Interview: Man or Astro-man?
Looking back, it was surreal, we're a weird band from a weird place, but at the same time, it makes perfect sense. It’s the kind of thing that he would champion.
Man or Astro-man? had a long and storied history with John Peel and his legendary Peel Sessions, the highlights of which have been captured on ROYGBIV (Recordings From The BBC), which has recently been re-released on Chunklet Industries. Gavin Brown had the pleasure of catching up with Man or Astro-man? drummer Brian “Birdstuff” Teasley to talk about the collection, his memories of John Peel and recording the Peel Sessions and various other Man or Astro-man? topics from punk and surf rock to sci-fi.
E&D: You recently re-issued your album, ROYGBIV (Recordings From The BBC) the collection of Peel sessions, what led to it being brought out again?
Brian: There’s a multi prong reason, number one, I think we were just reflecting back that, being it was coming up that our first session was over thirty years ago, and just trying to contextualise that whole era of the band. But also, our first three records are out of print and have been for quite some time. A lot of that material, we recorded with those Peel sessions. So it’s also a way to get those out. A lot of times I think bands either do one or two versions of a Peel session. They either do it at the beginning of their tour, where they’re a little rusty, or they do it at the end of the tour, after they’ve been on tour for six weeks and they’re razor sharp playing live. We were always lucky that we did it at the end of our tours. So I was always really happy with the versions that we got to make available there.
E&D: Did you get good feedback from the release the first time around and was it good looking back on all those sessions?
Brian: Yeah, really well. It’s wild to see how many we did. Originally, the whole relationship with John Peel started when I was 19. I had sent him a postcard telling him to never play our band. I told him that we didn’t want to be a flash in the pan band that did one session and then gets forgotten about forever. We just had a seven inch out at the time, and of course, he played it, kind of took my dare, and we ended up having a great relationship being friends with him over the years. So, just reflecting upon that, I can’t really underestimate what a factor he was on us being able to tour the UK twenty plus times. He was a huge part of everything we did with our band in that era.
E&D: Were you aware of John Peel before and the legacy he had even back then?
Brian: Oh yeah! We all came up on punk rock and weird, obscure music. So it was a big deal when you would see a band have a session. We were in school, which was when the band was starting. So, yeah, we were well aware of Peel.
E&D: What are some of your favourite memories of meeting John and recording the sessions?
Brian: We had a really great time hanging out with him at the Phoenix festival in 1995 for a while outside of everything. We did an interview with him then, and he was just really funny. He would take the piss out of whatever. It’s just funny that he connected somehow with these twenty one year old kids from Alabama. That was a really great memory. Then, of course, when we did what was our last session, that was super special, just to have him there and be able to hang out. He came for a few of the sessions, which I thought was funny, because people always say, Oh, he’s never there, but he stopped by for whatever reason. Looking back, it was surreal, we’re a weird band from a weird place, but at the same time, it makes perfect sense. It’s the kind of thing that he would champion.
E&D: Do you have a particular favourite session that you did for him or well they all special?
Brian: It may have been the one from 96 or 97 where we replaced his voice with a robot. There was a program on the Apple Mac where you could basically type out anything, and it would read it back in a kind of robot voice. We didn’t tell him, but we baked into the recordings, switching over to the digital version of John Peel introducing the songs like a robot and that was a lot of fun!
E&D: Did John find it funny?
Brian: Yeah, he did, of course, he kept it on there!
E&D: You did twelve sessions for the BBC in total that are featured on the collection. That must have felt good for the band?
Brian: We were these kids from Auburn, Alabama, and honestly, we thought it was normal for like to tour in a van and not take a day off for nine weeks straight, and get up, do it, play an in store in the morning, do a radio session, and then do two shows at night, and then do it again. We were kind of from that old school Little Richard era, we just want to work, you know, we were always the ones that were a little hard sometimes. Getting up at 6 or 7am and trying to rock was always a little difficult, but we always had fun, and we never really thought it was like, Oh no, we’re having a play on the radio in the UK!
E&D: You’ve always had a good relationship with the UK. Obviously with the Perl sessions but also playing as many times as you did over here live. Will you be coming over again soon? I know you had a show planned last year.
Brian: We definitely are. I had an injury that like took me out of playing drums for a little over a year, but back to normal now. We’re just waiting to get some new material. I mean, between the pandemic and then the medical stuff I went through, it kind of pushed us back a bit. But, yeah, we definitely want to come back. We spent so much time over there, I don’t know, I figured out, over the years, I spent two plus years in the UK, playing shows, if you put it day to day. I also played with Servotron and Polyphonic Spree. God, there’s so many times, I just have a flashback of loading out of some club and the Norman Cook version of ‘Brimful Of Asha’ playing in the background! That whole era is so ingrained in my head.
E&D: What been some of your favourite live shows that you’ve played Man or Astro-man? over the years?
Brian: I love playing London, of course, because there was always these people from NME or Mono there but honestly, the Nottingham’s and the Newcastle upon Tynes and, Sunderland and Stoke upon Trent, the weird shows that we played out of the way in these places that, aren’t maybe getting as many shows as somewhere like London that has a music industry was always super fun, just because they were like our people. We always found, without being problematic, as we went further north, it reminded us more of the South in the United States, we’re from Alabama, and people were a little more down to earth and just don’t give a shit, kind of wild and weird. So when we would go up to Manchester and north to Scotland, it was always like, Oh, these are our people. Not that anybody else, wasn’t. One my favourite shows ever in the UK was on our first or second tour, and we played TJs in Newport, a legendary old punk rock club where Nirvana would come and play their first show at or wherever. We played with this band, Cowboy Killers that was legendary from there, and we didn’t have a tour manager on that tour. We were just kind of doing it off the cuff and all the merchandising money, from selling shirts and all that kind of stuff, I kept in a pouch, and there wasn’t a real backstage there, so I kept it inside my bass drum, just because I’m like, oh, it’s safe, who’s gonna get it out of my bass drum? The show got super crazy, wild, and the drums ended up flying out over the crowd, and the pouch came open, all our money, and it just went all over the crowd, like holy shit! It was quite like that KLF moment where they threw out all that money but like a micro version of that! At the same time, the singer of Cowboy Killers, stopped everything. We’re gonna turn the lights. We’re gonna get these guys money back, and then we’re gonna continue on and, so literally, I think we ended up with maybe 10 more pounds than we started with! Everybody was so cool. The funny thing was, the show was pretty much over at that point, but they still wanted us to play so we set back up and started playing again! I’ll never forget that show. That was such a crazy thing, and that place was so special.
E&D: Was it cool that coming from a punk background, even though your music isn’t strictly punk, you could play with bands like Cowboy Killers and loads of different alternative bands?
Brian: Yeah, there was always that, we played with crazy psychedelic bands. We played with other instrumental bands that were kind of in our vein. We played with a lot of John Robb’s bands over the years that were always kind of strange and cool, and we played with a lot of punk bands for sure, all the weird bands together for sure!
E&D; Are there any plans for a new Man or Astro-man? studio album at all?
Brian: Yeah, we’ve been working on that forever. We probably got seventy songs that aren’t finished there, again because of the greater world at large. We’ll definitely get this completed, or maybe the world will get hit by an asteroid and will die, but the futures generations will unearth these seventy half finished songs that we have!
E&D: Have you ever considered doing another clone project that you did with The Astro-man Genome Project and the Alpha and Gamma clones, and was that a cool thing to do back in the day?
Brian: That’s been a cool thing to do. People said, oh, they’re just cashing in, or they’re making a lot of money off this but it took so much work to train two other bands, to hire out transport for them, to get them equipment. We did it because we were fucking crazy, so we got it together! Then people really were, at first, negative about it, you know, there they thought there was some kind of angle or scam. We were just trying to be weird and cool! Now people are like, Oh, it was so legendary. I was at one of those shows. I’m like, you didn’t say that at the beginning. You were like, where’s the real band? So probably not, although, I feel like we were on the front end of that concept. You’ve seen things like Smashing Pumpkins or The Hives, talking about franchising their band or selling it off. We probably wouldn’t do it, but I would love the idea of still making the studio records and then hiring a bunch of really cool, excited 19 year old kids to go play it.
E&D: Do you think that something like that would still work today with the advent of social media and everyone knowing everything within minutes of something happening?
Brian: There was something great about back in the 90s where that idea would kind of seep through over time. It was kind of a slow burn, and it’s definitely more instantaneous, just a flash point moment, and then it’s over so quickly, versus something that gets repeated often, again and again. Our whole thing, our band was the band that would be in a van or a bus. Every band does this, comes up with stupid ideas but the problem with our band was, like, we were always the band that would execute those ideas. Most people would just be, oh, yeah, that was funny, but we were like, no, we’ve got to do it!
E&D: What are some of the most influential surf rock records of all time to you and what would you recommend for someone just getting into the genre?
Brian: When we first started, we were trying to find our voice, and we were really into punk rock but I went home one Christmas and went through my parents records in their attic, and they had a lot of instrumental Dick Dale and Duane Eddy records, and even some old instrumental records and we wanted to use that. The Ventures In Space is pretty unbeatable. I think the things that we were always interested wasn’t like straight surf as it was the stuff that had that weird Outer Limits Twilight, slightly more echoey guitar than just reverb. So the Vintage Space was definitely a big one for us. There was a band from Australia called the Atlantics that we loved, and a band called The Fenders for the ones of that era that had very high energy were like, what we were into, anything that had that weird, Lydian scale on guitar, like ‘Misirlou’ by Dick Dale, that kind of Middle Eastern drum, dark sounding stuff that was really where we thought was so cool because it was dark and fast and ominous.
E&D: Are science fiction and spec still a big influence to you today?
Brian: Yeah, for sure. Strangely enough, it just sounds weird, but back then, it was watching B-movies and just being immersed in that world, it was almost not only a passion or a hobby, but almost part of our job too, because we were sampling movies and things to that degree. I own a couple of music venues now, so a lot of my life and worries are about other bands and making sure that they’re taken care of. But, yeah, definitely, it’s not something that goes away. I do think in the 90s it was such a heyday for that stuff looking back. I remember when The X-Files came out for the first time, like, how is this on TV, so cool, and that whole Alien Autopsy and all that kind of stuff was part of that culture, plus you couldn’t find that site. Now you can find, the most rare crazy sci fi B-movie, but you would have to trade and really dig in deep get that stuff back in the day.
E&D: Was making music with Servotron a cool experience for you, and would you ever consider bringing back that project?
Brian: You know what? One of the people in the band lives in China as a record producer now, and everybody’s kind of all over the country, that would be a tough one. But that was really fun and crazy and prophetic. Everything we were talking about, like, robots on stage saying we’re going to take over the world, and there will be mass global decline for humanity. It’s kind of starting to happen. It’s funny, because it was tongue in cheek then, but now, that is starting to actually happen. It’s funny to see a band that was like a novelty band have a prophetic type quality to us.
E&D: You’ve been involved in so much music over the years, you mentioned the Polyphonic Spree there, and you worked with Har Mar Superstar. Has it been cool to have worked with so many different artists?
Brian: Yeah,, after Man or Astro-man? went on hiatus for a bit in the early 2000s, I kind of became what some people would call a gun for hire. And I was like, this is going to be my life. I’m going to play on records and tour with bands. With Man or Astro-man?, we never had an actual manager. We had a booking agent and a label and all that, but we never had a manager So I kind of took that role, and after doing that for 10 years, I was like, I don’t want to have to worry if people are showing up for practice, or we’re on budget to record this record, I just want somebody to hire me, and I want to play and have fun and develop my drumming to the to the best level I can. So it was great just to play in so many different situations, and getting that kind of skill and to force myself to play in different ways.
E&D: Are you working on any other music at the moment you can tell us about?
Brian: I have a venue called Saturn here in Birmingham, Alabama, and I help with the amphitheater in Huntsville, Alabama, which surprisingly, is where NASA is based out of. It’s really become where my focus, besides playing in Man or Astro-man?. I mean, we’ve two thousand shows in forty plus countries. It was hard, there were years where we were on the road 320 days, and somehow, to turn that into the way I wanted to see it done, and to give bands that experience. It’s kind of been my driving passion. My club has a has a really nice band apartment. We take care of bands. We feed bands. We kind of combined the punk rock scene that I came out of with a European communal vibe with a southern hospitality. So that’s honestly my passion, my living now. It’s cool that Man or Astro-man? has kind of gone back to being my high school garage band..
E&D: Is that refreshing for you?
Brian: You know, even for us, a kind of wacky mid level indie band, there were still deadlines and you still have to plan out a year if you were gonna buy tickets to go to Australia or wherever. So there was a semblance of rigidness about having to treat it seriously, even though it was something that we started just for fun. So just kind of doing it when we can and when we feel like it is definitely less pressure. I don’t know, I couldn’t do 320 shows in a year! I could, but I would be on a gurney or a stretcher, dead. I would just be a prop on stage!
