Purveyors Of: Germs
File Next To: Soupcans, Ty Segall, Astral Gunk, Germs
Playing: Saturday, January 24 @ Junction City Music Hall

Hoo doggy, here comes The Flu. Toronto lunk-head punks bringing the maniac jams, jacked up on cocoa puffs and paint huff. Look out for the dropping anvil! The Flu spoke to Wavelength’s Adam Bradley to tell him about blackmail collecting, the space-time continuum and their cat Hank.

If you could add any three letters to your band name, what would they be?

I like the sound of The Peflum. We'd add entirely new letters not yet discovered by science. To pronounce our band name would require expensive and intrusive bionic modifications to the mouth and butt.

Your sorta-cover of The Who's “My Generation” (titled “Degeneration”) is awesome and hilarious. How did you end up making that?

One of us got hit in the face with a branch while working a landscaping job in the summer. It all came naturally after that.

Tell me more about how Dr. Octavio's miraculous new invention allowed The Flu to travel forwards in space-time to run a successful delicatessen out of your friend Hutt's garage in Australia.

Unfortunately, we are not at liberty to divulge that information and this current juncture in spacetime, for the safety of our family and in particular, our cat Hank.

Have you ever been blackmailed?

We have an entire room in our house for the black mail. It never stops. We never sleep. If we aren't working at our stupid jobs or writing our stupid music, we are out in the streets at the whim of all the people who would like to see us dead.

I think I heard that you live in your jam space? What's that like?

We do. It's a lot like listening to “Prison Song” by System of a Down on repeat, every day, only with a lot more board games.

You have a song called “I Don't Wanna Be Cool.” Why don't U want 2 B cool?

This one time back in our home town in ‘96 or maybe ’98, we were at the local roller rink totally busting mad moves to Jamiroquai, and out of nowhere a kid got stabbed. They shut the place down and we spent the rest of our younger years blowing stuff up by the river. That pretty much sums it up.

-- Interview by Adam Bradley