What do emo-rockers and child actors have in common? It turns out that The Get Up Kids and Macaulay Culkin share the same taste in drinking establishments. The Kansas City quintet recently encountered Mr. Home Alone in a New York City bar and had the following to say about it.
“It was hilarious,” says bassist Rob Pope. “It was us in this downstairs bar [with] The Strokes and Macaulay Culkin and some people from Saturday Night Live. We were just really drunk and we were like, ‘What’s going on here? Where are we?’ So we sat down and talked to Macaulay Culkin for a while… He actually had one of our records, which was funny.”
The question, of course, is whether or not anyone had the chutzpah to make The Face in Culkin’s presence.
“Some people were doing some illicit drugs and this girl that he knew that was right next to him – I think she was just really high – and she made The Face and looked over at him,” recalls Pope. “He was just like, ‘Don’t even.’ It was a good time.”
Earlier this month, The Get Up Kids played shows in Toronto and Montreal in support of their new album, Guilt Show. While they’re excited about playing live again, they aim to strike a balance between older and newer material.
“It’s really fun for us to be playing those older, faster songs,” says Pope. “Guilt Show just came out and we want to give people some time to figure it out for themselves before we started cramming it down their throats. It wouldn’t be any fun for us or for the crowd to just come out and play the record front to back every night and just be like, ‘Well, that’s us!’ I think that’s just pissing people off.”
Pope says he enjoys playing shows in Canada because of the subtle cultural differences from America.
“We love coming to Canada,” says Pope. “You don’t see a lot of redneck, gun-toting freaks running around with their Confederate flags everywhere. People are just more open-minded and not everyone’s scared of each other, which is nice.”
