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In Conversation

02 December 2008 01:48 BST

Cobra Starship: grateful for a second chance

inthenews.co.uk's Lewis Bazley talks to Cobra Starship frontman Gabe Saporta about Pete and Ashlee, the emo scene and motherf***in snakes on motherf***in planes.

So how linked is the success of the movie Snakes on a Plane, and you guys being in a band?

Basically, the guys who are in my band now, I'd wanted them to be in my band before but nothing was happening until the song Snakes on a Plane happened, so they'd be like 'yeah, thanks, but no thanks'. And then six months later the film came out and one of the guys was working as a copy editor someplace and called me up to say 'Hey, I just saw a picture of you in Entertainment Weekly with Samuel L Jackson... are you still looking for a band?' (laughs)

What's the relation between your band name and the song?

The reason why the band name came round is that me and my friends used to have a crew called the Cobras, just a joke, basically. And I did a cover of Hollaback Girl called Hollaback Boy that I put up on MySpace but I was never really going to keep that name. And then Snakes on a Plane sort of fell in my lap and the connection was so strong I thought we should do it. And I had a bunch of songs I'd been working on so we took one of those and made it work for the movie!



Did the success of the song make you think you had to start a new band?

Well, no, I'd been in Midtown and I knew I wanted to do something more electronic and more fun and tongue-in-cheek and, coming to something like this the challenge was 'how do you launch it?' So Snakes on a Plane was the perfect launch-pad because it's our kind of humour - if you get it, you think it's great, if you don't, you think 'What??'

Is Midtown done and dusted now?

I'd like to do some more Midtown stuff, again. I did a Midtown song with the Movielife at a show recently and people loved it. My only thing is, I feel like a couple of guys in the band don't have a love for it anymore and, for me, if I wanna do it, it's for the love of it, I don't give a f**k about the money. But I've been really lucky with Cobra Starship to get a second chance and it's bigger than Midtown ever was.

Looking at the biography for the band it says the aim of the first album was "teaching hipsters to not take themselves so seriously and telling emo kids to stop being pussies" - is that still the plan?

Totally. Our whole thing is that the emo scene that we came from, especially in America, got so serious and redundant... music should be emotional, of course, but when you're ripping your shirt off every night and choking yourself with the microphone stand, it's like 'Give me a f**king break'. You're doing the same thing every night, you can't be feeling that same way each night.

I don't want kids to go to the show and cry, I want them to come to the show and have a great time, and forget the problems of the week. We want people to have fun and take the p*** out of each other.

Talking of the emo kids though - a lot of that kind of fan was at Give at a Name so did your style go over ok?

Yeah, definitely. The scene in America is way different now, I think kids were getting bored of it, especially the way the media deals with it. And it's kind of starting to be the same thing in the UK. What's interesting in the UK is the whole new nu wave thing you've got, with people like Hadouken! and it seems like there's a real difference between the emo scene and that scene. I think we went over great anyway, and I was raised on emo, so I don't hate those kids, I just want them to have fun.

Who was the better crowd - the London or Sheffield crowd?

They were both really great. Um... I feel like we played better at Sheffield, as we weren't as happy with the sound at London.

You've got the Warped tour coming up - is that exciting or daunting? It's a long tour after all...

It's daunting and exciting! We never did the whole tour in Midtown but with Cobra Starship we're headlining one of the main stages for the whole tour. The good thing is - all our friends are gonna be there, the Academy Is... , Gym Class Heroes, so I'm gonna have the water guns and the slip 'n' slide, I've got my shorts. I'm all set!

Was making The City is at War video as fun as it looked?

Yeah, it was great but f**king freezing. But it was great to throw pies at all our friends and our manager, who busts our balls all the time!



Was working with Patrick Stump from Fall Out Boy a natural thing after touring with them?

Well, we wrote the record on tour with them, and they're huge so we were playing this huge monster domes. And there's no distractions at those because there's outside the cities. So we were basically stuck in a parking lot all day. So we'd play and then the whole rest of the day we could write and record.

Has Pete Wentz changed since being with Ashlee Simpson?

Oh yeah, every since he started dating a celebrity, he's just been doing lines of coke with hookers. No, I'm kidding, he's totally the same dude. She's a really nice girl and it's weird, I can't say that I was an Ashlee Simpson fan but I definitely know that kids in the emo scene have her record as a guilty pleasure.

What do you think of her music?

She was trying to be the more punk rock version of her sister so that's a good thing, I think. The only thing that changes is that he gets his picture taken a lot more than he used to."

I don't think that she was more famous than him but it seems that once two people that are in the spotlight get together, they seem to become a power couple.

Pete used DJ at the parties on our tour and he would always bring me along because basically we'd be DJing and no-one would dance, they'd just gawk at him.

They'd just stand on the dancefloor taking pictures, so basically, my job was to come up to the people and just stick my d*** in their face and start dancing!

Lewis Bazley

Cobra Starship's album Viva La Cobra! is out now.