Jamie Hince is on his umpteenth coffee of the morning as he sits down next to his bandmate and best friend, Alison Mosshart. We are in a photographic studio in north London and they have both been up late, but there are no rock’n’roll misdemeanours to recount — not from last night, anyway. Instead, the two members of the Kills were rehearsing for their forthcoming live shows. Despite the sleep deprivation the pair are nonetheless stylishly ruffled, elegantly knackered. Their hair is mussed up, their trousers are rock-star skinny and they are wrapped in theatrical coats — a double-breasted greatcoat with outsized lapels for Hince; a leopard-print faux fur for Mosshart. They certainly look the part. But below the surface each is a bag of nerves.
This is their first face-to-face interview since Hince got engaged to Kate Moss. He proposed to her in bed on February 1 with a vintage 1920s diamond ring. The Kills are hoping not to dwell on that but to talk about their music — a marriage of dirty, distorted blues- rock and electronica, with taut rhythms from a drum machine underpinning songs full of sex and conflict. They are releasing a new album, Blood Pressures, their fourth in a 10-year career. They are nervous because they suspect they are in for an uphill struggle: the wedding is the elephant in the room from the minute they arrive. They are uncomfortable even acknowledging Moss by name. Hince repeatedly employs metaphors and euphemisms, referring to “my situation”, “somebody”, or the publicity as “the smoke around us”.
He makes light of it only once, when I ask if he now gets papped when he pops out to buy milk. “I have people to buy milk,” he deadpans before grinning like the stray cat that got the entire clotted-cream factory. The grin lasts a split-second and then it’s gone. Is he worried the wedding will turn into a media circus? “No, I can’t honestly say I’m worried,” he sighs. “It just will be, won’t it? And what can I do?”
Now 42, Hince has dated Moss since 2007 after being introduced to her backstage at a Kills concert by Sadie Frost, doyenne of the Primrose Hill set — Moss’s inner circle. Ever since, he has reluctantly become a gossip-column staple: most of us know him only as the poker-faced fellow photographed next to his famous fiancée. He has remained more of an enigma than Moss’s ex Pete Doherty, whose narcotic excesses were front-page news. By contrast, Hince is thought to be a stabilising influence on Moss — last month’s mild controversy over her lighting a fag on the Paris catwalk is a far cry from her “Cocaine Kate” days; although a recent tabloid report of her drunken visit with girlfriends to a sex shop — during which she allegedly announced she was “horny” and sniffed the sex-enhancing substance poppers before collapsing — suggests she can still be a handful.
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I think one of my biggest curses is that as a musician I’ve always wanted to react against commerciality Even music magazines cannot contain their excitement about the wedding. One recently began a telephone Q&A with Hince with a question about Moss, which went down about as well as Ronald McDonald at a Greenpeace rally.
Two days before we meet, Hince, who turns out to be polite, laid-back and articulate, had snapped, scuffling in the gutter with a photographer outside a magazine party. It wasn’t a dignified look. His fiancée’s reported joke that she, not Kate Middleton, would be the most famous Kate to marry in 2011 had begun to seem less of an arch wisecrack than a dark prophecy.
“I’ve struggled with the spotlight a lot, and not just in my current situation,” Hince tells me.
“I’ve always felt like that. I think one of my biggest curses is that as a musician I’ve always wanted to react against commerciality. To me, the quality of something is often ruined by the commerciality of it. And I suppose that applies to the situation I’m in now as well. It’s like, the more you are thrown out there to the masses, the more you end up looking stupid.” Looking for a silver lining, he ventures: “Those are obviously the moments that show I don’t think I have some kind of celebrity position and have to behave accordingly. People want you to be a part of celebrity culture because of your association with somebody. But I don’t want to be a f***ing part of it. I know I am, but I don’t want to be. I don’t court that kind of attention. I’m often pretty clear to those people that I don’t want my picture taken. If they step over the mark and try to come into my little world then I’ll smack ’em. Those things make me look an idiot, but give me a break — I haven’t had any training in this, you know?”
Hince does appear to be struggling. How must he feel when so much of what is written about him — and the Kills — is currently focused on his bride-to-be? Before he can reply, Mosshart, who in photographs can bear an uncanny resemblance to Moss, leaps to his defence. “I think it’s just part and parcel,” she says. “It’s like, he’s going to be with the woman he loves. And these things are going to happen, and you can’t control them.”
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“It’s a very different view for people looking in to me looking out,” says Hince. “And to me looking out, I’ve just got a normal life. I don’t walk around thinking, oh, I’m with this person, or let’s get the papers to see what I’ve done. I just live my life pretty normally and occasionally I’ll get a reality check about it. I don’t know if this is the way to carry on. But it’s all I know for now.”
On paper, his talk of a “normal life” is hard to swallow. In July he will marry arguably the world’s most famous supermodel, worth an estimated £45m. They currently share her mansion in Maida Vale, which is on the market for a reported £7m, and will soon move in to her recently purchased seven-bedroom property in Highgate — she is believed to have paid just under £8m. Moss has reportedly installed a state-of-the-art gym, and there will be an “adults only” area complete with bar, stage and karaoke machines. There’s also a £2m country retreat in the Cotswolds. But I think what Hince means is that he hasn’t changed. He was 39 when he met Moss, then 33, and old enough to be set in his ways. He comes across as more of a head-in-the-clouds idealist than a cold-eyed mercenary. “It’s definitely not facing up to the reality of things that keeps you in a band,” he admits. “It helps in lots of ways.”
It certainly helped when he and Mosshart were penniless musicians. Theirs has not been an overnight success story. Both grew up in the sticks but on different sides of the Atlantic — Mosshart in sleepy Vero Beach in Florida; Hince in the village of Woolton Hill in Hampshire, near Newbury. Hince had an itinerant childhood. His father, William, landed construction jobs in the Shetland Islands and Africa, and the Hince family — Jamie, elder sister, Sarah, and mum, Carole — moved with him before settling in a leafy cul-de-sac in Woolton Hill.
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Jamie attended the local comprehensive and was by all accounts a model pupil. But outside school, to alleviate the small-town ennui, he would hang around the local record shop soaking up all the album covers and fantasising about the exotic lives the artists depicted on them lived, galaxies away from his own. “It built this weird mystery up about music,” he says, “I was kind of over-romantic about it.” He studied A-levels at a college in nearby Andover, where he and his friends became obsessed with the Velvet Underground and, to a lesser extent, Andy Warhol. “They seemed the epitome of dropping out and having a different kind of lifestyle.”
Significantly, Hince developed a teenage crush on Warhol’s glamorous but haywire muse Edie Sedgwick, a model whose androgynous beauty came to define her era, as did her self-destructive appetite for drug-fuelled hedonism. It is hard to avoid the obvious parallels. “I remember being captivated by her beauty,” Hince says of Sedgwick, though he could just as easily be talking about Moss. “And then things really hit home to me: this was the sort of life I was looking for.”
But this was 1980s Britain, not 1960s New York. Zeitgeist-surfing creative lifestyles were in short supply, but Hince gave it his best shot, with initially underwhelming results. He did theatre studies at Goldsmiths, leaving with a first-class degree, then dropped out to play in bands. To his parents’ horror, he would spend more than a decade living in squats in south London. “It was quite different then,” he says. “There were tons of us doing it, squatting places so you could be an artist or musician. But it wasn’t complete paupersville — we knew how to do our houses up and make them nice.”
Life wasn’t all charity shops and lentils. There were all-night parties, free festivals, wild illegal raves in Brixton — “I lapped it all up”. He eventually achieved modest success with the alt-rock band Scarfo, releasing two albums in the mid-1990s, but the band folded in 1998. It was around that time that Hince met Alison Mosshart. The daughter of a secondhand-car dealer and an art teacher, she also saw music as an escape route from her dull surroundings. “I was obsessed with big cities as a kid,” she says. “I still am. Something about them just seemed so dark and cool, and I liked the idea that there’s a million doorways and you don’t know what’s behind them: you’re from a small town and it just isn’t like that.”
Obviously if we were both single we wouldn’t do anything other than work all the time and we’d probably be together a lot more Alison MosshartAn intense and introverted teenager, she overcame her nerves to sing in a punk band, Discount, formed with skater friends, and had released three albums and toured America, Japan and Europe by the time she was 18 (they performed in school holidays).
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She would eventually evolve into one of the most formidable frontwomen in rock, her aggressive persona — likened by a Times reviewer to “a demonic scarecrow” — startlingly at odds with her diffident offstage manner. On one of Discount’s jaunts to Britain, Mosshart ended up crashing at the squat where Hince lived. After hearing him playing guitar upstairs, she shyly introduced herself, and despite the 10-year age gap the pair became firm friends, regularly corresponding upon her return to Florida. Hince’s letters must have made quite an impression, because in December 2000, aged 22, Mosshart called to announce that she was quitting Vero Beach for London. She arrived on New Year’s Eve.
“It was so exciting,” she breathes. “I can remember what I was wearing. I can remember being completely underdressed for the winter. I can remember a lot about that first week.”
It sounds as if she had quite a crush — but the Kills have always maintained that, despite the “incredible love” they feel for each other, their relationship has always been platonic. “People are obsessed with f***ing,” Mosshart remarked to Vogue when the magazine broached the subject last year. It had seemed reasonable to inquire: Mosshart has the date of her first gig with Hince tattooed on her left hand — 14.2.02. Valentine’s Day. I ask whether they have played on the idea that they might be romantically involved — their live performances and music videos are at times redolent with violent sexual tension. “Never!” insists Hince. “There has never been an air of ambiguity about our relationship.”
But they give quite different answers when I ask if the dynamic between them changes when they are in relationships. “Yeah, I think it does,” says Mosshart, adding “not in a negative way. Obviously if we were both single we wouldn’t do anything other than work all the time and we’d probably be together a lot more.”
Mosshart’s reply doesn’t entirely scotch the rumours that she has had a strained relationship with Moss due to the amount of time Hince spends with her. But the reality is less straightforward: the girls enjoy nights out together, and Mosshart has dated Jefferson Hack, the magazine editor and father of Moss’s daughter, Lila Grace. Even so, Hince is more circumspect: “Alison and I used to live, work and socialise together, and now we don’t live together any more, but the heart of this isn’t about time spent together. I think that’s natural after you’ve been in a band 10 years and there’s only two of you.”
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Anyway, Mosshart has recently been enjoying the attentions of another man, musically speaking. Taking a break from the Kills, she released two albums with the band the Dead Weather, alongside rock royalty Jack White, formerly of the White Stripes, who rates her as “the best female front person out there”. Reviewers of their live shows noted the chemistry between them (Mosshart is right, of course: people are obsessed with f***ing). But for now, she says, the Dead Weather are too busy with their other bands — the other two play in the Raconteurs and Queens of the Stone Age — to collaborate further.
The Kills are obviously close — they tease and coyly argue with each other like a married couple. Like many couples, in their early days they were flat broke: Hince was signing on and occasionally working in a recording studio “pushing faders and making tea”. But at least they had time to develop their idiosyncratic sound — rejecting the idea of recruiting other musicians in favour of using a drum machine. “It seemed to open up a lot of ideas,” says Hince. “One song could sound like it was recorded in 1968 and the next could sound like it was from the future, with a glitchy backing track.” Their fortunes would improve after they signed a deal with Domino — label home to Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand — releasing their first album, Keep on Your Mean Side, in 2003. They made enough to buy a house in Dalston in east London, which they still own. Soon after, they turned down “a shed-load of money” from Carlsberg to appear in a beer ad. “When I was starting out, putting your music on an advert wasn’t anything to do with getting the music out there, it was pretty clearly to do with selling out for some money,” says Hince.
Furthermore, “when even Iggy Pop’s doing car adverts, it doesn’t make me think it’s okay now; it makes me feel, f***, what is happening?” Which was pretty much how I felt when, soon after our conversation, I discovered that a Kills song, Cheap and Cheerful, had been used in a TV advert for Fendi; then another, URA Fever, in an ad for YSL; and a third, Fried My Little Brains, by Earl Jean. It suddenly seemed that Hince’s objection to Carlsberg was less a moral stance about selling out to The Man than a question of aesthetics.
When I was starting out, putting your music on an advert was pretty clearly to do with selling out for some money I asked the Kills to expand on this, but received only an email from their manager, explaining “it’s not just about the brand, it’s about the content of the advert. For example, the band turned down a huge car commercial because the visuals denigrated their music”.
This was hardly a rebuttal, but, to be fair, he went on to note that avenues such as advertising, TV soundtracks, film trailers and fashion increasingly provide bands with vital exposure, not to mention revenue. The Kills have successfully embraced all of this. Their music has been licensed to American TV shows (90210, Gossip Girl), Hollywood movies (The Losers, Welcome to the Rileys); they have played at exclusive parties for Prada and Etam, and they have modelled for Zadig & Voltaire.
And yet, “the idea of selling out versus promoting the band’s music is something that Jamie struggles with”. Hince had himself touched on this — although he didn’t fully elaborate — when he told me that the issue of advertising “has become such a complex animal that you can’t really look at it with the same simple politics you once did”.
Soon after our first meeting, I spoke to Hince on the phone about a more controversial issue: John Galliano’s anti-Semitic “I love Hitler” rant had surfaced on YouTube, and he has been fired as creative director of Dior. It had been reported that Galliano was to design Kate Moss’s wedding dress. “That’s unfounded entirely,” Hince snapped. Softening, he continued: “I haven’t seen the video, and I don’t even know John that well, but I feel like people have got to see reason here. John has a problem with alcohol, and the reality is that when we’re in trouble, and that’s all of us, we say things that are self-destructive; we say the most violent, cursed things. You can judge them on the stupid words they said — which I think were stupid, I hope that goes without saying — or you can dig a bit deeper and you can try to find out what the problem is. And I think it’s obvious that it’s alcohol… People are trying to say those are his politics. ‘I love Hitler’ — that’s not political, that’s somebody in trouble!”
The next day, the Kills left for New York for the first of their live shows. For the next few weeks they will be inseparable, just like old times — a blessed relief from London’s media goldfish bowl. Not that the attention has been all bad: tickets for their first British show of 2011, at Heaven, London, sold out in 15 minutes.
“I’ve noticed that there’s a kind of excitement about the new record,” Hince had said. “We’ve been working so hard, and now it’s getting to the point where we’re playing bigger venues. But whether that’s because of Jack [White] and Kate, I don’t know. I’d be disappointed if it was.”
Perhaps there could not be a more apt title for the Kills’ new album than Blood Pressures. One way or another, theirs have been raised to boiling point. It’s a brilliant album, by the way, their best yet. It needed to be.