HEALTH bassist and general maker of hubbub John Famiglietti doesn’t stop talking. It’s almost as if he doesn’t actually need to breath, or he’s perfected that circular breathing technique that people who play the didgeridoo have. Which is probably all the well as the high speed, high octane performances and the punishing touring schedule would probably need someone super human.
We begin on a long winded comic book conversation - unbeknownst to me John Famiglietti is something of a comic book fan so I mention the Daniel Johnston interview in which BCR took the Hi How Are You outsider comic book shopping in the West End… John’s reply?
John Famiglietti: Did he make a move on you?
BCR: Daniel Johnston? No…
John Famiglietti: He tried to make a move on my friend…
BCR: How does Daniel Johnston make a move on a girl?
John Famiglietti: I can show you, but, ha! It was just kinda awkward. He just went [John Famiglietti’s hands slowly advance on my breasts] she was like, “what are you doing?!” and then he said “kiss? Kiss?”
BCR: That’s so bizarre…
John Famiglietti: I know! But she was such a big fan she was like, “I’m really sorry, I have a boyfriend”. She probably would have done it because she was such a fan but she had a boyfriend and she couldn’t do that so she felt really bad.
BCR: I don’t know if I’d let Daniel Johnston grab my tits… To veer away from breasts and celebrity advances… How’s the touring been so far?
John Famiglietti: This is the very end of the tour. This show and then ATP and then we’re off. The tour’s been fucking awesome. This has been five weeks. We started in Netherlands, some stuff in the UK, Ireland, France, Italy, Switzerland... There was Eastern Europe; Croatia, the Czech Republic…
BCR: How did you go down there?
John Famiglietti: AMAZING! It was awesome, I was so surprised. We had a really big show in Croatia and it was the best show by far. We were like “fuck yeah! Croatia!” The response was really incredible. A lot of people. They were just down. They were really hyped for the show for a long time. I always heard Eastern Europe really rules. The whole tour has been really just solid.
BCR: No bum notes?
John Famiglietti: Pretty much no. There were no, like FUUUUCK! Which has happened. You play some really random towns, like ahhh shit. There was never a night that was shit. It was all happy.
BCR: So are you still reeling? After the split with Crystal Castles and the first live cassette, you seemed to explode…
John Famiglietti: For us, it never seemed quick because we were doing tours since we started. These brutal DIY tours, doing basements from the very beginning when we started and we thought we’d be doing it forever. Even at that point, it was still a real uphill battle in the US, touring, touring, touring constantly before people would come to our shows. A lot of that – we didn’t make anything out of that. We had a box of T-shirts and we were just touring, touring, touring.
BCR: So when did you guys actually start? As far as I can tell it was late 2004
John Famiglietti: No we started later than that. We started in 2005…
BCR: That means you must have started touring immediately.
John Famiglietti: Yeah, immediately. We formed the band, we were in seclusion for four months. Nearly every day were just practising and practising and we couldn’t get a show or anything. Then we did a tour with another band from Seattle that we met and we did this really terribly booked, DIY rough tour of the West coast, up and down. Huge gaps in between. We went out to Arizona and then back and then to Reno – anywhere we could get a show.
BCR: That sounds fucking gruelling.
John Famiglietti: It was fun though, we were so stoked to be on tour. It was the first time any of us had been on tour. We played a living room and got forty bucks and we were like “FORTY BUCKS! FOR A SHOW! IT’S AWESOME!” We pretty much had a cycle of every three months we’d go on tour at great cost to our wallets because none of us had any money. Then we did a US tour and we had started recording the first album ourselves before the US tour and finished it just after the US tour.
BCR: So you really haven’t had any time since then that hasn’t been HEALTH related?
John Famiglietti: Since the band started – before the first tour I quit my job and I didn’t have a job the entire time. The only time I got a job I totally ran out of money and unemployment had stopped for over a year and I was like, well… I better get some money. I did a really short lived job at Ernst & Young and made a ton of money really quick.
