Jamie Hince Celebrity

Name: Jamie Hince

Born: 24/12/1968 (Age: 42)

From: Unknown

Famous for: You won't have a clue who he is

Relationship status: We have NO idea

This Anglo-American duo force you to engage deeply in their music. Where most contemporary groups hit you with an elaborately orchestrated reading of a song, attempting to erect their own perfect castle in sound, The Kills reduce rock & roll to its barest components. As much as what’s played, you hear what isn’t played, the space between the notes, music as a force that flows between the people creating it (and listening to it).

The girl, VV, stares out the guy, Hotel. He fires an intense volley of noize into her stomach. She spits back at him, an inch or two from his face, and collapses to the floor. He places the body of his guitar, now rampaging into feedback, on the ground between her knees, and angles the neck over her. She arches her back, hair flailing. The sound surges…

You don’t see chemistry like this on a stage every day of the week. The Kills, VV and Hotel, have a special relationship. They met five or six years ago in South London, while VV, née Alison Mosshart, was on tour in Europe with her band at the time, Discount. Hotel, then known as merely Jamie Hince, had just wound up his group Scarfo and was just knocking around a few ideas of his own, solo. Before Alison returned home to Florida, they exchanged numbers. They corresponded, sending each other letters, tapes (of music; of themselves talking) and occasionally splashing out on a pricey international call.

At the turn of the millennium, Alison moved in with Jamie in his flat in Gypsy Hill, London. They gave each other a stage name, and The Kills were born. In many ways, The Kills had been born the very day when they met. The band was an expression of everything they experienced together, a document of them. They were entirely self-sufficient. Jamie did most of the guitar, Alison did most of the singing, Jamie learnt to drum and laid down some backing beats on tape. What else did they need? Anyone else would be an intruder.

One summer, they hired a car and drove round the States, calling ahead to clubs in towns they fancied stopping in, and booked themselves to play there. They started recording officially in March 2002, with Liam Watson at Toe Rag. Four tracks, including their cover of “Dropout Boogie” by Captain Beefheart, were released by Dim Mak in the US as the “Black Rooster EP” that summer. Early in 2003, the three originals were added to eight other self-penned songs to make up their first album, Keep On Your Mean Side.

Says Jamie, “We’re still really proud of it. We’d talked for weeks and weeks about the songs we wanted to write. We wrote and recorded them 100 percent exactly like we wanted them. That album was the only thing I’d ever done in my life which turned out exactly as I’d intended it.”

Happily or not, their rough-edged, blues-rooted take on rock & roll collided with the new craze for garage aesthetics. They felt uneasy being lumped in with any revivalism/traditionalism. “When people compared us with all that, we always felt… not insulted, but we never felt like a garage band,” says Jamie. They were more into updating The Velvet Underground’s idea of a rock band encompassing all areas of Art and Life – the total experience. So, they toured with bands from beyond garage’s narrow parameters, most notably Primal Scream. They toured incessantly, in fact, for 18 months making the most of the freedom that their micro-operation afforded.

In early 2004, the hangover wore off, and they soon set themselves a target of completing their second album by the end of June. To that end, they withdrew from the distractions of London, repairing for a month to sleepy Benton Harbour, Michigan.

“It’s a total ghost town,” says Alison, “about an hour and a half from Chicago. There’s nothing there at all. These kids there have bought a huge abandoned building on Main Street, and done it out with an amazing recording studio.”

Jamie: “We took all this stuff with us – minidsics of us talking, guitar riffs, thousands of little tiny bits of paper, typewriters, paint and art books and journals from the past year. To start with, we weren’t thinking about songs, we were just talking about all the things that inspired us over the last months. We spent the first few days just looking at those, talking, getting into the right psyche with it. It was the perfect place to get away from it all. You’d walk and not see any glass for ten minutes. Everything was boarded up, like a dead world, then we’d go back into our HQ of art and music and ideas.”

Kate Moss and Jamie Hince’s wedding guests are seen enjoying a day at The Swan pub in Southrop, the guests gathered for drinks and lunch before Kate and Jamie headed off on their honey moon. (Bauer Griffin) more pics » Jamie Hince (Bauer Griffin) After a three-day festival themed wedding bash, Jamie Hince must be very relaxed on his two-week honeymoon with Kate Moss . The duo is taking retail mogul Sir Phillip Green 's $10 million yacht, which they boarded soon after Kate stunned in a beaded John Galliano custom bridal gown and later jumped in a pool still dressed in the frock. ... Read Full Story.