Baring all for SUPERSWEET’s video party, The Others’ Dominic Masters was an interviewer’s dream. Polite, engaging and surprisingly unpretentious amongst the concreted recording studios, this notorious front man smoked, sat cross legged on a pink rug, while discussing the seamy underbelly of his Somerset youth. Confessing to make it to London only to discover “the dream isn’t as nice as it should be”, Masters became the epitome of city anonymity weaving his white “Im-in-a-rock-band” lies in the club scene, er, until he was found out…
SS: Is it true that you were telling lots of people that you were in a band and then all of a sudden, The Parkinson’s gave you a gig.
Dominic: You’re close; you’re virtually bang on the money there. I’d split up with my wife, an Israeli girl, very pretty. When we split up, I went on an independent streak. I went out to a lot of clubs like WayOut, a transvestite club which was very liberating, very experimental. I was working in an office job, I hated it. I was living in a flat on my own and needed to get out so I started going clubbing.
SS: By yourself?
Dominic: I had no one else to go with. As I was making a lot of friends, people would ask me, “Hey, what do you do in life?” When you’re in a Rock and Roll club or a tranny club you don’t want to tell people you work in an office job. Tell them you’re in a Rock and Roll band. I got away with that for about six months and then the questions started getting a bit deeper. I’d be batting them off the best I could. Then we were in Max’s club, Club for Losers and Victor from The Parkinsons (we’re drinking buddies) stood up in front of the whole club and goes, “Dominic, what’s the name of your fucking band?” I was like “yeah, The Others.” That’s how we got our name. He called over Max, “Oh Dominic, so you’re called The Others, are you? Brilliant, we’ll put you on in two weeks time; you want to do that don’t you?”
That was it, I sat down, went really white, nearly threw up, I felt so scared, I left the club immediately. I walked down Camden High Street, my knees were shaking and I didn’t know what to do so I phoned Jimmy, the guitarist of my first band, explained the situation. Jimmy agreed to be the guitarist and said we need a bass player and a drummer. So we got Johnny, our present bass player and we didn’t have a drummer so we got hold of a session drummer, called Arly. He was a jazz musician but could play drums so well that he held our first gig together virtually single handedly with his drumming. Believe me our first gig wasn’t the best. We did six songs in three rehearsal sessions; one of them was ‘Almanac’. Then we did the gig, I stood up on stage and everybody sort of clapped and laughed at the same time because they couldn’t believe I was actually here on stage after bullshitting for six months.
After the gig, (luck of the big man in the sky, bless him), the guy who signed Franz Ferdinand shook my hand and said, “When’s your next concert?” And I said, “We’re playing in a week’s time”, started lying once again and that was it, we had the next gig secured and that was nearly three years ago.
SS: Wow, so you’ve come a really long way.
Dominic: Always knew we could do it. But we had a lot of rejections, had a lot of trouble getting signed initially, because when you manage yourself, it’s quite hard. Record companies expect a good manager and an established company behind you; we had nothing. It was us against the world. It took a while to convince people that we were the right cup of tea.
SS: You don’t have any specific musical influences; your lifestyle is your influence…
Dominic: I’d say my whole lyrical quality is about basically all the shit that’s happened during my life. I’ve had an unusual upbringing. My mother was different from most mothers. I came from a very liberal family and I grew up with just me and my mum. We had to really struggle growing up and then we came to London and it was certainly a struggle to get through university, get through everything on my own, with no backing by anyone but myself. I tended to document all of my experiences in my lyrics. There’s songs like ‘William’, about my best friend, ‘I Nearly Lost You’ about how I nearly lost my own life, ‘This Is For The Poor’ which is a class divisive song and ‘Lackey’ which deal about quitting your job and following your dreams. So it all tends to be very autobiographical.
SS: Are you still best friends with William? Do you visit Somerset much?
Dominic: Yeah, too right! William is great. Somerset is a very conservative place, so conservative that I don’t think we ever had anything but a conservative MP. It’s very much in the right wing of politics. There are farmers and sheep. But there’s a prevalent drugs problem in Somerset, because there’s nothing to do if you’re a child, you have no youth club, nothing to do, nowhere to go. Not a lot of kids leave Somerset.
In my year there were four of us that came to London. I wrote songs like ‘Darren, Daniel, Dave’ addressing the early deaths of my friends. Darren died in a car crash, he was on ecstasy; he lost control of the car and died. Daniel died of lighter gas inhalation and Dave died of Heroin overdose. It’s hard to follow your dreams, your aspirations when people around you are dying. There’s no work, there’s no jobs in the area. It’s hard to pull yourself out of the area, move to a different city to follow your aspirations. It takes guts, only a few of us left, I’m just glad we’re still here.
SS: Where did you get the fire in your belly?
Dominic: Fire in the belly is just…you don’t grow up with your father, you just grow up with your mother, you’ve got no brothers and sisters, you don’t trust many people that you’re around, you have to become self determined, become totally independent, it’s total belief in yourself because you see such badness around you, the only way you can actually escape from it is to say “Come on Dominic, you’ve gotta really do this for yourself” ? ?We moved to London when I was eighteen. It’s almost like fulfilling the dream and then once you get here the dream isn’t as nice as it should be. That takes a lot of guts, being able to hold on to your dream and having to put up with the everyday, mundane stuff that you have to do to survive. I was in horrible jobs for years. I had to do market research when I was at university. After university, I’d do sales jobs and juggle the band; you have to be able to have determination to keep juggling that on four hours sleep at night and manage the band.
SS: You’re pretty opinionated about your drug use…
Dominic: I personally think I tend to be criticized most about advocating drug use. The way I look at it is we’re in the European community; we go to Portugal, import drugs that maybe aren’t legal. What I’m trying to do is, say to the government and say to the people that in your parents’ generation, what they would’ve done is go to work nine to five and go down the pub each night and get pissed. This is 40 years on; people now go to work nine to five, can go and do an ecstasy pill or cocaine and get up in the morning. I believe there are lots of people in this country that regulate their drug habit. In places like Portugal all drugs are decriminalized and you don’t see the whole of Portugal on smack. It shouldn’t be down to the state to ban intoxicants; it should be down to the individuals’ idea of identity and independence to be able to regulate their habits. We could also channel lots more money into rehabilitation centers instead of putting all the money to fighting drugs. That’s just me.
SS: Do you think the world’s a difficult place to live in at the moment?
Dominic: I should say. I live in Aldgate East and we just got bombed. Luckily, I was in Switzerland, my boyfriend was on a bus, so we both done alright there. To be honest with you, when it’s that close, when your local tube station gets bombed, Aldgate East, and the next local tube station, Liverpool Street, gets bombed, the world is turned into a more difficult place. I’ve been in London nine years, we got bombed by the IRA for years, I lived on Brick Lane when there was a nail bomber and I’ve seen it from all different sides.
SS: Your 853 Fan club has its own small division in Hong Kong, it’s amazing that you got it there in the first place.
Dominic: We do have an 853 Kamikaze Stage Dive Division in Hong Kong which is nice, but more than anything, the 853 is our fan club. It’s certainly grown (26,000 rebels in the UK), our 853 is pretty strong. We had kids crowd surfing, doing perfect swan dives off the stage, there was a beautiful amount of devotion, instead of just calling them ‘The Others Fan Club’, we called them the ‘853 Kamikaze Stage Dive Division’. The Hong Kong division is led by a guy called Chung. He’s been with us for about a year and he tries to raise awareness of The Others in Asia. He’s managed to make some interludes into Singapore, but with regards to Thailand, I don’t know how strong our 853 fan base is out there. I’d like to think, because we come to Japan in the summer we’d be picking up friends across the wall.
SS: We heard the story of a friend of yours. He got arrested for stealing money to fund his drug habit and you and your manager managed to stop him from going to jail.
Dominic: Anthony was a very intelligent chap, very articulate, good talker. I had addictions to drugs but I’ve always gone to work to spend my money to pay for my addiction. We established a portfolio for him to show there’s a support network around him that would prevent him from going to jail. It would stop him going to jail for stealing, all he needed to do was pay back the ten thousand pounds, get electronically tagged, go on a drugs rehabilitation program and prove he can use the support network around him to prevent him from going to jail. Luckily the judge agreed with me and everything’s okay.
SS: What you’ve achieved in such a time, you’ve built up so many people you’ve actually created a support network.
Dominic: Yeah that’s the whole idea. If the right support is not there, you can end up with some really crazy situations before you know it. Another kid, Tom, when I met him, he smoked hash every day. He was 16 years old and wasn’t in school. He explained he’s been expelled from two schools, so we spoke to his parents and got a hold of his authority.
SS: Would you ever see your music taking off in a political direction?
Dominic: I’d like to think that my music could influence, but to be honest with you, I think it’s a crass idea. You can only put suggestions to people. We’re not pressuring, we’re not a political party. We don’t have any power. What we do have is power of suggestion and that’s a quite considerable power. Well, at least we’ve come across as having ideas and being radical. At least we’re honest, at least we’re true. That’s the main thing.
Words: Ameena Kara Callender
Photography: Kriangkrai Srithongthai