Thee Oh Sees - The Stool Pigeon

The godfather of garage revivalism has a souvenir of England permanently stuck in his leg. Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer has burned through a dozen bands in as many years, quickly becoming the most prolific figure in San Francisco’s underground scene. But it was a joke side-project that almost cost him a limb. After smuggling cocaine into the UK while touring faux German techno outfit Zeigenbock Kopf, who were charting unexpectedly in Europe, Dwyer smashed up a bar in his underwear and awoke days later in a London hospital.

Glass had become lodged in his leg and the prognosis was amputation. “Every day they would trace the infection on my leg and it was getting closer and closer to my cock,” he says, pulling up a trouser. “I was just getting sicker. The doctor was under-staffed and irritated; wouldn’t give me any medication. Then these two Jamaican night nurses wheelchaired me to a phone and helped get me on a plane. My Chinese herbalist back home flushed out my blood; fixed me in days. Basically when your body can’t eject something infected, it gets encased.” He points at the bubble under his knee, inviting a touch. “So one day a piece of glass may come out and if it does, I’m going to have it polished and turned into an earring.”

At first, Dwyer feared that mellowing his amphetamine intake might mean slowing down. But since starting Thee Oh Sees, another side-project-turned-full-time-band, he has been steadily gaining disciples one seven-inch at a time. While playing the Matt Groening-curated ATP festival, Dwyer found two fans who’d each drawn one of his record covers on their chests. “It was an older gay couple, completely out of their minds. One had Thee Master’s Bedroom…, the other had Help on his chest. They were hilarious. We got a great snapshot and I was like, ‘That’s the next fucking record cover right there.’"

Such enthusiasm is easy to understand. Thee Oh Sees are the pinnacle of garage pop: urgent but uplifting, infectious but intense. Within the space of nine albums, the breadth of their sound has coasted from gentle psychedelia to full-on hard rock, proving that garage can be well-produced and still sound edgy. The grittiness is partly due to Dwyer’s vocal style, a soft falsetto developed by singing through an old phone mouthpiece but perfected by regularly biting microphones.

“My teeth are fucked,” he says, wiping his fringe from his eyes. “I can’t bite my nails anymore; can’t even open a packet of crisps. I’ve done a lot of drugs in my life, not so much anymore, but where once I thought, ‘My teeth are fuckin’ fine!’ Now they’re like, ‘Nooooo, we were actually cracked the whole time.’”

Wearing a sweat-stained sleeveless vest over black jeans and brogues, Dwyer blasts through a one-song sound-check before shouting, “That’s essentially that. How do you feel?” across the venue. “Um,” stutters a dazed sound engineer. “That’s twice as loud the last band to check the lines. As in, A LOT louder.” Dwyer just smiles. “Wait till there’s a room full of English flesh soaking it in. Then we’re goin’ to get drunk and turn it up.”

Dwyer doesn’t mess about. His rent is low enough that he can spend any downtime gleaning ideas, manufacturing inspiration for his rallying cries with brute force. A week is the longest the four-piece has spent recording an album (2007’s Sucks Blood), while the newly released Warm Slime was captured live in eight hours. Occasionally label reps come knocking, but Dwyer is happy to plough on independently, even if it means getting criticised for his prolific work rate.

“I get grief about that all the time,” he says. “I don’t give a fuck. I’m 35; I stopped caring about what people think 10 years ago. I mean we have to keep up with ourselves, frankly. Believe it or not, I edit out a lot of dog shit. So if people think I’m putting out shit now they can’t imagine how terrible it would be if I wasn’t laying down the law. The live set changes so much that to slow down to work on a masterpiece would mean playing songs that were three or four years old. And I don’t really have anything else to do! But If it starts to suck, tell me and we’ll talk about it.”