Island Records
Incubus‘ forthcoming album, 8, features the band’s new single, “Nimble Bastard,” which finally allowed frontman Brandon Boyd to use a phrase he’s had stuck in his head for years.
“We were somewhere in England, and I overheard somebody say with a thick British accent, ‘Oh, you’re a nimble bastard, aren’t you?’” Boyd tells ABC Radio.
“Bastard,” Boyd explains, also was the first curse word he heard when he was a child, but he doesn’t use it in that context now.
“Over the years, it has lost its kind of spiciness, it’s lost its sting, so to speak, for me,” Boyd says. “It’s become one of those words that’s almost, not meaningless, but it doesn’t mean what the dictionary says it means when I use it 90 per cent of the time.”
As he’s found out, though, “bastard” is very much still a swear word in the U.K.
“In the U.K., the word ‘bastard’ still really means ‘bastard,’ and it’s a bad word,” Boyd laughs. “They can’t play it on the radio ’cause it’s a bad word. And it’s ironic because I heard the term ‘nimble bastard’ in the U.K., that’s who taught it to me. And then now they’re throwing it back at us by saying, ‘We can’t play this, because this is a bad word!’”
Of course, the word “bastard” has also become synonymous with Game of Thrones. Incubus has already filmed a video for “Nimble Bastard,” but Boyd now regrets not doing a Westeros themed-visual.
“It’s perhaps the most ridiculous music video ever shot, and I’m really excited for it to be concluded and to see the end result, ’cause it has nothing to do with what you think it should,” he says. “But we should’ve done a Jon Snow thing.”
8 will be released April 21.
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