Orange County fuzzmeisters Fu Manchu may have returned to their roots with their seventh and latest album Start The Machine. Frontman Scott Hill spoke to Truepunk fresh from a recent tour with Corrosion of Conformity.

Interview by Steve Tauschke with Fu Manchu.

Tell us about your recorded version of the Adolescents’ track Things Start Moving? Were you a fan of the early 80s southern California punk scene?
Yes, a big fan of that stuff. What initially got me into music was pretty much listening to early Circle Jerks, Black Flag ad Minor Threat and all that stuff. Over the years I’d become a fan of the Adolescents too. Someone was putting out a tribute record to them and their singer Tony (Reflex aka Cadena) asked if we wanted to do a song.

And he actually sang on the track with you right?
Yeah, I asked if he would come down and see if he wanted to do a version with him singing all the words so he came in and did it in one take and was real easy.

Do you remember much from those early punk days in the LA area?
I’d go to clubs and see bands or go to roller rinks or old movie theatres that weren’t running anymore. Probably the first show I saw was maybe the end of 1980 or the beginning of 1981. It was Circle Jerks, Minutemen and Shattered Face. I think I was 13 and I snuck out of the house and took off and went with a bunch of my older friends. I thought, ‘this is my new thing.’

Do you feel Start The Machine revisits the sort of sonic muscle of your earlier releases?
Yeah, I think it’s a little more like when we were starting out, you know, the sound of when we started the band. The songs are shorter and more to the point and the guitars are heavier. We didn’t all sit around wanting to play like we did before, it’s just the way the songs came out.

The album is out on DRT (Clutch, Gwar). What became of your previous label Mammoth?
We’ve been on Mammoth since ‘96 and all of sudden they just closed up shop. It was owned by Disney and they just stopped the label, just like that. So we had to look for another label and DRT got hold of us and seemed pretty cool so we went with them.

Tell us about working on the album with producer Brian Dobbs, who I notice has a metal background?
We had a double live record (Go For It) come out a couple of years ago and we went into the studio to mix it with him and he did a really good job of making the rough takes that we gave him sound really good. On the new record he had a lot of good ideas, song arrangement-wise and different tempos and different things we wouldn’t normally try. The first song Written In Stone, that was one of the first songs we’d written for the album and we were having problems with the ending and the middle and the bridge and he just had all these ideas and so we tried them and they sounded a million times better. He was really easy to get along with too.

Surely he had some war stories having worked with Metallica and Motley Crue?
We asked him about that and he talked about a lot of time spent wasted on getting the right snare sound for two months. We were like ‘two months to get a snare sound? You’ve got to be kidding me - we could record three records in that time’.

Do you have any anecdotes of your own worth sharing?
Actually just about a month ago we flew to Spain to do just one show at a big festival. So we flew 12 hours to get there and we were supposed to go at 9pm at night on the Saturday and about 20 minutes into our set they had to stop the festival because the winds were so strong. The stages were starting to sway so that was it. We only played five songs so it was not good. We went home the next day.

Start The Machine is out through DRT.