Interviews

We spoke to Lars Strömberg of The (International) Noise Conspiracy while he was on tour in the United States:

FA: You’ve been touring a ton, which can take a toll. It sounds like you’re pretty buoyant and energetic about it…

Lars: Yeah, that’s what we’ve always done. As a band, we see making records as a way to get out and play, not the other way around. A lot of bands just want to tour and pay their dues and then just relax in the studio and do one tour a year, but we just love playing live and communicating with people and just sharing that emotion. We want to do it all the time. We’re all from a similar punk rock background we’re always into seeing bands live and giving it all you’ve got. That’s how we’ve been since we started out.

FA: When did you start playing guitar, what inspired you, what bands were you listening to?

LARS: I was always into music growing up…my parents listened to a lot of Stones, a lot of Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and more classical folky Swedish stuff and I always knew I wanted to play music. My older brother played guitar for a while and so I thought when I get as old my brother, I want to play the guitar. When I was 10, my parents signed me up for guitar school. It was alright but I wasn’t that into it – I realized later it was because I didn’t play with other people. Then in 6th grade, my friend’s dad was the music teacher, so they let us have the keys to the music room and we just kind of went in and went nuts with all of the instruments. That’s when it started to be fun. That’s when I realized that I was just more cut out to just make noise with all of my friends and to have the sum of all the parts be bigger than the individual effort.

LARS: There’s so much you can do, so focus on what you think is fun. Stick with what you feel or it will get boring really quick.

FA: Any good road stories?

LARS: We formed the band in 1998, and six months later early 1999, on tour in China. We played in Hong Kong. We smuggled ourselves and instruments and a few CDs into the country, we weren’t allowed to be there. Upon walking into the club, we see that there are all of these uniformed cops around outside and we were worried because we knew we we weren’t supposed to be there. And we’re a political band so we talk a lot about anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian propaganda so the Chinese officials weren’t going to be into that. So we talked to the promoter and he said, “Don’t worry, you won’t be arrested tonight, there are too many people here, though it is 100% illegal, but don’t worry they won’t arrest you tonight.”

So we got ready and sound checked, and then we walk up on stage and start playing our first song and forgot about the cops because the crowd was going absolutely nuts. We looked around at all these cops lined up at the back wall and we realize they’re all just rocking out and as people leave they’re actually helping us sell our CDs. It was one of the best shows ever.