The Singing Lamb: So what’s behind the name of the band?*

Jonny Bell: What do you mean?

Why the name Crystal Antlers?*

Jonny Bell: I don’t know…

It just happened?

Jonny Bell: Ha, yeah.

You know how I found your band?

Jonny Bell: How?

I really liked antlers, and I really want antlers so I searched on Google, ‘Antlers Music’.

Jonny Bell: Haha, that’s what’s behind the name.

What is the background of Crystal Antlers, for anyone who doesn’t know about them?

Jonny Bell: Well how did we start? We were all in different punk bands and they all kind of fell apart at the same time. And we had a music class together, and our teacher was being trialed as a child molester, and he was in church too, a catholic church. He was gone for most of the year, and there was no teacher because the school didn’t really have money and we just kind of played around in his classroom and that’s how we started playing together.

Do you guys know how to read music?

Jonny Bell: I barely know how to read music. It’s comforting because I can’t read music.

Kevin Stuart: I only play the drums so it’s much easier to read drum music.

Jonny Bell: I definitely don’t know how to read music. I took a classes in college though and I thought I was going to get it. And I also took music theory. It was really hard.

Is this your first time playing at NxNE?

Jonny Bell: Yeah, we played at SxSW, but then we played here at the Horseshoe Tavern but never for this festival.

Are you excited?

Jonny Bell: I am excited.

What has been your weirdest fan experience? If you have had one.

Kevin Stuart: That guy at Salt Lake City who hung out with us for a day, but that guy wasn’t weird he was cool.

Jonny Bell: Yeah, we played on this television show, the Carson daily show but it’s like a late night show and ever since that. Since it goes to such a mainstream audience, there has been a lot of strange people that show up at shows that don’t seem like typical music fans. A lot of people in their 50s and its just strange… people. Our friend, well, now he is our friend, but he was a super fan, and this guy Jim Portland**… we went and we stayed with him and he said he embalms people and that he was talking about how they were cremating all these fat people that week. Really horrible story, and there was a problem with the cremation thing, the fat people were actually melting… and all the fat… there was all this grease pouring out all over the floor in there and all over the floor and everything and he apologized about the way he smelled… he smelled like melted flesh. He said that because our van runs on vegetable oil, he would give us melted human flesh to run our van on. It’s a very interesting thing to find out about someone while staying in their house.

What was the concept of your latest album tentacles? If you had one.

Jonny Bell: We wanted to make an honest record. We did. I guess… the concept was that we would record it in a week’s time. And we did, and it was… yeah. But our idea was to make an honest record in a short period of time.

To do all of that in a week, do you find that you have to summon a lot of artistic energy? I draw, play instruments and write and I find that I can’t do it all the time.

Jonny Bell: Yeah there was definitely a lot of walls to break through to be able to do it, like, it was a real struggle, we hardly slept at all. That kind of helps when you want to be creative with that. In the last four or five days of it we slept for around 2 hours a night. We’d just stay up all night and finally fell asleep at four in the morning. And get up a few hours later at the floor of the studio. I didn’t leave the studio at all. Maybe for a minimum of 15 minutes at a time… but that was about it.

What are you guys listening to right now?

Jonny Bell: Usually in the van we listen to a lot of old punk stuff. I like to listen to religious radio, like preachers and evangelists and listen to all the crazy things they have to say, because I’m an atheist.

If you were a singing animal , what animal would you be?

Jonny Bell: We’ve been asked this question before. Hmmm, singing platypus… Ask Kevin.

Kevin Stuart: A singing bird… a predatory bird.

Jonny Bell: I’d be a human, primitive human.

*So after the interview, Sally and I attended an amazing show at Rolly’s Garage, and walked to Yonge and Dundas square to catch Crystal Antlers… only to find out we missed them. Suddenly, we came across Jonny again and met the rest of the band members. After a few minutes of watching the amazingly degrading AMP Rockstar contest, Jonny remembers how the bands name came to be, apparently someone had a dream about crystal antlers, and the meaning of it all was “the fragility of masculinity”.

**I apologize if his name isn’t spelt correctly.

For more Crystal Antlers,
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/crystalantlers

Interview By Katherine Mark & Sally Robins