Angels & Airwaves mean business

06 March 2012

by Poppy Reid

Heavily tattooed and dressed top-to-toe in Macbeth and Angels and Airwaves street-wear, you’d think it would be hard to confuse Tom Delonge and David Kennedy with two powerful business men; but you would be wrong.

Delonge and Kennedy are soaking up the last day of summer while in Sydney for the Soundwave festival: “It’s amazing how much energy you can get from drinking water, it’s like Tron.” Since the bands’ formation in 2005, the Californian quartet has released four socially awake records layered with sentimentality, documentary and a film entitled Love. The band is undoubtedly the best thing to come out of Blink 182’s six-year hiatus and arguably one of the most successful projects to spawn from a park bench conversation.

“We both strategised one day,” recalls Delonge, the band’s main focal point. “Sitting at a bench not unlike this one in San Diego, near a beach, just trying to figure out what we really want.”

What was desired was exceedingly specific, the duo linchpins were cognisant when selecting members who could help drive “the art” - as Delonge describes it. “Everything in this band is me trying to find a vehicle for the art.

“When Angels was starting our label was collapsing in the United States,” – Delonge is referring to UMG’s decision to fold MCA Records into Geffen Records in the early noughties – “so we had to figure out a better way of doing it. By creating a vehicle for the art, which is all that business plans are, by trying to find people that believe in us and people that support us, we’ve been able to really navigate a difficult field.”

AVA (an initialism conjured by Delonge to form his daughter’s name) may seem more like a series of artistic business plans than a band nowadays but Kennedy says graphics and film scoring were always part of the plan.

“When we first talked about the band it was probably conceptualised right at that moment,” he remembers. “I think one of the first comments was, ‘We could even do movies’.”

With one sci-fi narrative already under their belt, the band haven’t even skimmed the surface on the messages they hope to convey. Understandably, with only one script halfway finished, Kennedy and Delonge are tentative discussing the two concepts; however they did direct TMN to Strangetimes.com, another Delonge brainchild that posts the latest UFO reports and practically anything related to conspiracy theories. It seems the group’s deep fascination with the extraterrestrial hasn’t wavered since debut album We Don’t Need To Whisper. It’s not unheard of for bands to make films (read: The Monkees, Rob Zombie, The Beatles to name a few) but for AVA, their aspirations reach further than outing any governmental cover-ups or lending weight to the anal probing in Blink 182’s track Aliens Exist. 

“What we’re hoping to do is something that’s a bit revolutionary from a band’s perspective and also a bit forward thinking for our whole model for the music industry,” says Delonge, completely immersed in his art-form. “We want to hover between the music industry and the film industry and create our own path. We’ve shown that we can do that quite competitively on a small level.”

With such a distinct direction, it hasn’t been easy maintaining members with the same objective; in 2007, Ryan Sinn was replaced by former 30 Seconds To Mars bassist Matt Watcher and late last year Ilan Rubin (Lostprophets, Nine Inch Nails) replaced long-time stickman Adam ‘Atom’ Willard. The hook up with Rubin again shows Delonge’s left-of-centre business methods; after noticing the 23-year-old in a pair of his company’s Macbeth shoes at a solo performance, Delonge sparked his tenure using none other than a text message. But seated next to the wide-eyed man with his thumbs in multiple pies, it’s clear the departures weren’t just an attempt at graceless mammonism.

We’ve had a few lineup changes,” he admits. “But we’ve come to a really amazing situation at this point. It sounds like I’m being ultra-diplomatic right now but I’m being dead serious.

“I think our band is probably the only band where everyone gets along really well. I used to think the Foo Fighters did too, until the documentary came out.”

Delusions of grandeur have proven profitable however, this year will be the boys’ most ambitious yet. Delonge explains their postion: “We’re doing more things in this band than probably any other band on Earth. You have to be of a certain calibre to be able to handle those types of things.”

Perhaps an awareness of worth and an intolerance of false modesty is what has seen the apparition of each AVA business plan. In any case, it’s clear their heads are screwed on and their hearts are in the right place.

“I think your job as an artist is to catch people a little off guard and make them think,” says Delonge. “And make them have to personally invest in your art to understand it.”