The Crackhouse 5 are a splattery, Beastie Boys-esque hip-hop group consisting of Brian (B Cool), Matt (BB Gunn) and Kelvin (Shorty K). Salient’s Kim Wheatley met them for a chat over some coffee at the Paramount Theatre. You can also find an audio version of this interview on the Salient website. Our conversation began with a discussion of Crack Wednesdays, their weekly Wednesday night show at Mighty Mighty.
Salient: Crack Wednesdays, what’s the deal?
Kelvin: They started because me and Tommy Ill wanting to do something, just put on a night. We talked to Mighty and they were really keen.
Brian: But it’s getting hard for us to find people to play because we don’t really want bands with drummers or instruments as such just because of cost of sound engineers, etc.
Kelvin: We’re going to try having them monthly so they can be bigger and so that we can actually afford to get bands with drummers.
Salient: Is there any new CH5 music being recorded?
Kelvin: Um…. Yeah!
Salient: What can we expect?
Brian: Metal Riffs. Seriously.
Salient: Auto-tune?
Brian: Nah.
Kelvin: Auto-tune for our joke raps, but not for CH5. We are going to record more things, today in fact. The first group of songs that we did which we made into an EP were made over a couple of months in the Crackhouse when we lived there. But then we all moved out and it was kinda hard. It was so easy there because we were all in [Matt] Buck’s bedroom and we’d just wake up and walk in and Buck would be making a beat and we’d just start writing songs.
Salient (to Matt): So you make most of the beats then?
Matt: Yes. But because these guys are drummers and I don’t have any sense of rhythm, they help line up stuff.
Salient: That’s quite an interesting way of doing it—what do you use, can you reveal any secrets?
Matt: Just Cubase, and samples. Lots of breaks.
Salient: Favorite thing to sample?
Matt: ‘Funky Drummer!’
Kelvin: How many songs is that in?
Matt: It’s only in two. Oh wait, it’s only in one song.
Salient: But it feels like it’s in more.
Matt: It’s in every other hip-hop song.
Kelvin: We’ll probably use it again.
Kelvin: We’ll have a new EP that you can download.
Matt: But hopefully there’ll be no samples in it.
Matt: Drum samples, but nothing else. Played instruments [instead].
Kelvin: The thing with us is we couldn’t give a shit about being good at rapping; we just want to have fun.
Brian: I see us as a party band, a party starter, rather than a hip-hop group as such.
Salient: It seems as though you’ve thought about it though?
Matt: Yeah, we’ve definitely considered the songs. We’ve thought about the words we’re saying.
Kelvin: And also because we all played in bands, we’re not retarded at writing songs or anything.
Salient: It’s not like you were drunk and mumbled into your MacBook right?
Kelvin: Well, we didn’t do it in one take, even though the recordings aren’t that good quality, and our delivery isn’t awesome, we still put a little bit of time in it.
Brian: You think about our recordings and how old are they?
Matt: The ones on the MySpace are really old.
Kelvin: We haven’t changed the lyrics or the structure since the very first night we recorded them. We did that EP in September (2008) and then we went on making songs and realised we got better at delivery, so we went back and did it again.
Salient: So the next recorded output might have higher fidelity and be a little tighter?
Matt: I don’t know if it’ll be higher fidelity.
Brian: It’ll definitely be tighter.
Kelvin: And the songs will be better.
Matt: We just need a good microphone.
Salient: Do you really though?
Matt: Definitely.
Kelvin: The beats sound scratchy in a really cool way, which I really like, and they’re all over the place in a good way I think.
Salient: Like the Go-Team!
Matt: They make really good hip-hop beats.
Brian: That’s a good comparison, I hadn’t thought of that before.
Matt: Especially [CH5 track] ‘What’cha Gonna Get,’ that’s real Go-Team I reckon.
Salient: I haven’t listened to the Go-Team in ages. Somebody put that on at a party please.
Kelvin: We probably can, at Crack Wednesdays.
Matt: They had problems with samples on their first album. They redid that album for the American release. All those samples are really wicked, those chants are all from rallies in the 60s.
Brian: I heard something awesome that we could sample that was similar to that. Tom showed me this website that has amazing chantey sort of old bluesy stuff that has chants that we could take. Take the chants rather than the actual song.
Matt: Yeah. Do it.
Listen to the interview here.