road is out, and I love it!  It seems that a long time has passed since the last one.  Was it a hard-fought battle to release this guy?  What’s the story?

mary0:  Frankly speaking, I do not know what the reason was. Maybe we were more critical with our work, we rejected many ideas right at the beginning. Besides this, we wanted to have more time to record the album and listen to it, we adjusted many things after the first recording.  Above this, we had no idea who our label should be. We had the intention to release the album by ourselves. But finally the guys at Strobelight Records decided to put it out and today we are very happy about this. We want to release a vinyl version of it very soon with some bonuses – two cover versions featuring the Slovak Punk-legend ZONA A. Together we decided to cover the song EMI from the Sex Pistols, as both bands had a very "special“ experience with this label, the second one should be the song "Potopa“ (Engl. "The Flood“) originally recorded by the mentioned ZONA A – this will be a very special thing, because it will be our very first song sung in Slovak language.

Luc:  How was your recent tour with Antiworld?  Did you have fun?  Let’s hear a funny story about those Portland zombies.

mary0:  It was absolutely great. We are still remembering the time spent together, we love them, they are great people. We like their humour, the whole tour was a big funny story, I just remember days and nights of big party. Well, there are some special funny things, like MARSHMALLOW, RAMONEEEEES and DRUNKULA, but I am afraid this will be understood by our friends from Portland only!

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTAL SECTION: 
The cast and crew from Antiworld chime in with a special tour commentary…

Luc:  Okay, guys, tell me the truth about the Last Days of Jesus.

Ravenscraft:  They are totally fun and can drink beer 24 hours a day!

Granny:  They love the punk rock music...and they can sing a gypsy chant!

Frank:  They like their wine too!

Luc:  And you were on the road with them for how long?

Granny:  Not long enough, only one week.

Luc:  At the end of the tour, did you want to take them home and keep them as pets, maybe putting them in a crucifix-shaped terrarium?  I hear that young Last Days of Jesus' need more protein in their diets, but these guys may be mature enough to subsist on vegetable matter.  And don't forget they'll need a heat rock or some other source to keep warm.

Granny:  I know what to feed them.  One of their favorite foods is called "Banany"(chocolate covered banana gel) mmm mmm good.  Just lay out a trail of those and they will follow you anywhere.

Ravenscraft:  We already have a bunch of crazy animals in our house!

Jenn:  I wanted to keep them as pets and name them, Mr. Giggles, Marshmello, Rudy Ramone, and Count Drunkula.

Frank:  More like a castle shaped terrarium and a diet of Couscous.

Luc:  Did they show you any magic tricks?

Granny:  They told us some jokes...ask them the one about the rabbit and the bear!

Ravenscraft:  They showed us how to make a lot of beer disappear in a short amount of time!

Frank:  They showed us the bomb shelter where they create their magic.

Luc:  And your grand, overall conclusion?

Granny: I am convinced that they are my long lost brothers and that we were separated when the mother ship landed on earth! 

Ravenscraft:  We didn't get to spend enough time with them.

Frank:  Never Go Home!

Luc:  All right, thanks for the data, my friends…

END SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTAL SECTION

(Back to mary0 and Luc)

Luc:  Anybody change their name since our last talk?  And, just curious, but do you guys have any pets?

mary0:  ...and what were the names the last time? Ha-ha…  Let me think, Vajco, our drummer, has a cat, Anjo-Pithecus, our keyboarder, had a dog, he died recently, I have a fish and a snail, but after buying a house, I mean when I will get the fee from this last CD, I would like to buy a dog... And Fessy, the guitarist, had also a cat...

Luc:  Okay, now I have to get serious.  As a black man living in America, I have a certain idea of what it means to have a white, trans-gender girlfriend.  Does the central European ethos, in general, discourage unorthodox romance, or can a poor man in the Carpathians love his goat without fear of social stigma and/or persecution?

mary0:  He still cannot, even this problem is not so huge or minimal in bigger  cities, but there are not so many. There is still a big influence of orthodox or conservative opinions in general. Maybe this is caused by the history, the communists never tolerated foreigners or ideas from abroad (except those from the East of course), so many people still use to be not very friendly to things coming from outside, here are maybe the roots of a certain paranoia from anything unknown, bigger, stronger. Today the catholic politicians still prefer heterosexual intercourse without  a condom and present it as the right way of life. But the new generation perceives those things differently.

Luc:  I see, thank-you.  Now I’ll change directions again.  As an Asian-American living in California, I can tell you that we have an abundance of fine sushi restaurants.  What’s the cuisine like in Slovakia, and what are some of your favorite places to dine?  Is there a wide variety of foreign fare to choose from?

mary0:  There are quite a lot of Chinese restaurants, but three of the four band members are vegetarians, so we do not use to go there, because they often prepare the sauces with chicken soup. Other national cuisines are represented poorly, so I think you still can be lucky in California. But the gastronomy in general started to develop itself just after 1989, when the communist regime fell down, so maybe in a few years also an Afro-American Eskimo will find his favorite meal here... We have some favorite places, there is a good vegetarian restaurant we are having lunch at nearly every day, they cook vegan, vegetarian but also with meat, so our manager SexDwarf can join us too.  The Slovak cuisine is very traditional with classic ingredients like potatoes, ground vegetables and first of all meat, but it is quite wide. From those traditional meals I like for example potato pancakes, Antiworld tried them also the last time... But I like to cook, so I often prepare meals at home, I like probably all cuisines of the world, so it depends on how I am, sometimes I like it spicy – Mexican, Arabian, Asian, sometimes just simple, like Italian. Above this I love to sit around with my friends drinking good beer and wine. We are very social beings in the band:-))

Luc:  That sounds just fine.  Next interview will have to be conducted during one of these home dinners, I think!  Back to music; have you begun work on material for another album?  Do you think the group will take a new musical direction, or is there still more to say using the sounds that you’ve captured in this recording?

mary0:  We have already started with some new stuff, but at the moment I cannot say, this will be for sure the sound of our next album. We never pre-define how our music will or should sound like, we are just doing things how we feel them right in that moment, or how we think the main idea should be transported. After some time we could say many things about our former recordings, but they are a picture of our state of mind that time, so at the end of the day we would not change anything. And the future? Well, we “Live for Today”...

Luc:  And are there any new film or theater projects you’d like to mention?

mary0:  Yes, but I would talk about it a bit later… We are also working on some special tracks, one of them is a song to be published as a bonus CD together with the new book from Martin Gerboc, the director of our video clips. The book is called “Kvapky krvi” (Engl. Drops of Blood) and it is a S/M fetish study...

Luc:  Lastly, tell me about your website, some of the history and what it covers.  It seems as though you guys have really done some hard work, through this site, in keeping an underground scene alive in Slovakia, and in the region.

mary0:  The whole thing started somewhere at the beginning of the 90s. Together with my friend DJ Stigmata we begun to run parties (even he was DJ-ing already before), a fanzine called Stigma (we managed to publish two issues as an official magazine in 1998) and a local radio program dedicated Goth/Deathrock/Batcave/Electro and blah, blah music. Stigmata started then do things by himself, so at the moment I am running all the things together with my friend and our band manager SexDwarf. We are organizing parties, added the webzine www.batcave.sk to it and making concerts and a lot of other stuff… We decided to go on-line with the site, because we wanted to bring a local information source about this kind of music and last but not least because many especially younger Goths started to consume all those bullshit magazines, which are very often just deforming the scene by featuring dark-electro-non-sense and metal-like stuff. Our banner is “BACK TO THE ROOTS”...

At about this time, several servants made their way onto the veranda and began to sweep the dust away, and we were compelled to move inside.  The conversation turned to ethereal topics and questions of historical trivia and some time later I took my leave, happy to have had this second chance to visit with one or more of the very fine fellows from the Last Days of Jesus.   Between the backstage three-ring circuses, the magical hills of Scotland, and the tour escapades of the mysterious Count Drunkula, I hope I’ve illustrated sufficiently that the new Last Days album, Alien Road, needs to be on every CD player in America.  And I demand my right as future President of the United States to state firmly that this interview is ended.


The Last Days of Jesus: http://www.lastdays.host.sk/

Antiworld: http://www.anotherstateofmind.net/antiworld%20home.htm

Cinema Strange: http://www.nightmarezone.de/cinemastrange/
 

11/14/04