The Dillinger Escape Plan On Warped Vs Download

Only minutes after arriving in Uniondale, New York, for our first ever Warped Tour show, BringthenoiseUK find ourselves sitting at a picnic table, shaded by a huge tree, chatting Warped vs Download with our favourite member of our favourite band of the tour. The very charming, and currently very bearded, Liam Wilson of The Dillinger Escape Plan.

BTN: How are things going?

LW: Things are good. The vibe is good. It’s a summer tour, we’re all kinda getting our sea legs on the whole Warped Tour thing. But it’s good, we just do like sprint sets, and then hang out, listen to music the rest of the time. There’s a decent amount of downtime, there’s a lot of time spent in catering and doing press and stuff, overall, aside from the heat it’s cool. It’s America’s premier adult daycare.

BTN: So this is week three…?

LW: Out of seven, yeah. At this point I’m just kinda like an automaton, it’s kinda like groundhog day, I feel like a carni. Totally, that’s what this is, it’s a carnival.

BTN: And you’ve been playing quite early sets so far, does that mean you’ve been naughty?

LW: ­­Yeah, it seemed like at least for the first ten days or so we probably opened the stage, or played second, eight out of ten of those days. We were definitely turning into the breakfast club. So that’s what we thought. We were like, are we getting punished for something? And then we decided, okay let’s just not say anything, let’s just take it like the men we are, we don’t wanna overreact too soon and eventually it got to the point where even our driver was offended and went and talked to them They were like, no, no, no, honest mistake, we didn’t realise. So now they’re putting us on late. Yesterday we were on at 2pm today we’re on at 4.30pm.

BTN: So, you guys played Download earlier this year. How does Warped compare with Download?

LW: There is no comparison. I mean, you can’t even… Download is like all of Warped Tour in one day. And you’ll never see Aerosmith on Warped Tour. So, there’s no… okay bands play, that’s about the only common denominator.

BTN: So what should we expect at Warped?

LW: So you shouldn’t expect to have to camp. You shouldn’t expect it to go on past 8pm. You should expect the demographic to be mostly 14 to 18 year old girls. I mean Download draws from all kinds of music whereas Warped is, for the most part, young, hip music as opposed to anything classic or… well I guess that’s not strictly true, they have some punk classics but I guess overall this is still kind of a punk tour, at least in ethic. And Download is a music festival. You know what I mean? This is about punk culture and that’s about music culture.

BTN: So how does it compare when it comes to playing? Instead of a one-off set, you have to play day after day…

LW: There’s just so much electricity in the air at places like Download that things just happen. There’s so many people… Not to get meta-physical or anything, not to get cosmic, but there really is just so much energy generated in a situation like that so we can’t help but get sort of tapped into it. Whereas here it seems like it’s a lot more spread out… you know we don’t have as crazy crowds… coz you know those kids are geared up for it, they’ve been there for days at that point, and are still ready to party. You know when you’re camping you have a totally different vibe, you’re in it to win. Here it’s a lot more fickle. It’s funny because we did have Hurricane Alex when we hit Texas, like down in that area, and that did put a literal dampener on our day. That was ummm… that was a lot of rain. And that was still cool. The show went on, and people were still stoked so…

BTN: Well, when you played in the rain at Download, you seemed to feed off it…

LW: Yeah, Greg and I were like, this is rad, this is exactly what we need. And actually we played Warped Tour in 2005, I think it was, and we played a show in Buffalo, I believe it was Buffalo… and we have a song called We Are The Storm, and we literally started playing that song and all of a sudden this epic thunderstorm, like we could see merch tents blowing away… it just came in, like literally out of nowhere and we were all looking at each other, and everybody who knew us were all like, yo, that’s like too weird.

BTN: It’s too good…

LW: It’s really too good! So there was a little bit of that, I’m pretty sure we said at the time this is pretty much the same thing. Yeah, that was cool.

BTN: So, what’s your best festival moment?

LW: I dunno, we did Coachella this year,  that was epic. I don’t know what to say… I mean Download this year was awesome… oh, festival moment, ok… Joe Perry’s son is a Dillinger fan, he got us on stage to watch Aerosmith, so the ten year old in me is losing his shit. And you know, they were rad, they were so good, Steven Tyler’s voice is unparalleled… that guy… and he sees us standing at the side of the stage and I guess they’re doing Eat The Rich, and I swear from like 30 feet away he just looks at me, and walks over to me, and puts the microphone in my face, so we both do the “shove it up your ass” line, and I was like… That was just the most ridiculous thing that’s happened to me in a long time. I can actually show you the photo of him getting all up in my shit…

At this point Liam gets his phone out and starts showing us  pictures and talking through the event step by step…

LW: So he just walked over and was like c’maaaan, and I’m just, like I’m glad I know the lyrics to this one. That was scary. He’s coming over and I’m getting all nervous thinking, what line, what line, ok, “shove it up your ass”, I know that one, that’s cool.

BTN: What would be your dream festival line-up?

LW: Dream festival line up… uhhhhhhhh… there’s just certain bands I haven’t seen yet, I have never seen Tom Waits, I would love to see Tom Waits. Uhhhhhh… I would love to play with Radiohead… Uhhhhh… I can’t think of this stuff. I sit around and talk about this when I’m drunk, like three in the morning and I’m like, alright guys what’s your… you turn into a teenager again, but now that I’m on the spot I can’t come up with anything…

BTN: Any new bands that you would put on there, as openers, that you think everyone should see?

LW: You know what, there’s a band on this tour that I’m impressed by, called Closure in Moscow. They’re pretty rad. They’re good dudes too. They’re some of my favourite dudes on tour. But other bands, in a more metal genre, this band Animals as Leaders that we took out on tour, they’re pretty wicked shredders. You know who else I like? And I know their lyrics probably suck if I could understand them but, Dungen. I guess they’re a Swedish band and they play almost like classic rock and I don’t understand a word they’re saying, kinda like Sigur Ros, I’m like, whatever man, but their riffs are killer. I really like that Fleet Foxes band, I’ve been into that a lot lately.

BTN: Is it that eclectic taste that you think makes Dillinger what it is?

LW: Yeah, not just in music but in the personalities in the band, we’re all like pretty alpha people. Some of us are a little more passive aggressive, or aggressively passive, you know, but, yeah I definitely think it all feeds the machine, I guess. For one example, Greg, Ben and I have been working on this for, you know, almost a decade together, and then having a new drummer and then having Jeff contribute more on the writing, it kinda keeps it fresh because you’re bringing in somebody else’s eclectic tastes into an already eclectic beast. And this time around the writing process just flowed. And it was really easy to work with Billy and as strange as it sounds, this may be the first time in Dillinger history that we record a record with the same line-up twice.

BTN: Does it feel settled now then?

LW: It feels really settled now. You know I hope everybody else feels settled. I think we are. I hope this next record is more consistent, we haven’t written it yet but, I mean I think the inconsistency is what people find charming about my band, but yeah, I hope, at least for my sanity’s sake, I get to see what happens when you really build on something.

The Dillinger Escape Plan will be touring the UK in October and November 2010 and their latest album, Option Paralysis, is availble to buy now.

Tags: Aerosmith, Animals as Leaders, Closure in Moscow, Download festival, Liam Wilson, Sigur Ros, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Warped Tour