Nardwuar connects with Oly: Singer enjoys putting others in the hot seat

By Molly Gilmore | For The Olympian • Published May 15, 2008

He's the lead singer and keyboard player of Vancouver, British Columbia, party band the Evaporators. He's a fearless (and rather strange) interviewer for Canadian local access TV.

But to sum Nardwuar up, Wikipedia seems to do it best:

"Occupation(s): Media personality."

A brief phone interview with Nardwuar revealed that he is indeed a personality.

Asked if his interviews - some of which will be shown as part of The Evaporators' concert Sunday in Olympia - overshadow the band and whether he considers himself primarily a musician or an interviewer, Nardwuar doesn't bore me with his serious musical ambitions or a lament about how his genius has been ignored.

"The first interview I ever did was on Feb. 26, 1985, in high school," he said. "The band didn't form till Feb. 20, 1986. The band and the interviews have pretty much gone hand in hand, and a lot of the records I've released have had interview snippets.

"When I do an interview, it's like when I'm up on stage. You are yelling and screaming or getting excited."

Nardwuar does get excited when he does interviews.

"He has a way of thinking up unusual questions and the fearlessness to ask them, even if he knows it'll get him thrown out of the room," Dave Watson wrote in Georgia Straight, an online news magazine based in Vancouver (http://straight.com). "And yet, he's not an instigator or some kind of put-on character designed to irritate people. He really is that guy, incredibly earnest and enthusiastic like somebody's kid brother after you feed him way too much candy."

Nardwuar traditionally begins interviews with "Who are you?" and ends them with "Keep on rocking in the free world" and his trademark "Doot doola doot doo," after which he waits for the interview subject to respond with "Doot doo."

"When you're doing the interview, you kind of wish you were the musician, and when you're the musician, you kind of wish you were doing the interview," he added.

He doesn't consider himself a journalist - more of a superfan.