Rebels with a change in voice

A biker dressed in black wanders among the tanned bodies and bright bikinis lounging around the pool of the Mondrian Hotel in Hollywood. With his helmet under his arm and hair like a freshly coughed-up fur ball, Pete Hayes from LA band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club looks totally out of place.

Another journalist and I are at the hotel to interview Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, but, because we're at the next table, we take the chance to see how BRMC's third album, and follow-up to 2003's Take Them On, On Your Own, is coming along.

Hayes obliges happily and takes a seat at our table. "There's a lot of epic kind of stuff on it, you know, heaven and hell, God and the Devil. All the classic stuff. All the classic battles," he smiles, baring his stained, dead teeth.

That brief interview was in early March and the band - who take their name from Marlon Brando's motorbike gang in The Wild One - hadn't finished their new album, Howl. But it was clear a change of direction was in the making.

Six months later, Hayes is in Los Angeles once again, but this time he's sitting on his back porch and on the phone. After hearing Howl, which opens with the mantra "Time, won't save our souls", I tell him he was right about the heaven and hell thing.

To that, he just cackles. "It's a bunch of things though and we were trying to have fun making a record within heaven, hell, God and the Devil," he says.

While their first two albums were a mix of squally, psychedelic, and drugged-out rock, Howl is a mix of country, gospel, and rock'n'roll. But this is not a singer/songwriter, unplugged, acoustic album. "I've never been into listening to me whining about my problems," he says, cracking himself up.

"We were just making the record in the style of the Beach Boys, Beatles, and Pink Floyd ... they sounded like they were having fun making a record and we figured we'd try the same kind of trip - take some LSD, and go at it."

"It's funny," he says, of recording under the influence of acid, "[because] you end up in the middle of writing something and then you're somewhere else, and you can't play the guitar anymore, but it's the thought that counts."

But before all this happened, the band (also made up of drummer Nick Jago and co-songwriter Robert Levon Been) nearly broke up. The initial sessions for Howl began back in June 2004 with the band revisiting songs they had been collecting over the years, but had never released.

However, the tensions within the band started soon after when the band were playing the European festival circuit in August. They were fighting amongst themselves, taking too many drugs, and Hayes declared that he wanted to leave the band. "I was just like, '[expletive] it, I'll keep the music to myself'."

But it was Jago who left, leaving Been and Hayes to complete the remaining dates of the tour without him. In one strange incident in Spain, a fan ended up playing drums for the gig.

But in November "Robert and I sat down and started putting these things [for Howl] down on tape" says Hayes.

Eventually, Jago rejoined the band and BRMC are back on track and playing gigs at fancy venues like La Scala in London. "It's nice to see smiles to the back of the room at La Scala, and they're shaking their heads and going, 'Hey'. And that's [expletive] great. That's what we want," says Hayes.

"We wanted to invite the listener in [with Howl], and we were just really going for that feeling of being a family, with friends around, sitting out on the back porch, stomping their feet, bangin' on a jug, chiming in."

On tracks like Devil's Watchin' and Gospel Song, you might think BRMC have gone and found God. Well, not exactly, says Hayes, who grew up on a farm in Minnesota where "the family went to church every Sunday and prayed for rain to make the crops grow".

"So it's definitely in there," he mutters.

Howl does have a spiritual vibe to it but this has a lot to do with the array of instruments - including piano, mandolin and trombone - and eight-part vocal harmonies, that come across like a gospel choir.

"But it's obvious that we're not a gospel choir from the 40s and we didn't grow up in that, but we love that music and respect it, and hopefully it came out respectable. It wasn't new ground, but it was new ground as far as recording. I don't really play piano, but I play piano, and I don't play trombone, well, at least I haven't since I was in high school, and harmonica, I've just been learning how to do that over the years.

"That's what was a lot of fun about it, playing instruments you've never played like the mandolin and thinking that you know how to do it," he laughs.

Hayes says this album is another voice to the band and likens it to the Beach Boys going from Surfin' USA to Pet Sounds to "and all that bizarre vegetable [expletive]" on Smile. "If you're into this band then you're into taking the journey with it. And if people are up for it, great. We're up for it."