How Jamie Hince Almost Lost A Finger While Making The Kills' 'Ash & Ice'

The Kills' Jamie Hince has just come home to the house he shares in London with bandmate Alison Mosshart after walking his dog, Archie. It's rainy and miserable, about 10am ("It's not [early] for normal people, but it's early for me"), and he's chatting to The Music between headline shows in London and Atlanta. His dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier crossed with a Vizsla, was born without a tail: "…So he looks a bit weird. He's a beautiful dog: people kind of stop you in the street and ask what breed he is."

The Kills, armed with their fifth record, Ash & Ice, will be returning to Australia in July for Splendour In The Grass — "it feels like a world tour", he says, speaking of his really good memories of "a lot of laughter" in Sydney and Melbourne: "In fact, after I got married, I took my wife to Australia." Throughout our conversation, we can hear the warmth in Hince's voice. He describes himself as "the most positive person I know", and chuckles easily, earnestly and often.

"I can't ever fall for that sort of stuff. I didn't sense any of Jimi Hendrix in there, but I did love the studio."

With five years between Ash & Ice and 2011's Blood Pressures, the new record seems to have had a long and winding gestation period, taking Hince and Mosshart from Russia and Nashville respectively, to a ramshackle mansion in the Hollywood Hills, and finally to Electric Lady Studios in New York, a place where Hince has partied, and where Mosshart felt the ghost of music icons past: "I can't ever fall for that sort of stuff. I didn't sense any of Jimi Hendrix in there, but I did love the studio.

"I guess I don't like to look back too much. When I was in there I wanted this to be the place where, rather than thinking 'This is the place where this was recorded in 1972…' I always just think about, I want people to be like 'This is where The Kills recorded Ash & Ice!' That's what I want."

Hince and Mosshart made 80 percent of the record in "a rented mansion in the Hollywood Hills, [a] rundown, beaten up, leaking, falling apart mansion".

"I wanted to be just suddenly on the spur of the moment 'Let's go for a drive,' you could drive somewhere, if you needed to get out you could drive down Sunset Boulevard at 3am and see some absolute freaks, or you could go to a bar, eat good food…

"In reality I was on the point of going crazy in that house, I was just doing too much of everything, working and everything, and I didn't really go out very much. Everyone else would go out and I didn't take advantage of it too much. There were times when I was just on an absolute roll just writing all through the night and I would be going to bed when everyone else was getting up. It was lonely for me."

Hince and Mosshart have two very different approaches to writing music. "Alison, when we have to start writing the record, she sits in her little studio in her house in Nashville with a microphone and a guitar and 200 cigarettes and just keeps playing whatever comes out, so she's just playing all the time and she'll come up with three or four songs in two days. That's her process, kind of like exploding.

So Hince booked a cabin on the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Vladivostok and back again — a journey of 12 days and over 12,000 miles (about 18,500 kilometres). "It's truly a once in a lifetime thing in the sense that it's a real sense of achievement when you've done it, but you definitely really don't want to do it again. I'm going to find something a bit more glamorous next time," Hince chuckles.

"I thought that it would be sort of like a changing landscape and it'd be quite sort of, there'd be mountains, basically different backdrops, different landscapes while you're passing through these kind of bizarre territories, as it gets closer to China and Mongolia it'll change even more. And really it didn't change very much, it was just lots of silver birch trees for like two weeks.

"I'll go to Jamaica and spend a week trying to write a song there. And this time around I started it on the Trans-Siberian Express."

"So there wasn't that much to see, but what happened was, I think when you starve your brain of stimulus it kind of starts working, it finds beauty in really mundane things, and I started really finding that. I just was euphoric on that train after a while, it was like I would see something in the sky like some sort of vapour trail from an aeroplane and it would just be, I could study it for like 20 minutes just staring at it. And then my imagination kind of ran wild, it's almost like you're going— there's a sort of madness about it. Some of the things I was thinking of after the first week, having not spoken English to anybody, it was really bizarre, I started thinking about all these things about quantum mechanics and magic.

"I would describe it as completely solitary. I didn't make any eye contact with anybody. It was just not like that. It wasn't like a holiday train, it's not like the Orient Express. It's a proper working train, a battered beaten-up old train, most of the time you can hear some drunk soldiers in the carriage next door. There's a dining car where you go and there was never anybody in there. I'd sort of pluck up courage to go. My little cabin was my little safe place and I rarely left it… When [the train] stopped at the station it only stopped for ten minutes, so there was a real sense of urgency and loneliness."

A trip across the barren lands of Siberia was not the only experience that coloured the record for Hince. In fact, the record may not have even been made — we may have seen Hince reinvented as a "studio dude, a producer" — after he almost lost use of the middle finger of his left hand, "the hand he makes chords with". Following multiple surgeries, he learned to play guitar again.

"I had a problem with my hands and I had cortisone injections in my knuckles and then I slammed my finger in a car door. It was a series of bad, bad judgments. My surgeon gave me another injection into my broken finger. Then I sort of happily went away to Morocco with my wife and it just started hurting more and more and more and more. It was just throbbing, started to go black, and I knew there was something really weird going on. So I rushed home and they put me into surgery that night, and I nearly lost my finger.

"It turned out I got this deep tissue infection that completely rotted my tendon from the tip of my finger to my wrist and partly onto my elbow as well. So that was that really. So I had to learn to play. I had six operations, and I was writing songs and learning to play guitar again in between surgeries. Most of the time I had like a hand brace where I could move my hand between like six or nine weeks after the operation, so it really took a lot of time up. There was a lot of me trying to rehabilitate my hand by learning to use it again.

"It turned out I got this deep tissue infection that completely rotted my tendon from the tip of my finger to my wrist and partly onto my elbow as well."

"It was a pretty weird business, but it did make me think differently about songwriting. It made me realise that I'm really positive; no matter what happens to me I'll find a way of making it work. Things always turn to your advantage I think. I just tended to start writing songs in different ways — much more lyrical because I couldn't play guitar. I was concentrating on lyrics a lot more. I'm using bass sounds and software and programming; all that stuff you can hear a lot more on the record basically because I only had one hand."

Did Hince ever panic, or consider giving up the guitar? "I never really stopped. I never sat down and panicked, worried, I never felt sorry for myself about it."

And there is humour to the story of Hince's broken middle finger: "It's quite funny because it's my middle finger and it doesn't really bend. When I'm playing — sometimes I'll watch videos back — and it just looks like I'm flipping the crowd off the whole time. I've just got this stiff middle finger just flipping everyone off, giving the bird. Oh man, not much I can do."

Ash & Ice is a record birthed out of chaos ("I thrive on chaos"), the accomplished result of months of careful consideration. "I'm not a big believer, for me personally, writing a record in a really short burst, in a short amount of time. There's people that do that brilliantly, like Jack White does it brilliantly, Alison does it brilliantly in a way, writing songs in a short burst, but that's not my thing.

"Everyone's got their own fears — some people's fear is being in the studio too long and having to actually see themselves working on music. And that's a fear for a lot of people, they just want to go in and explode and leave, and get everyone else to look at what they've done. My big fear is being ordinary, and I don't feel like I can just make a record, I can't just write a song like that and put it out. I feel like I have to operate above my ability. I've got to find my super-self, find the magic in what I do. It's not just there. I don't presume that whatever I do is going to be good enough, in fact I kind of presume it's not going to be good enough.

"I just want to be better. I always feel like I'm operating slightly above my natural ability. Which is why I stay up all night learning to play a keyboard part, or learning some software so I can program something, or learning how to use an amazing new drum machine that I've never used before. And I'm always like working double time I think to try and hit. The standard I've got is always higher than my actual ability is I suppose what I'm saying. And I need to write songs and play music that surprises me. And it's kind of hard to do that. It's hard to make music that surprises you, not just surprises you when it comes out of your mouth or comes out of your guitar, but surprises you, two, three, four, five listens later, ten listens later it's still surprising you that you did that.

"And it's a struggle to do that for me, but it's what it's what I need to do. I don't think it's necessarily the best way of working but no matter how I try to make music in different ways, and no matter how hard I try to make it a pleasant experience, it's always a chaotic and stressful and 'I'm dying!' kind of experience where I push myself to the point of madness. That's just how I am. I'm terrified of making my mistakes public I think."

But the madness paid off, resulting in an honest, powerful, fiery album which Hince describes as the "most autobiographical record I've ever written": "There's no doubt that I've been through a lot since the last record came out. There's a lot in my life that's really changed and a lot of things have happened in my life that have been probably big, big things in anyone else's life. Luckily I've got a lot of chaos going on so it doesn't ever seem that crazy.

"I feel like the universe is moving around me in the right way. Like everything's lined up and I feel like there's a harmony there with what I'm writing. I know that sounds like hippy shit, but the reason I'm saying it is because, I know a lot of people have presumed the songs I've written are about something else, obvious things like my marriage or whatever, but they were written all before anything like that happened, so there's this kind of sense that things line up and they fit together, and they speak about things that are in a much further periphery, and I like that. I just like that a song about partying or about addiction sounds as much about a song about love and despair."