Posted on June 20, 2010 - by Post Punk

Limozine: How To Get Ahead in Rock

Limozine © Kim Ford

With their second full length record “Evil Love” released recently, the four piece London based Limozine play punk rock n’ roll, inspired by a fusion of rock and 77’ punk. Their songs range from quirky to funny and based on the day to day experiences of singer Dean, of course booze and excess has its fair share of influence. Distorted caught up with the guys to find them in good spiritis and humour to discuss the band, rock and punk’s relationship and influences as well as already lining up their next record.

Ayisha: Can everyone introduce themselves?

Dean: I’m Dean; I’m singer and guitarist of Limozine.
Karl: I’m Karl and I play the bass guitar in Limozine.
Johnny 0: ‘Johnny 0 (Zero)’, lead guitar player, I think.
Tim: Hi, I’m Tim and I sit at the back and eat things.

Ayisha: How is everyone?

Dean: Yeah, cool, looking forward to the gig yeah.

Ayisha: How did you come up with the name?

Dean: I came up with the name…I kinda just wanted like a sort of punky, rock ‘n’ roll name that kind of just fitted the music. Originally we were called The Zips actually, like six years ago, and then we changed that from The Zips to Limozine. So literally we just became Limozine. Except it was (just) spelt with a ‘Z’, because there was another band that was spelt with a ‘U’ (Limouzine).
Karl: And it came out of the ashes of The Zips.
Johnny 0: All the best bands have a name that they change the spelling of – The Beatles, The Byrds, that’s it…(Laughs) How to get ahead in rock – be dyslexic! (Laughs)

Ayisha: Your musical style is quite interesting…

Dean: How did we invent it? (Laughs)

Ayisha: No, no; it kind of branches hashed-out rock ‘n’ roll with core-line 1977 punk. For instance, ‘You Da Boss’ sounds like The Vibrators a lot, and ‘King Cockroacher’ sounds like Dead Kennedys – the riff in that actually sounds like ‘Let’s Lynch the Landlord.’ I won’t tell anyone that, but it does sound quite similar!

Dean: If you do we’re busted (Laughing)
Karl: I think it’s the first thing we all heard.

Ayisha: Nah, I think it’s quite amazing, because you get these gaps in the song where you think, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds like that.’

Dean: Yeah obviously we played the Dead Kennedys’ songs, so I just loved the riffs.
Tim: We wear our influences on our sleeves.
Dean: Yeah.

Ayisha: Was that the sound that you were aiming for?

Dean: Yeah it was…I think with the songs I was writing, I just wanted to sort of put a band together that literally sounded like all my favourite bands basically. And like, the Dead Kennedys, The Ramones, The Stooges, The Cramps, all those bands. So I kind of thought, just sort of stick ‘em all in a big pot and just write some songs that sound like those bands (Laughing).

Ayisha: Have there been any bands that have done that before out of interest – like recent ones not dead ones?

Dean: I don’t know about recent bands; they might do it in the states or Europe, I don’t know about in England. I kind of think of those bands are just rife.
Karl: I don’t think anybody’s quite as shameless about their influences as we are!

Ayisha: Well, I think there’s a thin line between doing all that tribute crap and making something new but not stealing people’s stuff.

Dean: Yeah, I don’t think if any of it wasn’t new, it’d be strictly ripping it off. (But) I’d be disappointed if it was just (a

Dean © Kim Ford

tribute).
Tim: It’s because we know what we like as well. You only get that with being a bit older.
Johnny 0: Every single band that ever was has ripped off basically.

Ayisha: Is that what you wanted to do from the start?

Johnny 0: (Ripping off) is ancient; it’s just a musical fact, that’s what we do, (what) we’re interested in. But if you do it well, you rip off your favourite bands and it goes back (phone rings)…hang on…God -Muddy Waters is on the phone (Laughing).
Tim: There is live energy about us; I think it translates really well, and it translates on record and also when we play live. There’s not a shortfall between listening to the record and listening to us play. In the end, there’s so much energy in it.

Ayisha: How long have you guys been about?

Tim: As a four-piece, not long. Only a year.
Dean: We’ve recorded two albums. As a four-piece, about a year and 18 months. Before that there was me and John, and we were like a three-piece, we had different drummers and all that sort of stuff. And on the second album, we decided that we needed to get a sort of solid line-up and we also wanted two guitars. And Tim and Karl had just left another band, and we’d been playing with them for a while, so basically just said, ‘Do you want to join Limozine?’ And they said ‘Yes.’
Karl: Well, no actually we said ‘No.’ (Laughing) And then they said, “There’s plenty of beer.”

Ayisha: How would you relate rock ‘n’ roll to punk? I mean it’s quite difficult isn’t it? I know punk fed off rock ‘n’ roll from the start…

Tim: I think it goes back through Limozine to garage basically. It’s like good sort of 60s garage, goes through punk. I think we are a garage rock band, with all those influences. But I think it is…especially American garage rock.

Ayisha: People who come to your gigs, are they mainly into that punk, staple stuff or…

Karl: Well on the punk side of things, I wouldn’t say we were musically so much punk as more in terms of ethos. In just that everything that we do, we do it ourselves, we make it at ourselves.
Dean: Yeah, it’s got like a punk attitude. Personally, I kind of like the rock ‘n’ roll take because I kind of see rock ‘n roll it’s got a more sort of glam edge to it, you know.

Tim © Kim Ford

Ayisha: What are your musical influences? What have you grown up with listening to?

Karl: All kind, all kinds. Between us there’s a huge multiple of stuff.
Johnny O: Especially because we’re all massive music fans, and that covers obsessively massive amounts.

Ayisha:  Does (Johnny O) know that he looks like John Lennon?

Johnny 0: Most people are too young to even remember John Lennon, and they just know Ozzy Osbourne because of his wife, you know, on all those shows. And little kids (say), “Ozzy Ozzy!” People remember who Ozzy was, because his career had gone down the toilet, before Sharon kind of cleaned him up and scrubbed him and got him into America and on television.
Karl: He’s the new medical columnist in The Times, isn’t he?
Tim: Who Ozzy?
Karl: Yeah, yeah on the basis that he’s survived so much!
Johnny 0: But, I mean the thing is, we listen to all kinds of music between us. But what we’re doing, this is something that we all have in common, that we all love this kind of music and it’s something that is immense fun for us all to do together.
Tim: Yeah I think the other thing is that we haven’t lost the passion for music. The reason we live is to (make music).
Dean: But basically, we grew up with something like The Birthday Party.
Johnny 0: Karl and Dean, they were there at the time; they are punk rockers. Me and Tim are probably more, I mean we were there, I wasn’t a punk rocker but I was like listening to Syd Barret and The Beatles. And I was slightly frightened by punk, ‘cause I’m a wimp (Laugh) and I was a bedroom boy, but I was always playing my guitar. So when we go too muso, they bring us back from the edge. You’re turning it into Stevie Dan now!

Ayisha: What’s your audience like? Is it kind of younger people or older people or a mixture?

Dean: A mixture, yeah.
Karl: It is sort of a mixture, yeah. We’ve got 16 year olds who come to see us and we’ve got people who remember it from the first time round who come to see us.

Ayisha: Do you find it a difficulty to fit in with the modern market?

All: I don’t think so. No, not really.

Ayisha: I was talking to Dean before about your reviews being pretty good. Has it been mostly positive what people have said about

Karl © Kim Ford

you?

Dean: Yeah.
Tim: It’s been mostly positive, but the best thing is that the negative reviews that we’ve had have read more positively than the good reviews. I mean you either get what we do or you don’t. If you don’t, you come up with the harshest descriptions you can think of, which only make us sound better. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
Karl: And it’s funny: the negative reviews generally say exactly the same as the positive reviews, except they’re meant in a different way. They’re exactly the same thing (Laughing).
Dean: What was that Classic one – yeah I think that’s what we’re trying to say. It was like er…

Ayisha: I can’t remember now…

Tim & Johnny 0: “Primitive to the point of retardation, but in a good way.”
Dean: So yeah, yeah it depends how you look at it. We’ve had good reviews like that, but you could write a bad review and you could say exactly the same thing.
Tim: Depends what you’re into.

Ayisha:  And where do you get most of your song-subject inspiration from?

Tim: Over to Dean.
Johnny 0: That’s Dean. It’s just everyday, day-to-day living by Dean.
Dean: Yeah it is pretty much just day-to-day living.
Johnny 0: His girlfriend beat him with a baseball bat; he gets put in a cage…(Laughing)
Karl: And as for that Polish transvestite…
Dean: Where do I get it from? I think girls are a lot of inspiration, good and bad, and the rest of it just real and some of it’s just made-up.
Tim: We had a joke at a Camden shop the other day something about Dean’s lyrics. And they said, what if he sings something that you think is not right? And we were both like, “Well, we haven’t got to that point…”

Ayisha:  What’s the new one out?

Dean: ‘Mutiny Girl’?

Ayisha: Yeah I like that song.

Dean: Oh do you like that one? I really like that one. That was just like er…about meeting a good-looking girl, just as simple as that (Laughs).
Karl: You wait til you interview us on the next album.
Dean: We’ll have some crackers coming for you.

Johnny Zero © Kim Ford

Ayisha: So does it take you a long time to get from the lyrics to recording it?

Dean: No, we just recorded the third album.
Tim: No, no approximately 96 cans of lager.

Ayisha:  I was gonna say, you are reeling out albums pretty quickly.

Johnny 0: Once I get working on it, I’m going to do a fanzine of all the lyrics. The lyrics are so good, and they’re so funny as well. They’re serious, but they make you just crack up.
Tim: They’re darkly funny.
Karl: The great thing is that Dean is always typing things into his mobile phone, ‘must make a note of this.’ Things happen to us roundabout and, ‘Hang on, that’s a Limozine thing.’ He types it in for later reference.

Ayisha: And how’s touring been?

Dean: We’ve mostly played around London.
Tim: Well we’ve got our own club. And that’s where we get most of our gigs. It’s most beneficial for us, because we get paid for doing it.

Ayisha: Where’s that sorry?

Johnny 0: The Albion in Hammersmith. It’s a rock ‘n’ rollers club.
Tim: We’re coming up to our 1 year anniversary, so we’ve been doing it for a year; putting on bands, Djing, playing the music we like. So yeah it’s good, that’s our main gig. And then we just play wherever we can.

Ayisha: And what’s your most influential songs?

Karl: What songs that influence us or songs that influence other people?

Ayisha: Er, songs that influence you.

Dean: ‘Human Fly’ by The Cramps, Dead Kennedys’ ‘Holiday in Cambodia’, Ramones’, ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’…basically easy come easy go, that’s from my point of view.

Ayisha: Is someone called Johnny O here? It’s you right. Why are you called Johnny O?

Johnny 0: My name’s John O’ Sullivan, and most people call me Johnny O, because I introduced myself to you as Johnny O. And in all the bands that I’ve been in it’s always been ‘Johnny O, Johnny O, Johnny O’. And first Limozine album I’m credited ‘Johnny O.’ But I thought, I’ve got to work harder than this! (Laugh) And make the O a 0 (Zero). So I thought, ‘Perfect!’ Limozine. 0. So that’s why it’s 0. It’s just my surname basically. You know the famous quote about David O’ Selznick, the producer of ‘Gone With The Wind’? Somebody asked him, “What does the O stand for?” And he said, “Nothing”. He just did it because it sounded good. David O’Selznick rather than David Selznick. Gives you an initial here and there, or a fake name.

Ayisha: One last question: if you could support one big band, who would that be?

All: AC/DC
Dean: And Iggy and The Stooges.
Tim: Maybe the Eagles of Death Metal, if we were pushed.
Karl: No but with AC/DC we could share their oxygen tanks. They make us feel young. (Laughing)