We made it! In the interest of saving time and money (mostly money), Can't Sleep is now a purely online publication. And we couldn't be more chuffed. To celebrate, here's my previously unpublished interview with the enigmatic force that is Whipped Cream Chargers.
I met up with them at their pad in Hibernian House to talk about religion and worship and can I say, as an interviewer, I couldn't have asked for a more eloquent, well read, polite bunch of gentlemen. Their music ain't too shabby either, a perfect combination of rockabilly goodness seasoned with a measured dose of bluesy psychedelia. You can experience it (if you haven't already) via their myspace and/or this video. After you read the ensuing interview, of course. Enjoy!--
CS: Do you think song writing is an act of worship?
Lucas: Well, we have this one song called 'Fifty Dollar Bill', which is about this guy who refuses to spend more than fifty dollars on his prostitutes. We kind of worship that guy.
Louis: He's kind of a recurring character in all of our songs, even if we just touch on him slightly. There's this one song called 'Lotus Rose', it's sort of a really sad, sombre song about Fifty Dollar Bill and this Vietnamese prostitute that he falls in love with. And he can't get away from her, because he loves her, but he still won't pay more than fifty dollars for her, and…
(to Lucas) did she die?
Lucas: I think he killed her.
Louis: I think he kills her because he only has fifty dollars, and she would demand more so he was like, 'Well, if I can't have you no one can.' And he shoots her, 'cause he's a cowboy.
Lucas: It's a tragedy.
CS: He sounds like a reasonable man.
Felix: We have some songs with biblical references, slightly. Well, I mean Jesus Hound...
Louis: That's about an actual dog called Jesus, though.
Lucas: A friend of ours has a dog called Jesus, and I had a rather mystical experience with this dog. At the first house we were rehearsing at, he was staying with us and he would always come in and bite all the leads and pull them out and ruin everything. And we'd be like, “Jesus! Fuck! Oh my lord, Jesus!” So we decided to write a song about it.
Louis: He was huge fucking dog, a pig hunting dog. And he had scars all over him from hunting these pigs. But he got really docile living with Lucas.
Lucas: I really like the Rolling Stones and they've got heaps of worship in their music, the darker side of things... I just read this essay at the start of [Nick Cave's] lyrics book and it's all about how the love song is trying to grab on to God, trying to flesh out God through the lyrics and whatever's going on. I personally only sometimes find that in Nick Cave but it's a pretty cool concept.
CS: What do you think, I mean there's a lot of talk about how God doesn't exist in the 21st century, what do you think we've replace God with?
Lucas: Money.
Louis: Starbucks.
Felix: Well, it seems as if society itself has replaced [God] with all sorts of false idols, which the bible actually implies, but it's actually up to the individual rather than to rely on a set religion... I still think it's important, to have a slight connection to [religion] but it's about people sourcing it out for themselves at this time. But, religion has definitely killed the idea of God, I think.
Lucas: I just think spirituality is a really important part of life. I used to be a really intense atheist, existentialist, I mainly just hated the organised bit… since then I’ve started realising that I didn't have to follow a religion in order to be spiritual, I don't have to read any particular book in order to be spiritual, it made my life better. There's just heaps of people who clothe spirituality under their particular religion and then say, “You need to pay for this...” Like; me and Jeff, the drummer, went to this Scientology meeting once just to see what it was like. And the whole thing was like, “You can join us, and we'll save you, but it's gonna cost ya! We've got 260 books you've gotta buy and read in order to be saved!”
CS: What do you think about that, the overlap of money and religion?
Max: Money and religion are intrinsically linked.
Felix: I mean, there was the idea of 'Absolution' back in England with Chaucer, who would describe it in the Canterbury Tales, with the pardoner who you'd pay money to and then go to heaven... It's sort of bullshit, actually.
Louis: If there was a heaven, and you could get pardoned, I'd be pretty happy with that.
CS: Going back a little bit, [to Felix] you mentioned that you think religion killed God. How do you think that is?
Felix: I think it's just a really strict doctrine, I mean it helps to an extent for plebeians to kind of grasp the idea of living a good life through religion but the problem is that when people become 100% religious with no spirituality, living by a set of rules and to an extent it actually closes people's eyes to the actual similarities between all religions and the recurring consistencies. Like, I was speaking to this particular Hillsong woman before I moved out from my old house and she was saying, “Oh, you know that Jesus is the only way to God. And you will only find God through Jesus” and I said, “I think that you can find God through anything, whether it be mathematics, music, meditation. Or even through different [Gods] say, Allah or Krishna.” And she was just like, “No no no no no no, that's not it, that's not it.” And so, she was an example of a fully religious person with absolutely no spirituality.
Louis: It's like a blockade. It's like people are putting a blockade on whatever this higher thing is, and whatever path you take to get to this, it's like these people – extreme religions and Christian scientists – those people just keep trying to block the average person, so you have to try and weasel your way in. And exactly what those people are saying is “God.”
Felix: And that God, I think it's just love. So to have a non-inclusive sort of clan where it doesn't actually encourage love for other religions, other people, trying to find love, which works as God at the same time, it seems almost flimsy.
Lucas: Well, I was just reading this thing; Crowley and Nietzsche both say that you can't shut out all the negative in the world, it's just as much a part of everything as the positive. And these religions are just deciding what's positive and saying, “You have to live like that.” And so they're kind of raping you a bit; you just have to enjoy everything that's provided for you by the universe. Whatever you want to call it - God, Allah or whatever - it's all been provided. You can't just shut the devil out and say that that's not part of you.
Max: It's yins and yangs.
Felix: It's all part of it, and religion's just giving you these rules that you can't live by. And that's why they say everyone's a sinner, and that you must follow through with these rules in order not to be.
Lucas: And pay the money.
Felix: Yea, and pay the money. It's like, no one's a sinner. We're all born here and we're all meant to do what we do. Some of the most evil misadventures have been the funnest ones. And that's an interesting point too. I was reading, I think it was in an Eckhardt Tolle book, that you have the idea of everyone being born into sin, that it's recurrent within the Buddhist philosophy. And you wouldn't think that Buddhism has “sin” but sin itself is actually an archery term where it doesn't mean to actively work against hitting the bull's eye, it just means when you take a shot and get it slightly off, that's a “sin”, instead of a bull's eye. So it doesn't mean that a sin is working against God, it's really just to not quite get the precise point of what it's meant to be.
CS: So do you think religion is just inherently paradoxical? That you can't win?
Lucas: I think it's designed so you can't win. Because obviously people in the higher levels in religion, say the pope and all of that, they would understand the deep significance of different ideas that the common man could grasp, but if you subject people to these impossible ideals that they spend all their time trying to live up to, and then say that they're evil for not being able to follow through with them, you're kind of putting them in this dead end. They all sin as well, they all have sinful thoughts, and I'm sure they realise the beauty of those sinful thoughts. It's just a dead end that they put people in because it really stops people from having the power to explore their own spirituality.
CS: Do you think most religions are reflective of human nature?
Lucas: I think they're reflective of a nature that's been pushed on to us. Like, there were all these really naturalistic pagan religions which had all of this stuff built into it that wasn't so much about sin, but more about the tragedy and comedy of life. About how everything just keeps playing itself out over and over again and is beautiful as is...
Max: But if you're talking about human nature, I think religion is sort of reflective of it. In the sense that people always strive for security and comfort, religion can offer security and comfort to some people.
Lucas: But to me, I think that's just in our current society.
Max: Well it is in our society but I think, you know, if you just look at even primitive animals, there are still fundamental things that they have, they have shelter and security and food -
Lucas: But they don't strive to get beyond the basic things like, say, the alpha male fighting the guy wanting to be the alpha male, they don't strive to be selfless and to therefore lose that thing that makes them become the one who can breed and have the most children. They don't strive against their natural functions in their society which have been instinctually built into them, you know? I mean, they don't look for security like we do, by allowing others to be their superiors. Maybe religions do reflect human nature at the moment, but I just think human nature is a really shit band at the moment and could be changed for the better with a few distortion pedals and a new haircut.
CS: Do you think everybody has their own version of God? Like, you guys have music, other people have drugs...
Felix: Oh yea, there's heaps of Gods. Yea, definitely. But the thing people don't seem to realise is, although our paths are completely different essentially it is the same plateau which we're all trying to get to. And that we could be sitting on.
Max: Well, if you think of God as a feeling then there's no particular plateau, it's just coursing through, constantly.
Lucas: Well, technically, we live in this field of infinite light, right? And everything that happens to us is made up of this light in different forms. And I had this dream once that I was in this massive spiral staircase and all around it were stained glass windows. And each one had a picture and people were just standing there, staring at these pictures of stained glass windows and that was their whole life. And I stood in front of mine, and I kicked out a pane of glass and this infinite, brilliant light came out of it. So everyone's just worshipping that light in their different forms... you can worship your muscles, you can worship television or whatever, but in the end it's all made up of the same stuff. You can get caught up in forms, and forget that its really a lot more complex and beautiful than that.
CS: How would you define a false idol, then?
Lucas: Anything, like, if I praise my guitar. I should really be praising what the guitar's made up of and what the guitar's capable of.
Louis: I would say a false idol would be a transient material thing. Something that's not a feeling, or something that's not the spirit. Or feeling a feeling that you know is fake, like jealousy or regret. There is definitely something higher than that beyond the material thing.
Jeff: Praise Xenu!
Sebastian: All hail Marduk!
