Interview with The Beauticians' Tony Viviano

We were pumped to chat with Tony from one of our favorite synth-punk bands, The Beauticians. If you're not hip to these guys, we highly recommend their killer new release. Take a read to hear about how the album came together, influences, and the bands craziest gig!

Firstly, hows your quarantine?

It's good when I can manage to ignore the incredibly bleak political
response and implications for life as we know it in the near future.
When I can do that, it's a great time to catch up on what's on the
Criterion Channel and spend more time than ever with my cats. They are
decidedly unaffected.

What’s the band been up to recently?

We played two gigs at UFO Factory (where I also work) in the last
month. The first was with Toeheads and The Cowboys. Toeheads ripped as
usual. During our set some young girl in some sort of windbreaker
pantsuit was getting down MTV spring break style near the monitors. I
gave her my best eyeroll. Real geezer flex. Got drunk with Jake and
Joey after the show. I think that was like their fourth gig that week.
The Cowboys were excellent too. They've easily become one of my
favorite active bands in the last year. They've got a new record that
comes out at the time of writing, later today.

The second gig was with The Stools and a one-off reformed version of
our drummers dads old Detroit-area punk band from the 80's, The
Pathetx. My mom came out. Purely weird time, but turned out to be a
great show. First gig we had played in a few years with The Stools. We
both played some of our first shows ever together. I think we started
at about the same time. They played a great set, they've come along
way since those shows and it's always cool to see em'. I was almost
able to claim that this was the last pre-quarantine gig at UFO, but DJ
Assault played there the next night.

We also put out some new music.

How did your new album come together? What was the goal with the release?
Give or take a few songs, this is most of the material that we've been
playing out for the last 9 months. We recorded it in our drummer
Keith's living room in Hazel Park. All of the guys in the band are
major gear-heads and synth nerds except for me, so I mostly just shut
up and played the guitar while they handled the technical end of
things. All tracks were recorded live, with a fairly minimal amount of
overdubs here and there. I'm excited to get it out.

Will it be coming to tape?"
Maybe a small-run C30 sometime in the future with some additional
tracks. There will probably be an even smaller run of lathe-cut copies
available soon. So limited that it hardly even exists.

I remember the first time I heard “Donna,” when it was just a single.
It’s such an awesome tune, tell me a little about it.
I had trepidation about bringing that song into the repertoire because
I didn't know whether it would work or not. It's a pretty light,
straightforward pop song which isn't anything we've ever really done
in the past. I wanted to write something with a persistent and sticky
organ-line that burrows into your head, like "Tally Ho" by The Clean.
I wanted the production to sound a bit like one of the ballads from
"Psychocandy". Lyrically, it's a love song that's an outright
denunciation of love. The inverse perspective of the typical
unrequited love ballad.

What are some of The Beauticians biggest musical influences?
Kelly and I share an affinity with a lot of the obvious 70's punk into
80's hardcore touchstones , but we especially bonded in a big way over
being into The Screamers when we first started putting the band
together. The Screamers were an LA band by way of Seattle existing in
the mid-to-late 70's. Extremely arty and theatrical, featuring an ARP
Odyssey, a Fender Rhodes, and a drummer. No guitars. They never made a
studio album. Instead they made a videotape that's out there and
crucial to check out if you've never seen it. The two of us played
Buzzcocks and Dead Boys covers in the basement, and a song from the
first Can record while we tried to find the right fit for a rhythm
section.

Keith started rehearsing with us about a month or two in. I've known
Keith since I was 13. He lived just down the block from South Lake
Middle School, where I was a student. Back then, we'd walk to Car City
Records and buy albums together with whatever sub-$20 sum we had to
our names at the time. Even at that age, Keith was already heavily
into noisy rock stuff like Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, The Gun Club,
and The Cramps. Both of his parents were real-deal rockers, I think
that had something to do with it. He was the first person to introduce
me to numerous bands of that ilk, which was invaluable at the time.
He's also really into Britney Spears and once went to a Miley Cyrus
show. Quite frankly, the man is an enigma and always has been.

Tyler and I met through shared acquaintances in the noise scene about
8 years ago. At any point, Tyler seems to split time between five or
six different musical projects. I've dabbled in the odd noise thing
here and there, but Tyler has made a real commitment of performing in
the realm of improvisational sound for years now, and he's the
youngest in the band by a few years. I think he taps that vein when it
comes to playing bass in The Beauticians. When you expect him to go
right, he goes left. It pushes the band and I think it makes for a
welcome deviance from the sometimes tired idiom of "punk" as a musical
format.

As far as guitar, I never wanted to play it too straight after getting
into Sonic Youth when I was 16 or so. I try to incorporate that sort
of energy into my playing, as well as that of certain so-called
college rock stuff from the 80's. Yo La Tengo, REM, The Dream
Syndicate, Green on Red. Bright, jangly, strings ringing open. If I
can find some agreeable balance between that and Killed By Death
record collector bonehead punk, I'm happy.

What was the best gig you played and why?
I can't pinpoint one gig that stands out as an absolute favorite, so I
wont try to. Usually, once we start playing, my nerves kick in and
anything outside of just playing is a distant blur off in the
foreground.

  Our earliest gigs were pretty out-of-control, with mixed results.
The two of us who drink with any kind of regularity would at times be
pretty drunk and out of it. We don't get drunk when we play anymore.
Kelly can be an intense and occasionally brooding kind of person, and
he reflects that in performance very well. He'd run out into the crowd
and confront them, showering himself in mustard, or wrapping his face
and body in saran wrap. Gimmicky? maybe. It was fun though. Some
people talked shit, some people went along with it. I think we've
sufficiently apologized to Kelly's Bar for the mustard, and Trixies
for the Fruity Pebbles (opened and thrown by an audience member, not
us).



I think our shows in the last year have been our most "together"
musically, though. Sometimes we plow through the set with a
hyper-focus and there are other times that it wouldn't be a
Beauticians show without a busted thumb and three broken strings, but
it feels me like we're doing the music as well as the audience the
justice of an honest performance more than we might've done in the
past.

Favorite local bands?

Womb Worm. I don't think they're getting their due as one of the
better local punk bands in Detroit in the last year or so. Check out
their tape, or better yet, see them live if that whole thing ever
comes back. 
I also liked Zip It when we played a show with them at Outer Limits a
few months back. Hopefully they'll be playing shows in the future too.

What can we expect next from you guys?
More new music, more shifts in more unusual directions, more gigs. As
long as we're all allowed to go outside again soon.