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Gimme Five! Duncan Webster of Hammer No More the Fingers

Playing as Hammer No More the Fingers, Webster, Stickley and Hall have toured relentlessly, spreading their own spin on ‘90s college rock to anyone who’ll listen.

They’ve known each other since elementary school, played together since middle. But after playing every talent show and garage that would let their high school band make a racket, Duncan Webster, Jeff Stickley and Joe Hall parted ways and set off in wildly different directions.  Stickley wound up at ECU playing bluegrass.  Hall rambled down to Brazil and picked up some new riffs.  Webster did that New York dance where you fall in love, start a band, and then lose both.  Somehow, after a little time tilting at windmills, the guys all ended up back in Durham.  The adventures had taken them down wildly different paths, but all roads led home and to making music together once again.

Playing as Hammer No More the Fingers, Webster, Stickley and Hall have toured relentlessly, spreading their own spin on ‘90s college rock to anyone who’ll listen.  Their sound is a throwback to those grunge inspired indies of old without sounding kitschy or too nostalgic.  Coalescing idiosyncratic riffs and thumping bass lines with Stickley’s tempestuous drumming and Webster’s mundane, Hammer No More the Fingers bang out songs as interesting musically, as they are affecting lyrically. “Don’t know how hard it’s been, living without a friend, in the center of the world,” Webster sings on “Shutterbug” off their record, Looking for Bruce, but given the way these guys play, it’s not a feeling any of them will know for long.

And now just five tough as nails questions for Duncan to hammer down:

1. If your band were a cartoon character, who/what would it be?
ProStars—the Saturday morning cartoon starring Bo Jackson, Wayne Gretzky, and Michael Jordan. For obvious reasons. That, or the cast of Mulan II.

2. What instigated the choice of band name?
Every band name we were coming up with was terrible or was already in use: Vaudevillain, Wolf Laser, Korn, The Monkees. We just got tired of coming up with dumb band names. So we decided to keep the latest and dumbest that we had.

3. Describe the writing process for “Fall Down, Play Dead”

That’s one of the oldest songs we have. It started off as a riff that we played in a prior band called “Dead by Dawn” back in high school. All our songs were based on the Evil Dead trilogy. Pretty rad stuff. That was one of the riffs that stayed with us. We just kept tinkering with the chord progression until it morphed into what it is now. The lyrics are about a story I heard on NPR one day.

4. Who/what might be a few early inspirations or influences that might really surprise people?
Biz Markie is one of my favorite lyric writers of all time. Every song of his is about a different, whacked out subject. He raps about being a dude and doing dude stuff. Very down to earth, and yet weird and hilarious. We used to cover “Alone Again” from the album I Need a Haircut. Great song.Phish, Outkast, bluegrass, My Morning Jacket, Ween, and a lot of Brazilian music have a big influence on the Hammer. As do a lot of books we read, stories we hear, people we meet, and strange towns that we play.

5. What did you dream of being when you were a kid? (How’d that turn out?)
We’re all 26 now, and have known each other and been playing music together since we were kids. Like 9 or 10 years old. This is pretty much an extension of that. Definitely on a smaller scale than Nirvana, because Nirvana is all I cared about as a kid. We couldn’t be more psyched about playing in a band, though. It’s more fun these days than ever before.

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Keep up with Hammer No More the Fingers touring schedule and other updates here, here, or here.  And check back next week to see who else will take up the challenge of facing down the five. Oh and by all means, give Duncan and the rest of the Hammers a high five when you see them!