Going in for the Kills

Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince of the Kills have come up with their own sound

"Sorry, sorry, my mum's driving me crazy here," laughs Alison "VV" Mosshart, from the Kills.

"I can't do interviews if you're staring at me," she tells her mum sweetly.

The singer has just flown into her home state of Florida from Denmark, where the Kills played a gig the day before and she is understandably keen to spend some time with her folks.

"I really, really miss my family, but I don't miss Florida," she says. "It's really hot today and I've been wearing tonnes of winter coats for the past few months and I'm feeling a little bit weird."

She's back for the wedding of a friend who drummed in her old band Discount, which split up in 2000.

It was while she was in that band that she met Jamie "Hotel" Hince, the other half of the Kills. The pair, who released their debut, Keep On Your Mean Side, in 2003 and follow up, No Wow, this year, play the Kings Arms in Auckland on Tuesday and Indigo in Wellington on Wednesday.

"It was a whirlwind," she remembers of the time they met in 1998 while Discount were touring Britain.

"One of his room-mates had booked our tour and another one was driving us around," she says. "So I met Jamie then. He was upstairs playing guitar and stuff in their flat and I could hear him through the ceiling.

"I was just absolutely intrigued by him. I was really shy and he wasn't really shy, but I was so shy that it rubbed off on him.

"We never really talked the first couple of times we met but when we finally did - I think he came to one of my gigs, and after that we just talked and talked."

Their chats revolved around music, art, the New York scene of the 60s and 70s, bands they were both inspired by, and most of all, what they wanted to do musically.

"We both agreed that we wanted to do pretty much the polar opposite of what we were doing at the time."

He was based in London and she was in Florida so they started sending music packages back and forth to one another. But eventually she left the States to join him in London, and the Kills were formed in 2000.

"It was really cool because I felt like I had found someone to share all that secret stuff I used to do in my bedroom with," she says.

Keep On Your Mean Side was a stripped-back, and quite often abrasive, album that got them noticed enough to be playing alongside bands like the White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party. "We definitely wore our influences on our sleeve with the first album and we did a record of all the things we loved."

These included bands like Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, Velvet Underground and Fugazi. "They [Fugazi] were my favourite band since I was 11. I was obsessed," she says.

And if this is possible, No Wow is even more stripped-back. But with great tracks like Rodeo Town - where Mosshart sounds like Lucinda Williams - and Love Is A Deserter, it is more varied.

"The second one was about us having experimented with music long enough for us to come up with our own sound. We didn't use any effects, we didn't glorify anything, we just put it down," she says.

"The way we work we're both quite intense about things, quite emotional, quite bi-polar, and that was the appealing thing about when we first started working together. It was pretty perfect."


Performance

* Who: The Kills, made up of Alison "VV" Mosshart and Jamie "Hotel" Hince
* Where & when: Kings Arms, Auckland, Tuesday; Indigo, Wellington, Wednesday.
* Albums: Keep On Your Mean Side (2003); No Wow (2005).