For all this horsing around, Tim and Scott are serious musicians, and serious about keeping trains on the track. The same sharpness that has Tim owning the numbing cream company. The luxury of touring on a bus these days comes from working out how to get one because, as Scott says, “when you’re about to turn 30, after years of touring in a van, you need that shit so it doesn’t suck”. For so long, people told them they’d be the outliers on this tour, that tour, and that was a good thing. It meant you could do anything. Now people are catching up. Years feeling like the odd shoe have blossomed into a situation where Polyphia are both massive and liberated.
“It's like a double-edged blade,” says Tim. “The beginning is a lot harder, and then it gets easier as you climb the mountain. At one point it was like, ‘Who the fuck do we tour with? Nobody?’ It was just a struggle. But then once you get up the mountain, it's like, ‘Oh, we could do anything.’”
And with that comes the guitar hero stuff. Come on, you love it, right?
“It's fucking cool,” smiles Tim. “I remember being a young kid looking up to the people on those magazine covers, and we get to pass it on with our own little brand of what we do. Hopefully there's some kids out there that read these magazines and see us on these covers, and they go on to make shit 10 times doper than us.”
Ask them what they want out of this, Scott will say he just wants to “keep creating shit and getting to find ways to create a feeling through music,” while Tim, somewhat more ambitiously, plumps for, “I'm ready to keep busting ass and get to the next big [venue]. And eventually do like, Royal Albert Hall. We want to do stadiums and shit.”
Ambitious? Yeah. But then, the way Polyphia see it, things have become theirs for the taking. They might not be all up in your face about it – indeed, both are actually pretty modest gents – but in the sense of creative opportunity their success so far is affording them, the sky’s the limit. As Tim himself puts it as the tattooist continues to work, “We can do whatever we want. That’s kind of all I know how to do.”
And that’s the bottom line.
Polyphia are on tour in the UK now
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