Interview

BLASBERG: What were the bands you most admired when you were young?

MOSSHART: Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, Captain Beefheart, the Stones . . . Johnny Cash!

BLASBERG: When did you start playing music?

MOSSHART: When I was 13. I just sang at first—I didn’t ever play guitar before The Kills.

BLASBERG: What was life like before The Kills?

MOSSHART: I was in another band in Florida, touring and going to school. I started that band when I was in junior high school—

BLASBERG: Wait, junior high? Like sixth grade? I was still passing notes in sixth grade. Hell, I was still dating girls in sixth grade.

MOSSHART: It was, like, an indie-punk band. It was called Discount. I didn’t make up the name.

BLASBERG: Still, that’s good for a bunch of sixth-graders. If I were in a band in sixth grade I would have called it The Banana Republic Club.

MOSSHART: That might have been better. But I’m thankful for that experience. I was touring at 14. That’s when we toured England and I met Jamie [Hince].

BLASBERG: How did you two hook up?

MOSSHART: Touring then was low-budget. I met a lot of people on that circuit, sleeping on people’s floors. Once I stayed in Jamie’s apartment—it was kind of this squat with two levels. Downstairs were my friends Ben Corrigan, who drove our tour bus at the time and who is now a photographer, and Sean Forbes, who works in a record store. I stayed with them, and Jamie lived upstairs with this unpredictably difficult kid called Simon, who once got wasted on whiskey and started waving a big bread knife at me and talking nonsense. I expressed an interest to Jamie in working with him. I said that I was done with the band I was in—I felt like all I did was make up words to other people’s songs—and I wanted to do something different. I told him I wanted to start writing myself, and he lent me a four-track to take on the road for the rest of my tour, which I took as an opportunity to mix, like, 20 tapes of music and bring them back to have Jamie listen to them. I really looked up to him.

BLASBERG: But this is purely musical? There was no funny business between you two?

MOSSHART: Absolutely only musical. Nothing more. I was really nervous around him—I don’t think I spoke in a year of knowing him. I just giggled. He made me laugh all the time. He’d talk, and I’d listen.

BLASBERG: How do you two work together now?

MOSSHART: It’s still like that! [laughs] No, we work in a million different ways. Sometimes we sit together and jam things out—but we’re both equally controlling and equally secretive. So we’ll work separately, even in the same room, where we can see but not hear each other.

BLASBERG: Your last record was everywhere.

MOSSHART: It’s weird. The music enters this public realm, whereas before it was private. You don’t know how anyone is going to react to it. You don’t even know how you’re going to react to playing it. It’s a total mystery.

BLASBERG: So you never thought your song “Sour Cherry” would become a Gossip Girl promo?

MOSSHART: No, but I was very proud of that. I love that show. I have friends on that show.

BLASBERG: But isn’t it bizarre? For a rocker in London to discover her song is the anthem of an American teen drama?

MOSSHART: Not for me. I think it would be more bizarre for my mom to hear it on TV. For me, that’s the industry I’m in. When you do music, your friends are writers, actors, painters. It’s all under the same roof. So anything creative is interesting to me. I don’t really like the idea of my music showing up in a beer commercial—that would be weird. But being on a show that I watch? That’s kind of cool.

BLASBERG: Still, you have entered a realm that’s not just about music. If someone hears your song on Gossip Girl and buys your CD, that’s probably an audience you didn’t expect. And Jamie dates Kate Moss, which is a whole other element.

MOSSHART: I don’t know if that kind of attention helps or hinders. Regarding Kate, you could look at the sales for The Babyshambles [Moss dated Pete Doherty, who is the band’s lead singer and guitarist] and say having Kate attached to your band—in the media, anyway—doesn’t necessarily help. It’s a totally different group of people who read tabloid magazines compared to hardcore music fans and people who go to gigs. [Tabloid readers] work in offices or something and probably don’t have a real connection to the arts. They don’t care, they just read these magazines on the train. I don’t think they cross over.