Pitchfork: What’s up with the lip-syncing at your live shows?
The Tough Alliance: A thousand things. The singing sounds much better pre-recorded plus we can concentrate on more important things like dancing and communicating with the audience. We want our performances to be a situation including the crowd rather than a concert with audience and we want to have the freedom to not sing and play if we don’t feel like it. You can’t let yourself go totally if you have to concentrate on playing the right notes and shit like that. We actually have a microphone plugged in, slightly lower than the recorded singing though, to be able to sing along if we feel like it.
We were honestly suprised with the fact that people questioned it in the beginning. We have learned the hard way to not overestimate people. We think they get upset with us doing what we feel like instead of what they feel we are supposed to do. And the fact that we do something that they could do but don’t dare to. We don’t owe anybody anything, we don’t force anyone to come to our performances. There is a crowd in Sweden who truly appreciate our approach to performances and we’re happy that they are the ones showing up at our performances nowadays instead of boring, complaining ones who want “real concerts” and skillful musicians. TTA are no show, no entertainment, it’s just two boys doing exactly what they feel like.
