Alan Léonin: Through a haze of headache and acrimony, I saw Brussels. Burnt through the concert like a match lit to flimsy paper. I really let Emma shine that night, let her do her twirls and kicks and witty banter. When she turned to me I had only other people's words left over. Kurt Vonnegut: "I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over, on the edge you can see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." Richey Edwards: "I know I believe in nothing, but it is my nothing." Whoever it was that said "Life is a disease, sexually transmitted and always fatal."
Emma Marx-Hall: We were interviewed in Brussels and that was the first time that I really started to do some of the talking for myself. I mean, I always talked in interviews, but before we went in for one I'd always beg Alan to tell me what to say, and during the interviews I'd always glance over to him to make sure I was on point.
excerpt from an interview with Adventurist magazine, May 2008
ºAdventurist: Would you consider yourselves a political band?
ºAlan Léonin: Not really, I wouldn't label us that way.
ºEmma Marx-Hall: We each have our political opinions. And we're very opinionated, at times. But we aren't trying to use our music to tell you to support a particular political party or decide one way or another on any issue.
ºTom Thorogood: We're probably telling you who not to support though.
ºEmma Marx-Hall: Well what we do is, it's like the Daily Show, how they satirize everyone, regardless of their beliefs or political affiliation. And what we do—we consider everyone equals before us, all subject to our scorn and disdain. Including ourselves.
ºAlan Léonin: I'd say we're probably the hardest on ourselves.
ºEmma Marx-Hall: That's why we're not the King or Queen of Hearts, we're the Knave of Hearts. We're looking in from the outside.
ºAdventurist: What is a Knave of Hearts, actually?
ºEmma Marx-Hall: He stole the tarts from the Queen of Hearts I'm told.
ºTom Thorogood: Handy with a sword and dashing of looks. The girls probably love him.
ºAdventurist: Do the girls love you, Tom?
ºTom Thorogood: Sure, if they can handle me.
Emily Alexander: Brussels was another dance club performance. I was brought back to mid-2007 in Edinburgh when the band climbed into the DJ booth. Only this time, when one of the DJs in Brussels hit on Emma, she shrugged her shoulders and turned away. Not so cuddly anymore, were we? It wasn't hugs and laughter, it was Tom putting on the headphones and nodding along, then frowning when he thought the mix was off. Lane was dancing in the shadows behind the booth and I saw a boy join her. She didn't try to push him away, which was weird at first until she introduced him as her cousin.
Alan Léonin: I headed to my room to pass out, when a girl approached me. I shook her hand, I felt I at least owed her that, and she rolled up her sleeve and showed me that she'd cut "Knave of Hearts" into her arm. I covered my mouth and was nearly sick. I mean, it wasn't fresh, she'd done it some time before so it was now just scars.
"I knew you'd be proud of me," she said. And I...I considered just saying, all right, take care of yourself, but then I realized maybe she'd go tell other people to follow in her footsteps.
"I'm not proud," I said. "If you want to show how much you love our band, buy more albums. Come to our shows. Tell your friends about us. Don't hurt yourself. It's a sign of weakness." And I fucked off to my room. About an hour later I was filled with fear about what I'd just done.
Lane Kennedy: I was spending time with my cousin Faolan, who was studying in Brussels at the time and had come to see us, when a girl ran out from backstage sobbing. I stopped her and asked if she was all right. She showed me that her arm was scarred and she said Alan told her she was weak. Faolan sat down with her and we talked to her softly about how Alan was coming off an alcohol addiction and so he was moody, and how no, we weren't 'proud' that she'd cut herself but we didn't hate her either, and she should try to get help.
Emily Alexander: Alan came and 'confessed' to me that he'd been rude to a fan, and I asked him for the details and found out that a girl had cut herself 'for' him. Part of me was really glad he'd been there to discourage her, but I just kept thinking—that's the sort of thing that destroys people. Feeling that something like that is your fault, or that the whole world is your responsibility. Men aren't fit to be gods.
"You're fine," I said. "Go to bed." And then I called the manager of the venue in Berlin and told them not to let any fans get backstage.
Natalie Leonard: The band had a small group of very devoted fans in Berlin. One of them, a boy named Paul, offered to text a running commentary to me, Alice, and Rivka to put online. The next day, he phoned and said he wanted to give us a full gig report.
(reading from Damaged Goods #9): My name is Paul Fischer. I took this photo from beneath the feet of the one, the only, Knave of Hearts. I have been a fan of this band since my sister brought back a CD from England. She thought they might be something I would like. She was right. Knave of Hearts' music described my own struggles and feelings better than any other band, and their music was just my style. It was a love affair. Finally getting to go to the concert filled my heart with joy.
They have switched opening acts from Kiss Me Deadly to The Foxy Foxes, who are a boy and girl from Sweden who play with synthesizers and wear long white gloves. The audience found this somewhat boring, and you could see them sending SMS on their phone throughout the performance. At the end of the intermission, Emma took the stage and immediately began scolding the crowd for their reaction to the Foxy Foxes. Beautiful image! She was wearing a pink leopard print dress and a sparkly tiara. The rest of the band came on and amazed us all. The set is very tight these days. Not a note is out of place. Emma flirts with the crowd, Lane plays deafening basslines, Tom thrashes his drums, and Alan strikes poses.
"Our record company told us not to do covers," Alan says with a wicked smile, and they begin playing the Stone Temple Pilots' "Sex Type Thing". We love it because here is Emma glaring over the mic and singing "I am a man, a man..." Terrifying description of rape flipped on its head, made into something even more bizarre. Alan sings along and looks right at me when he says "I know you like what's on my mind". I must be blushing bright red.
After the concert the bouncers say no one can go backstage and meet the band. The people turn away frustrated. My friend Marguerite tries to stay and a blonde woman comes out from backstage and yells at her. I go to comfort her, and Alan emerges to curse at the blonde woman and tell her she hasn't the right. Alan steps forward and comes to speak to us. He reminds me that he sang to me. He kisses Marguerite's cheek and signs her CD. He invites me to follow him...
I was so...freaked out when I read that. The blonde woman had to be Emily. Who else could it be? Emily who was always so wonderful about bringing the fans and the band together. Something was going wrong with the band, but I could hardly deal with that when so many things were going wrong back at home. Our sixth form had stopped allowing us to distribute Damaged Goods, because the teachers had found out that one of the fans disappeared and that they had 'disturbing messages', and other schools around the country were following suit. And speaking of Evelyn, she had stopped writing to anyone. After Rivka had admitted to receiving a letter, other people who had received them stepped forward. Now no one was getting them.
Emily Alexander: Alan and I were not on the best of terms after what happened in Berlin.
Through Poland and the Czech Republic and Russia we were in a cold war. He was still sleeping with fans and sneaking around behind management's back even when we told him to reign it in.
Lane Kennedy: I was so sick of their fighting. I wanted to knock their heads together. Finally I told Alan he was going to have to resolve this thing with Emily or we were going to have to find new management. I half expected him to say, all right, let's find new management, but instead he told me, "I'm trying my best."
Alan Léonin: Emily's opinion mattered. It's always mattered. She wasn't just our manager, she was our friend. But I felt like I owed just as much to the fans as to her. Finally as we began our long trek from Russia to Japan, I apologized.
I told her, all right, you were right. I was trying to find meaning in meaningless interactions. I was trying to give more of myself than I had to give. She smiled, she told me she thought maybe everything could be all right now. She stepped over and looked like she was going to put her arm around my shoulders but instead she just shrugged and turned around and left.
Davina Thewsley: Meanwhile, the fan community was up in arms about Paul Fischer's account in Damaged Goods. DG #9.5 came out hot on its heels, a compendium of fan letters to the magazine that ran the gamut from unsurprised 'we all knew that the band were getting famous, there are questions of security' to betrayed 'what happened to the Knave we used to know?' to total denial 'Paul made up this story for attention', and of course the obligatory one that lightly scolded DG for printing such a personal article.
I would say the most notable was a letter by one Rivka Starlett, of Scars and Stripes fanzine.
Rivka's letter was highly inflammatory, and it spanned two pages of DG. The letter lashed out in anger against both the band's management and the fans. She said the management, especially Emily, were warping and twisting the minds of her beloved musicians, turning Alan into a slave of the industry. The fans, apparently, weren't working hard enough to protect the musicians they loved from the evils of capitalist greed. She called for a mass movement to "liberate them with our words", which was also the title of her letter. According to Ms. Starlett, all the tales of suicide and drug addiction from the annals of music history were the obvious symptom of a widespread litany of oppression.
The letter was frighteningly clear-headed and thought through, especially to those of us who'd read Rivka's work before. Before, and since she was definitely one of the younger members of the fandom at only fifteenish, it was to be expected that her articles and poems were the work of an intelligent (for her age) but fairly immature writer. It was as if she had been possessed by some bizarre spirit, ingenious, vengeful, and half mad. And that wasn't the end of it. The next issue of S&S, published shortly afterward, as the band finished up the European segment of the tour in Russia, was twice as thick as it had been before, and the stuff inside it was—I mean, I don't even know how to describe it. Disturbing. Macabre.
Her rants about politics and the media sounded...well, they sounded like Vincent's work that we published in ANTI EVERYTHING. Actually, 'anti everything' is a good descriptor. Rivka was—muckraking is a good word, maybe. She contacted all sorts of organizations. Battered women's shelters, PETA, self-harm survivors' groups, pro- and anti-anorexia, workers' unions, and pasted their goriest photos above her articles. Everything from animal abuse to rape to third-world worker exploitation was apparently all our fault, as British citizens. She said if we weren't taking direct action, it was our duty to expose all the corruption underlying the way our world worked and trace it back to its sources and shame them.
Actually, it was quite a bit like early Knave.
In a way, anyway. In the way that it was muckraking, a bit. It was like the old Emma Marx-Hall idea of turning the whole world into a cigarette package. But I think Rivka went further than them. Emma wanted to show that corruption existed; Rivka wanted to place blame and promote some twisted idea of justice where everyone would be punished and no one spared. And unlike the old Knave songs, which combined incendiary ideas with accessible music, Rivka's tracts were reams of paper in tiny type. I don't know who she was expecting to reach. Lots of us were reading S&S and we tried our best to read that issue—it was titled "If you only read one book in your life make it this one"—but most of us gave up and had to skim through it. It meant everything to her and very little to us.
There was, I think, a sense of fear that the entire fan community would turn into an army of Rivka Starletts, but what really happened is that her own isolation went further and further, until she felt alienated from every other human being in the universe.
Naomi Fried: None of us knew what had overtaken my sister. She hardly spoke to us, refused to eat meals with the family. Her teachers at school kept phoning and saying something had changed in her. Her grades had formerly been middle-of-the-road; now she was top of the class. She was awake while we slept. We took her to see a psychologist; he said she seemed well-adjusted and that she was simply a case of someone who had discovered meaning in her life, and who was finding direction when she had spent her entire life in a confused haze. We knew it was complete crap, but we couldn't do any better than the NHS.
We didn't know what to do. For once my moody, apathetic, lazy little sister seemed almost...happy. (voice starts to crack) Despite her faults I had loved her still like a sister does, and the idea that she might find happiness meant so much.
Emma Marx-Hall: Tokyo, Japan was like no stop on our tour had been before. Sure, there had been teeming crowds and shouts and banners made and gifts presented to us, but the Japanese seemed to have got Knave fandom down to a science. They dressed like us, they could quote us fluently, they brought copies of obscure singles and treasures from our back catalogue to be signed. They came from all over the country and lined up for hours before the show. For security reasons we had to stay in a car with tinted windows.
We did a brief in-store performance and signing at a record store. All four of us were proposed marriage at least once. Even the managers of the record store seemed thrilled to see us and get their photos taken with us.
Alan was standoffish and taciturn. I think he was still coming off both a, his alcohol addiction and b, his dispute with Emily over whether he was "giving too much of himself away" to fans. And of course that's what the fans actually expected, so they loved it. They wanted us to stand up to over-exaggerated idealized versions of our personalities, so we did. I was all glitter and jewels and "dahling"s and chatting and flirting with anyone who so much as glanced at me. Alan kept on speaking only in quotes. Lane was quiet until anyone engaged her in conversation about fashion or design. Tom was a bit of a flirt too, but he was also the music geek we knew and loved, willing to field all sorts of questions about our musical technique.
Emily Alexander: I couldn't stay out there very long. Alan had started quoting people instead of using his own words and it was something Tristain always did. It hurt to hear.
Lane Kennedy: The same day we arrived in Tokyo, Marque put out our third single from the album, a song called "Yesterday" about the dangers of living in the past, and how also a lot of people in power were doing just that. The video was professionally acted and had the actors clothed in all white, painting the lyrics to the song on gigantic rolls of paper and their clothes getting spattered with all colors progressively throughout. We didn't appear in it at all.
Tom Thorogood: The venue in Japan couldn't hold the crowd. The management threatened to cancel the performance in the name of public safety until the government surrendered a sports arena. Our JumboTrons weren't 'jumbo' enough and we had to rent some from the NPB that they used for baseball games.
It was glorious. It was deafeningly loud. I was in top form that day and I played like I had never played before. The whole band did. Alan in his reluctance to interact with human life became completely absorbed in his guitar playing and never missed a note. Emma sang beautifully and when it got to one of her big flashy guitar solos, it was so magnificent that she dropped to her knees halfway through out of sheer need to respond to her awe of the music. Lane never stood still, she danced and strode and strutted around the stage and tossed her hair. It was the best concert we'd ever played. The very best.
Alan Léonin: Afterwards we waited for hours at the signing table. We were given gifts and some very high compliments. It felt almost like a ritual of some sort. My hand ached from all the signatures. By the end I felt like I was seeing everything through a haze. It seemed unreal. I had to pinch myself to be sure I wasn't dreaming.
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