It’s been a long and crazy journey for Cairo Knife Fight’s founder and lead singer Nick Gaffaney, so the chaos and madness which commonly surrounds SXSW should be nothing new to him.
In the space of six months Gaffaney moved from New Zealand to the US, recorded an album and an EP, and has since been gigging nonstop around the world, now joined by Grammy winner and industry extraordinaire George Pajon Jr..
A pure passion for music and an unbridled love for performing makes the new duo one of the most promising new rock n’ roll bands of the past few years.
The partnership between Gaffaney and Pajon started through coincidental networking within the music industry. “Initially I met two of his lifelong friends when I was working in New Zealand,” Pajon explained to Live4ever during the band’s visit to our Ei8htball Media Lounge @ South by Southwest Festival 2015.
It was in the US though where he first met Gaffaney, who had also recently moved to the States. Without a place to live, let alone record his music, Gaffaney found Pajon with both a home and a studio to share. As new room-mates, Gaffaney asked Pajon if he would care to collaborate on his band’s new material. “I YouTubed ‘Cairo Knife Fight’ and stayed up until about four in the morning watching all the videos, going ‘Oh my God, I love this stuff’,” Pajon recalled. “The next day we started working.”
Gaffaney’s rough DIY brand of rock n’ roll contrasts starkly with much of what Pajon has been involved with over the course of his thirty-year career. “I was in the Black Eyed Peas for 17 years, I started with them in 1998,” Pajon said. “It was just a part of my life.” Yet, despite also working with other hugely successful acts such as Carlos Santana, John Legend and Sting, Cairo Knife Fight has given Pajon a new sense of purpose and perspective. “Honestly it’s what I’ve been looking to do for a long time,” he said, lucky to have finally found a partner that can help carry the creative load of being in a band.
Cairo Knife Fight @ Ei8htball / Live4ever Media Lounge
After recording Cairo Knife Fight’s debut album, the band’s record label in New Zealand had a spontaneous request for Gaffaney. “The label in New Zealand said, ‘We want to bang out an EP before that’.”
“‘Can you have one for next week? You must have B-sides. Every band has lots of B-sides’. Not me, I write like two songs a year.”
Instead, the band finished a New Zealand tour and quickly flew to Australia to start banging out a five-track EP in just three days.
“The whole process was four days long, from the beginning to actually handing it over, and luckily it’s not shit,” Gaffaney stated with a sigh of relief. “Everything came out really well, and that was one of the craziest experiences we’ve ever had.”
Moving from one country to another is difficult enough, but Gaffaney is now facing the challenge of finding a suitable distributor for his band’s musical output. At the moment, the ‘The Isolator‘ EP is essentially merely a New Zealand and Australian release. It is the same situation with their debut album. “I’ve only lived in America for six months, so I’m only just getting started,” he explained. “Hopefully, over the next few months, that gets rectified.”
Once Cairo Knife Fight do find a suitable home it will be difficult finding a market on the radio for it, as the mainstream shifts ever more towards electronic-based music. “I’ve noticed that when we hand over songs to radio, I’ve often thought that they are normal songs, like within anyone’s sort of parameters, but often the radio people or the label people will go, ‘What the hell is this you’re sending to me? I really like it but there’s no way I can play this anywhere’. So I’m not the best person to judge what is current or acceptable in mainstream,” Gaffaney said.
Indeed, recent years have seen electronic music and hip-hop undergo something of a creative renaissance, wrestling the mainstream initiative from a current rock n’ roll scene which some have lamented as creatively stagnate; when asked whether rock n’ roll still has artistic and cultural relevance, Gaffaney offered up an interesting perspective:
“It’s funny, it’s still massively popular music, but it seems like a lot of young people would rather take toward hip-hop, indie and electronic stuff that they can make at home without needing a lot of people, which necessarily gives rise to a lot of creativity. Young people are always the people searching for the next thing. I don’t really give too much thought to that kind of stuff, because our thing is so full for me to keep my head around anyway.”
Artistry, or a lack of it, within rock n’ roll is an argument which gained more publicity thanks to Kanye West’s comments after Beck picked up the coveted Album Of The Year prize at this year’s Grammy awards for ‘Morning Phase‘; ‘Beck needs to respect artistry and he should have given his award to Beyoncé’, West famously said. “When I heard that statement I was flabbergasted,” says Pajon. “Because I don’t know exactly what Kanye’s process is when he makes his records, but I do know what Beck’s is.”
Pajon’s veteran wisdom and industry savvy too shines through in his response: “I’m not sure if he did it on this album, but he did it on the one before, he recorded the whole thing to vinyl. So all these musicians had to rehearse this stuff for six months. We’re talking orchestra, a 30-piece ensemble, and I was talking to Justin Meldal-Johnsen during that time and he said, ‘It’s so frustrating because if you make one mistake, everyone has to start all over from the beginning’, and if that’s not artistry then what is? That is artistry at its purest form. That’s Robert Johnson cutting to vinyl back in his time, no Protools, no edits, nothing. It is straight old school as you can get. And he is writing it all himself.”
Radio airplay and mainstream popularity isn’t the goal for Gaffaney and Pajon; it is much simpler than that. Gaffaney humbly hopes the band can reach a position where it is ‘able to work, tour, and release enough music that people will want to listen to’. Even Pajon, who has achieved as much success as anyone over the course of his career, isn’t interested in monetary gain or fame. “As much as I’ve done, I don’t need that,” he concludes. “Sure, it’s great if it comes back but that’s not the goal. The goal is to play constantly, like we are doing here. We’ll play anywhere. ‘Wanna do this show?’ Absolutely. ‘We can’t pay you’. No problem. Honestly at the end of the day that’s how you are going to reach the masses – one fan at a time.”
It’s clear Gaffaney and Pajon share an unrelenting passion for their craft. Not to please anyone, or for financial gain, but out of pure love for the music. After some tough early battles, the duo are sharpening their knifes – ready to knock down and battle anything in their way.
Catch up with all of Live4ever’s coverage from the 2015 South By Southwest Festival at this link
