Black Kids Interview

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

Party lights are on dude. Florida’s Black Kids are here to show you how.

Reggie Youngblood, sister Ali and drummer Kevin Snow are pretty exhausted. Chatting with three members of Jacksonville, Florida’s pop darling band of the moment Black Kids, I’m getting a grasp on how much work their chance at breaking out of their hometown to an international stage has been. The easiest part apparently was being discovered; the band was playing at the Athens Pop Fest in August of last year to around forty people including several bloggers. After seeing the band they got typing and launched them into the worldwide blogosphere, though not necessarily with all the facts. An early blog mentioned the band sounded like My Bloody Valentine and Arcade Fire and since then almost every article about Black Kids has picked up the same thread. It’s something they are keen to dispel.

“It was a lazy thing to write and everyone else just picked it up. We don’t feel like we sound like them at all,” states Reggie. “But then we’ve also heard that we’re from Brooklyn, are all fresh faced teenagers and none of us are black.”
Growing up in the “culturally bereft” (as Kevin calls it) Jacksonville, Florida, Reggie and Ali were raised on a musical diet of Prince, Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie and P Funk, Al Green and The Beatles.
“Personally I had ADD when it came to music,” states Reggie. “I would obsessively be into one artist or genre and then move on. I was really into cock rock for a while, then gangsta rap, metal, grunge, classical guitar, emo. I think that’s what bothered other people about us was that we’re really just throwing together a bunch of elements that don’t want to live together. I think the trick is to just make it seem like it’s natural. Like there are some groups that can just fuck with any genre and make it seem effortless, like Magnetic Fields or Yo La Tengo.”
Listening to their debut album Partie Traumatic you can hear the funk and r’n’b upbringing of the Youngbloods, together with synth pop and a large English influence that is most notable in Reggie’s lyrics and vocal style. The presence of miserablist icon Morrissey is probably more evident in an early incarnation of Black Kids when Reggie and bassist Owen were in Mata Hari, a band that eventually sunk in its own mire of cheerless gloom. Though it can also be traced back further to Cubby, a band that featured Reggie, Kevin Snow and brother Keith. The transformation of Mata Hari into Black Kids came about but a twist of fate, as Reggie tells me.
“Our drummer decided he wanted to become a guitarist in another group and that left us drummer less naturally so my first thought was Kevin Snow but he refused to be in a group called Mata Hari and he didn’t want to play the same songs. I would say he’s pretty much the matriarch of the group and I would say I would be the patriarch,” laughs Reggie. “So Momma bear wasn’t happy so we had to write new songs and it had to be stylistically different. Mata Hari had done a lot of pre-programming and we didn’t want to do that, we wanted the synthesizers and the keys to be live hence Ali and Dawn were recruited.”
After two years of gigging in Jacksonville they played the Athens Pop Fest and soon found Kate Nash, she of numerous covers and infinitely annoying voice had covered their song ‘I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You’ and thus introduced them to an English audience. She requested the band for one of her tours which gave rise to their popularity in Europe, and before long there was talk of releasing their debut album. Called in for production duties was ex-Suede guitarist/Midas touch producer Bernard Butler, but in order to get the album out for the festival season the band spent just over a week in the studio to record, feeling rushed, but satisfied with the result nonetheless.
Still relatively fresh to constant shows, I wonder how the band is holding up?
“All of our shows have been wonderful since we came back to the UK,” says Reggie. “I think it’s made us really improve.”
“Yeah January was our first time touring and it was a rocky start,” adds Kevin. “We’re just getting used to gigging all the time but we’re getting a lot more consistent now.”