When You’re Not Excited, You’re Not a Fan: An Interview with Nardwuar the Human Serviette

Nardwuar: And they just sort of slap it off, I’m not sure what they say about it, but I thought that caller was a genius, predicting Degrassi: The Next Generation.

Popshifter: That’s so funny. Have you read any of Chuck Klosterman’s books or the stuff he’s done in SPIN?

Nardwuar: Again, I really enjoy all his heavy metal references, but I don’t know a lot about it. I do appreciate his articles and I loved his April Fool’s joke when he reviewed Guns ‘n’ Roses (Chinese Democracy).

Popshifter: Yes! That was so great. I was totally fooled for about 15 minutes. Another music writer that I really like, although he can be kind of sarcastic which sometimes is a negative, is Nick Kent. He was famous for getting into fights with people and pissing people off—

Nardwuar at CITR
Photo © Barb Yamazaki
Image from Nardwuar’s Gallery

Nardwuar: Yeah, like the Sex Pistols. The only writer of that ilk that I’ve done interviews with is Jon Savage, the author of England’s Dreaming. He was kind enough to phone in during my Twenty Year/Twenty Hour marathon that I did on CITR, celebrating twenty years of Nardwuar the Human Serviette radio show. So I interviewed him live from London, England! And again, people phoned in and it was amazing to be able to talk to Jon Savage because he has such a learned approach and everything. He’s the only one of all those people that I’ve been able to interview.

And, that interview. . . a lot of it was revolving around his book Teenage, about the history of teenagers, which is kind of interesting because it wasn’t necessarily about rock and roll. So to answer your question, have I followed some of these people, the closest I’ve got was Jon Savage. But that was about his book that didn’t make it up to the rock and roll era, but just told the roots of that, which I thought was interesting.

Popshifter: You’ve said that you go in as a blank slate and you do research, but you kind of keep an open mind to let the questions flow, but how did you do your research before the Internet made it so easy? Did you look through magazines? The library? Did you talk to people? How did you find stuff out?

Nardwuar: Well, most bands nowadays have press kits and they had press kits before, so you could just ask the record label for a press kit and flip through that. Also, CITR had a clippings file, where they would hire somebody every summer for a year to go through all the magazines and do clippings. So when it was time to interview a band, you’d just go to their file and red about them.

Unfortunately, a few years ago somebody chucked out the entire clippings file. . . they didn’t realize the worth of it, the entire file—

Popshifter: Oh my god!

Nardwuar: It was an entire filing cabinet filled with stuff. And it had stuff from like, NME, Rolling Stone, SPIN, etc.

Then I would ask people at CITR. Like if it was a Techno band, I would ask the Techno guy. So I would approach various experts.

Popshifter: The clippings thing is really interesting because I’ve done that my whole life. Back from I first started reading music magazines at age 11 or 12. If somebody lost that I’d be devastated.

Nardwuar: I kept a clippings file, too, reason being that I’ve always been into local music in Vancouver. When I was president of the student council at Hillside Secondary in West Vancouver, I was in charge of getting bands to play dances. So I’d have to go and ask people, “Who should we get to play the dance?” and I didn’t know anything about local bands. But at our school we had a lot of people who were into punk rock and whatnot and some of them had been into punk or alternative music because there was a great cable access show called Soundproof. It eventually went off the air, but I was able to contribute to it at the end.

But before that when it was really, really popular, kids at my high school would watch it and they’d see a band on there—a local band—and they’d tell me to try and get that band to play the gig. So that’s how I ended up getting into the local scene.

People would say, “Why don’t you go get the Young Canadians?” With Art Bergman. And the Young Canadians broke up, but Art Bergmann had a new band called Poisoned—not Poison—so I got them to play a dance. And I got this band the Villains to play a dance and I got the Enigmas to play. They later turned into this band The Real McKenzies, a band who are still kicking it, Scottish punk rockers, on the Canadian scene.

All these bands have influenced me and believe it or not, The Evaporators have a song called, “Shaking with the Shaggy Shaker” which is all about those bands. Young Canadians, Enigmas and Villains set the stage for our future cold chillin’. In other words those bands helped inspire me.

We had a cool local media (i.e., Soundproof) and we also had good writers on the Vancouver Sun and they’d interview a local band at least once a week. John Mackie is still with the Sun and I would clip everything he wrote and put it into my clippings file. I didn’t start until 1985, but I have everything he’s written from then on.

So when it would come time for me to interview a local band, I’d be like, “Ohmigod, it’s time to speak to Slow. I could ask them about the Expo 86 thing! Oh, but they’ve broken up and they’re this band © [The band name is pronounced “Copyright.”—Ed.] now and oh, there’s some good little clippings I have that John did.” So I could interview Slow through © and I could read the clippings that John had written.

And Stephen Hamm, the bassist of Slow, now plays in my band The Evaporators. So it’s come full circle from a guy in a band that I totally idolized now being in my band and helping put together the song.

Click to read more from Nardwuar on. . .

Inspirations and approaches to interviews
Music journalists and the early days
Can Rock and Chris Murphy of Sloan
Beck (Hansen) and Bach (Sebastian)
Digging into history and school dances
Redd Kross and Bill Bartell
Nardwuar’s fave fanzines, part one
Nardwuar’s fave fanzines, part two

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