Marco Pirroni of The Wolfmen

T-shirts, boring stuff.

I had this idea of a band called Wolfmen but it was just a name and I was hoping someone else was going to do it but I couldn’t find anyone else. Chris was doing another project at the time and he said, “If you play on some of my stuff I’ll play on some of your stuff.” So that’s what happened. We did these two separate bands for about two weeks and then we thought “Well this is just stupid. Why don’t we just do it together and just call it The Wolfmen?”

The original concept was retro garage glam rock soul so that concept hasn’t changed. Whether we’ve actually achieved that concept is doubtful. Concepts just fall by the wayside. It just depends on what is in the ear of the listener so they’re not really things that you should adhere to too strongly.

Ian from Damaged Goods was a friend of our lawyer’s and he suggested them because record labels aren’t as important as they used to be. There were certain things we wanted from a label and they fulfilled them.

We thought about it, but we both didn’t really see any reason to be exclusively online because the only thing people don’t seem to want to buy is CD singles. But they want to buy vinyl and they want to buy downloads so we thought, “Ok, that’s what we’re going to do. That’s what we’re going to sell them.”

Yeah, we write and produce everything, yeah. Though there is a producer named Chris Hughes who produced some of the work on EP. He was the original drummer and producer from Adam & the Ants He’s an old friend of mine so I got him involved in a couple of tracks.

The thing is that the great thing about home studios is that we can now record separate tracks and then merge it all together in this technological garage rock thing, but it’s still garage rock.

I think what they said was that generally people of our advanced years are going out to do reunion tours and rehashing old hits and doing this whole nostalgia trip. Funny though, that’s what we desperately want to do but we just can’t get it together, so we just decided to do a new band instead.

Yeah. This whole reunion tour thing is fine if it’s what people want to do. It’s mostly financial and I’m not knocking that at all. It’s not something I need to do or something I would get off on.

Yeah we have.

No, I don’t think so. I’ve never done anything retro unless I’m desperately trying to make it retro.

It’s not as easy as you’d think. Everything starts coming out sounding new. The strange thing is that when we started doing The Wolfmen what we were listening to were old soul records and the Velvet Underground and glam rock and that is what it is a mixture of. A lot of people our age say, “Oh no man, it’s too late.” I believed them for about five minutes and then after playing it for a bunch of 17 year olds they said it was brilliant and that it sounds really new. So never try and be what you’re not.

Needles In The Camera's Eye is a song I’ve always really liked from Eno’s first album, it came out when I was 13. So we did that and the Lou Reed song The Primitive wasn’t as much as a cover version as us finishing it off. So we did it and then I thought, it’s not much of a song really, it’s one little phrase over and over again. So we finished it off and made it into a complete song and then we had to approach Lou Reed’s publisher saying “Is this all right? Can we actually play this?”

Well they weren’t initially ok with it. They came out with a ridiculous deal, they wanted like 90 percent of it and we said “No, fuck off. You can’t have 90. This is someone’s estate that’s been dormant for the last 40 years; you can make some money off of it or no money off of it.” So they were sensible.

No, never met him.

Well I’d like them to like it but that’s probably unlikely. It’s a song they abandoned anyway.

Absolutely.

No, actually I’m a big Frankenstein fan. I never actually liked Wolf Man films. They were all right but they weren’t my favorite. I just thought that Wolfmen was a great title and a great name.

I’m not sure. They have just always been there. I’ve always liked those kinds of movies. I don’t particularly like modern horror movies like slasher movies or anything like that.

Yeah, it’s beginning. As I suspect or hope to have happened, a whole bunch of people are listening to Wolfmen stuff who’ve never really heard of Adam & the Ants or they’ve heard of them but they never really knew who they were. Many of the people listening weren’t even born when we were putting our records out. It’s weird but it’s nice as well because if you’re 47, like me, 20 years ago doesn’t seem a long time ago but if you’re 21 obviously it’s all of your life.

Yeah, if Adam wants to do something. I haven’t talked to him about it but if one day we want to do something together I’m definitely up to it.

I have this record label going as well called Only Lovers Left Alive and my partner in that, Sam Bully, pulled all that together but I’ve always known them.

Not yet, because we haven’t really been seeking out collaborations with new bands. We haven’t been seeking out collaborations with anybody because we just started this. So we just want to put the album out and maybe when the album comes out people will call us up and say, “Do you want to do something?”

In those days no one really thought very much about anything. Billy Idol was due to play guitar with them then he didn’t want to do it so they just asked me. They didn’t even offer, they said, “What are you doing Tuesday?” I said, “Nothing.” They said, “Let’s do a gig.” I said, “Ok” and that was it. Then we tried to rehearse and after ten minutes we realized that we could never in a million years hope to learn certain songs. The idea was to play songs that come from versions of songs we hated which is a great concept but we couldn’t even get that together though we didn’t try very hard. We gave up after ten minutes and decided we were just going to go on stage with no songs written and no songs rehearsed and just see what happens.

We didn’t think about it. We didn’t think really think about it being the legendary punk performers because they weren’t legendary yet. At that point it was just four idiots, which is really the level that we wanted it all to be anyway.

Yeah, I listen to stuff like Babyshambles. There’s lots of new stuff to listen to. But it doesn’t sound especially new, new-ish but I like it because it sounds retro in a funny way.

Yeah, it is a weird that 17 year old kids listen to Wolfmen because they sound new and then me listening to new bands and liking them because they sound retro.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck