Interview with Noodles of The Offspring pre Reading Festival August 1999
How's the tour been?
Cool - Lit and the Dickies were on tour with us and I've been a huge Dickies fan for about twenty years so it was great. We been really going since the album came out first in the US then right across Europe

I just got the mellow hip hoppy Wiseguys remix of the Kids Aren't Alright
Yeah remixes are something we aren't really prepared to do ourselves, so we had them do it, it's an awesome remix, it's good for clubs I think that's all it's been released for

Did you pick Kozik as the cover artist?
Yeah, a friend of ours that works for Nitro hipped us to his book and we knew a lot of his work, he's done a lot of concert posters on the West Coast from Seattle to LA so we recognised it and he agreed to do an illustration for every song on the CD, we actually spent a lot of money to make sure that got done but it was worth it.

D' you prefer European gigs which seem a lot more anarchic than American ones?
Yeah I guess they are.......although there's a lot of seated venues in America we always try and have an area in front of the stage where people can jump around but it's kinda tough because everyone in America is so afraid of lawsuits and so security is really tight - one of the consequences of that is that the crowd then have more to rebel against so things get really trashed, trucks get set on fire like at Woodstock recently, y'know because everyone's feels like they're under some kind of oppression ...I don't think you can have fun doing anything without some kind of risk, we don't want anyone to get hurt but you have to draw a line. We always try and let kids stage dive which is becoming virtually impossible in the States now because there's a company that owns virtually all the venues across the country and when ever we start shit in any of those places they want to pull the rest of the shows so it's kinda frustrating for us......

What did you do for a living before Offspring?
I was a janitor, which meant I hung out with the kids and waited for them to throw up so I could go get my mop and clean it up, the teachers used to catch me smokin' in my little janitor room, I still run into the kids from there I actually ran into this kid last month who was handing out flyers for his own club in Santa Anna and I was like "hey didn't you used to go this school"..and he's like eighteen years old now, it's funny

Talking of kids do you have any?
Yeah I've got a nine year old daughter and I just got married like a year and a half ago. The four of us have decided we wanted to be home some of the time, so like no more than four weeks at a time on the road and then we're home for a week or two and get to see our wives and kids, touring sort of gives you a foot in both worlds. It helps - you just get off tour playing to huge crowds and everybody singing along and shit and you get kinda a swollen head then you come home and your wife says "you're shit pick up your clothes ,you're not treating this house like a hotel" and I'm like "alright alright" straight back down to earth and your kids telling you "no I won't clean up my room!!"

You don't want to do an Ozzy and take 'em with you
I've taken my daughter to some local shows, I've never actually had her out on tour, the nights are so late I don't think its a good place for kids.......but she's actually pretty cool although she likes the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears and Robbie Williams who's just starting to bubble up in the States, I took her to our hometown show a couple of months ago and after I asked her, "So what did you think" she was like "oh it was good" I'm like "Was it better than Robbie Williams?" she's like "hmmmmm...........maybe........."