The Niceness of Thriceness

• 10th Feb 2006

AS THRICE GET SET TO ROCK BRIXTON ACADEMY ON THE FINAL NIGHT OF THEIR (SLIGHTLY SHORTENED) EUROPEAN JAUNT, I AM LUCKY ENOUGH TO CATCH A FEW WORDS WITH TEPPEI TERANISHI, THE QUIET, UNASSUMING, GUITAR-SHREDDING GENIUS OF THE OUTFIT…

Last time I caught up with THRICE you were a little unsure about what the reception to ‘Vheissu’ would be. How have you found people’s reactions to the record and the shows you’ve played since its release?

Teppei: Um, I think it’s… for the most part it’s been pretty good. I don’t think a lot of people will tell you to your face if they hate your record or whatever but I know it’s probably been the most divisive record. It seems like people either love it or hate it kind of thing, which I actually think is really cool. I’d rather have people who really love our record and some people hate it than have everybody be lukewarm about it, you know? I mean it’s definitely a pretty big departure I think from the last record and I think some people were disappointed that we didn’t make the same record over again but I mean that’s just kind of ridiculous…

Do you think maybe you’ve reached a newer and different audience to that of your previous records with this album?

Teppei: I think it’s maybe starting to. I think that a lot of people who’d maybe appreciate the record probably have preconceived thoughts about us and probably wouldn’t pick the record up unless somebody told them to. If they don’t get a recommendation or whatever then a lot of people won’t pick it up, but I think as the word gets around I think that a few people are starting to pick up the record who wouldn’t have thought to before so… It’s pretty cool.

As you play the songs more and more are they ever-changing and evolving?

Teppei: Yeah, I mean it’s kind of a slow process usually. A lot of our older songs we now improvise on cos we’ve played them so many times and we’re always changing them, you know what I mean? But, I don’t know, the new songs… a lot of them we’re just trying to perfect live first so… I think it’ll happen.

Is it hard to have any worthwhile and gratifying communication with your fans now that you’re on a major and playing Brixton Academy and everything?

Teppei: Yeah, I think you reach a certain point where it just gets really hard to have communication with your fans I mean its just.. I remember a long time ago when we could play a show and I could go out there and watch a band from the crowd and it was great you know? A couple of kids could come and talk to you and we’d have a good conversation and we could sit at the merch table and talk to people. Um, but it gets to a certain point when you just can’t really do that and it’s just too much and you just end up signing people’s stuff and it’s really impersonal. Just like signing and that sort of thing. But we do a lot of meet and greets and stuff like that with radio stations and contest winners.

Is it better when you get to meet just a few of your fans at a time?

Teppei: Yeah, yeah definitely. I mean we do… we have a thing called the Thrice Alliance which is like a fan club kind of thing and we do, we’re actually not doing it on this tour I don’t know why, we should be… but um we’ll meet and greet at every show with the fan club people and usually there’s anything from 5 to 20 people at the most. So yeah, it’s cool, you get to have one on one conversations with some of them.

How’s Island life treating you?

Teppei: Great. Yeah, I mean we’ve never really had any problems with them. They’re really supportive and they really let us do what we want to do and make the records we want to make and make the decisions we want to make. They’re always really supportive.

When will you be getting down to the business of a new record?

Teppei: Not really sure at the moment… we’re gonna probably be taking the summer off so we’ll probably start writing then. But we have a few kind of ideas that are still in baby form but I don’t know… we’re thinking about it.

More ground-breaking to be done?

Teppei: Yeah, we have some pretty interesting ideas but we don’t really know what we’re going to do with them just yet.

With your profits from the sales of ‘Vheissu’ you’ve decided to continue donating a percentage to charity, as was the policy of your previous label SUB CITY. Can you tell us a little about how you came to choose 826 Valencia as your cause in this instance?

Teppei: Dave Eggers who’s an author… he actually did the artwork for the record; he designed the cover. And so we kind of got involved with him you know by having him do that and he runs that charity. He’s one of the people that runs the charity or the organisation I guess and so that’s kind of how we got involved with them. It’s just a cool thing, they do a lot of things with literature and writing with kids. They have tutors that go out into schools and have one on one tutoring with kids that are falling behind in English or whatever. They have writing workshops, creative writing workshops. Stuff like that, getting kids involved in literature and writing at a kind of early age which is cool.

And we also just got involved with a charity called Invisible Children. It’s an organisation that’s doing a lot of stuff for kids in Uganda. It’s not a really well known crisis. We actually didn’t really know about it until we heard about the charity but basically there’s kids being kidnapped and being forced to kill in militia – kids ranging from 8 to 13 or so. Really brutal situation out there so it’s an organisation that works with that.

We’ve been working pretty close with Invisible Children. We’ve done a couple charity shows for them. It’s really weird actually how… I don’t know if you’ve seen the video for ‘Image of the Invisible’…. But it’s really crazy, like the theme for that video and the lyrical content, even the title. It really ties in with what’s going on and that happened before we even knew about all that.

How is it playing with Coheed and Cambria because you must have done that quite a lot now…

Teppei: Yeah. We’ve known them for a long time now. It’s great, it’s fun. It’s like hanging out with good friends. Circa Survive too, they’re a great band.

How does it feel knowing that you’re going to go on stage at the famous Academy in a couple of hours?

Teppei: It’s pretty crazy. I’ve never been here before but walking in and seeing it, it’s cool. Yeah, it should be fun. Last show of the tour so it’ll be a cool way to close up

’Vheissu’ is out now on Island Records

www.thrice.net

Interview by Sarah Maynard