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On the tail end of an Australian tour which took in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, and included a last minute Atlas Sound show, Deerhunter’s willowy singer-guitarist and stand-up comic in the making Bradford Cox entered the 2ser studios to trade words with Static’s Chris Berkley about all things in the Deerhunter-verse including forgetting lyrics, screaming at his family, the art of the first take, a possible chat show and more. (Bradford would front Deerhunter for a gig in Sydney later that evening rounding off a wildly successful couple of weeks for the band.)

And joining us in the studio on Static this evening it is a pleasure and a privilege to have Bradford Cox from Deerhunter. Welcome to Sydney!

Hi, the privilege is all mine. (deep voice)

Nice radio voice Bradford.

Oh, thank you.

You’ve been filling in your days pretty well on this Australian Tour haven’t you? Atlas Sound shows, Deerhunter shows, there hasn’t been a moment to breathe.

No, but breathing is overrated. (laughs)

Was that how you built the Deerhunter reputation at home — really touring a lot and playing wherever you could? It seemed especially when Cryptograms came out you guys were on tour forever, it was a real word of mouth thing.

That’s been the case, yeah, and it’s been really rewarding. There’s more and more people there and the audiences are really responsive and it’s a pleasure to meet everyone and play for people that are excited and stuff. That’s something I never take for granted, because when you’re starting out in a band – I’m sure it’s like this everywhere all over the world – there’s so much time spent playing in these tiny rooms to nobody and they don’t know who you are and they don’t care. And when you first start playing shows where people actually know your songs and they recognize your music or they know the words or something, it’s really unusual, it’s hard to describe, but it’s really rewarding.

It must be a weird thing as well where it’s got to the stage now for the Atlas Sound solo show, people know your songs better than you do and you can’t remember the names of some of your songs…

It’s really funny: I didn’t mention it last night, but before I played that show I had to go on the Internet and look at guitar tab websites to get the chords because I couldn’t remember the chords to the songs and so I decided to look up where people had — it’s site where people put chords on the Internet.

It’s a big help for the artist himself, let alone the fans.

Well a lot of people do that, I read that Michael Stipe has to google his lyrics.

Yeah well he writes the lyrics in his hand on stage because he can’t remember them…

Really…? Well he has a lot of wordy words so…

Shaun Ryder from The Happy Mondays when he was here used a teleprompter…

Are you serious?

…And freaked out when the teleprompter cut out .

Oh wow, that’s embarrassing.

It must be hard to remember some of those Happy Mondays lyrics.

A lot of times with Deerhunter and with Atlas Sound though, I improvise.

Do people notice?

Oh yeah. Like I just change the words sort of, it’s something I guess I always admired about Stephen Malkmus, he used to do that in Pavement, he would change the words.

Yeah, and you can get away with gibberish as well sometimes I guess.

Yeah, sometimes it’s better than the real words.

Well I mean on the recorded front with Deerhunter it seems to be equally in the studio that you’ve built a pretty impressive legacy. When you started out did the band stem out of your own home recording? Is that what you were doing before the rest of the band fell into place?

Yeah it’s where a lot of it came from, but everybody’s contributed equally to Deerhunter, it’s not just like me or my home recording, like Lockett [Pundt] — some recordings have a lot to do with it too, and Josh and Moses, they both write a lot of stuff.

It’s not like you’re forced to delegate or anything like that?

No no no, we all kind of come together on it. That’s why Atlas Sound’s liberating to me because I have total control. I don’t need it with Deerhunter, there’s no power plays.

Well it definitely seemed to fall into place after the first record as well when Lockett came into the band — it seemed that things solidified a lot more?

Yeah definitely, Lockett and I shared a lot of the same influences and we grew up together finding out about the same stuff, growing up. So it [was] natural for him to join up.

It seems that with the sound of the band, you’ve always retained a lot of effects on your songs even with the band setup. There’s reverb on the vocals and guitars and those sound collages of film dialogue and stuff on tracks like “Saved By Old Times” — is creating music in the studio for you a way of making something otherworldly Bradford? Is that the way you look at it?

I do appreciate the ability you have to stretch time and create artificial environments just with reverb and stuff like that.

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