The Almighty Defenders, Or How The Black Lips Met King Khan

Atlanta, Ga. lo-fi garage-rockers Black Lips have a reputation for outrageous on-stage shenanigans, so it came as no surprise that the band's ambitious tour of India came to an abrupt end after band members Ian Saint Pe and Cole Alexander kissed each other on stage.

But the quartet made the best of a bad situation, retreating to Germany where they hooked up with The King Khan And BBQ Show and recorded a garage rock-meets-gospel soul record under the name Almighty Defenders.

CHARTattack caught up with Alexander to talk about the supergroup.

CHARTattack: The record came about after you guys got the boot from India and went to Berlin.
Cole Alexander: Yeah. We had some off time when we had to leave India abruptly. We ended up recording because we had nothing else to do in Berlin.

What drew you to Berlin?
We had a European tour booked like a week and a half later. We could have gone anywhere, but we were like, "Well, King Khan's there. We can probably crash at his place. Berlin is cheap."

Did you know you were going to record an album when you got there?
We'd been listening to a lot of old black gospel, some old '50s and '60s black gospel. It was pretty inspiring listening. And then we felt a bit like religious taboos created the tension in India for us, so it was like a coming of age story. Homosexuality is highly frowned upon and me and Ian were kind of kissing. And then we found ourselves listening to this spiritual music at the same time.

You must have known that doing that kind of thing would get you in trouble.
Yeah. We kind of forgot about it. When we first got to India we tried to dumb it down, but then after a while we were getting quite frustrated with people hating us. So we were like, "Fuck it. Let's just go nuts." And when we got to Berlin we weren't expecting to make a record. It just kind of happened.

Were the songs already written, or were you writing and recording at the same time?
"Bow Down And Die"... There's this Atlanta church with this preacher named Johnny L. Jones that I visited and this label called Dust To Digital that's planning on putting out his record. So I kind of ripped off one of his songs. Mark just happened to have a song ready and then a couple we wrote on the spot. A couple of ideas had been floating around in our heads, but we put it all together when we got together.

Black Lips and King Khan have a long history together. How did you first meet him?
We were in Germany, and he came to our show, and got kicked out and got us banned from the club, even though we weren't with him. We didn't even like him when we first met him, honestly. He broke every single beer glass on the dance floor, put cake in all of our faces and pissed on all of our merch. But he kind of kept persistently pursuing us and we realized he was kind of a charming guy. So he just took a while to grow on me.