Excerpt from an interview Max did over the weekend –

I’ve attempted the impossible: making a list of 5 favourite songs. I’m sure if I had to tell you what they were tomorrow or next month or next year it’d be different!

1. ‘Love of My Life’ by Queen – the Live version. I only recently heard this song for the first time while watching a documentary on Queen. There’s nothing like thousands of voices singing a great song to make me cry!

Max on video set, last week.

2. Pretty much anything by Aussie punk legend Nick Cave. My first experience was hearing ‘Stagger Lee’. It terrified me and I decided he was a psycho! But after seeing Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds live I was a convert; he has the power to move an audience from terror to tears in one show. My hero!

3. ‘Little Well’ a traditional Ukranian song recorded by punk band Borshch and taught to me on a tour in Ukraine. The raucous energy of Ukraine’s punk audience changed us as a band forever!

4. ‘Time to Pretend’ by MGMT. This song blew my mind when I first heard it – such lush dancey pop. We were recording our album Betrayer in L.A. at the time, so it’s a reminder of the excitement of making music.

5. ‘Without’ by us. It might seem conceited to list one of our own songs, but I don’t mean it that way! Marty (our guitarist) wrote this song and we’ve been closing the show with it for a few years now. It still makes the hairs on my arms stand up as the tempo gets faster and faster and people get crazier until we’re all out of control!

Hopefully see you at our Beijing show at Mao’s (May 5th). – Max

Checkya later.
Fires out.