Surf's Down

“I stepped backwards on to a broken piece of ceramic in my garden and it ripped the back of my leg off – it was one of those wounds that went completely to the bone. There was probably six inches of flesh removed and just my bone exposed. It didn’t bleed for half an hour – it went past all of that!”

Incubus frontman Brandon Boyd laughs as he recalls the injury that kept him away from his beloved surfboard for the past six months.
“It was the most painful thing I have ever experienced, but I also severed the nerves in my foot so it wasn’t as bad as it would have been if I hadn’t done it in so completely. When we were in the Emergency Room we took some photos of it and have since succeeded in grossing out anyone who asks what happened. I got a bit sick of people asking about it though, so I started making up stories about a rogue pack of Yorkshire Terriers attacking me as I was walking down the street. Yes, they believed me. But I have a really cool scar now – it’s like a purple smile on my ankle. I’m thinking of having two little eyes tattooed on.”
Speaking to hotpress from his Californian home, Brandon is enjoying a week’s break before embarking on an extensive European tour in support of the band’s latest album, A Crow Left Of The Murder. Recorded in Atlanta at the home of producer Brendan O’Brien over a brief two week period, the record sees the group returning to their rock-centric musical roots. Having explored the depths of digital effects on their 1998 release Make Yourself and pretty pop rock on 2001’s Morning View, the band felt it was time to restore the human element in their recordings.
“Ever since we made our first studio record, Science, we’ve recorded in the standard way of the drummer playing to the click track, then the bass is put on top of that, then the guitar and then the vocals. It’s a sort of Frankenstein layering process, and it makes a record that lacks personality. When we did Make Yourself, we started wanting to make a live record and that one came out a little bit more organic. So when it came to doing this new one, we basically did the whole thing at once, as a band. The meat and potatoes of our band is actually playing the songs. Making records is fun in a different way, but there’s nothing like playing your music for real, in front of people, and seeing bona fide reactions from strangers. We just did our first month of touring over in Asia and Australia and we were playing a lot of these new songs, and they were such a blast to play – as much fun as when we were coming up with them.”
So much so that the band have been making live recordings of the shows which they plan to release as bootlegs over the coming months to benefit the Make Yourself Foundation.
“I’ve been listening to the tapes, Kuala Lumpur last night and Fookwoka in Japan the other night. I normally can’t listen to tapes of Incubus shows or watch videos of them because they make me over analytical of myself. I get in to that insecure realm and tear myself to pieces. I’d rather just avoid it and go draw pictures! We’ve never done real live bootlegs before, so I’m trying to put out what is in my opinion our best effort.
“What’s actually been the most rewarding thing though is listening to the audiences. It makes it so much more real to me – and it also means I don’t have to pay as much attention to my voice if I didn’t like the quality of it that night or if I fucked up or something.
“I’ve been having more fun on stage as a result and trying to move in to a more objective and effortless place where I don’t think about my voice as much,” he concludes. “If a show has that feeling, and it speaks to me, then I’m going to run with it.

Incubus’ A Crow Left Of The Murder album is out now on Columbia