INTERVIEW
DENY EVERYTHING
by Christer Davidsson, March 2008
Posted on March 10th, 2008

Hey guys! What's happening in Cologne?

Not much, actually. Except for Carnival being around the corner, where everyone will be going totally nuts. I’ll probably be out of town this year though.

First off, tell me a little bit about the band. Who's who in Deny Everything?

Deny Everything is Björn on bass, David on guitar, Christoph on drums and me (Pablo) on the mic.

For how long have you been playing as Deny Everything?

Deny Everything was founded in 2003. We’d been playing music together before but never really focused on the band a lot. At some point we figured we wanted to take the band a step further, putting more effort and time into it. At the same time our music was evolving into a more hardcoreish direction and we decided it’d make sense to start over under a new name.

The obvious question... Does the name of the band have anything to do with the Circle Jerks? Ha ha...

Good guess. Actually I don’t even really like the name that much, but back when we were searching for a bandname we were somehow having a really hard time finding something descent, so we ended up agreeing on stealing the Circle Jerks song title pretty much out of a lack of alternatives. In Germany no one can understand what it means or even spell it out correctly. Actually we’re often referred to as Danny Everything or something like that.

Ha ha! Well I like it.
How would you decribe the band to someone who has never heard you and why should people check you out?

Well, I’d probably say we play punky oldschool hardcore with a lot of melodies. Why should people check us out? I don’t know, because we rule? Ha ha, I’m not very good at this sort of advertisement I’m afraid.

I love your new album "Fire This Time"! Are you happy with the way it came out?

Actually I haven’t listened to it in a while. There’s some songs I really really like and some that I thought could’ve been done better. We booked our studio time before we had actually finished writing all the songs for the album and time got a little tight at the end of the song-writing process, so I’m not completely satisfied with ALL the songs.
All in all though, I’m really proud of the record because it’s very good and it’s the best one we did so far and I think that if I wasn’t in this band myself I’d still like the record a lot in a lot of ways.

How has the album been recieved so far?

Pretty much all reviewers liked the record. One reviewer didn’t like my lyrics. Tough luck. A lot of friends and strangers also told us that they love the record which was really uplifting because back in the days no one told us they liked what we were doing, probably because what we were doing sucked. All in all the record has been a huge step forward for us as a band. The shows we play now are a lot better than they used to be before, because you can tell by the reactions that people know and like our record, and that makes playing live a lot more fun.

I think the lyrics on this record are good. What do you like to write about in general? Are there any specific topics you're writing songs about at the moment?

Thanks. Well, pretty much all our lyrics touch on political matters. I tend to write about the things I see in daily life and that I feel are going wrong in some way. I think that the “private” cannot be seperated from the “political” and so the way we treat each other on a “personal” level is a much more direct and important political arena than what goes on in parliaments, on meetings of politicians, parties etc. I think that these and other domains that constitute the field of politics in a more traditional sense often have very little connection to our actual lives. As opposed to this, questions of how we behave, how we talk, or how we approach each other on a daily basis are political in a very concrete sense. Since we as a band and as individuals spend a lot of time on punk and hardcore shows a lot of our lyrics deal with what we feel is problematic behaviour or thinking within the punk and hardcore scene, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, violent, masculinist behaviour etc. These are things that bother us because we think that our scene should be a place to question the norms and standards of our wider society, but instead we seem to be reproducing and reinforcing them in a lot of ways.

I like the way how you mix the agressive parts with melodies on the record. What bands would you say have had an impact on your music?

Hm. Let me put it this way: I love early 80’s US-hardcore. I also love a lot of melodic punk bands, those I grew up with, you know, the usual 90’s melodycore suspects, but also a lot of pop punk bands. What we basically try to do is mix these two influences. Most of our songs simply consist of one or two Minor Threat'ish hardcore riffs plus a simple melodic chord progression. I just like the kind of dynamic feel that comes out of that mixture and I hope that it makes the songs a bit more interesting. Plus it kinda fits with our political/lyrical approach as well, since we are pissed off about a lot of things but try to focus on a positive outlook on things as well. We just try to play the kind of music that we would like to listen to ourselves.
Then of course you could also just say that we’re a total Kid Dynamite-rip off, which most people do, and which is totally ok with us because we love KD and I guess they had a pretty similar songwriting approach.

Well, I actually thought of Kid Dynamite when I first heard you guys. Not a bad band to be compared to. Speaking of great bands, have you had the opportunity to play with any more established bands yet? It's usally the best way to get your name out there.

I’m afraid this list is gonna be kinda short. We’ve played with Good Clean Fun, This Is Hell, The Sainte Catherines, The Gaslight Anthem, oh and we had the pleasure and honour to support the Gorilla Biscuits in Cologne a couple of months ago. That was by far the biggest show we’ve ever played. That’s all the namedroping I can think of right now.



What are you guys working on now? Any new recordings coming up? Shows, projects?

We are actually recording material for a new 7” right now. We recorded 8 songs, one of which is a Kid Dynamite-cover (“Zuko’s Back in Town”) for a KD-Tribute Comp. called “Carry the Torch” that will be released by Copper Lung Rec. in the US pretty soon, and the other 7 songs will be released as an EP by YOYO-Records who also did “Fire This Time”. The record should be out by early May.
We’re also doing a short Eurotour, which is starting this week. There will be more touring this summer, but nothing’s fix yet. We might do a week or so in the UK around June.

What's it like playing punk/hardcore in Cologne or the rest of Germany for that matter?

Playing in Cologne has gotten a lot better for us in about the past year I guess. Before that people never really seemed to be into what we were doing musically and our shows in other towns were actually a lot better. Outside of our hometown we’ve had equally great and shitty shows in pretty much every part of Germany. It’s always kind of unpredictable. Sometimes we play shows were no one even listens to us and then a day later we might be playing to a crowd that goes totally wild and knows all our lyrics.

I've been to cologne a few times and I've been at clubs like the Sonic Ballroom and the Underground. Do you have a lot of good clubs to play at in Cologne nowadays?

Not really. Sonic Ballroom is a great club and it’s a gift to play there every time. But the problem in Cologne is that there are virtually no clubs for DIY, non-profit shows. Clubs are either to big or charge huge rents if you want to put something up yourself. Cologne has a kind of weird scene that is subdivided into a lot of smaller scenes that don’t have a lot to do with each other. Things are getting a little better since the Hit & Run Collective (our bass player Björn is in it) started putting up small shows a year ago. Some of those were just really great, inspiring DIY shows. The Collective also features members of other cool bands from cologne like Cobretti and Kingdom, who are really good friends of us. Apart from that, the scene in Cologne is pretty apolitical and somehow more focused on consuming music rather than doing something yourself. There just isn’t a real conscience for the value thing such as DIY or non-profit culture.

What's the best city in Germany for playing shows, according to you?

Hard to say. We like to play in Kiel because we have a lot of good friends there. Some shows in South Germany have been pretty cool too, like in Nürnberg or Darmstadt for example. I guess it depends on a lot of factors. As I said by now our shows in Cologne are a lot of fun too.

How do you feel about hardcore in Germany? Are there any good bands around? I know almost nothing about german hardcore to be honest. To me, Germany seems more like a punk country than a hardcore country. Am I right?

Well, there is some really good bands and there’s actually really tons of hardcore bands right now. Dean Dirg is probably one of the best and best known (not sure if you would file them under “punk” or “hardcore” though), Spermbirds are still around as well, Tackleberry is a smaller band from Kiel that is very good and tours relentlessly, there’s tons of cool thrashy early-80’s influenced bands like The Italian Stallion, Tangled Lines or Short Fuse, more “modern” sounding bands like Just Went Black, Empty Vision, and there’s tons of Metalcore bands that I can’t stand but that are probably good at what they are doing too. There’s also two cool pretty new bands that are more on the Lifetime/Kid Dynamiteish side of things called Goodbye Sweet Halo and Tomorrow Tomorrow that you should check out if you’re into that kinda sound.

How about hardcore in general? What do you think of the scene nowadays? Personally, I tend to like bands who are more melodic and positive rather than the tougher-than-you-macho stuff that is really popular these days.

I’m on your side here. I just can’t relate to most of the tough, metal-influenced bands, neither musically nor politically (I’m sure there’s some exceptions here). This is a matter of personal taste, but I tend to dislike all hardcore-bands that are not firmly rooted in punkrock. I don’t have anything against metal per se (I totally love Municipal Waste for example), but the sound, aesthetics, lyrics and politics of most metal-core just seems kinda ridiculous and, in a way, outdated to me. Luckily, there’s a lot of great bands waving the flag of punkrock within the hardcore scene, so as much as we may be complaining, there’s still plenty of inspiring and challenging bands, shows and music within this whole thing to keep things interesting.

Anything else on your mind? Anything you'd like to say to the readers of MUTINYZINE?

Well, maybe just thanks for being interested in our band. Hope to see you soon, on tour somewhere.

Ok, Pablo, thanks a lot for the interview! Good luck with Deny Everything!

Thanks!