Dollar-Sent Interview

Interview with Chris P. Rizzanski by Nicola “Nix” Crichton

Punky, alcohol soaked rock with a venomous edge - Brighton’s Dollar-Sent (formed of Chris - vocals and guitar, Sparky Rogers - drums, Loz Serota - Bass) have done a fair bit with themselves in the last year. After landing a slot at the annual bikers festival, the Bulldog Bash and supporting the likes of Orange Goblin and Zeke in the past they’ve continued to gain a healthy sized following.

They don’t seem to be hell bent on being a ‘saviour’ to modern rock or major revolutionaries in the change of sound unlike a lot of bands kicking around the circuit at the moment. They’re just happy playing gigs and spreading the love of hard rock. Frontman Chris spoke to Nix about how the band started, what they’ve been upto recently, nightmare releases, random policemen at gigs and their plans for spreading the word that posing is passe and good rock is where its at.

Nix: Tell us a bit about yourself and the band?

Chris: Dollar-Sent are three hairy arsed blokes who play fucking loud rock'n'roll. We're a bit of a mix of old school British heavy metal and biker rock and the more garagey punk bands. I play guitar and sing, well grunt, and seem to be getting eaten by my sideburns at the moment.
I'm all about the sideburns.

N: How did you all get together? What do you set out to do?

C: Dollar-Sent went through quite a stormy time with line up for a while. I'm the only original member left these days! Don't get me wrong though, we've been playing with this lineup for quite a long time now and have no plans to change it. Sparky was tek-ing on some recording we where doing with our old drummer, when things came to a head he was there at the right time to fill the slot. Loz works down our local, I'd know him for ages before he joined the band. Again when the old bass player left he was there at the right time. I couldn't imagine Dollar-Sent with anyone else these days. There's never been any plans to do anything than play rock'n'roll, we don't have any delusions that we're treading any new ground, we just want to play music that excites us. There's not much chance of us recording some long winded concept album or coming up with some bullshit stage costumes, although we are fond of stupid lights, which we use at the drop of a hat, and once made an attempt at stage probs, but they look fucking awful, so we'll be leaving that one for a while.

N: To anyone who’s not heard you guys before, who would you say were your influences?

C: The obvious one is Motorhead, there's no way we could ever deny that. We've all loved Motorhead since we discovered what rock music is, so they're gonna be in there. There's a lot of NWOBH in our sound, it's just something that I grew up with so it's the guitar sound & style that I'm most comfortable playing. There's all the usual suspects like AC/DC, Gun's and Roses, the guys you have to like if you're in a band like ours, but we tend to lean a bit more to things like The Almighty, Diamond Head and Zeke. There's a fair bit of punk thrown in. We all love The Misfits, The Damned, Black Flag - all that stuff. We've also got a thing for a lot of the old 70's bands like Budgie and Blue Oyster Cult. The new stuff that we've been writing has gone far more towards the Sabbathy, 70's end of the spectrum. We're getting much more of a groove to us, not in a Disco way, we're starting to lean towards bands like Kyuss, Orange Goblin, Fu Manchu, the more stonery stuff. We still play pretty fast on a lot of our songs. I'm very excited about the new stuff. We're basically a mix of all sorts of stuff, if it rocks we love it!!

N: Why should anyone else come and see Dollar Sent over any other band at the moment?

C: We're old school. If you like riffs and honest rock'n'roll we're the band for you. There's a bit more to us than a haircut, we have the music to back it up, we have to, we're a bunch of ugly bastards. If you want to see a rock band playing rock music and having a bloody good time doing it then check out Dollar-Sent.

N: What’s your take on the current music scene?

C: Great. It's great that there is so much interest in guitar based music. There's hundreds of truly awesome bands out there, for the first time in ages I've been getting excited about bands I've never heard of before. There's a huge thing about style over substance, but that's always been there, there's a lot of interest in the 80's metal scene at the moment and that was terrible for bollocks bands with nice hair, some great bands but some utter image over everything crap, just like now. I do prefer it when bands don't put on some big act trying to pretend to be all rock and roll stereotypes, that seems to be happening a lot at the moment. Just shut up and write a good song.

N: How would you describe your live show?

C: Three blokes playing their arses off, that pretty much sums it up. We just play, we don't fuck about on stage, we don't scream and yell and whoop like mental patients at you between songs, we just play. We always give all our attention to playing the music as well as we can, we do fuck up but who doesn't. We're a band for people who prefer music over image. Like I said before, we like lights. So from time to time you might see the odd laser at our shows.

N: Your latest release - "Dollar Sent", tell us a bit about that?

C: Fucking nightmare that. It's a miracle the CD that is currently out ever got done. We originally recorded about 16 tracks for it. Most got lost or fucked up somewhere down the line. In the end I had to just put out what was there or I was going to have a nervous breakdown, we'd already paid for a lot of stuff for the "album", which is why it's referred to as an album instead on an EP or mini album. I think I've listened to it maybe 3 times since we put it out. It makes me quite angry at times to think of all the stuff that got lost and brings back some quite bad memories, I was not someone you wanted to be around while we where doing that. Now that I've had time to lick my recording wounds we're planing to go back into the studio as soon as we have time. This time with far fewer problems and less arseholes.

N: Favourite gig to date?

C: Bulldog Bash by far. Even tho I had only had an hours sleep I enjoyed it so much. It was over so quickly, I would love to play that gig again and again. Playing with Orange Goblin is a very close second. I love the band, they're really cool guys and the music is fucking awesome. On top of that the show was sponsored by Jager, so it got pretty messy.

N: Favourite song you play?

C: All the new ones, I love playing them. You'll see what I mean when you see us live. Out of the old tracks, "Kandy". It's such a satisfying riff.

N: Strangest or worst gig to date?

C: Sadly it has to be The Ruskin Arms. It was both strange and bad but also oddly quite cool and the same time, we where looking forward to playing there so much, the place is a legend. Sadly it's day seems to have gone, the new management don't seem to give two shits about the place. The show was organised by someone who just didn't do good job, when we got there out of a three band bill we where the only ones who turned up. Turns out the gig had been cancelled but no-one had bothered to tell us. We played anyway to a handful of people who seemed to really like what we where doing. The police turned up while we where sound checking because someone had rung them because the had seen people loading stuff into the venue, we knew we where in for an odd night. Thinking about it we had the police turn up to another of our shows. We where just about to start playing when a couple of policemen get on stage with us and start taking pictures of the crowd. They disappeared, we played and the next day the venue had their licence revoked until they did a shite load of building work. Apparently we pulled too big a crowd for the venue. We're playing there again in February.

N: What are your plans for 2007?

C: Gig, Gig, Record, Gig. In a nutshell. We've got shite-loads of gigs lined up for the next few months and we're off to the US in May. Once we get back in June we're going to have some time off and then get onto the festival and rally circuit through the summer. We're heading to the studio, hopefully, very soon. We're itching to get our new material down. I wouldn't say that it's a new direction for us, but definitely a more evolved Dollar-Sent. If you're familiar with us you'll still know it's us, but you can tell we're a much happier, cohesive band these days. We've also got some pretty cool projects that we're going to be working on. We're playing our cards pretty close to our collective chest with these. It's gonna be a great and busy year for us, and hopefully anyone who's into what we're doing.

Check out Dollar-Sent on their official website www.dollar-sent.com. You can pick up your copy of "Dollar Sent" on their MySpace through PayPal. We reviewed it, check it out here.

Words and interview by Nix, promotional photo by NakanNickie and the rest of the images courtesy of Dollar-Sent's MySpace.

© Pure Rawk 2006