Spurning the big city ills of Los Angeles, ALL are now enjoying fishing and playing music on a farm in Missouri. Karl Alvarez and Bill Stevenson interrupt their current US tour to speak with Truepunk.

Interview by Steve Tauschke with drummer Bill Stevenson and bassist Karl Alvarez. Interview from 1992

“We live in Missouri now as opposed to LA,” starts Alvarez on the phone. “Maybe that makes the music a little more relaxed-sounding and comfortable. I’m not talking in terms of tempo because speed is a different thing but it does sound a little wider and a little less uptight.”

ALL recently issued their third album Percolator, the quartet’s first since relocating to Brookefield, Missouri in 1990. The album follows in the wake of two excellent EPs and a pair of albums, the most recent of which Allroy Saves was experimental in nature, says Stevenson.

“It was pretty good I thought,” he says of its reception in the US, “but for people who are non-musicians, it was a little bit, er, I don’t think they quite understand it because it’s so complicated. It sold really well but I think it’s pretty complicated music so a lot of our normal fans would probably have rather had us play three chord pop songs, you know, like the Ramones or whatever. But we don’t do that very often.”

So what was the general feedback from musicians who heard it?

“They tended to like Allroy Saves the best because it is the most advanced musically,” Stevenson adds. “I think it’s one of the most advanced rock records that’s ever been made! But it’s not exactly a pop smash hit album.”

Which brings us to Percolator, a tearaway pop-core effort that also is also not as simple as it sounds.

“Our music is very complex on a lot of levels,” he says. “It’s not intentional, it’s just that we play so much, like 3 or 4 hours every day and the music becomes very dense and intense and very difficult to listen to because it’s involved. But it’s what we enjoy playing and that’s what keeps us interested.”

Aside from the odd lyrical surprise, one of the album’s highlights is Stevenson’s crisp drumming which is again typically melded into the mix given he and guitarist Stephen Egerton produced the record.

“I think my drumming’s changed from album to album,” he says, “yet everyone seems to say they can spot my drumming a mile away. But I’ve always tried to change it, to keep it moving and keep it interesting. I think I’ll always have that incredibly tight, almost verging on mechanical tightness, and I guess that is what people recognise as being my style. But personally, you know, I practise and try to get better and learn as I go along. I’ve never had any drum lessons.”

Certainly, Stevenson’s drum parts create a seamless rhythm with Alvarez who wrote most of the Percolator’s best tracks including several golden love odes and the song Nobody’s Hands..

“It’s a real tricky thing, you want to have the opinion that people take sides very readily in life,” explains Alvarez, “and it can be as extreme as a war or as trivial as a baseball game but when you get the right down to it you can examine both sides of any conflict and absolutely nobody is innocent. So the song is kind of coming to terms with the difficulty of that.”

After an uncharacteristic six month hiatus earlier this year, ALL have dedicated the remainder of 1992 to playing live, including “99% all-age shows” for North American fans on both east and west coasts, with additional dates in Canada.

Their tour mates, Seattle’s My Name are “quite exceptional” says Alvarez who describes them as a mix between Big Drill Car and No Means No and will certainly keep headliners ALL on their punk-pop toes.