Better to rock up late than never

Frontman Mikel Jollett (centre) with other members of The Airborne Toxic Event, who will be playing in Auckland next month. Photo / Supplied by Universal Music

At 35 years old, Mikel Jollett knows he's a late starter in the rock 'n' roll business. The leader of the grandly named American band, The Airborne Toxic Event (thankfully also known as TATE for short), says he gets emails from teenage fans wanting advice.

"I have this kind of avuncular relationship with some of them," he chuckles at his Los Angeles home. So old uncle Mikel takes it upon himself to give them practical solutions like, "Don't smoke weed at high school, but once you get to college you should probably be alright."

Although, when it comes to songwriting, Jollett pipes up that Leonard Cohen didn't start writing songs until he was 33. So there's still hope for him yet.

While TATE are still little known in New Zealand, over the last three years they have made a name for themselves through MySpace, constant live shows, and with hits like the U2-meets-Killers catchiness of Sometime Around Midnight.

And they arrive here for a show at Auckland's Kings Arms on September 3 after playing the NME stage at next week's Reading and Leeds music festivals in Britain.

But Jollett says the band never expected to be as big as they are - and he's still a little perplexed by it all.

"We thought at most, if we were lucky we'd be like some sort of underground phenomenon," he says. "We never thought we'd live in this world of TV, singles, radio and press and all that shit. I'm still shocked at how many people show up to shows, and shocked when people ask, 'Can I have your autograph?' And I'm like, 'Why? What the f*** do you want my autograph for?"'

The reason he got into music only recently followed a late change in career three years ago. He had established a reasonably good writing career after years of chipping away getting published and earning enough money to make ends meet, and he was on the verge of finishing a novel.

But during one horror month in early 2006 - where his mum was diagnosed with cancer, he was diagnosed with autoimmune disorder, and he broke up with his girlfriend (who is possibly the heartbreaker he sings about in Does This Mean You're Moving On?) - he suddenly realised he was composing an album instead of a novel and decided to form a band.

"I'd been alone in this room for a long, long time just writing," he laughs. "I didn't have a job, I'd just write and write until I made enough money to not write for a while and just f*** around. I would find myself doing things like walking round in a raincoat with an umbrella and a bottle of scotch at three in the morning in the middle of summer. I'd be writing on my walls, on my arms, and sit there and smoke and stare at the ceiling.

Jollett says he got himself into all kinds of "useless situations that you do when you drink too much" and many of the songs on the band's debut album come from those times.

The band, also made up of guitarist Steven Chen, bassist Noah Harmon, drummer Daren Taylor, and multi-instrumentalist Anna Bulbrook, was recruited following a series of mini-parties that Jollett put on where he invited people who played instruments as diverse as the oboe, ukulele, and double-bass. They'd put a bottle of whisky in the middle of the room and the goal was to record a song each night.

"I would do that a couple of times a week and everyone who's in the band now was part of that because Silverlake is filled with musicians," he says.

What they've come up with is a mix of slick, catchy, and, because of the many instruments they use, often elaborate and flamboyant rock 'n' roll, with hints of everything from dour post-punk intensity to rabble-rousing Pogues-style tracks like Missy.

Compared to writing fiction, Jollett describes writing songs as "living out your dream life in front of people".

However, for him, the songwriting process is similar to writing stories in that he writes his best songs at night. "When you've got the late-night daring, and the sense that you can say anything," he says excitedly.

And when coming up with songs, rather than being infleunced by songwriters and musicians, it's authors like Czech writer Milan Kundera, and American novelists Philip Roth and Don DeLillo, who inspire him. A section in the latter writer's book White Noise is where the band name comes from. "They are people who were willing to say things that were unpopular but true," he says.

Musically, his first favourite band was the Smiths ("I liked the wit and the irony and the fact Morrissey meant it but he only kind of meant it."), but he is also influenced by David Bowie and Leonard Cohen, groups like the Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd, and late 80s/early 90s American indie bands Pavement and Jane's Addiction.

The funny thing is, TATE sound more British than an American band out of sunny Los Angeles, and Jollett has a theory on this.

"A lot of American bands start off as jam bands because there is a jam culture in America.

"You know, someone comes in with a riff, and then they play for a couple of hours, the singer goes home and writes some lyrics on the back of napkin, and they use that experience to sculpt a song.

"Although some of the greatest jam bands were British, the way most British bands approach it is there is one person who writes a song and the band form the soundscape from the start. So there is very little jamming and I think that's how we do things. I don't like jamming," he chuckles.

LOWDOWN

Who: Mikel Jollett from Los Angeles band The Airborne Toxic Event
Where & when: Kings Arms, Auckland, September 3
Album: The Airborne Toxic Event, out now