The Kills Live From Abbey Road

Last week we featured an interview with MGMT's Andrew VanWyngarden about his August 14 appearance on the Sundance Channel's Live From Abbey Road. In keeping with our insatiable infatuation with the Beatles' famed studio and those who inhabit it, here's The Kills' guitarist (and Kate Moss paramour) Jamie Hince on what it was like performing in within those hallowed sound-proof walls, the origin of his and singer Alison Mosshart's off-kilter pseudonyms, and the trouble with overexposure.

How did it feel recording in Abbey Road?
They make you feel really at home there, and the stage is pretty amazing. We’ve mastered records there before but never recorded them in the actual studio. It’s a pretty awe-inspiring place I think. It just kind of takes you with it. There wasn’t anything at all awkward or anything like that. It’s just a kind of immense room and you just get on with it really. I live just around the corner from it. Every time I walk past it, there’s always tons of people outside, taking pictures. The wall outside is always covered in graffiti, and they paint over it, and it just gets signed on again and again and again. So it’s like a monument. You get that feeling, when you’re walking inside there, that you’re walking into something magical that means a lot to a lot of people. You can’t avoid it really. The actual studio where you record, they haven’t changed that room very much, so it’s kind of weird to think of all those people who were there all that time ago. I’m a sucker for that ... I love all that stuff.

Do you think being on “Live From Abbey Road” will help your career?
I don’t really know. I don’t really care about exposure or popularity or anything. There’s not many tasteful music shows around anymore. Everything’s kind of geared up by popularity and money ... . Music ends up appealing to the lowest common denominator and just being kind of cheesy. The “Abbey Road” thing is a really sort of tasteful show. Probably won’t stay on the air very long because of it.

Are you weary of getting too popular, or would you welcome the exposure?
It’s just doing what we want. I think if you’re in a band, and you don’t care about being the biggest band in the world, and you don’t care about exposure, and all that sort of stuff ... I think that really kind of starts people. I don’t want to start something I’m really not invested in. I don’t care about all the tricks that would maybe make me sell another thousand records. That’s the sort of stuff that makes me not want to be a band.

Do you write your songs together as a band ?
A song comes about in any way we could possibly get one. We don’t really have a formula. There’s no routine. It’s really any way possible. Sometimes it starts with me making a drumbeat, or sometimes it comes from lyrics, sometimes we write together, sometimes we write apart. Just any way at all really.

Can you tell me how you got the names “VV” and “Hotel”?
Right at the beginning we were squatting in this house in south London, which we’d sit in pretty much 24 hours a day just writing music, having all day practices and stuff. We didn’t have any money, so we couldn’t go out or anything. We were just a two-person social group that just drank wine and talked about taking over the world. At that time we had no idea we were ever going to be a proper band and get a record deal. So it was just a silly kind of gesture really. It was going to be a ground zero and we were going to start again and we decided we were going to rename each other. We came up with the stupidest names. It was just kind of drunk, never thinking it would ever come back to haunt us.