The Kills formed in 2000 when a boy from Andover, England and a girl from Florida, USA met in a South London hotel. "It was like we'd lived parallel lives," Jamie recalls. Both had been to art college, the boy had just left a punk-pop band called Scarfo and the girl wanted to leave a punk-pop band called Discount, and both were disillusioned with the musical scenes they were part of. "We had these bedrooms on different sides of the Atlantic which were full of artworks and films and music that we'd made for no-one to listen to. We had so many things in common. It was at a time that if you spent a lot of time making art and dressing up you got beaten down for being pretentious. Everything was about being down to earth. And we both just felt this relief when we met each other."
Alison was so convinced that this was the creative partner she'd always been searching for that she decamped from Florida to Jamie's flat in South ...
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The Kills formed in 2000 when a boy from Andover, England and a girl from Florida, USA met in a South London hotel. "It was like we'd lived parallel lives," Jamie recalls. Both had been to art college, the boy had just left a punk-pop band called Scarfo and the girl wanted to leave a punk-pop band called Discount, and both were disillusioned with the musical scenes they were part of. "We had these bedrooms on different sides of the Atlantic which were full of artworks and films and music that we'd made for no-one to listen to. We had so many things in common. It was at a time that if you spent a lot of time making art and dressing up you got beaten down for being pretentious. Everything was about being down to earth. And we both just felt this relief when we met each other."
Alison was so convinced that this was the creative partner she'd always been searching for that she decamped from Florida to Jamie's flat in South London. Inspired by a mutual obsession with The Velvet Underground, '70s London and New York punk, they formed a duo called The Kills, rejected everything they'd begun to hate about being in a rock band, got themselves signed to Domino Records and made a spectacularly sexy garage-punk album called 'Keep On Your Mean Side' in 2003.
Buoyed by the deserved critical acclaim for this and their incendiary early live shows, but also nonplussed by the fact that they were, once again, in a proper band with a record deal, they made a completely different, yet equally spectacular second album in 2005 called 'No Wow.'
The Kills' most recent album 'Blood Pressures,' was released in 2011 on Domino Records. The album saw Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart deliver their vivid and uniquely gritty post-blues, but with a new level of thoughtfulness and depth not yet explored by the duo. Tinged with wistfulness and vulnerability, 'Blood Pressures' has an enduring sense of intricacy and richness that intensely blends with their ever-compelling songwriting.
Recently, the band have been busy exploring their other passion -- visual arts. Jamie opened "Echo Home," an exhibit of his photographic work at the Morrison Hotel Gallery spaces in New York and Los Angeles Alison's original paintings on paper, canvas and fabric art have been exhibited at group and solo shows in NYC and at Art Basel in Miami.
After two years of festival shows and special guest appearances at arena shows with Queens of The Stone Age, Jack White and The Black Keys, and following on from a third album release from The Dead Weather, Alison's band with White, Jack Lawrence and Dean Fertita, 2016 will see The Kills releasing their fifth album, hitting the road once more, and scaling new creative and commercial heights. A long way from south London!
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