The Super Rad
February/March/April/May 2001
| I first heard about The Sugarplastic on The
Powerpuff Girls: Heroes and Villains CD. I was instantly intrigued
by the lyrical ingenuity as well as their skillful musical craftsmanship.
They have three difficult-to-acquire albums: Bang! The World is Round;
Radio JeJune; and their most recent release, Resin. The best
description I can give is Drums and Wires era XTC meets the
Pixies with an indie-rock twist. --Matt Finley |
What genre of music (if any) do you feel you play?
I feel as though I play melodic rock music, but that's probably because I don't
quite understand what rock music is. A lot of people have pigeon-holed The
Sugarplastic as a "pop" band--I think mainly because we have melodies that can
be whistled and because we don't sing about coitus and narcotics
exclusively.
What are your musical/lyrical influences?
Our musical influences are The Beatles (of course), the Kinks, Brian Eno, and
(speaking for myself) a lot of classical music--but that always sounds
dreadfully pretentious coming from a guitar player in a band (and so does using
the word "dreadfully").
Read any comics?
I never liked comics. In fact my friends at Meltdown Comics (in Hollywood) are
always trying to get me to read them, but lo and behold, I recently hit pay
dirt with this chap named Chris Ware.
I've become a fanatical endorser of the Acme Novelty Library. I've also
recently picked up the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and found it
uncommonly good.
What's the origin of the band's name?
The Sugarplastic came about in this way: our original drummer's brother had a
band (I think called Steaming Coils) who released a vinyl LP. Wee, you know
how on the inner ring of vinyls the band will sometimes inscribe a message or
some words? Well on the Steaming Coils album, each of the four band members
chose a word from the dictionary and inscribed it on the wax before pressing.
The four words chosen were "Sugar," "Plastic," "Apple," and "The." So we took
those words and named ourselves "The Sugarplastic Apple." Later, we dropped
the "Apple."
If you had any super power, what would it be?
This I've thought about since I was a tot. I even wrote a "paper" called "How
to Foil a Leprechaun" which detailed ways to avoid being tricked by a
mischievous wish-granted who decided to take your words too literally. Problem
was, I could never whittle my wishes down to lower than seven (that whole
"three wish" thing is ridiculous!) AND, all of my wishes were extraordinarily
selfish--they were all super powers (except wish number seven, which was that
no one else could have any super powers). Now you're asking me to whittle my
wishes down to one. Can't be done, amigo. I get at least three super powers.
If that's cheating then I'll just invent MegaSuperPower that has all three
rolled into one. Voila. In order:
| This interview was taken from the
February/March/April/May 2001 edition of the Super Rad. I tried
researching The Steaming Coils for websites to give more information, but
I didn't really find any good ones. Also I think that Ben and Kiara are
cuties. --evelyn |
The end.
Go back to Spastic-Laughter Press Clippings.
Thanks to evelyn