Fangs for the memories

I wanna go home. I’m kinda over it. At this point we all are. We were playing this record before it even came out. It’s really bizarre, we’ve moved ahead yet another step and we’re still stuck in this situation. It’s like if you could afford to rent a mansion and live in it but you can’t ’cos there’s none available, so you’re stuck in the ghetto.”

Brody Dalle is not jaded, but she is tired. You join us on the afternoon of the band’s Ambassador gig in Dublin, near the end of an 18-month campaign that began before The Distillers recorded their third – and best – album Coral Fang. Despite the fatigue, they’ll later play a gutsy show to a full house of mostly tanked up Avril-punkers and stick-on Mohawk fashion victims behaving like children hyped up on too many M&Ms and fizzy drinks. It’s the kind of audience they might do well to outgrow.
Ms Dalle is the band’s obvious focal point, newly blonde, tall, slender and finer-featured than she photographs, wedged into an armchair beside drummer Andy. Both are plain speaking and unpretentious. And we can only surmise that if the pair can sit in close proximity after a lengthy tour, morale can’t be too bad.
“It’s a lotta downtime,” Dalle says, her Aussie twang having long morphed into a Valley girl drawl. “And if you can’t turn your brain off like I can’t, it’s torture. All I wanna do is go home. It’s not like, ‘Fuck you guys’ – we’re all feeling it.”
But then, it’s not just the tour. 25-year-old Brody Dalle has had a pretty intense few years of it. A Melbourne wild child of Sicilian/Irish/English/German extraction, she moved to LA to wed Rancid/Transplants founder, Hellcat records CEO and West Coast punk don Tim Armstrong (when they met she was barely 17, he was 31).
Over the next few years she worked her way through various Distillers line-ups and put out two albums of spunky mongrel punk (Discharge meets Black Flag topped off by a Courtney-esque caterwaul) while struggling to maintain a relationship fraught with problems. Following a very public split from Armstrong that effectively ostracised the singer and her band from the tight-knit LA punk clan a couple of years ago, The Distillers signed to Warners and embarked on a breakthrough tour with No Doubt and Garbage. Brody changed her surname to Dalle (after her beloved Beatrice, star of Betty Blue) and took up with new beau, Queens Of The Stone Age mainman Josh Homme. The fallout was considerable, and a Rolling Stone photo shoot featuring the two in mid-smooch did little to salve the situation.
In the middle of all this controversy, The Distillers released that Gil Norton-produced, Andy Wallace-mixed third album - a bristling, visceral collection that just might be the most potent melding of barbed wire and bubblegum since Nevermind.
When I mention that our paths crossed at the Queens table backstage at Slane last year, Dalle says, “That was one of the most amazing shows I’ve ever seen. 80,000 people at Slane Castle and they just fucking slayed them. It was huuuuge.”
It was also the end of the Queens as we knew them. Does Brody think there’s anything to be learned from what happened Josh and co?
“Yeah. I mean when the warning signs come up, don’t keep pushing it.”
What kind of warning signs?
“Well, exhaustion. I don’t think our band’s gonna implode, but we definitely need time ’cos we’re really connected, the four of us, we’re best friends, we hang out when we’re not on tour. I think we were meant to make music together and grow together. We don’t have any serious drug addiction going on in our band, that’s always a really big problem. But we party every night, just ’cos we’re kinda at the end of our rope.”
Ropes crop up a lot on Coral Fang. Or to be more precise, nooses. And death. And blood. Lots of blood. Does she think women have a more intimate relationship with the stuff than the rest of the species?
“Well I definitely get to see mine on a monthly basis. Yeah, I mean, I’m like an instinctive person and very tied to the ground. We’re all really salt of the earth people, really grounded. Although I was raised with the occult and astrology and white magic and stuff so I was fascinated with darker imagery and stuff like that.”
Wasn’t her wedding to Tim Armstrong a Wiccan ceremony?
“Yeah it was. I did jump over a broomstick. And then I wished I had gotten on a broomstick and flown out the window!”
The above is rendered with little rancour, just a dirty guffaw. Dalle, over the last year, has had to weather her own scarlet-lettered witch-hunt. Punk is like any other fundamentalist movement – if the individual outgrows the doctrine and decides to extricate themselves from that clan . . .
“You’re fucked.”
How hard is it to exist in a city where the battle lines are so clearly drawn?
“Well I don’t live in LA proper now,” she says, “I live in the Valley. And I love the Valley; the aesthetic is very 50s and 60s, wide streets, trees, very family orientated, old diners and cool bars. I love LA now; I used to haaaaate it with a passion, I could not stand it. It disgusted me. And I’ve been there for six years now, so I’ve figured out where I am. When I first moved there I didn’t understand it, I didn’t get it, I wanted to go home every day.”
How long did that last?
“Three years. It was pretty scary because when I first moved there I only had one person to rely on. It just made things very difficult.”
Does she have a social circle now?
“Oh fuck yeah. And growing. That’s the beauty of us now; we’ve kinda come out. We were hermits. We didn’t really socialise too much. It’s so hard to explain. But now we’re making friends on our own terms, it’s not because we’re related through this or that. We really haven’t encountered any problems. Like when The Face came out, it shut everybody up. Everything just stopped. It was like the conclusion to everything.”
That one-time-only tell-all cover story for The Face last February was a grisly tale. All marital break-ups are messy, this one was further complicated by Dalle’s being married to the mob.
“We were never really confronted,” Andy says. “Like I was confronted on one occasion, but it was pretty much people just turning their back on us, wouldn’t talk to us.”
Brody: “Anyone who’s coming up through the ranks who haven’t grown out of it yet is gonna want a handout, so they can’t afford to be flipping off the people who are running the show.”
But that’s history. The end of the Coral Fang tour marks the conclusion of a difficult first act for the band, but I suspect they’re only getting started.

Coral Fang is out now on Warner Music