Tengo passion

Yo La Tengo frontman Iha Kaplan is on top form. The sun is shining and what transpires to be a storming set on the Witnness More stage is only a matter of hours away.

Given their quintessentially art-rock background, is it unusual to be booked for such mammoth events?
Kinda! But they are interesting and very challenging, replies Iha. They are so different to club shows and they present different possibilities. We don t do that many, but we re happy to try them. We did one a few weeks ago in Northwest Spain. It was really sandy and rocky and the Spanish tend to be out of their minds, so that was really great. A week ago we were in Japan for a festival called Fuji Rock. Most of the Japanese audience are a unique combination of being really polite and really demonstrative.
Any favourite shows recently? Not to suck up, but Vicar St was a really fun one. One of the things that made it a really fun one was that we had just done some shows in England, where we mounted an ambitious tour with Neil Innes from The Rutles and Sonic Boom from Spacemen 3. We also played with Robyn Hitchcock and in London it was all six of us. We were doing mostly our songs, but we did some of their songs too, and everybody was playing on everybody s songs! It was a three-hour show and it was really exciting for us and really demanding! Our brains were ready to explode. The first show afterwards was Vicar St. The timing, the venue and the audience couldn t have been better. When we were in New York in June with an improvising jazz act called Other Dimensions in Music, we used two horn players from that band and a third horn player sat in with us. The next night we had a woman called Suzie O Hara playing with us, who is a phenomenal percussionist from New York. She sat in on the entire show. I m sure we ll do more of that stuff because it s been very exciting.
Is it a relief to perform in an instinctive and spontaneous manner rather than tour product relentlessly?
Well, we never really do that anyway. We always change the songs we play and work on songs that we haven t played in a long time. We never settle on an actual set. It is demanding to play that way, because before those English shows we had two days rehearsal where we all thought that we were going to kill ourselves. The intensity of trying to put something together is difficult. In New York it is probably made easier because we ve played there more than other cities. We know that today there is going to be higher percentage of people who haven t seen us, or mightn t even have heard our name. We try to play accordingly. You wouldn t want to come out with a horn section and do something intended for an audience who have seen our band before.