That's Entertainment

"I moved to Nashville to pursue a career in music, but I didn't think I was going to be doing it playing instrumentals, honestly,” Angel begins, still sounding bemused at his good fortune. “I thought it would be more for fun and I'd do something else that was serious. But the timing was right. When we started the band the second time in the '94/'95 the movie Pulp Fiction had just come out and all of a sudden the landscape had changed and there were surf-instrumental bands in every city in America. Then of course we had the Mexican wrestling masks, the Lucha Libre masks. We had those because Danny [Amis, band co-founder] was and is a big fan of Mexican culture and he'd been travelling every chance he could to Mexico City and he had a big box of them when we were getting together to rehearse and we just thought they looked cool. You know, 'Let's put them on for a lark' and never thinking much more than that. But that was probably the reason we've had a career for seventeen years – the wrestling masks. Not to take away anything from the music, but I just don't think that we would've sustained it. So here we are seventeen years later: we've been nominated for a Grammy, our songs have been in TV shows and movies and we're in a movie and we've been on TV shows. So it's been a very improbable journey.”

Angel describes the band as surf-instrumental and name checks The Ventures and Link Wray, but he thinks it's a convenient label, not an accurate one.

“To be honest, we've never considered ourselves strictly surf-instrumental: we consider ourselves a rock'n'roll-instrumental band,” he explains. “I think calling it surf-instrumental is a good handle because it gives people a good idea that you're not playing Steve Vai type of guitar or something, but we draw from all kind of things: everything from The Beatles to soul music. People are always asking us, 'Isn't it kind of limiting to not have a vocalist?', but when you think about all the universe of music and how much of it is instrumental – classical music and jazz music, for example – there are no limits, really.

“One of our philosophies when we started the band was that we wanted to be fun. We wanted to be fun and we wanted to be entertaining, those were the two things,” Angel continues, discussing the raison d'être of Los Straitjackets. “We didn't take ourselves too seriously. I mean of course we take it seriously, it's now our livelihood, but we really thought that rock'n'roll should be fun. My idea of rock'n'roll is like Little Richard; I always smiled when I heard him. And that translates into our live show. We definitely always wanted the live show to be entertaining.

“And I think we tried harder because we thought, 'How are we going to hold people's attention, for an hour?' People are so conditioned to watch a singer that I really thought at the beginning of the band that we were going to fail for that reason. I didn't think that people were going to pay attention. So that's part of the reason that we tried at every turn to pull something out of our sleeves, like the masks or the matching guitars and dance choreography. We really did want to entertain people. We wanted to be an antidote to where rock has gone – it's so glum, a lot of it. So that was definitely a conscious decision and it was an easy one, because it comes naturally to us.”

Los Straitjackets will be playing the following dates:

Friday 8 March - The Standard, Sydney NSW
Saturday 9 March - The Highway Hotel, Adelaide SA
Sunday 10 March - Acacia Ridge Hotel, Acacia Ridge QLD
Thursday 14 March - The LuWow, Melbourne VIC
Friday 15 March - Devilles Pad, Perth WA