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If you could be any other member of We Are Klang who would it be and why?
Steve: It would probably have to be Greg.
Marek: I’m going to pick Greg. I’d pick Greg because I’d like to be able to walk around with no concern for my own personal hygiene.
Greg: That’s very difficult I’d probably be Steve purely because he doesn’t make up reasons for me being banned from Edinburgh. I’d like to be both of them for different reasons, in many ways they’re both my hero. Marek’s incredibly charismatic; women literally just fall at his feet. I’m in absolute awe of both of them.
Which one of you is the most famous and why?
Steve: At the moment Greg is because he’s in The Inbetweeners and so we’ve really noticed it in the last while. We’ve all been recognised at times but The Inbetweeners, that’s the thing that’s changed it, the number of kids coming up going ‘Oh My God it’s Mr Gilbert from The Inbetweeners’. And I was wondering if it was going to be Marek because he was always pretty much the poster boy for Leukaemia but that hasn’t really happened so it was Greg with The Inbetweeners that changed it.
Marek: It’s Greg because he’s in The Inbetweeners, it used to be me and now it’s Greg.
Greg: Marek probably, because of his tireless charity work.
Staying with the theme of fame, who is the most famous person you have met? Did they recognise you?
Steve: We’ve had a few shows where some proper terrifyingly famous people have come to see us. Sir Clement Freud came to see us do a show once and that was very weird. But the most famous, and the person that made us the most excited, was Harry Enfield. He’s been incredibly nice to us, he gave us a bit of advice and he’d specifically come to see the show. It’s one of those things where he’s a proper hero and there’s always that nervousness about are they going to be as decent in real life. But he is a genuinely lovely bloke and he’s very, very funny, but he just knows comedy so instinctively as well so there were a few kind of directorial and editorial suggestions he had which were just so precise and completely correct. That was pretty cool.
Marek: Probably Jason Donovan and he had absolutely no idea who we were. We had to do a sketch with him. He just thought we were idiots. Oh and Jonathan Ross and he sort of pretended he knew who we were but I don’t think he really did.
Greg: Desmond Tutu and no he just walked past, it wasn’t really a meeting to be honest. We met Jason Donovan, he really liked us, he keeps ringing us all the time now, we did a sketch with him. We like Jimmy Carr, we met Jimmy.
When will we be able to visit a We Are Klang website?
Steve: Well we’re so slap dash that we have only just bought the website quite recently. With there being three of us it always takes one of us to go ‘Are you going to do it? Oh well I’ll do it’. The others get sulky with me because I run our Myspace page, but for the specific reason that I was the only one who got off their arse to do it so I do all the work, I’m the one who always ends up writing our press releases and stuff like that so I think if I do all the hard work then I’m the one who gets to have the fun. But at the moment we’ve bought the website address and no one can be organised enough to set it up.
Marek: We’ve got the domain name but were not very computer literate so we’ve got to try and find someone to make it for us so maybe 2 and a half months.
Greg: Yeah I think we’ll get one when someone rings us up and says do you want us to do your website for absolutely no money whatsoever and then we’ll have one.
Which of you is luckiest with the ladies, why do you think this is?
Steve: It is undoubtedly Greg. And that is partly because myself and Marek can barely dress ourselves most days so there’s not a lot of competition. But I think that because he’s 6’ 8” a lot of ladies incorrectly assume he’d have a massive wang, which he doesn’t. But he is the most charming man you will ever meet. You will discover this. You will probably find yourself pregnant and not even know how it happened.
Marek: Greg, even though he’s got a girlfriend now, he’s just far more charismatic.
Greg: Marek, he just works out so relentlessly. He’s just physically perfect and women just can’t resist him. Unbelievable, women of all age groups as well.
What is the Klang question? Is there more than one Klang question? I’d like to answer it.
Steve: The Klang question is very specific. If you want to know the Klang question you have to be prepared to answer it. There’s a sort of commitment on your part. The Klang question is specifically which one of Klang, if you had to, death not being an option, which one of Klang would you sleep with? But this is asked to both men and women. I genuinely want an answer; if it isn’t me I will be genuinely angry. I think there’s a bit of magic happening here. The thing is we take it very very seriously as well. Greg percentage wise is probably on about 70%. When we did The Wall earlier this year on BBC 3, Alexa Chung chose me so I take that as a victory for the rest of my life. Crumbs of comfort in these lonely times.
Marek: I had a clean sweep on the pilot. I’ve had a bit of luck recently, it used to be Greg and now it’s me.
Greg: Before you even get asked the Klang question you normally have to go through an incredibly vigorous vetting process. You can’t just ask it to everybody because it’s a very powerful question.
If there was a 4th member of We Are Klang (or Steve died), who would you want to be in We Are Klang?
Steve: We’ve got a standing agreement that, if I died, they would replace me with some kind of bin, like a small kind of push pedal bin that you have in the kitchen. If Greg died we’re going to get Matt Le Tissier. If Marek dies we’re going to get a small child with special needs.
Marek: I think we should branch out and have someone from a different multicultural background. Ghandi would have been a really good member of We Are Klang, he would have really calmed us down and I think he would have helped us branch out into India but unfortunately he was assassinated some years ago. Or Nelson Mandela, someone like that to give us more of a nice side. And he’s already got comedy shirts already, we wouldn’t even need to make him a costume.
Greg: If Steve died I would instantly want to replace him with Derek Griffiths the old children’s entertainer.
Are you Star Trek fans? Is this where the name came from?
Steve: No it’s not. I am a Star Trek fan, I don’t know every episode but I am a fan. It’s purely coincidence. We picked a name that we thought wouldn’t have anything else and then we discovered that it actually has loads of references to other stuff. And it turns out that the guitarist from Elastica, Donna Matthews, her new band is called Klang and they’re really good, but it is just pure coincidence.
Marek: No, Greg’s dad was driving us to one of our first gigs and he knocked over a dog and we were really upset. It was a small dog, it was quite old and on the name collar it said Klang. So we thought we’d call ourselves We Are Klang out of respect for the dog.
Greg: No, I think Star Trek is absolutely deplorable. An absolutely loathsome institution.
Steve, the others seem to be on the telly all the time. Have you got any acting parts coming up?
Steve: I don’t do that much acting, what I’m doing in the autumn is I’m supporting Russell Howard on his national tour so that’s what I’m doing. I did it in the spring. So that’s where most of my commitments lie at the moment.
If someone hasn’t heard of you (god forbid!) what can they expect from We Are Klang?
Steve: A bit of rudeness, 3 men humiliating themselves and if they’re a lady they can expect to fall in love.
Marek: Just three men being complete idiots. Basically amusing themselves onstage and hoping that other people find it funny.
Greg: Just to be moved in a near religious way. And to cry. You know when you cry and you can’t say why?
