When the compulsive liars and renowned pranksters, We Are Scientists, rolled into town with the NME tour, The Edge caught up with Keith Murray, Chris Cain and Michael Tapper to discuss ticket touts, law enforcement and JD Salinger…

On your website a lot of the content is written by you, does that take up much of your time?
CC – We write everything on there. Every word. You might have noticed the quality is pretty low.
KM – It just flows out.
CC – We right a lot of sh***y stuff and then don’t edit it down. That’s easy. The hard part would be to make it good and concise. We have gone for the voluminous approach. Usually I find it written on a scrap of paper while going through my laundry.

I presume you took the name for your album from the JD Salinger collection of stories. What is the reason for this and why did you drop the ‘For Esme’ part from the title?
CC – It didn’t seem quite as relevant to our album.
CC – We are big fans of his. Oh yeah, we all love it.
KM – He is one of our fav’s.
CC – We like his approach to dialogue and sense of humour. And, we go to his house.
KM – Many people think his misanthropy has taken hold, but if you go to his house and open his window and yell, ‘JD, GEETTOOOUTHEERREE!!!’ he will shuffle down in his boxers cocking his shotgun and be like ‘Whooose that?! Ahhh come on in! Get yourself out of the cold’.
CC – He is rough, he has really become a forest man.
KM – He is a little stuffed teddy bear. Looks like a grizzly, nothing but a teddy.
CC – Yeah, he is a real bear.

Some parts of the media portray you as cool, others portray you as dorky. Which would you prefer to be described as?
KM –Those that call us dorky do so to make them feel like they lay claim to us. Those calling us dorks are usually either hippies or nerds, every last one of them.

Do you get on well with the other bands on the tour?
CC – Hell yeah. The Arctic Monkeys are terrible people, so yeah! We like a good depraved son of a bitch, and that band is chocked full of them. We worked in law enforcement for a while, so met guys like them pretty regularly. Wife beaters, child rapists, things like that. Keith worked the vice squad. They remind me of a lot of the snitches I used to work with.
KM – I still work those guys for tips.

Do you usually watch the other bands when you are done?
KM – Yeah we do. It gives us tremendous pleasure to watch something for free that other people have paid for. I love going up to the touts just before the show and asking how much the tickets are going for. They say (in a rubbish cockney accent "oooh two hundred pounds mate", then I run inside and go to the balcony and just watch. I mean, I hate Mystery Jets, but this is worth two hundred pounds!
MT – We can’t get enough of them.

Do you also get touts in America?
CC – Some bands do, we sure don’t. Its supply and demand. Touts sell our tickets for a dollar.
KM – (in that cockney accent again) "Got any change for a cup of coffee?" as he tries to throw our ticket at you. Because in America, touts are British as well.

Do people follow bands around in America the same way they do here?
CC – No, not as much. Over there, if you see someone at two shows in different places, you get scared and call the police. Your blood runs cold.
KM – Yup, we have got a live one!

Would you say you have a bigger fanbase over here or in America?
CC – We are ahead of our US presence over here. We released the album earlier here. Its going really well though. We play small shows back home and big shows here. It keeps it fresh. You don’t have to pine for the days when you played small shows, because you still do. Then you don’t have to say, I cant wait to get out of these small sh***y clubs, because we come to the UK and play big shows.
KM – There is certainly a level of difference.
CC – Its not like we get mobbed on the high street over here though.

Have the sales of your earlier EPs increased after releasing the full length album?
CC – We have no sold 500 copies of our second EP, ‘Bitching’.
KM – We put them out of production. They are out of print.
CC – We didn’t sell out of them. We stopped selling them. Once we moved on to a new EP, we became horribly embarrassed of the previous one, so we would take it out of circulation to the best of our ability. This often involved hunting down friends to whom we had given copies, taking it, kidnapping it.
KM – [making a gun to the head motion]…just in case they remembered anything and might be able to recreate them.
CC – They are not coming back. We will sue the pants of anyone who tries to play one of those songs. Even if it’s at a birthday party for their little kid.
KM – I’d have to slaughter the whole lot of them. Go in there, put that baby on a spit roast…
CC – …and then eat them…
KM - …well you couldn’t be wasteful…
CC -…complete with mayonnaise and the full compliments salad.

There seems to be some confusion about whether you are from New York or California?
CC – We are based in Brooklyn, that’s true. We went to university in California. None of us are from there. We are from Miami, Dallas and Utah. We call New York home now, we have lived there for almost six years now. We formed the band just after graduation. We then spent a year as a band in very low levels of operation in California. Then we moved to New York, and then spent about four more years as a band in very low levels of operation. Then we really kicked into high gear. We gave up about a month ago. Now we are just coasting it out. Let it ride.

What did you study at university?
CC – (to KM) Maybe you should tell them…
KM – I don’t want to, its too awful and a little embarrassing. I studied literature.
CC – I studied International Relations and Mike [drums] studied engineering. The plan was to come up with something funny, but we couldn’t.

Have you started work on the second album yet?
CC – The crap we’re coming up with now is so sophisticated. Its such a jump I don’t think people would find it plausible. They’d think we stole it from somewhere, or got Bloc Party to write it.
KM – We do need to make a start, thanks for that reminder…

Interview by Stephen Thompson and Jack Marshall

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