Pole Position

Interpol’s guitarist Daniel Kessler arrived in Byron Bay just yesterday, but has already been on a bike ride and hit the beach twice. “I was just sayin’, ‘You know what? I kinda just wanna rent a dog for, like, an hour.’ And today I was actually walking by the ocean... this dog all of a sudden, like, abandons [this woman] and just comes up to me... in the best of ways I was like, ‘I am actually renting a dog right now’,” he laughs disbelievingly. “‘This is all I wanted yesterday and then today this is what’s happening!’… Those moments are the best kind of moments, for me, when I go on tour.”

The guitarist has a dorky, infectious laugh and wheezes when he really guffaws (kinda like Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop). Kessler credits his two older brothers with introducing him to “pretty obscure bands... I mean, they also had good taste and I can safely say that. You know, my first musical memory is probably, like, The Jam – my brother was in The Jam fan club.” Kessler’s brothers also dressed the part, “Wearing Doc Martens in France in the early ‘80s, it was dangerous!... But my brothers were very young and were so life and death about music, it was like a religion. I think that had a very lasting effect on me.”

“Wearing Doc Martins in France in the early ‘80s, it was dangerous!

Interpol toured their self-titled fourth studio album “a lot” and Kessler says the band didn’t feel pressured to make another album. After taking most of 2012 “to do other things or whatever”, there was a point when Kessler and Interpol frontman Paul Banks decided to reconvene. Banks writes all the vocal melodies and lyrics for Interpol and Kessler praises, “He’s one of those guys who can write a thousand different melodies for one song, and it’s about choosing which direction you wanna go in and what you wanna say… And there’s certain songs probably, or certain moments, where I’m like, ‘I’m crazy about that vocal,’ maybe more than others, but there’s never been one where I’m like, ‘I don’t like that,’ you know?… And it’s, like, if I really didn’t like something I think I would say it, ‘cause it’s your music: it’s like, ah, life and death stuff [laughs]. If it’s really something you’re not feeling – and plus you have to play it every single day – you need to pipe up.”

Kessler says that El Pintor track Same Time, New Story almost became a b-side until Banks added some flavour in his absence. “I just remember walking in the studio the morning after Paul had been working that night and the engineer playing back to me what Paul had recorded... it was one of those great moments where I was just like, ‘I would never have imagined this in a million years!’… everyone was dancing around the studio.”

Despite the band’s personnel changes, Kessler stresses, “this record sounds like an Interpol record and I think people can identify that right away… They’re not Interpol pieces of music until we all touch it and move it into a certain direction.”