The Kills: ‘Touching down in Heathrow was like the first day back at school again, feeling triggered by the bullying’

Guitarist Jamie Hince and singer Alison Mosshart have been reinventing rock’n’roll for two decades – and dating famous people. They talk to Stevie Chick about punk rock, dark times and sucking at lockdown

‘We started out like some art project, making crazy, experimental spaghetti western music,’ says Jamie Hince of his early collaboration with Alison Mosshart (Supplied by label)

Every record we make I have a terrible f***ing disaster!” says Jamie Hince, with a grimace. The Kills’ guitarist, sitting across from the group’s singer, Alison Mosshart, in Dalston’s De Beauvoir Arms, is recalling the gnarly surgeries he’s endured since shattering his feet while making the band’s new album, God Games. Hince sustained the injury at his home in Los Angeles after leaping three flights of stone steps to rescue his dog from what he imagined was a coyote attack (the distressed pooch had, in fact, been sprayed by a skunk). “They had to slice open my calf muscles and reattach my achilles tendon,” he winces, his garrulous croak making him sound like Keith Richards’s mischievous nephew.

Hince is a remarkably disaster-prone rocker. When the transatlantic blues-punk duo began work on their fourth album, 2011’s Blood Pressures, he shattered his elbow; unable to hold his guitar, he wrote the songs on a pedal-steel guitar he played on his lap. “And in 2013 I slammed my finger in a car door and smashed it all up,” he continues. “We were playing a charity show that week, so I figured out how to play the songs without that finger, and we got away with it. So maybe I didn’t even need that finger! Playing guitar is only difficult if you want to sound like everyone else. And I never have.”

While he’s struggled to remain in one piece, Hince’s inimitable brutalist guitar – not to mention Mosshart’s bull****-intolerant, cheroot-chewing snarl – have seen The Kills juggle critical acclaim and chart success for two decades now. Their new album suggests their best is still to come.