![]() ![]() After that, the band had to relocate to another space across the street. ‘I know it’s that big idiot!’ she screamed. One of the ceiling tiles fell into the proprietor’s wok. One night, Hickey and Kelly were eating in the restaurant and heard Steele’s bass amp roar to life upstairs. (At 6’8”, Steele was a particularly big idiot.) ![]() The proprietor referred to him as ‘the big idiot’. Unsuccessful, he then tried his luck with her daughter. ![]() The rehearsal space was above a Chinese-owned Tex-Mex restaurant. For them, mordant humour and deadly seriousness were often interchangeable. They were sure to bake laughs into the Type O experience. Hickey says it was a ‘brutal’ and ‘monotonous’ process: ‘it was definitely the most cumbersome record to pull out of him.’ It went on like this five days a week for over four months. They left in a fury, before slowly calming down and starting the process again the following evening. The clock ticked down until they were too inebriated to play anymore and began arguing instead. When they started playing, they also started drinking. We’re talking about a guy who liked to cut his french fries all the same size.’ ‘And mathematically based, because it was just part of his OCD. ‘He wanted everything to be controlled,’ says Hickey on a Zoom call with me. But the state he was in demanded tough medicine. Only then could Hickey and Kelly recommence the arduous process of extracting riffs from Steele. They played at a relentless volume of 120 decibels. But over the winter months, Rockaway became an exposed, frigid and unforgiving place.Įach night, they set up in a rehearsal room measuring ten feet squared. Rockaway Beach is a summer resort on a sliver of land that is technically part of Queens. If they couldn’t rehearse down the block and visit their favourite Chinese restaurant, what was the point? He had started to train as an EMT, so only came to the sessions once or twice a week. In particular, keyboardist and longtime band producer Josh Silver was ‘dead set’ against it. For the self-styled ‘Lords of Flatbush’ (a neighbourhood in Brooklyn), leaving the borough to do anything was a bone of contention. ![]()
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