Who’s to say whether or not the East London band Dead Kids will be that one mind-bending group that will offend and please you so much you can’t help but love to death and beg for more? My guess is they very well could be that raucous band you’ve been searching for; the one you want so badly to believe in with their anarchic energy that is capable of altering your view of ‘punk’ music. According to Dead Kids turbulent frontman Mike Frankel, “these songs are going to stick to you like cum in the bath.”

Feel offended or be intrigued. Dead Kids will surely change your opinion with their hellraising shows and headfuck style of music, as they prepare to unleash their latest single ‘Fear & Flouride’, this coming Monday, 19th of November on Salvia/XL. Have a listen to it here, buy it presale from Rough Trade, download it or make a purchase of their very limited 7″. Seek it out!!!!

As if they weren’t doing enough damage to our heads, they’re terrorizing us hard on the dancefloors too!! Check out Dead Kids remixes and have a listen to their collaborations with New York’s hot hot lads, Shy Child. Woah, love them. Dances with White Girls, and another of our favorites, Lillica Libertine, doing some more vicious remixes of Fear & Fluoride!! America, watch out, Dead Kids are heading down a path to capture and captivate us all.

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Dead Kids – Fear & Flouride

Posted in March, Lillica Libertine is Fresh out of Death

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Dead Kids – Fear and Flouride (Lillica Libertine’s Tried and Tested Remix)

Read on for more of the cheeky and elaborated thoughts by Dead Kids ringmaster, Mike Frankel.

Lovestar: Tell us about your East London band, Dead Kids – Please give a rundown for those that are not familiar

Mike Frankel: dead kids made a pact to be the best band that the U.K. had produced since oooooooh ‘the specials,’ ‘adam and the ants,’ or ‘duran duran’ or something like that. and its been going very well recently i can tell you thank you for asking.

LS: What is a typical day like for Mike Frankel?

MF: at first i become aware of myself but not in a ‘material’ or bodily form, more like in the form of ideas. it is a lucid state where i come up with fantastic melodies for songs or where i get a chance to talk with gods. on a bad day i only get to talk to demi-gods or titans and once communicated with the spirit of whitney houston who had escaped her form for destroying her mind and liver on a four-day crack binge. it was not pretty but she gave me a lot of great tips that i have adhered to until this very day.

i slowly become aware of my ‘material’ or my physical self through either pain or sexual arousement. sometimes i must dash from my bed to take care of urgent dealings. telephone calls from my lawyer who takes care of all my offshore banking in the caymen islands and sometimes on a wednesday i have to go to the benefit office where they grill me on not having found employment yet. i find it easy to handle this business, i simply tell them that i will get them to dance with hot girls in my next video or that i will introduce them to uk hip hop grime star kano.

LS: Your influences – past and present?

MF: funkadelic, prince, rick james, iggy pop, flava flav, evel knievel, king kong, martians, nicole kidman and idi amin.

LS: Nicole Kidman – haha. Idi Amin?!
What do your lyrics speak about and how are they inspired? Specifically ‘Fear & Fluoride’, your latest 7” out on Salvia/xl. Please elaborate on this fear

MF: fear is fear. it can be internal or it can spread very quickly to the rest of the pack. it can be self induced or it can be induced from an outside agent. in this case ‘fear and fluoride’ concerns itself with the conspiracy theory that fluoride is put in our water by the government for a population that has given no consent to fluoride let alone an informed consent it also deals with the hypocrisy of the organic food lifestyle if you spend half the week taking shit drugs and never sleeping but in its most basic form this song documents the spiraling panic attack of overindulging on a night out in the city or indeed the following weepy days after that.

LS: Also your last 7” single, ‘The Dead Wife Pills’ (one of the last 7: releases off Fierce Panda)

MF: i was staying with a man when i was hitching in america. i ended up in new england. i stayed with a man whose wife had died that year. he made me lobsters and put stubbies in front of me. everytime i finished one, ‘BOP’ a new stubbie got put in front of me. i sat in one of those sofa chairs you have in america where you go back and your legs come up horizontally in front of you. i ended up staying up all night drinking beers, watching amazing films on cable and taking his tiny sized pills he took for depression. the combination was very soothing..but i feel very guilty talking about it now somehow. i feel ungrateful and disrespectful but im not. he was a lovely man and i kept him company for a bit. its just what happened. i was just escaping new york, thats all.

LS: I read somewhere that you were dubbed a ‘troublemaker’ growing up, what is your greatest escapade?

MF: whoever wrote that did not know me. no one has written about me growing up who grew up with me thats for sure. i didnt get up to as much trouble as half my friends. i always knew when to stop or how much i could get away with. its only later that things have got out of control. the worst thing i did as a kid is we jumped over a fence at my school Wanstead High in east london and me and my friends smashed up a green house over a period of a week or so. we would jump over the fence of this house that backed onto the school fields. it looked quite derelict so we ended up smashing up all the panes of this green-house in the garden. the house was rundown apparantly because the old man who lived there was in hospital. we didnt know that but when he got out of hospital he went into his garden, saw the state of his greenhouse and collapsed and died. his family complained to the school but they had no hardcore evidence they only had rumour on their side so we got away with it. i remember the head of school going around with a bucket collecting money to make a donation and he made sure me and my mate put money in. put in more than the rest. o well thats life.

LS: Your greatest feat?

MF: no, i dont believe in judging myself by great feats its the little magic things that keep us alive.

LS: As front man of a well liked, raging band, the focus is most often on you, which means, you’ve got some powers. How does this effect you and your character on stage?

MF: being on stage has nothing to do with your character off the stage. when your feet hit the stage, when the mic is in your hand you are somewhere else communicating on a different level. you are filled with adrenalin and an energy that is so overwhelming that you can only try to channel it. its a rollercoaster ride with no safety harness.

LS: Do you have a message for the youth of today?

MF: i would say ‘grow up’ but i havent.

LS: I have yet to see a Dead Kids show in the flesh, but they are clearly high energy, spastic, known to go off. What makes a great live show?

MF: a great live show is when there is no space to move in there and then BOOM the place goes off in undulating waves of joy. where you can hear the drums and the vocals and everything sounds tight and people are drunk and high and laughing and dancing and losing it with you. where you cant tell who is driving on who anymore. the union between the band and the crowd at a great gig is what drives me to make music.

LS: Dead Kids are doing loads of gigs, mainly in Europe. Any plans to strike the U.S. (or anywhere else) on a tour at some point?

MF: we would love to come to the states. i grew up listening to prince to james brown, to nwa, madonna to guns n roses…to american music full stop. im not like most of these suckers over here who think its fashionable to pretend they are freedom fighters and hate america and then go eat macdonalds. i love america…woo har!

LS: What big things are in store for Dead Kids??

MF: lets just see shall we? we dont want to jinx it somehow. i know that government agencies and your mamma will try to hold us back but we love you. we are coming to spread love like its a virus and theres nothing you can do about this now cos these songs are going to stick to you like cum in the bath.

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