Photography by Cochi Esse

DEATH BECOMES HIM

Antiquarian book dealer, illustrator, singer, taxidermist. All of these virtues are extolled by Gabriel Bruce, but the modest gent in front of us would prefer to be known as ‘an entertainer’. “I’m more of a song and dance man really,” he laughs. “I’d love to tap dance.”

Arresting in a charming fashion, Gabriel’s laidback personality grips with one hand as his intellect probes with the other, over a Guinness on a break from recording his debut album. Heavily influenced by South American poet Pablo Neruda, whose prose projected a powerfully political intent, Gabriel isn’t your normal 22 year old. “I often worry I’ve missed out,” he tells me. “I remember seeing an old photo of me smoking, black and white, with a suit on and reading Dostoyevsky…” his voice trails off with a chuckle. OK maybe he is.

Something of a crammer, many an achievement has already been made. Front-man for the now deceased band Loverman, Gabriel found it tough to move on. “It’s hard to make as much noise,” he ponders. “I try to from time to time but I end up looking silly.”

Striking out solo was a bold move; warping his own, very personal experiences was a real rush of blood to the head. “I was basically left to learn how to play so I ended up getting this lovely Farfisa organ and these songs are an extension of that process. I’ve still got it and it’s featuring on the record – she’s a humble creature.”

The not too assuming Farfisa accompanies Gabriel throughout the record, but before the album comes the single. ‘Sleep Paralysis’ is his signature song, for now, coming on with an insolent strut and a breathtaking vocal. Lyrically it’s bruising and real, the truth coming from Gabriel’s crushing attempts at a good night’s kip. “I actually suffer quite a lot in my sleep,” he says. “The song is my exploration and I did a lot of research into old books. It’s that kind of nowhere between full cognitive sleep and waking, it’s hypnotic and it’s very scary. You feel conscious but you can’t move; you’re constricted in your own body and it’s often coupled with hypnotic hallucination.” Gabriel smiles and morphs into his best terrified face.

Released by arts collective Off Modern, who took their background in publishing and Gabriel’s passion for the page and ran with it, in a delightful twist the debut single will actually be a book. “Originally we were just going to do a set of poems about sleep paralysis,” he explains, “but then I wrote the music and the rest fell into place. There’s a book by Anne Carson called Nox (a fold-out book in a box full of haunting images and poetry), which was originally created as a requiem for her dead brother. It’s heartbreaking and I think in my own very respectful way I’m nodding to Anne.”

As if researching 18^th century text books and releasing a 7-inch by 7-inch book wasn’t innovative enough, a rather macabre interest in the dead has also played a unique part in Gabriel’s artistic development.

“You mean the human spine, don’t you? I was trying to figure out how to make this thing dance, you know, get a murderous groove, so you hit something and think hmmm that might sound good. I build these kind of drum kits, so a human spine on a metal tray acts as the snare. It rattles around and sounds fantastic. It’s a shaker as well of course.”

Bright eyed and upbeat in person, there’s a dark underbelly piercing through in the music. Finder and keeper of all things grisly, Gabriel finds beauty where other’s fear to tread. “There’s a lot of dead things in my bedroom. I’ve got a collection of dried out animals that I framed myself. A frog I particularly like that I found in France that must have been run over by a lorry or something as it’s completely flat”.

With formaldehyde in the fridge and a skeleton based percussion ensemble Gabriel Bruce’s persona is undoubtedly original, but add his voice into the equation and it elevates his work that much more. Baritone and breathy, he doesn’t so much sing as talk to the melody as it talks back.

“I’m not a singer, I don’t think. I don’t have the voice for it like Harry Belafonte or William Bell; I do the best I can with the instrument I have. I used to like singing low in a choir so that’s how it started and I never wanted to sing high but now I do and it frustrates me. There is more variation though in the full record.” No tap dancing though – get yourself a hobby Gabriel.

By Ian Roebuck

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Originally published in issue 33 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. November 2011.

TEN YEARS AGO YOU WOULDN’T HAVE PEGGED AKRON DUO THE BLACK KEYS TO BE A BAND CAPABLE OF FILLING ALEXANDRA PALACE TWICE OVER

A decade on from the rough recordings from an Akron basement, The Black Keys are a band dealing with the glare of black tux and red carpet award ceremonies; the mainstream multiplicity of licensing deals and the global reach of soundtracking the idle hours of millions of football-obsessed teens. This wasn’t the tipping point they were anticipating or expecting.

Firmly entrenched in an ethos of hard work and spontaneous simplicity, long-time friends and bandmates Pat Carney and Dan Auerbach are as genuine as they come; just two boys from the mid-west beating the hell out of their respective drumkit and guitar. After years of gruelling cross-country, cross-continent tours in cramped Buicks and a growing frustration of watching bands explode, burn out and fade away, The Black Keys have stood firm, played loud and proudly kept things true to the day two sixteen year old kids decided that they just wanted to make music.

“We’ve been doing this so long, we’ve just always had this natural connection,” explains Auerbach. “The first time we played music together when we were sixteen, seventeen, it was immediate. We didn’t have songs, Pat hardly played drums and I was just learning guitar, but we could make music and we could make stuff that sounded like music. It’s always been really easy with Pat, to play.

“I started playing because everyone in my family played music and I wanted to play with them. If The Black Keys didn’t exist, I’d be playing music. This is what I do. I love music and this is what I live for and I don’t understand any other way of thinking about it.”

Entrenched in the spirit of howling blues and feral garage rock, they’ve always been a band that emits a raw, simple power. Pat hits like a blacksmith, powerfully and purposefully precise as Dan coaxes a frontier wildness from his Harmony H77, stoking the guitar swarm with a preacherman bark. On record, they invigorate and enliven; on stage, they make every show feel like the inside of an atom, closing the walls and pinning you to them with an amplified intensity. And it’s this power, allied to a staunch set of values, that’s enabled Dan and Pat to tough out their slow build to success.

“We have a studio now but it’s still the same set up… it’s just Pat and I banging away on the drums and guitar, the same thing we’ve been doing since we were sixteen, although our tastes have changed and our points of view have changed. I think bands don’t have enough time to mature and grow as they used to be able to. Not that we’re The Beatles or anything but they didn’t start to get into their psychedelic, way-out-there stuff until how many records into it? Same with the Rolling Stones or whoever…most bands took a while to mature and it’s a good thing. I think you lose out on a lot of good stuff when you hype a band to death then turn your back on it, then it’s over for them.

“When we first started coming to London we realised the press in London hypes bands even more than the fucking Internet does. You know what I mean? It’s kind of ridiculous. And we’ve seen so many bands over the years come and go, bands that get on the covers of magazines and shit and we’d be like, “Why?!”. Then they’d get headline festival slots over here and we didn’t understand it, but over the years we’ve been so glad it wasn’t us. At the time it made us really angry but we look back now and we’re happy it wasn’t us. We were probably pissed off about it at the time because we’ve seen it happen. It’s unhealthy. Pat and I are from the mid-West so we don’t fuck around like that. We like to make music, we like to make records and we like to play shows. We’re not for that hype machine. We weren’t built for that.”

The hype machine never reached the critical levels for the band through the ‘The Big Come Up’ and ‘Thickfreakness’ releases but third album ‘Rubber Factory’ marked a subtle shift in the band’s status. Armed with the timeless ‘10AM Automatic’, the wailing ‘Girl is On My Mind’ and the squalling ‘Til I Get My Way’ it was never the stampede the album deserved but it made many sit up and take notice of Dan’s whiskey and razorblades vocal and The Black Keys’ intoxicating white boy blues. But where the following ‘Magic Potion’, ‘Attack and Release’ and the duo’s solo projects kept an honest momentum, it was ‘Brothers’ and more specifically the album’s ‘Tighten Up’ that fundamentally changed the perception of the band.

“Absolutely,” confirms Dan, “it changed everything! But I think mainly ‘Tighten Up’ changed stuff for us because it got played on the radio, and that was a big thing for us. It was something we’ve never experienced before and I don’t think any other song on ‘Brothers’ was playable on the radio, but because ‘Tighten Up’ got played, it opened the door for other songs, like ‘Howlin’ For You’ is on the radio in the States; ‘Next Girl’ is on the radio in Canada. Those are not traditional radio songs.

“I think it was a combination of things, really. It was the first time I’d written songs in that way. I wrote those songs around the same time I wrote the songs for my solo record and was thinking about songs in more of a classic songwriting sense and having a lot of fun with that and I’d never really done that before. I think with the first couple of records we were just kids messing around and I didn’t know how to write songs and we were just having fun. On ‘Brothers’ it was a different thing and it was really getting into the writing part. So there was that and using a really great engineer, Mark Neill, who engineered a lot of the record. It was weird because ‘Brothers’, tracking-wise, was really minimal compared to ‘Attack and Release’. That was way more pro but ‘Brothers’ came out sounding bigger.”

‘Brothers’ didn’t just sound “bigger” it sounded almost alien. The Black Keys were supposed to be raw and rooted in bristling porch blues and primal garage rock and here they were working with Dangermouse, buffing up the process instead of scuffing it; polishing the edges instead of making them more pointed. Conversely, it wasn’t a total departure from what preceded, just an unexpectedly layered offering given an extra dimension by taking the production process outside of the duo.

“We were in Muscle Shoals for ten days, recorded ten songs, we were at my studio in Akron for four days and did a couple of songs, then we did ‘Tighten Up’ in two days in Brooklyn and pulled the album together and it was a record. We spent less money than probably any major label band; Pat’s brother did all the artwork, as he always has done. Nothing really changed except the process was longer, but that was mainly because we were on tour and we were working with Brian [Dangermouse] and he was working on the U2 record so he’d have to fly out and fly in, then we’d be on tour. It took about a month because it wasn’t consecutive and it felt like forever. I think it’s good to hunker down and get into a groove and we got disrupted a bunch making the record but we’ll take it how we can get it.”

For a band that has spent most of their career earnestly “trying to make rent” the opportunities to go beyond basic sustenance were few and far between. Accused of “selling out” courtesy of licensing songs for use in various adverts and soundtracks, it’s a backlash The Black Keys have had to deal with in light of their growing mainstream success. From Nissan to Sony, Levis to Victoria’s Secret, the revenue has been a lifeblood for the band and it’s not an issue Dan is prepared to shirk and shy away from.

“I don’t know what to say to those guys. Pat and I have worked harder than any band we know of; we’ve driven more miles across the country in stupid fucking Sprinter vans, across Europe all winter, over and over and over again. To call us ‘sell outs’ would be sort of ridiculous. We turned down around $100,000 for a mayonnaise ad for a company in England because we didn’t want to be sell outs when we were about twenty two, twenty-three, meanwhile we’re driving a Buick Sentry across the country with the amps and drums filling the trunk, stopping us from reclining the seats, on 11 hour drives to play little clubs. We turned down that money which was more than our parents would make in a year, combined, and that felt stupid. After we turned it down, we just said we’d never do it again because it was so stupid. That whole sell-out mentality is absolute garbage. Nowadays where records don’t sell, it’s the only way to make a living. How do you make a living from music?

“We never sold a lot of records and we’ve still not hit a million in America. We had the number one single for sixteen weeks straight! Man, if you had the number one record in 1985 for sixteen weeks straight, you’d have a platinum record. You’d own your own island next to Richard Branson! It’s pathetic, the record industry.

“We had a hit record and our entire team at Warner Brothers got fired [laughs disbelievingly] because of downsizing. It’s crazy. The only way Pat and I make a living is playing shows, which means we have to be on the road constantly. Basically, getting licensing money is amazing, it helps so much and enables us to stay off the road for a little while and enjoy a bit of life, which is nice.

“And I think it’s awesome when we hear our music on a movie or a TV show or an advertisement and we get paid for something that we created in a basement for almost nothing when we were 20 years old. I love that. There’s a TV show called Hung over in the States, which is about a male prostitute, and it’s kinda big and they use one of our songs. But it’s weird that this is the only art form where this situation happens. Every actor on the face of the earth has watch ads in Japan or aftershave ads somewhere and they don’t get shit for this at all. Who created this?!”

There’s a fierce sense of pride and self-awareness and self-sufficiency that’s palpable in almost everything The Black Keys have done. To them, it’s more than the fact they feel they’ve earned the right as much as anyone, there’s a frustration that they needlessly compromised on some unfounded values. For them, the austerity of the early days still rings responsibly true and just because they’re in a privileged opportunity to take advantage it doesn’t mean that they’re prepared to exploit the big budgets that may or may not come their way.

“We’ve always prided ourselves on being cost efficient. We’ve never had a big budget to make a record and we’ve heard so many stories about bands with a million dollars to make a record. We like to get in and get out because this comes out of our own pocket – we’re not stupid. I had a friend who used to manage a band called Be Your Own Pet, remember them? They were kind of like an ‘It’ band for a while, a real cute girl singer and they were young. They’re gone now but they had $350,000 recording budgets for each record! It’s insane.”

With new album ‘El Camino’ – the band’s seventh – the driving decade marker for the band, for all the awards, backlash and the belated recognition, The Black Keys’ tenacity and level-headedness is finally paying off. Perhaps it’s the maturity they’ve been allowed to develop over the years, learning quickly from missed opportunities or the unyielding commitment of Pat and Dan to see it all through. Whatever the secret, The Black Keys are still as uncompromising and inimitable as they were back in that basement.

“We just want to make a good record and have fun doing it, that’s all we’ve ever wanted to do. There’s no other plan. We met people in LA who write songs, pop hits, and are rich but it just seems miserable. We’ve seen so many talented bands ride and fade away and never given the chance to even release a record. We’re not trying to be the best at guitar and drums, we’re just trying to make music that’s interesting, you know? The music that’s not polished and it’s not perfect and we’ve gotten lucky. It’s a combination of three things: luck, timing and hard work. There’s no other way to explain it.”

By Reef Younis

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Originally published in issue 33 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. November 2011.

Photography by Lee Goldup

THE MOVIE-SCREEN MEETING AND UNDERSTATED ATMOSPHERICS OF GREG HUGHES AND TESSA MURRAY

Greg Hughes, founding member and principal songwriter behind Still Corners, is an American living in London, finding his way over from Texas in 2002 due to “a girl”.

“I came over here to see if it would work, but it didn’t,” he laughs, adding, “but I ended up staying because I’d built up a life and some friends and I love it, it’s a great place.”

Fast forward some years down the line, and the results behind one of the most quietly gripping debut records of the year is really down to nothing more than a serendipitous meeting.

“It was really weird,” Greg tells me. “I was going to London Bridge to see a friend and for some reason the train went to Kidbrooke, which is like another twenty minutes out or something. So I got off and this person came up to me and said did you get on the wrong train too?” The person in question was the now lead singer of Still Corners, Tessa Murray. “We got to talking and she said she would be late for choir practice and as soon as she said that light bulbs started going off in my head,” enthuses Greg.

That chance encounter was the foundations to the band’s birth, one that lies even more heavily on luck than just that fortuitous meeting. “Actually,” continues Greg, “Tessa told me recently that she was going to go and sit down on a bench that day but the bench was so wet she didn’t.” Had she done so, her encounter with Greg would have never happened. “So it’s really weird that this whole band has hinged on the fact that that bench was wet.” After exchanging words and ideas, the two started to work on demo’s until Greg finally said: “Why don’t you be in my band?” to which Tessa accepted and “everything has just really fitted into place from then on in.”

After working on more complete versions of songs, and becoming a full band by taking on Luke Jarvis on bass and Leon Dufficy on drums, Greg and Tessa soon garnered attention. Sub-Pop expressed an interest.

“They bought a song from our band camp,” says Greg. “Then I got an email a week later, they came to some shows and we had some drinks and they were just really cool peeps. The whole thing just happened organically. So we signed with them and the rest is rock’n’roll!” he laughs.

The album, ‘Creatures of an Hour’, has a nighttime darkness to it; an almost nocturnal stillness; elegiac yet somehow elevating.

“Yeah, that was intentional,” ponders Greg. “I mean, we worked on the album at night a lot, as we all had day jobs and I guess the title reflects that. I have my own studio and the album was recorded there and we all rehearse there, so there was a lot of nighttime activity when creating this record, definitely. I think how you described it in your review [‘music for 3am breakdowns’] sums it up perfectly – that’s spot on.”

Likewise, the album has a cinematic scope and tension to it. Ensconced within the layers is a brooding sense of atmosphere of which the cinematic quality is no coincidence.

“I’m a big movie nerd,” says Greg. “I’m a big Alfred Hitchcock fan and I wanted to try and capture some of those eerie qualities, so I think some of his vibe found its way onto the record. Some of the emotions he was evoking interested me. Also some horror guys like Dario Argento, there is some of that on there as well.

“I mean there’s also some real music influences on there too, like CAN and stuff.”

This musical exploration transforms into a record rooted deep in texture and tonality, so I want to know, was this exploration as much a focal point as song writing?

“Oh yeah, absolutely” says Greg. “Whenever me and Tessa would click on something, it was always around an eerie atmosphere or something.”

All this may lead to a presumption that ‘Creature…’ is a calculated and outright spooky album, full of faux horror for dramatic effect, but there is an overwhelming gravitation towards human emotions on it, which leads to a delicate and affecting balance between song craft, atmospherics and emotional investment.

Next the band are to head out on a headline, coast-to-coast American tour, “which we’re all really excited about,” enthuses Greg. “It’s going to be great. We’ve never played the West Coast before” he bubbles.

Free from the shackles of employment, Greg has been able to work tirelessly on more material for Still Corners too, which means that while the debut has barely had time to find its way onto your turntable, there could already be a follow up on its way.

“Yeah, I’ve been working on a lot of stuff for the second one and hopefully that will be out fairly soon,” Greg nods, before giving further insight into his creative restlessness.

“I handed in the debut record on April 25th and the next day I was in the studio working on new stuff,” he laughs.

If you can keep up with Still Corners, their gorgeous debut album is out on Sub Pop now.

By Daniel Dylan Wray

Still Corners – Cuckoo by subpop

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Originally published in issue 32 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. October 2011.

Photography by Dan Kendall

MY 2011: HOW RAPPING THE BLUES EARNED OBARO EJIMIWE A MERCURY PRIZE NOMINATION

Obaro Ejimiwe requesting that we meet at Tate Britain only confirms how differently he approaches things compared to most young musicians, and, in turn, how his year has been quite unlike anyone else’s featured in our top albums list. We find him sat in the museum’s café, a first time visitor who’s finally found the time to make it to the River Thames’ Millbank. It’s hard to fit these trips in when, off the back of your debut album, you’re touring with Metronomy, playing festivals and shows across the UK and Europe, performing on Later… With Jools Holland alongside Peter Gabriel and being courted by the Mercury Music Prize.

‘Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam’ is an impressively mellow British hip-hop record that skips the usual swagger and instead takes everyday monotony and makes it woozily seductive. The raps are mumbled in Obaro’s unmistakeable, tranquilised tone and the homemade beats and orchestrations combine elements of indie, electronica, trance and dance, all at half-speed – “the music I’m a fan of,” he says.

A little over a year ago Obaro was working a nine-to-five job and piecing together his debut album by night. He’d moved to South London from Coventry and describes it as “an eventful time in my life generally; an important time, and important for this record, because if I didn’t have so much going on it might have come out sounding different.” Last night he was watching E4 when he saw a trailer for new drama Top Boy. It was sound-tracked by ‘Finished I Ain’t’, his own song.

“Yeah, 2011 has been a positive step in the right direction,” he nods. “My headline gig at the Scala was particularly amazing, just to fill it up and see so many people know my music and be interested enough to come and pay to see me play, that was amazing. And playing Jools Holland was a highlight as well.”

Nothing quite propelled the success of ‘Peanut Butter Blues…’ like Ghostpoet’s Mercury Price nomination though. Looking back on it, Obaro explains how the whole Mercury saga unfolds each year, with the nominees being told they’ve been short-listed when we the public are. “It’s all very cloak-and-dagger,” he says. “It’s like being opened up to a secret world that you never knew existed. It was all a bit of a haze really, a bit mad. But that was the beginning of the Mercury whirlwind.”

Obaro’s friends got to him before the Mercury people did, congratulating him via text for a nomination he didn’t know he had. He was then summoned to the The Hospital Club, Covent Garden, and pushed in front of twenty interviewers.

“That day happened and then it was a case of, ‘Okay, we’ve got to get back on with what we’re doing’. You have to not get consumed by it, because you can easily get caught up with it, finding out who else has been nominated and what the odds are etc. I did indulge a little bit, but I did just get on with it, and it’s only after the Mercury night that you realise just how much it takes over your life. You’re forced to think about it more than you might like to. It was an interesting bubble to be in, and weirdly so, it was nice when it was over. It was like you’re watching television for a month straight and then someone turns it off, and you’re like, ‘oh, shit, there’s a world around me.’

“It was a relief to have done it, and for it to be over, and to have not won it. I always said in every interview that I didn’t expect to win it, and it was a relief to have been part of it but to have not won the ultimate accolade, because if you’re a new artist that wins it, it’s expected that everything you then touch turns to gold, and if it doesn’t you’re vilified for that.”

I ask Obaro if he put a bet on himself to win anyway, predicting the spluttered “No way, I’d never do that” that I get as an answer. Arrogance doesn’t become him, which is exactly what makes ‘Peanut Butter Blues…’ such an appealing and uniquely modest hip-hop album – never self-deprecating, but not quite aware of how good it is either.

“I never thought about how it would be received or if it would be in the end of year lists,” says Obaro, “so it’s a great bonus to a great year. But for me, I’m just thinking of the future and what I’m going to produce in the future. There’s no rule. It’s like being here at Tate Britain, looking at this art, you realise there are no rules; you can do what you want. I knew that anyway, but after this year I’m more aware of it.”

By Stuart Stubbs

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Originally published in issue 33 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. November 2011.

Photography by Tom Cockram

OUR 2011: THE YEAR’S MOST AMBITIOUS ALBUMS

You’d really think they’d be in a better mood. After a year that saw them sharing stages with punk rock legends Keith Morris (ex-Black Flag/Circle Jerks) and the Descendents, as well as festival bills with Kanye West, a year during which they toured more than at any stage during their career, and a year that marked the band’s 10^th anniversary, Fucked Up should be at least quietly content. Instead, the mood in a cramped backstage room at London’s Scala is one of deflation. Bassist Sandy Miranda and guitarist and main songwriter Mike Haliechuk seem tired and distracted, which might be the direct result of the incessant touring, and are curt in their answers. This ties in with their largely static stage presence – they and their colleagues are the professional punk rock machinery to frontman Damian Abraham’s exuberant, huggable school-boy-turned-rock-star character.

They look back on 2011 soberly, the last few months presumably blending into one messy mental scrapbook full of late nights and early flights. But there is also a certain reluctance to reminisce at all, maybe hinting at a relief that the chapter of ‘David Comes to Life’, their fantastic third full-length-album, is about to be closed. That record was a ridiculously ambitious yet fully coherent, barnstorming rock opera about David, a light bulb factory worker whose doomed love for Veronica, a pamphlet-toting activist, first sends him into a spiral of guilt and depression (she dies, possibly as a result of his actions) but then becomes the driving force in his redemption. Bound to feature in almost everyone’s ‘Best of’ lists this month, it could very well be their best album yet. So, to borrow a phrase, was 2011 the year Fucked Up broke?

“Not really”, says Mike. “I think we actually sold less records in England than last time around.”

Sandy concurs: “Yeah, it’s mainly that we’re touring more. The shows are better. They’ve been progressively getting better with every tour. But yeah, I don’t know. It’s kinda the same.”

Their own relationship with the ‘David Comes to Life’ story and its characters is a curious mix of pride and distance – you get the sense that the rock opera idea was something they thought of as the next necessary step in Fucked Up’s line of artistically independent, slightly unorthodox releases (see the series of 12” singles based on the Chinese astrological cycle) as opposed to the storyline dictating the format. They probably felt like a concept album was a Fucked Up thing to do, and because they are Fucked Up, it turned out to be an amazing concept album. But now, after a year of working on it promoting it and touring it, the magic has worn off a bit: “There was no turning back”, says Mike of the recording process. “It was like when you get a picturebook that you have to colour in, and you can’t change the way it looks once you’ve started. Whenever we had doubts, we just pushed on. It was the only record we could have made. I actually thought the plan of the story made it easier, because you had boundaries and limitations.”

Have they, after talking about them in interviews and singing songs about them for so long, learned more about the characters and ideas on ‘David…’?

“I kinda stopped thinking about it once we finished the album,” shrugs Mike. “After putting the final full stop after the last verse, I completely stopped thinking about the lyrics.”

Sandy nods. “Yeah, playing the songs I don’t focus on the lyrics at all, only the music. The only discussion about the story happens when I read an interview or if we ask each other about it.”

‘David Comes to Life’ sounds huge, and the topics addressed are in the same ballpark, size-wise. Among the whirlwind of reverb-drenched guitars and the whipped-up drumming Abraham can be heard breathlessly growling lines about romance and companionship (“He understands all her needs, and for that she loves him eternally/Syncretism is so natural and they’re experiencing something so actual”), but the background and location of the story – a fictional English town in the early 1980s called Byrdesdale – is quite specific. I ask if the atrophy of the union movement that began at that time, which is referred to on the record, is something the band think is relevant today? Again, the answer is “not really”.

“The working class movement in the 80s in England was important for Damian’s part of the record. But we didn’t try to make any kind of political statement. The organisation that is happening now [with the Occupy Wall Street/London Stock Exchange movements], is kind of like post-labour – labour isn’t really part of the equation anymore. But it’s all good, right? Organising is organising. The world is just a different place now.”

The world has most certainly changed during the last ten years the band has been together. Fucked Up’s 10^th birthday passed without much excitement (“It registered,” says Sandy), and during the last 12 months there were points where band members were close to throwing in the towel, which is something they’re used to, says Sandy. “Things may get tense,” she says, “and then we’ll all find some reason to think alright, that’s it. But then we keep going somehow, and we’re still together at this stage.”

Maybe it would help if the band toured less?

“I don’t think [the tour schedule] is that crazy. I mean, you’re in a band, so you go on tour. You get used to it, just like you get used to going to work every day.”

Later that evening, it becomes clear what Sandy meant when talking about the band getting better with every show. Despite their tiredness, Fucked Up turn the Scala into a boiling punk rock cauldron, with Damian giving out high-fives, telling anecdotes about Henry Rollins and hosting a costume competition (it’s the night of Halloween). They clearly are a well-oiled machine now, so part of the reason for the break the band are affording themselves early next year might be to become a bit more un-familiar with each other – both personally and musically. On a scale of one to ten, then, how good was 2011 to Fucked Up? “Eight or nine. It was pretty good,” deadpans Mike. Eight or nine out of ten? You’d really think they’d be in a better mood.

By Matthias Scherer

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Originally published in issue 33 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. November 2011.

Photography by Phil Sharp

THE UGLY SIDE OF NEW SOUL

In a very basic, but-GIRLS-are-actually-guys kinda way, The One are a puzzling prospect, and not just because they are in fact two. Take Joe Ryan, the drummer who dreamt up the future soul project in the first place. He’s a hardcore drummer, isn’t he? His other band, Fair Ohs, had us believing so, even if they have sailed more tropical seas since their early punk shows and recordings. Joe – a musician so proficient he teaches others how to bash when he’s not playing himself – still pounds as much as he swings, after a lifetime of forming noise bands with his brother Sam, who now tours as Tom Vek’s guitarist and performs with The One when they’re not one or two, but in fact four. Pete Havard also joins them then, but really The One are Joe and Emeson, a six foot five south Londoner who knows what’s expected of his appearance.

“When a big black dude walks into a room, everyone’s like, ‘oh, he’s going to sing some soul’,” he says, “and I’ve not tried to get away from that, or my background in soul, but there’s also an electronic side [to The One], and we’re trying to approach things in a different way, and that’s something I was doing in solo projects before.

“Working with Joe is still soulful, but there’s load of other elements in there. There’s latin in there, there’s jazz in there, some pop in there.”

Emerson doesn’t teach singing, but he should. When we meet in a north London pub, he plays a very convincing vocal coach as he assures me that anyone can sing. The owner of a classic baritone purr, it’s a little like Audley Harrison telling you anyone can box.

Emeson grew up on Stax, his dad an avid collector who would teach his son the history of each record he owned (“I’d be like, ‘But dad I wanna go outside and play,’ and he’d say, ‘Sit down, listen to that, and then I’m going to tell you where it’s from’.”), while Joe’s musical education originated in ’80s Minneapolis soul and Seattle grunge – a perfect mix of gnarly rock and classic pop. The two met when Joe heard Emeson sound-checking at east London arts centre the Institute of International Visual Arts.

“Music wise, Joe had already gone so far ahead,” says Emeson, “and I was singing in INIVA, in Hoxton, and this guy comes up to me as I’m warming up and says, ‘ooh, yeah, yeah, I just heard you warming up there and I really like what you’re doing’. We started talking about drumming and about this project he was thinking about working on and I was like, ‘there’s something interesting there,’ so we exchanged numbers and had a good ‘ol chin-wag, and then we didn’t speak again for about a year. And then out of the blue we got together and he started playing me this amazing stuff.”

Joe made the call (“I’m always the bloody instigator. Like, ‘Will you go out with me???’”), saying, “Well, why don’t you come to my studio (my bedroom) and we’ll try and put some vocals on?” And now, having spent a little over a year assembling songs via email (“The songwriting process was a lot like The Postal Service,” notes Joe, even though the pair do live in the same city) The One have completed their debut album, ‘Who Are You?’.

Inspired by Flyte Tyme Records, the ’80s label of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who have produced everyone from Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey to Janet Jackson, Barry White and Mary J Blige, it’s a proudly commercial sounding record in many ways, and yet with this being the year of new RnB and soul, it couldn’t have arrived at a better time. It fills in the blanks between James Blake’s dark, post-dubstep take on the genre, Alexander O’Neal’s FM hits and Cameo’s motoric sex beats. The synths are dub and funk influenced and the drums often simple and stark.

“The thing is, you can say all different things about it, because maybe it’s a bit more of a dance album than it’s meant to be, but everything about it is soul, really,” says Joe, while Emeson explains that songs like ‘This Time (It’s Over)’ and ‘Double Life’ are not tracks that even Luther could bed anyone with.

“The beauty,” he says, “is that the record doesn’t just address love, per se. Most soul records will. He loves her, she loves him. But even if our songs do deal with that, there’s another meaning there also.

“The way I see it, is ‘Who Are You?’ questions people’s characters – who you are, what you’re about. It talks about love, but it’s a bit murkier and darker, and not so straightforward. It questions are the things you’re doing now right for you? Is this what you want your life to be, and if not are you questioning that, or are you just going to go with it.

“So it does all of that and then it’s also just songs. And you can dance! Y’know, it’s weird playing ‘Let’s Get It Straight’ and seeing people just dancing to it, because it’s like, ‘Do you know what these lyrics are about?’. But then, it’s just a song that we wrote, and people can take what they want from that. It’s not like we’re going, ‘ooh we’re really quirky and here’s a double entendre, get us’. People can feel what we’re saying in the songs, and that’s cool, or they can just listen to them as songs and enjoy them that way. Either is a huge compliment. We just want to get them out there. That’s fulfilling enough.”

By Stuart Stubbs

—

Originally published in issue 32 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. October 2011.

Photography by Elliot Kennedy

AFTER TEN YEARS THE GODFATHER OF BRITISH URBAN MUSIC IS FINALLY COMING TO TERMS WITH HOW INFLUENTIAL HE HAS BECOME

Roots Manuva – aka 39-year-old, south Londoner Rodney Hylton Smith – has come a long way since the release of his debut album, ‘Brand New Second Hand’, at the tail end of the last century. From humble beginnings, his life journey has so far taken in the release of a series of highly heralded albums, several Brit Award nominations, a Mercury Prize nomination, high profile collaborations and a deep influence on UK urban music, which casts him as a highly respected figure for many currently emerging artists. It’s been a journey quite unlike any other, and one that is unlikely to come to a halt anytime soon.

Rodney has developed a habit of making genre-hopping albums that pull from a vast range of influences and merge into death-disco, raga, grime, hip-hop and reggae, yet he’s remained largely on the underside of the mainstream – a familiar name to many, but one who has been left enough room to be inventive and forward-thinking, and in the week of his fifth album, ‘4everevolution’, being released, he can be found in his North London studio, in and upbeat, talkative mood.

He begins by telling me how the creation of his latest record was not part of a pre-planned turnaround – it was a lot more organic than that.

“From start to finish I’ll say it was two and a half years,” says Rodney of ‘4everevolution’’s… erm… evolution. “I never sit down and keep going. I have intense periods of two weeks and then stop, stop for half a year and then keep going back to it and then there are other times where it is a six week or a two month run straight. I’ve never been disciplined enough to just hire a cottage and go there with a bit of equipment and record, then say that’s the album. I just don’t have that kind of focus.

“It’s good, but it’s not economically viable at all, I tell you. Making this record has really stretched me on loads of different levels  – on personal levels, a financial level, a business level to artistic integrity level, every single level you can think of.”

With Roots Manuva there is an overall sense that the pressure to push things forward is not from an external source but instead one that flourishes from within. As Rodney puts it, “it’s a pleasure never a pressure.”

“But it’s an expensive pleasure to indulge in,” he nods, “to keep trying to further yourself and delve into a love of sonic exploration.”

Over the past twelve years, Roots Manuva has obviously established a loyal following who eagerly await what’s coming next, but it doesn’t silence the nagging voice in Rodney’s head; the one that asks ‘what are people going to make of this?’. He needs to think about his new fans too, because unlike other acts as established as he, Roots Manuva is constantly picking up admirers – the Godfather of UK hip-hop who inspired everyone from Dizzee Rascal to Dels and Toddla-T.

“The thing is, the audience grows,” he explains, “but I’ve not really been in touch with how the audience has been growing of late, because my kids have gotten older and they are into certain albums and certain songs that their friends are into. I wouldn’t say my kids’ friends are super fans, but they know of me. I’ve been to pick up my kids from school and from their friends’ house and have been referred to as Roots Manuva by a friend of one of my sons. That really knocks me for six – that’s too weird! I don’t really expect a five year old or a six or seven year old to have heard of me, but their parents listen to it and we live in the age of the internet where it is not necessarily someone who has bought your record that knows of you. It constantly shocks and startles me every day,” he says, wide-eyed, “the different amount of people that recognise me while I’m just going about my daily business. Even on the phone using the company Roots Manuva card and someone at the insurance company knows who Roots Manuva is, or went to a concert recently or happened to be in America while I played in some strange place in Cincinnati, it really is a revelation.”

These same people may not exclusively know Roots Manuva from his own pure work. Rodney is fond of collaboration; an artist that has worked with a vast array of musicians that stretch from the Black Twang to The Cinematic Orchestra and The Maccabees. His most high profile stint, however, can be found on The Gorillaz album ‘Demon Days’, specifically on the track ‘All Alone’.

“It really pushed things forward,” he says. “That was seven years ago and it was a real push out into the mainstream as such, and seeing how the mechanism works on that big multimillion pound level. I had just finished my own awfully deep tour, which I had been moaning about, and then I went out onto this massive, massive Gorillaz monster. In all, I only did ten dates on their own tour (five dates at the Manchester Apollo and five dates at the Harlem Apollo). I did one of those crazy sub dates that Damon Albarn does too, the African Express. I did one of those dates in Paris, which is another monster as well, because there are so many people, so many different artists that you know over the years and you want to talk to, but you can’t talk to them as you’re half in shock and half star struck and you have to behave yourself.

“I remember sharing a dressing room with Neneh Cherry and constantly wanting to sing one of her songs and you just have to restrain yourself as it’s really annoying. If people come up to me and starts whistling ‘Witness’, I would really get annoyed as I’ll rather they knew another tune, something less obvious, even though people are only ever going to know what they know. I can’t chastise someone for only knowing ‘Witness’, can I? It’s one of those weird things.”

It’s been more than 10 years since the emergence of that track, though, released on Rodney’s second album, the 2002 Mercury Prize nominated ‘Run Come Save Me’. It remains his most well known song, which must be annoying for any artist that has continued to create for a decade.

“For me, ‘Witness’ has always been the fluke. The tune I never heard at all. It wasn’t just me. The musicality – the words, the drumbeat, the bass-line – was all made by me, but the wider production of it was done by a team. Big Dada Records and my old management team who I am no longer with put a lot of effort into moulding what would become the Roots Manuva sound and it’s just one of those weird things that happened and that we can’t seem to top yet. It’s like England winning the world cup in 1966, that’s what has happened here. 2001 was a great year for British music and we can’t seem to achieve the same heights again.”

While some artists tend to view such crossover hits as a mainstream launch pad, Rodney outlines that there was already an underlying confidence beforehand, that things were progressively moving forwards. There was, back then, however, a particular pivotal point in his career.

“Before ‘Witness’ I was getting offers of work,” he says. “After the first album it led to working with lots of other scenes and genres. The thing that really opened the door, though, was working with Leftfield. That was probably the most significant element that influenced the way in which I approached making music. Sitting around the studio with those guys opened my mind as to how to abuse technology.”

As we sit in Rodney’s studio, he tells me about how his desire is to “just make good music”, citing himself as “a writer” who covers everything from “the mundane to the political astute to love and the respect and honour of your team”. With Britain being in a bit of a state, us being in Tottenham, the epicentre of this years London riots, and with many of ‘4everevolution’’s tracks having a political bent, we discuss politics, albeit briefly.

“At first [with the riots], I was a bit like, ‘this is just a load of bollocks! This is rubbish! This has been orchestrated by the powers that be for them to be able to change laws and create a state of emergency!’. Now I’m realising that it was a lot more serious than I thought. Walking around talking to people who really got affected by it, and seeing how much damage was truly done to small businesses (not really to big businesses) and how it is going to affect working people, it’s a real complicated issue and I’m a bit uncomfortable talking to you about it, as I’ve not quite worked out what’s gone on. I’m in this artistic bubble in this warehouse, living quite comfortably, working as a self employed creative person and I’m not really that in touch with what is really going on out in the street.”

Another notion that doesn’t quite penetrate the Roots Manuva bubble is the influence Rodney has had on acts that have followed.

“People have had to sit me down and really explain quite pedantically what was happening at the time of the very first Roots Manuva album and afterwards, step by step, as I would be an arsehole to try and claim all of that, but I have to respect the fact that I did play a part in it and I do have to somehow find it in myself to say, ‘Yes, I influenced that new bloke, whatever he’s called, and yes, that new girl quotes that rhyme.’ I have to start saying yes, yes. It’s not very respectful to be over polite, and to answer your question, yes, I did influence a whole wave of British music, both urban and indie related. I even remember that before the Arctic Monkeys blew up, even they came to see us play.”

Many of these artists that Roots Manuva has influenced, particularly that of an urban disposition, have gone on to have some level of success in the USA, but Rodney Hylton Smith isn’t of the perspective that UK based acts have now suddenly got breaking the States any easier.

“British urban music has always had a regard in America,” he says, “it’s just never managed to get the right funding over there. It just works on a corporate level, from a micro-corporate to a small person to the massive majors, it just works so differently – it’s a lot faster. In Britain we are just ho-hum – over there things work! You see someone give them the masters and they put it out. Things just angle and move forward so differently. You don’t take eighteen months to negotiate one point on a contract over there, it’s just move, move, move. You don’t sleep, you eat, drink and breathe it.  The British way is a bit slow, a bit archaic, sitting around playing nicey nicey and being all civilised when we should be saying what the Americans say: ‘You’re breaking my balls man, we can’t have that!’. We need to start expressing ourselves with some of that direct language instead of playing around with long words.”

And for emerging artists who are currently hoping to make music a long-lasting career, Rodney’s advice is simple, if not what many musicians would like to hear. “I would just say avoid viewing music as something you can just depend on straight away. Avoid that. It’s an illusion. Today’s artists have to be open to having other careers as well, open to working ten or fifteen years for the gas board or for the council. It’s the total opposite of what happened to me. When I got offered a job from the council when I was nineteen, I didn’t take it, I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to do music’. I would not advise that to anybody. Your music would be all the better for the fact that you have more of a rounded life experience than just being a musician and experiencing a musician’s life. As wonderful as it is, there is more to life than being a musician.”

By Nathan Westley

—

Originally published in issue 32 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. October 2011.

Photography by Owen Richards

MODERN LIFE ISN’T RUBBISH. IT’S HOW CIVIL CIVIC SURVIVE.

A band born in Australia; a friendship strengthened and distilled by a mutual love and loathing, separated by mainland Europe but somehow driven by those few thousand miles, Civil Civic are a digitised still-frame of an unconventional dynamic prospering through modern means. If it’s not Aaron or Ben hurtling at a few thousand miles between their respective London and Barcelona bases, it’s their songs whizzing through air and fibre optics onto each other’s computer screens. In the same way we were infatuated by The Kill’s primal sexual tension and Trans-Atlantic phone calls, and Animal Collective’s ability to continue to wow from disparate corners of the globe, distance has become an increasingly common denominator. Once upon a time it was an obstacle. An inconvenience. A royal pain in the arse that meant if the drummer’s mum couldn’t give him a lift to rehearsal, you spent a wasted night kicking your heels. But with the right ethos, it’s capable of driving a process that’s just as dynamic, intense and painstaking than that of any highly-charged practice room.

“Because it’s been that way from the start,” Ben explains, “I suppose we’ve just accepted all the draw-backs as a natural feature of the band. On the positive side it’s stopped us from just pissing around in a local scene and doing things piecemeal. For me, the tour always starts with a stint on Aarons’ living-room floor in Dalston, so that feels like a compulsory stepping stone to actually performing. Even if we had a run of Spanish gigs lined up I’d probably have to fly to London first and kip on Aarons’ floor just to make sense of it.

“We have to organise a long, tight run of shows (or a big slab of studio time) for it to be worth the effort of even being in the same room so it provides focus. The other benefit is that our burning hatred of each-other only starts to really become a problem after a few weeks, and by then the tour is usually almost over.”

It’s an interesting snapshot into the duo’s dynamic. As driven as they are distracted by each other, in many respects, their relationship is part of the fuel that drives them beyond the transit, displacement and creative isolation. You’d anticipate that when they do get together to bang heads it’s done with all the verve and energy of their music, but here we get the contrast because behind the rambunctious personality there’s a serious sense of consideration and commitment.

“We probably should make some shit up about raising hell and getting arrested/beaten/fucked-by-models and what-have-you, but the truth is it’s all work work work here at CC HQ. Because we’re a geographically challenged outfit we only get to rehearse in a short window before touring, so it’s pretty hammer-and-tongs. Plus we’ve got the record coming out, which means a zillion small tasks relating to the release. It’s basically all work and no spazz.”

With such a demanding workload, the obvious suggestion would be for either Ben or Aaron to relocate to streamline their whole process, particularly with debut album ‘Rules’ in the pipeline. Paradoxically, though, the odd geography seems to be the one familiar factor that keeps the band on an even keel, and with Ben keen to impress that changing things now would go against the band’s initial mission statement, it’s clear that they don’t want a helping hand either.

“It’s a valid query,” says Ben, “but this act was the product of a pretty specific concept, and “duo” is one of the fundamentals of that concept although our drum machine, The Box, has gradually taken on its own persona and gets more fan mail than we do, so maybe we’re a trio now.

“Aaron tried to find someone London-based to play the other role, but the search drove him crazy and in the end he was forced to come crawling to me! It was destiny. I’ve thought about relocating to London, but if I think about it too hard I start sweating and shaking and my tummy hurts. And if Aaron moved to Barcelona people would ridicule his translucent skin and nerdy wardrobe. So for now we’ll just stick to what we know.

“Aaron is still very active as a producer/engineer/songwriter/smarty-pants independent of the band. He produced the last Snowman record and has recently been working with Conrad Standish from the Devastations among other savants and luminaries.

“For my part, I was a pretty productive musician/songwriter/producer/moron before Civil Civic started, but I’ve done precious little of my own shit in the last few years. That could change violently and without warning. I have killer bees in my bonnet.”

So for a band driven by impulse and intent on doing things via a literal scenic route, their self-enforced distance does have its benefits. Working independently and exchanging tracks via email, theoretically, it should give both Ben and Aaron the opportunity to apply a vigorous attention to detail and refine the way they operate. Away from the face-to-face exchange, there’s the chance to step back, deconstruct and evaluate.

“That’s a sharp observation,” says Ben. “If you work up material together in a rehearsal room or studio, ideas get thrown up quickly and shot down/changed just as quickly, which is a valid and healthy way to do business. But when you get an MP3 of an embryonic track in the mail, you still have immediate reactions, but you end up listening to it a bunch of times and formulating your response in a much more methodical and considered way. Ideas have a chance to grow on you.

“And how often we get together really depends on what’s going on. We try to organise ourselves around shows. For instance when I flew over for the mixing of the record we made that a prelude to our summer tour, and before that when we recorded and mixed the last single we made it coincide with some London gigs. We have to concentrate shit, because neither of us has the time or money to fly back and forth just to have a chat and a jam.”

It brings us neatly to the here and now with Civil Civic setting off for Europe. It marks a hectic few months in terms of touring and the impending album, and neither Ben nor Aaron are thinking about downtime. Interestingly, though, they are thinking about their next steps and the overall reaction to ‘Rules’ is set to play a big part.

“We’ve got some touring to do,” says Aaron, “so we can alert as many innocent people as possible to our existence and also our awesome, smelly album being released. After that we’re going to take a short break and see what sort of reaction the record generates. That’ll play a big part in dictating the next move. But there’s so much to do, even in so-called ‘down time’. We want to make a couple of good videos for tracks off the album and maybe do a bit of writing. That sort of stuff. All will become clear in time.”

Bearing musical similarities with the likes of Errors, Holy Fuck, Moderat, Fuck Buttons and those who attempt to create instrumental music that goes beyond merely complementing montages of beautiful panorama, Civil Civic are no passive soundtrack. Creating a complex package of math rock, post-punk and screeching white noise, at the heart of it all is a desire to be a party band, making them sound, at times, like Metronomy trying their hand at krautrock. Sure it can be loud, rhythmic and ultimately unhinged, but there’s also a resolute level of intelligence at work which is noticeably important to both Ben and Aaron.

“When I hear the words ‘instrumental post-punk’ I have real trouble not falling asleep, instantly,” says Ben. “To me those words say boring, noodley, self-absorbed, jammy, long-winded, quasi-emo horseshit. I have no perspective, but is that really what we are? Shit, part of our mission statement is to be a Good-Times act. A pool-party band! Neither of us are vegans. We didn’t study jazz improvisation at school. Damnit, we’re fun!

“We try and make sure that we are writing really songy songs, with tons of melody and good arrangements and all those vital ingredients, rather than just jamming out and looping it and masturbating over the top and expecting anyone in the world to give a shit. Perhaps that’s harsh. Jamming and looping and wanking are all great things in their own way, but we have rules about how to do business, and massaging our musical egos at the expense of the listener is most definitely against the rules.

“One of our most cherished goals is to produce tracks that will get played at pool parties and under-age booze orgies. We’re proud of the prog /nerd elements in our sound, and there’s no way in hell we want to be a dumb disposable outfit, but if we aren’t making fun jams then please tell us, because that would mean we’re fucking up.”

Fucking up is not something Civil Civic should worry about. The release of ‘Less Unless’ kick-started the typical blogosphere battle between speed and substance with the band forced to debate and deliberate it’s next steps. With Civil Civic still in its embryonic stages, the reaction took them by surprise, but armed with the insistent, triumphant ‘Run Overdrive’ and a growing reputation, Ben and Aaron shouldn’t have to worry about being pigeonholed as nerdy, noodling and self-absorbed. Civil Civic are pushing beyond that of shoegazing instrumentalists and their party is just getting started.

“When ‘Less Unless’ started getting blog-love, the band was only 6 months old and we hardly knew what we were going to do with it,” says Ben. We knew that track had something special about it, but fuck, I’ve been in bands that toiled for years and released loads of stuff and never generated a reaction like that. I’m a cranky old band whore who’d resigned himself to total failure and anonymity, so the internet reaction to those singles completely revolutionised my whole outlook on life. I don’t even cry in the shower any more.”

By Reef Younis

—

Originally published in issue 32 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. October 2011.

Photography by Guy Eppel

THE TRICKY FIRST ALBUM

Brooklyn, New York, is home from home for Veronica Falls. Drummer Patrick Doyle lived here for just five months in 2008, but in that time he made enough friends to be mistaken for Mayor Bloomberg. He “wanted to escape Glasgow for a bit” and before long so too did Roxanne Clifford. She joined Patrick in Williamsburg for what she describes as “an extended holiday”, cycling over the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan’s Lower East Side every day, only to cycle straight back again. “I didn’t have anywhere to go, I was just trying to get fit,” she says in her broad Manchester accent as we trundle over the jumbo structure and New York’s endless conga line of vehicles do the same.

Guitarist James Hoare has never lived here, but he’s not short of hands to shake in the local bars and clubs either. And the same goes for Marion Herbain, who met Patrick and Roxanne in Glasgow and learned bass especially to be in this band with her friends.

When I’m introduced to James and Patrick at the first of their two New York shows it’s as “the only person in the room you don’t already know”. It might not even be an exaggeration. “It was bad for my health, living here,” says Patrick. “I was just getting wasted every single night.”

It’s easy to see how they’ve done it – become New York’s favourite outta-towners. Their music – made up of his’n’her (and his) three-part harmonies, fantastic tales of the macabre, girl group drums and the warts’n’all stylings of early lo-fi bands like Beat Happening – is far greater than that played by most of the garage bands that surround them. They trade in clean guitars and enviably doe-eyed melodies, rather than forgiving reverb and scuzzy distortion. Everyone else is singing about catching a wave; Veronica Falls pine for the deceased (‘Found Love In A Graveyard’) and cherubly coo about suicide (‘Beachy Head’). Personally, it’s even harder to dislike them.

During our two photo shoots – the second of which takes place early morning, before a five hour drive to Boston, where the band will begin a nationwide tour with The Drums – Veronica Falls willingly ‘play the pop group’ where so many shy away, automatically bored of the camera’s gaze. Roxanne has every reason to be fed up, having picked up an eye infection on the plane from California that cost her five hours in A+E yesterday. “It was an eye-opening experience,” she jokes, which climaxed with her right eye being frozen. Three hours later she was onstage at Brooklyn DIY venue Glasslands. When the infection spreads to her other eye two days later she tells me so with a dignified shrug. New York City is fast. There’s no time to mope.

Before the band’s second show, at Manhattan’s Pianos club, we take a couple of hours to take some pictures, play with sidewalk trash (“I’ll get in the trolley,” says Marion, unprompted), get told off by a psychic (only in New York) and catch the eye of countless passers-by, one of which screeches his mountain bike to a halt to see what the hell is going on.

“Is this a band then?”

“Yep.”

“What are they called?”

“Veronica Falls.”

“Oh yeah, I know them… Are they any good?”

You’d think, with this being the home of Saturday Night Live, Letterman and Broadway that New Yorkers wouldn’t even notice four people having their photograph taken in rush hour, but they do. Here, people like to talk, or shout, which is one of the topics of discussion at dinner, in a French bistro called Pink Pony, which, Roxanne says, “has not the best food but a nice atmosphere.”

“Those guys talking to us in the street, I like that about here,” says Patrick. “I like it when you enter a shop and someone says, ‘hi, how are you?’. Strangers talk to you a lot on the subway here too, and I always felt that that made me feel safer when I lived here. If someone did that in London you’d be like, ‘I’m fine. Why are you asking?’.”

“You can be in a bar in New York and turn to someone and say, ‘hey’, and it’s not weird,” adds James. “You’re not hitting on them, you can just say hey. If someone speaks to you in England they’re a crazy person.

I find people in London, within music, are bit closed off,” he continues. “Like, I’ve been going out to gigs in London for years, and I see the same people all the time, and it’s not like I have anything against them, but I don’t speak to them. I can’t imagine that happening here.”

“When we were in Minneapolis, this guy gave us a hamburger for free!” Patrick exclaims. “He was like, ‘I ordered two but I’m probably not going to eat this one’.”

James: “Now, if that was in London you’d think, he’s put this down his trousers.”

“Let’s not be too down on Britain,” says Roxanne. “I prefer living in London to New York.”

Patrick agrees. London is better for his health.

“We were really lucky when we moved here,” says Roxanne, “in that we met this really nice group of friends who are all really supportive and are doing really interesting things.”

“Everybody is very supportive of each other here,” nods James. “They all play in bands with each other and release each other’s records. In London things are bit more disjointed. So many good bands come out of Brooklyn and I think that whole supportive community must help a lot. It means that you’ve got a free-er attitude to working with people.”

Roxanne: “I think it’s similar to Glasgow in a way – that was what I most liked about Glasgow when I moved there: everybody knew each other and everybody was doing stuff.”

Brooklyn’s indie fertility comes from a simple more-is-more work ethic, reckons Patrick, who says: “I think people here are more willing to start more projects; they don’t put all of their eggs in one basket. Like, some friends of ours play in two or three bands.”

“There’s something a bit more genuine about that as well,” notes James, “playing in bands for the sake of playing, rather than forming a band in order for it to become a job. It does seem that in London sometimes people can be a bit more calculated, starting bands and having all of these ideas about what they want to do before they’ve written a song.”

Of course, that does go on here too, and to a greater extent since the wider success of MGMT, Yeasayer, Animal Collective, TV On The Radio, and so on, but James is right about the overall creative drive of the city – Brooklyn is the centre of Planet Indie; for most bands here there’s no need to be recognised outside of the party. And of course by them not caring if the world’s looking, we can’t help but stare. British musicians like Dev Hynes and Kele Okereke have even moved here. Natasha Khan tried. Tom Vek’s considered it.

It’s in keeping with New York’s all or nothing philosophy, where the bloke on the subway is either asking how you are or pushing you in the back. In the street, pedestrians shout at cars that aren’t moving fast enough, while flyer guys knock on your window, hand you a leaflet and politely deliver their sales pitch. New York exists on polar opposites, much like the lyrics of Veronica Falls. When I ask Roxanne if her songs have any recurring themes she plainly answers: “Love and death. Extreme emotions.”

It’s a foolish question, really. One listen to the band’s debut album and that much is clear. ‘Found Love In A Graveyard’ says it all. And ‘Misery’. And ‘Bad Feeling’. And ‘Wedding Day’, about watching your loved one marry someone they don’t like as much they like you. And ‘The Fountain’, which if full of all kinds of doom. Having now met Veronica Falls, I’ve got to say, I was expecting them to be a far more dour bunch.

“[The lyrics] are not really meant to be taken at face value, to be totally honest,” says Roxanne. “They’re tongue-in-cheek. Like how Daniel Johnson and Roky Erickson wrote lyrics that are so far fetched, it is more about the imagery and storytelling. If you take it literally then more fool you.”

At the start of 2011, Veronica Falls reported to us the progress of their debut album. It was without a label, but it was complete. It had been recorded in the shadows of the Yorkshire Moors, in a residential studio that the band couldn’t really leave because they were snowed in.

In January, Marion remembered the experience simply as “intense”, while Roxanne told us that it was “like being at boarding school 20 years late”. James said: “Apart from the actual joys of recording, very little excitement was experienced until visitors from London arrived.” Patrick didn’t say anything.

Eight months later, at Pink Pony, with the release of ‘Veronica Falls’ a week away via the fitting Bella Union label, the drummer says: “You always imagine that when you finish making an album you’re going to want to go out and drink champagne and celebrate, but when we finished ours I wanted to kill myself.”

The rest of the band felt the same, and it wasn’t because the thrill of being in the studio was over; a sudden return to London and normality with a bump. Veronica Falls hated their own record.

Roxanne casually announces that they made their debut album twice over, halfway through discussing the band’s 60s influences and the aesthetics of bands like Young Marble Giants and Beat Happening (“stark and simple, childlike but really sinister”).

“Yeah, after we recorded our album for the second time…” she says and pauses. “Do you know that we did that?”

No.

“Well, yeah, we did. At first we did it in a residential studio and we kind of just went about it in the wrong way. We did it all properly, recording all of our parts separately. It was something that we tried because we thought it might work for us, but it didn’t, so we scrapped it.”

Remixed, three tracks from the band’s original album have made it onto the ‘Veronica Falls’ that you can now buy in shops, but, really, everything about the sessions in Castleford was wrong for a band wanting to capture their live energy on record.

“Part of the thing that was so shit about the one up north was that it was a brand new studio and a very uninspiring place as well,” explains Patrick, “whereas Smokehouse [the studio in Wapping, London, where the band rerecorded ‘Veronica Falls’ in three days], we only spent a little time there but it’s full of old amplifiers and just looked like…”

“…It just had a bit of history,” says James. “The Chairworks [in Castleford] was clinical, like a hospital, and they had a photographer who took photos of the bands and there were pictures of N-Dubz everywhere.”

“There was just a really bad vibe about it,” says Roxanne.

“Literally, you’d walk in and there’d be pictures of N-Dubz in frames everywhere!” says James again.

Roxanne says: “It was the antithesis of what we’re about”, while Patrick compares it to “like recording in Ikea.”

“And we knew it,” continues Roxanne. “As soon as we stepped foot in the door we knew it, but we thought, well, we’ve arranged this so we’ve got to give it a try. And then after that we thought, right, we’ve got to do the complete opposite of that, and then I watched that ‘Definitely Maybe’ documentary about how they made that, and, wow, that record sounds so good, and they ended up putting their amps in the same room, facing each other and playing really loud, so we just did that.”

Certainly something had to be done because the band couldn’t even think about releasing the record they’d first left the studio with. The “joys of recording” that James reported ended up not being too joyous at all.

“It was because it was so extreme,” says Roxanne. “If we hadn’t recorded it in a way that was so alien to us we would have been able to stand by it and say, well, this is us. It’s not that we’re perfectionists or anything, it was just so wrong.”

“So all over Christmas we were sat with this record, which we knew none of us were happy with,” says Patrick, “and we were getting pretty scared that we were going to have to release it. I mean, I couldn’t even listen to it!”

“It’s a testament to our manager, Mark,” says James, “because we spent a lot of money on it and he was instantly like, ‘Fine. Do it again’.” (Just before the band take to the stage at Pianos, Mark (Bowen) tells me how it’s the only time the band have requested a meeting with him. “They said, ‘Can we come in to talk about something?’,” he remembers, “And they came in and said, ‘We don’t like it,’ and I said, ‘Great! Neither do I. You’re an exciting band so go and make an exciting record.’”)

Veronica Falls – Come On Over from Army Of Kids on Vimeo.

‘Veronica Falls’ certainly is an exciting record, relentlessly charging forward and played on guitars with hands that blur with speed, stopping occasionally for a waltz (‘Stephen’) and some whimsy (‘Veronica Falls’). But it’s also a testament to the band that they had the nerve to reject their first attempt.

“Well, you’d go through phases where you’d try to convince yourself it was good,” admits Patrick.

“We had a progress meeting where Mark came up and we all sat and listened to the record so far,” says James. “I remember that was the moment that I was like, fuck, this is really not good, but everyone else was still pretending it was. Inside, deep down, I really didn’t like it, because it was so against what I like, and it freaked me out. I thought that was going to be it.”

“It didn’t have that sleezy sound that it has now,” explains Roxanne, “where everything was driving together.”

James: “It sounded clinical and charmless. [Our producer] would have us working for hours on vocals and one small thing. You want to just record something quickly and capture the moment. For me, it’s not really honest, that kind of producing.”

Roxanne: “In an ideal world you’d write a song and it’d come out the next month, but of course that can never happen.”

The band clearly haven’t forgotten the horrors of Castleford, or the session’s darkest hour when, as Marion remembers, they would “have to walk across courtyard in the snow at three in the morning to listen to some more tracks that we knew we weren’t going to release.” But Roxanne is adamant that it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

“I feel like that was a really important part of making the album,” she says, “because we learned so much from that, and we really finished off the songs, so when I think of the finished album I think it was all essential. We knew exactly how we wanted it after that – they were kinda like really expensive demos.”

After we settle up at Pink Pony, Roxanne – now with the flu accompanying her eye infection – quietly retreats to the band’s van to sleep before their stage time. She still refuses to mope or make a fuss; she just slips off. The rest of Veronica Falls begin shaking hands again, Pianos just as full as Glasslands the night before, the bill made up of more friends in more bands.

Again, they put in a show that flies about the place, tambourines crashing and vocal harmonies on point. And now, thanks to Veronica Falls’s own volition, we can take that home with us.

By Stuart Stubbs

—

Originally published in issue 32 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. October 2011.

Photography by Leon Diaper

COMING IN PEACE

Standing beneath a tree in the churchyard of St James’, Clerkenwell, currently having their pictures taken is Friends. Not our mates from way back when or, dare we even mention it, those shockingly wealthy actors from the TV series, but five hiply dishevelled Brooklyners who make fun, percussion-filled pop music. Suddenly Samantha Urbani, the frontwoman of the troupe, who has green eyelashes at the moment, paired with ripped fishnets and sequinned plimsolls, screams and rushes past our unwitting photographer to their manager Steve, who is holding a freshly pressed copy of the band’s new seven inch ‘I’m His Girl’. Grabbing it from him, she slowly slides out the record and waves it around audaciously, while pretending to lick it. This ought to give you a good idea of the sort of band Friends are.

Ranging from their mid-twenties to early thirties, this outfit of former squat-dwelling misfits are Matt Molnar on synths, percussion, bass and guitar; Nikki Shapiro behind the keys and guitar; drummer Oliver Duncan; Lesley Hann doing a bit of everything, but mostly bass and backing vocals; and the bubbly Urbani, who sings and “dances a few groovy moves”. “I play my body,” she drawls demurely, failing to keep a grin from bursting across her face. “Everybody plays everything except for me.” During the live show, they’re a sensual cacophony. While the rest of the band swap instruments – this happens so frequently that Duncan doesn’t even sit down – Urbani whips around the audience, grinding alongside both those willing and unwilling, the latter frozen to the spot and looking in any direction other than the skimpily clad nymph rubbing against their leg.

Friends are over here to play their debut UK shows, kicking off with two London dates with the similar sounding Caged Animals, who happen to be the band of Urbani’s ex-boyfriend, Vincent Cacchione, who played a small part in getting Friends together. “Matt was in a band with my ex-boyfriend three years ago.” Urbani reveals. “Me and Lesley grew up in south-eastern Connecticut and we went to elementary school together. Lesley and Oliver have been friends for a few years – they met through music in New York and played in a band together. Matt got me a job in a vegan restaurant called Angelica Kitchen two years ago that Nikki worked at and we became friends.”

It wasn’t until a few unfortunate incidents in the summer of 2010, however, that the five of them decided to form a band. “We all ended up at my apartment at a certain point,” starts Urbani, “because Lesley and Oliver had bedbugs in their apartment and my subletters – I’d been in Berlin all summer – had totally demolished my apartment. They threw away shit, stole a bunch of stuff and wrecked a bunch of stuff and changed my locks and I was miserable,” she huffs.

“We had nowhere to stay,” adds Hann. “We were all totally fucked and it was the end of the summer and I don’t know… It was a weird transitory kind of thing.”

Urbani already had a few songs to hand, which she brought to the table and this is how they’ve made music ever since. “I come up with as much of the songs as I can,” she explains. “Lyrics, melodies, vocal structure – then I’ll usually make a demo for the beat and instrumental licks. And I might have an idea for the vibe I want the song to be. Then I’ll bring it to everybody and we’ll work it out.” When she says “vibe” she means the mood it will put you in, but Hann enlightens us from behind her jet-black sunglasses that match her jet-black curls falling around her face by seriously stating, “It’s the attitude of the song, it’s abstract.”

Back then, they were still called Perpetual Crush, which changed after a serious brainstorming session at a band meeting one day, when they finally, and happily, settled on the most difficult name to Google. “Totally,” laughs Urbani.

“Yeah, that was definitely an interesting thing for us,” adds Molnar.

“I think it’s saying ‘Fuck you’ to the Internet generation a little bit,” Urbani continues. “But it’s cool because our…our…,” she looks around shiftily, then leans forward and whispers “legacy”, like it’s a dirty word, “had to spread word of mouth for the first few months before anybody knew what our songs were called. We just played tons of shows in Brooklyn and I handmade these little pins and gave them to people – tried to sell them – but mostly just gave them away and everyone was talking about us. So it was very grass-rootsy coming up, because you couldn’t just Google Friends. That wasn’t a particular intention from the beginning, but it worked out really well for us because that’s how we wanted our…legacy…to develop.”

At the moment they’ve got an album in the works, but nothing set in stone like a title or release date, other than “before SXSW” next year. To whet your whistles, though, they already have a seven inch, ‘Friend Crush’, available with a new single, the aforementioned ‘I’m His Girl’ that was being fondled by Urbani, coming out on October 31st. It’s an RnB-laced track with a marching beat and plenty of triangle that apes Little Dragon, even though none of the band have ever heard of the Gothenburg-based electro-pop quintet. “Are they terrible?” asks an incredibly mellowed Shapiro, who has an air of couldn’t-give-a-toss hanging about him. “No, they’re really good,” Urbani shoots back.

Musically, what does influence them is a love of Michael Jackson – “watch my dance moves; tell me they look like him when he was 12,” Urbani urges us – Krautrock, dub and RnB. In fact, the B-side to ‘I’m His Girl’ is ‘My Boo’, a cover of the ’90s hip-hop trio Ghost Town DJ’s track. “I feel like since I’ve been in this band I’ve started listening to a lot of ‘90s R&B,” says Duncan, “because everyone in the band listens to that a lot and I never did before, so I guess that’s been a big influence.”

Not all of Friends’ inspirations come from songs, though. Urbani tells us that, “personally, I don’t like to think about writing music as being influenced by other music. I used to do visual art and I specifically didn’t look at other art for a long time because I wanted to do my own thing, so at that time I feel like I was really influenced by music. But now I’m writing music, I feel like I’m more influenced by other sensory things and feelings and thoughts.”

And the practice space where all of this comes together? Molnar’s living room. “It’s tiny and it sometimes smells like things that don’t smell that good,” mutters Urbani, wrinkling her nose at the thought as Molnar blames his cat. “… and it’s really fucking hot in the summer because there’re no windows,” Urbani rants on. “Well, we also practiced a few times at Market Hotel,” she says. “It’s like a big, old ex-ex-venue and living place in Bushwick,” and also the squat that each member of the band has lived in at one point or another.

Now, having quit their day jobs, which between them varied from gas station attendant to flyering, waiting tables and working in a world instruments repair shop, with odd jobs taken up here and there – Urbani was a PA on a Beyonce music video last month – they’re focusing solely on the band and touring – something that isn’t always such an easy ride, especially when you forget vital components like Friends do. “Matt left a super important power adaptor in his house in Brooklyn, so we don’t know if we’re going to be able to play the right synth,” Urbani directs at Molnar. “So if it sounds weird, like medieval cheesey…”

“Medieval cheese?” butts in Hann.

“It’s a new thing,” retorts Urbani, with barely any hesitation. “It’s just special for you guys,” she smiles coyly.

Of course, your van going up in flames while you’re driving through Wyoming in the snow can also set you back. “That was really weird,” pronounces Urbani. “Matt lost a sentimental acoustic guitar. We lost a couple of sleeping bags and leather jackets. The left ass-cheek of my favourite shorts!” she exclaims, while sitting in said shorts (the hole has a grey piece of fabric stitched into it), “which is clearly not deterring me from continuing their… legacy.”

“My iPod got torched and melted but it still works,” adds Molnar.

Hann continues: “Some of the gear and a lot of our gear bags that we’re still using right now have burnt-up holes in them and melted plastic that have fused onto them and they smell really bad sometimes, but we didn’t lose anything that we need to technically play a show, which is totally unrealistic. I mean, the van was… Fucking. On. Fire! I thought we were done.”

“Weird things happen to us everyday,” justifies Urbani. “We got turned away from Canada because me and Oliver both have criminal records.” She’s referring to an incident that involved stealing icing for a friend’s birthday cake while she was on a solo road trip when she was 19, but Duncan doesn’t reveal his misdemeanors.

“You played with that kid whose mum was a cat,” Molnar offers up.

“Oh yeah!” remembers Urbani. “There was this little kid who was two or three years old and looked like a little punk. He had a ripped up denim vest on and no inhibitions about talking to everybody, but his mum was one of those people who you see on ‘Ripley’s Believe It Or Not’. Super tattooed with metal, surgical whiskers.”

They may be magnets for the weird and wonderful, but it’s probably because they give weird and wonderful. There’s a reason that they’ve managed to build something based purely on their live show, because as well as funky tracks, their stage presence makes you feel like a voyeur, yet involved, excited and intrigued and a lot like you’re being let in on a secret that no one else knows about. Their growing legacy.

By DK Goldstein

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Originally published in issue 32 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. October 2011.

LUKE JENNER IS DONE WITH BEING COOL

You make an anthem of the noughties; a track spanning English indie discos and Lower East Side loft spaces as skinny white boys and girls hack a very deliberate route to the dancefloor to lose their mind. And that cowbell. Man, that cowbell. Forget disco sirens and klaxon calls: ‘House of Jealous Lovers’ was a catalyst; the beginning of the rise and rise of the all-conquering DFA Records, dance punk and, latterly, the crystallisation of LCD Soundsystem. As DFA’s first ever release, The Rapture were at the forefront and Luke Jenner’s characteristic yelp came to represent the early battle cry of the legions that weren’t there to just passively appreciate, they came to fucking dance.

Almost a decade – and a five-year hiatus – later, The Rapture are still here. Following the euphoria surrounding debut album, ‘Echoes’, their history has been a tumultuous one scarred by band disruption and personal tragedy, but lounging on the sofas at XOYO ahead of a rare London show, the conversation with Luke is a long and astoundingly candid one about suicide, mental illness and reflection. Reformed and re-signed to DFA, recently released new album ‘In the Grace of Your Love’ marks a new, “peaceful” chapter for Luke and the band, and with the recent end to the LCD Soundsystem story, there’s a mantle to be re-taken up. But at 36, and with a wife and young son, Luke’s challenge simply seems to be maintaining the balance that eluded him first time around and threatened to destroy him and the band.

L&Q: So, five years. A lot’s happened. Do you feel energised for making a return?

Luke: “Peaceful is a better word. I used to feel quite energised, but we’ve been doing this as a band for years so we’ve done everything and been everywhere and met everybody, so it’s been like having a sort of a normal life for a while, which is amazing because I’ve never really had like a normal life. Even when I was growing up my family was really broken and detached from the community, so for the first time in my life it’s like being part of a community.

“I spent a solid 10 years of my life trying to prove to people that I was cool, and that I was important, and I did that, but it was good to just take a step back and be around people who didn’t know who I was and be part of this sort of social experiment. When I met my wife I didn’t tell her I was in a band because I wanted her to love me for me, because being on tour last time, I got further and further away from that and was surrounded by people who didn’t know me and have no chance of knowing me. Being a father now, my kid doesn’t care if I’m a rock’n’roll dude and I’ve found that it’s been really important to me to find a bit of balance.

L&Q: It’s been a disruptive few years both musically and personally. You’ve had a lot to deal with…

Luke: Yeah, my mom taking her own life as a result of her illness sort of forced me to get real and this whole Ziggy Stardust child-like fantasy got nuked. There’s more to life than just being on a tour bus and chasing some kind of dream and trying to manipulate the world into thinking you’re a cool guy, or trying to prove that. It’s not something you can easily shake off. It’s heavy.

“I never expected that to happen and even though she’d tried to do it before, I’d never taken it seriously. My grandma took her own life too. She actually took off all her clothes and walked into the ocean in Swansea, escaping from a mental institution, so my family’s been ripped apart by mental illness. In a protective way, I felt like my making music was trying to make sense of growing up with my mum being so ill and having to take care of her and my dad not being there. It’s a lot to process.”

L&Q: It’s obviously a tragic thing to happen at any stage of life, but do you feel that with your mother’s suicide happening at this time in yours you were able to deal with it better than you might have been when you were younger?

Luke: “Absolutely. I think I would have killed myself, not on purpose, but if it had happened the day ‘House of Jealous Lovers’ came out, being on tour for the first time and being surrounded by loads of drink and drugs and hedonism, with the amount of hedonism that was available at that point and my level of maturity at that time, I think it would have killed me. I was already hanging by a thread at that point and it probably would have done me in.”

L&Q: Looking back, that must have been a wild period for you with the surge of dance punk and being a prominent figure in it all. Has your attitude to the way things were back then changed over time?

Luke: “Oh you mean Dunk? (laughs) I’m really grateful for all that time. I mean, to have a record that impacted on the history of music is a dream come true and even though it was kind of ushered aside by the press, that record changed everything for us and made some things ok. I never wanted to be famous, I just wanted to be important and I was really confused after that because I was sort of handed the keys to the kingdom, like I had all these people I really looked up to coming and telling me, ‘Wow, you’ve done it, you’re really important’, and that this record was going to write its name forever.

“I felt a bit lost because I’d achieved what I wanted to do and I think that it became a little half-hearted after that. The second record, we wanted to make a pop album and it was kind of exciting. Justin Timberlake was interesting at the time and it felt like indie could cross into pop and it was all so pregnant, but in hindsight, it just seemed a bit flaccid. I became addicted to the high of changing history and there was just too much pride involved. But when we did make a record that changed history, it wasn’t a conscious thing, it just kind of happened, it was like a Nirvana moment when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came out and changed everything. We weren’t trying to do that, we didn’t expect to do that and I became obsessed with doing it again. They were heady times.”

L&Q: So it was a case of being undone by your own aspirations?

Luke: “Yeah. Also we’d just signed with this huge band management company who had U2 and I think you then get anointed by a certain label; you go on tour with a certain band and it’s like stepping stones. But you get to a point and you want to get off that and we went all the way to the top of the pop world in terms of being anointed. I mean Justin Timberlake used to walk out on stage to ‘House of Jealous Lovers’ for three years in giant arenas and we’d hang out with him after the show and we did a one off with Timbaland and they were going to sign us to their label… so we’re managed by U2, we’re hanging out with Justin Timberlake and Timbaland… you can’t really get more tooled out than that.

“But I didn’t start making music to do that, and that’s when I realised, between ‘Pieces of People’ and this record, with the mental breakdown and my mom dying, I got to see myself in that blinkered trajectory; harder and farther and faster. I was able to see that I achieved what I wanted when ‘House of Jealous Lovers’ came out and then it was after that I could see I was lost and had been lost for years of my life, and my mom died and that cracked me open. Then with my son being born, and coming off tour and not knowing how to be a partner to my wife with my son involved it forced me to take a look at my own mortality and evaluate what I want to do. Hanging out with Justin Timberlake is not important to me.” (Luke bursts out laughing).

L&Q: Away from everything that’s happened to you personally, you seem to have returned at quite an interesting time with LCD Soundsystem ending and you re-signing. It almost feels like a cycle’s just finished…

Luke: “Oh, completely. At least once or twice. I couldn’t have planned it out that way but it feels like full circle, especially with LCD, but I didn’t think James was going to suicide his band. The process of this record was very different, it’s like there’s been two really divergent paths. I guess the lesson we’ve learned musically, and in life, is that you can’t control anything! (laughs). And it wasn’t an immediate thing. I think when my mum died, it accelerated me wanting to control things until I quit the band, and it came down to me wanting to express my ideas because I started the band as a vehicle for my own song writing and then Matty joined the band and he was just a really young kid who grew up in the band and wanted to be the song writer. It just came down to space and I didn’t feel like I had it and I couldn’t control that either and it reached the point where I had to let go. It wasn’t comfortable but it was very necessary.”

L&Q: Despite everything, you’re still here and seem to have earned veteran status. Do you feel a sense of pride in seeing it through to this point?

Luke: The thing I’ve always respected the most in music is resilience and I think we’re a really resilient band and we always have been. We’ve been through a lot and I’ve known Vito since I was nine years old and that’s been a core relationship for the band. When I was going out to write my own music, I was like, ‘I can’t do this without Vito!’ I think there’s knowledge in that you’re not an island and you need other people. That’s true resilience in a way.”

L&Q: Not to dwell on the band issues too much, but was there a motivation to prove a point when you quit the band?

Luke: “I think it was a necessary thing and it was motivating. I think if you stare a relationship dead in the face with the prospect of living without the person then you can’t truly be involved. For me, coming to terms of what it would have been to make a solo record, I think ultimately I didn’t want to do that and I’m glad I didn’t do that. Going the whole way and quitting the band and having the moment of being on my own and thinking, what am I going to do? who am I going to work with? where am I going to go and tour by myself?, I think it was very healthy in the sense that I got to see what the relationship really was as opposed to dealing with it in a fearful way. I didn’t want to lose Matty and I was just like, in an unhealthy way, I was very co-dependent and it was very much, ‘I’ll give you whatever you want if you don’t leave,’ as opposed to, ‘I want to be with you and if you don’t want to be with me I’ll have to accept that.’ When I came back to the band, it was very much the latter and I think my relationship with Vito changed a lot because that had never happened. I literally followed him to San Francisco to San Diego, in tears, because I couldn’t imagine losing him.”

L&Q: So in terms of the band now, do you see this as a return or a continuation?

Luke: “The word that comes to me is depth. It’s not really a retirement or a new start, it’s like there was a floor and it cracked and we sort of made a new floor that was lower. We were standing on something that wasn’t very stable so instead of continuing to build on it, we let it crumble and started again. And I think you do something because you want to do it. To me, albums are like diary entries and the great thing about putting out a record is you can move on from it and totally let go. You capture yourself at that point and it almost allows you take the next step. Now, I just felt like it was time to share what we had.”

By Reef Younis

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Originally published in issue 31 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. September 2011.

Photography by Phil Sharp

WELCOME TO CONDALE: SUMMER CAMP GIVE US A TOUR OF THEIR FICTIONAL TOWN

Retro jumpers, vintage keyboards and old photos all go towards making up the twee and fuzzy dream-pop duo Summer Camp, comprised of music journalist Elizabeth Sankey and singer-songwriter Jeremy Warmsley. So it’s fitting that we should find ourselves in Mary’s Lunch Box on White Hart Lane – a modest greasy spoon that we’ve settled in until their photo shoot.

“Thank you, do you have any milk? Can I do it myself?” Jeremy asks the somewhat baffled waitress as she hands him his tea. He’s worried they’ll put too much in. “Tea and milk – it’s an important thing,” Elizabeth concedes before sliding across the table a copy of the fanzine they’ve made to accompany their album. With the same title, ‘Welcome to Condale’ – a fictitious place they’ve conceptualised for the theme of the record – the front cover image reaches around to reveal two gawky teenagers in prom dress on the back. This isn’t Summer Camp, it’s just another of their many random and dated photos, something that Elizabeth has been collecting for years. You’ll notice that all their artwork follows in this vein.

Jeremy explains that, “having these photos makes you hear the music differently. In a way it makes it appeal more. I don’t know if you’ve seen the blog that we’ve got [wearesummercamp.com] with more photos along these lines, but it’s great because we have people sending in their own photos that we project behind us when we play. So, to me it just gives an atmosphere. I can’t really explain it.”

But Elizabeth doesn’t think it suits the sound. “Well, it does,” she falters, “but it is one of those things where because you hear the music with those images, they fit together. I guess the things that we write about – growing up and being a teenager – do correlate with nostalgia and looking at old photos, but I don’t know if it necessarily…” She trails off and Jeremy tells us that in the early days they used to look at the photos and think “Ok, this is the kind of band we are, so what kind of songs are we writing to fit that framework?”

In a sense, they still stick to a strict structure in the characters they use and the way they approach writing. “You know John Hughes, the film director?” Jeremy asks. “All his films are set in the same fictional small town and we realised that we could do the same thing, in that we could make a place that would act as the framework where different characters from different songs could actually interact. I mean not really, because they don’t exist, but fictionally.”

This is where the fanzine truly shines. It’s like a scrapbook of diary entries, newspaper cuttings, retro ads, photos and notes that expand on the lives of characters in the songs. For example, the second track on the LP, ‘Brian Krakow,’ is a character taken from the nineties teen drama My So-Called Life. “We watch a lot of American sitcoms,” mentions Jeremy as Elizabeth explains the grizzly-riffed and fuzzed-up number that’s vocally led by Jeremy. “We were watching a lot of My So-Called Life right at the time of recording [the album],” she points out. “Brian is one of the main characters and I wouldn’t say he’s dorky, he is intelligent, but quite socially inept and he’s in love with the main character who is played by Clare Danes – who was 13 even though in it she’s 15 and she has her first kiss ever with Jared Leto – mind-blowing.” Elizabeth rattles this off excitably. You can tell it’s a major passion for her. “Anyway, Brian never gets the girl because the series gets cancelled before they got together, so we thought we’d make him a super-hot, super-cool guitarist in a band, where he could live out his fantasies and have all of the girls in love with him. We fall in love with characters and people and I personally love writing about bad parties and love going wrong, falling in love – the intense stuff that you feel.”

In ‘Condale’ Brian is in a hot new band called Alleycats and he’s got a serious attitude problem. In their first interview – and remember this is still fiction – he storms out and returns “swigging from a bottle of Jack. He removed the tape from [the interviewer’s] Dictaphone and tried to eat it while the others restrained him.” Louis, who’s quite the lothario in track six (‘Nobody Knows You’ – a dark tale of nobody being there for you when you’re down and out) is also featured in a heated and apologetic lovers exchange through torn up letters. But the third song, ‘I Want You’, tops that with its epic drums and creepy lyrics: If I could, I’d kiss your lips so hard your entire face would bruise, write your name in blood on every wall, it would make the evening news, I’d chain our feet together so that you could never leave, I’d make you love me so much you’d have to ask permission to breathe. It’s crooned dramatically by Elizabeth and emphasised by Cathy’s obsessive diary entry about Brian in the zine.

There’s such a wonderful continuity to it all that they’ve been honing since they covered ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ by The Flamingos back in 2009, a track that Elizabeth put on a mixtape for Jeremy. Now they’ve got the ‘Young’ EP under their belts and a debut album on the way that Jeremy informs us they’ve financed through ‘pledges’. “Basically, people can pre-order our album by ‘pledging’,” he says, “by paying, and we’ve used that money to make the album. Or they can pledge for brownies [made by Elizabeth] or for a CD of demos, a t-shirt. We’ve even gone and played in people’s living rooms or in their gardens. We’ve done a couple of those now and they’re two of the best gigs we’ve ever done because you know that people care and are really excited to have you.”

There’s a long list of things to pledge for, but among them are production consultations with Jeremy (£50), a signed CD with your name in the credits (£30, but unsurprisingly all have gone), a three-song acoustic set over Skype (£50) or an audio book recording of your choice by Elizabeth (£300-£650), which happens to be another of her jobs.

“Sometimes I’ll do voice-overs,” she clarifies. “When we were doing the album, I did a Disney series called Lucky Fred. I also had a long run of doing hair products that prevent dandruff. I won’t say which one, but I am the voice of dandruff,” she smiles as Jeremy informs us he hasn’t had a day job since he got signed. “But there is this underlying terror that it is all going to end tomorrow.”

Of course it can’t all end tomorrow, the album isn’t released until October 31, on Moshi Moshi/Apricot Recording, and they’ve been working for too long and hard for it to bomb, plus the charming and unique pocket of time it resides in that doesn’t quite fit the synthy ’80s, but perhaps a Bermuda Triangle close to it that holds Goldfrapp (especially ‘Done Forever’) and Allo Darlin’, is a must-hear.

The two have been penning material for this record since they formed. “We write a lot,” emphasises Jeremy. “We’d written more than sixty songs for the album and we were still writing last week. You don’t really go, ‘I’m going to write the album now’. You just write constantly and then you pick the songs that are the best.” The prime cuts were then handed to Pulp bassist Steve Mackey who was working on production, which Jeremy gushes about.

“It really showed us what kind of band we could be,” he enthuses. “Some producers just chuck everything out and start from scratch. Other producers take what you’ve got and leave it or just make it sound a bit better. But Steve took what we had and really maximised the potential of all of it. Every sound has got the most detail and warmth and punch that you could possibly get out of it.”

“He gave us loads of advice about life stuff, artwork and things like that,” adds Elizabeth. “He was a really interesting and clever man.”

Comparing the EP recordings to the LP, their warm and hazy sound has definitely become a little more polished, although it’s difficult to tell through the lo-fi fog. What kind of gear do they use to get that sound in the first place? “We use ’80s synths and ’80s drum-machine sounds,” answers Jeremy, taken aback. “It’s funny you ask that because I care very deeply about it, but I generally assume the vast majority of people don’t really care. Sometimes I tweet that I’ve got a new keyboard, and I don’t get much response, but if I tweet that I’ve just had a nice cup of Earl Grey, I’ll get like 20-30 tweets back arguing about milk.

“But gear isn’t really important. What is important is that there is so much free software that anyone can make something that sounds good quite easily. I like using hardware synths because it forces you to actually change the settings by hand, whereas on a computer you need to change one thing at a time with a mouse, and having the real thing is more tactile and more fun.”

“I think Jeremy has a really good ear for harmonies and melodies,” says Elizabeth, particularly in the car, she reveals, where he’ll always harmonise with you if you’re singing to a song. “And he’s always got a million ideas,” she continues. “I think that’s what makes the difference. The gear he uses is pretty normal really.”

(Nothing in their studio costs more than £600.)

“It’s just stuff that anyone’s got,” states Jeremy. “It’s the songs that are important. Elizabeth is a really amazing songwriter, which I think came to her as quite a surprise as she had never written songs before the band.”

“I had,” counters Elizabeth in a cheeky and matter-of-fact way. “When I was 12 I wrote an amazing song called ‘Hip Replacement’, which was all about how celebrities live in a fake world and inside they’re all decrepit and old – it was pretty deep. Maybe I’ll dig it out.”

Summer Camp – Ghost Train (viral) from Paddy Power on Vimeo.

When Elizabeth was younger she had wanted to be an actress, so she enrolled in drama lessons. “I’d always loved music and wanted to be a part of it, but I thought it was something untouchable and I didn’t think I had any musical ability whatsoever.”

After leaving drama school she moved back to her parents’ house to try and make it as an actress. “I had this mentality of hitting the big time. I got an agent and it was great, but I didn’t get any jobs, so my agent dropped me and then I was just living at home. So I got this job in a burger restaurant two days a week and there would be moments when people would say, ‘How old are you?’ and I’d say 24, and they’d say, ‘No way, I thought you were 17’ and I’d be like, ‘Ha you thought I was 17! I’m 24! Hang on…that means I’m 24 and this is what I’m doing with my life’. That was for six months. It was tough.

“But when we began to play live, it was very nerve-wracking because I didn’t know what was going to happen or if I was even going to be able to do it,” she continues. “It took quite a long time for me to get used to that. So I think we weren’t that good live for a few months.”

“Yeah, well, I think we’ve learnt a lot now,” Jeremy interjects. “We’ve been a band for four times longer than we had at that point. We’ve figured out how to, you know, get your shit together.”

By DK Goldstein

—

Originally published in issue 31 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. September 2011.

Photography by Cochi Esse

THE VERY REAL ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITIONS OF HYPOCHONDRIAC MARIA LINDEN

Swedish native Maria Lindén, a self confessed hypochondriac, is convinced she has acquired a fatal illness, so, as standard practice, she starts to Google her symptoms. This takes her to an on-line forum to discuss her illness with other people, presumably consisting of the ill and the not so. Amongst the ‘not so’ is her soon-to-be musical collaborator Fredrick Balck.

Fredrick too was a hypochondriac and when aliases were dropped and he and Maria began to openly speak to one another, they soon realised not only did they share mutual friends, but also music tastes. I Break Horses wasn’t so much born (Maria had been working on things for a while) but was now complete. In a previous interview with The Sun, Maria has said, “I hardly panic nowadays. Except for the swine flu alerts last year.” She also joked that her and Fredrick “Have competitions on our way to rehearsal; who can hold their breath the longest when somebody sneezes on the subway. Whoever gives up first is forced to use a public bathroom.”

While it may sound like a scene from a Wes Anderson movie, it’s most real and the results have given us ‘Hearts’, an album that plunges into the world of blurred, hazy and multi-layered electronics, guitars and atmospheres, but whatever you do, just don’t call it shoegaze.

Maria speaks excellent, slightly broken, very sweet English, almost as what I imagine speaking to Nico would have been like. It’s difficult not to become engulfed by her when conversing. As we begin to chat, she has put her dinner in the oven to coincide with the end of the interview. “Let me know when it starts to smell good and I’ll go,” I let her know. “I’m not a very good cook, so I just do easy stuff,” she confesses, “… so it pretty much smells like shit, actually.”

“It’s some sort of fish shit I’m doing today,” she continues, “but it’s food.”

Mmmm, fish shit. Maria is at home, which is Stockholm, Sweden.

“It’s a pretty stressful city,” she says. “It’s very beautiful because there is a lot of old buildings and a lot of water in the city centre, but stressful, and people are pretty cold.” She then goes on to explain how the parks have begun to “put in several one-person benches so that you don’t have to sit next to anybody. I don’t think I’ve seen that anywhere else in the world and the concept seems to be growing. It’s everywhere!

“It is beautiful,” she insists. “You should all come here and visit this cold, cold town!”

Still, I imagine the cold climate has the locals turning to each other for warmth? I mean, the music community in Stockholm is quite supportive, isn’t it?

“Ermm…not necessarily,” she laughs. “It’s more like everyone keeps to themselves, but I mean, with this project I haven’t played any shows yet. So it’s a bit difficult for me to say yet.

“Since I play all the instruments except the drums, I won’t be able to do that live,” Maria explains. “It takes a while to find the right people to play with and it’s not straightforward to get the sound live. I wanted to get the best possible people to play live with. I could have gone out there with a backing track and played the whole thing myself but I want to create something different live”

So, with no live shows under her belt and the album dealing almost exclusively in textures, layers and essentially elements that would be very difficult to recreate live, how are live rehearsals going?

“We’re getting there. I want people to experience the songs in a new way. It’s been very interesting to give the songs a new life because it will be a completely different energy bringing in new people and playing together as a band. Also, I’m the kind of person who wants to go back and change forever. I probably have ten different versions of each song, so I’m looking forward to changing things and making things differ from the album.”

In regards to the album’s tightrope walk between the contrasting emotions, Maria says: “I’ve always liked to mix something dark with beauty, and the record really is a mix between the two, although I was probably in a light kind of mood when writing the songs and realised the fragmented darkness afterwards.

“It was an enjoyable process though, recording the album, apart from some moments where I simply didn’t have the technical skills to do what I wanted. But enjoyable; the writing process is always enjoyable, but the finalising and mixing, when you have a specific sound in your head but you don’t have the technical skills to achieve it – that can be pretty difficult”.

For such a hard fought and personal project, Maria doesn’t actually write the lyrics for I Break Horses. That’s Fredrick’s job.

“People find it pretty strange that we do it in this way,” says Maria, “that I write the music and he writes most of the lyrics, but actually it works perfectly. He’s been able to say what I wanted to say in less words that I could ever write, because what I would need ten sentences for, he can do in one.”

When placed in context to the album, it makes sense. Maria’s vocals often feel otherworldly, almost detached from the project, as though they are their own entity, and by working in this unorthodox way, it has clearly created this idiosyncratic sense of atmosphere.

The record has been a long process for Maria; it took three years to complete. “Not because I was working on it all that time,” she hastens to add, “just that I was also working full-time too, so it was just a long process.”

Now comes a question that, if put to someone less affable than Maria, with less of a sense of humour, would be rather awkward. Have you been pleased with how ‘Hearts’ has been received? Have people ‘got it’? “Not Loud And Quiet!” she laughs. And we deserved that – in our August issue the album received a 4/10 review rating.

“I mean it’s my debut album,” she continues, “of course I get pretty sad when I feel like people didn’t get the point, and obviously because I’ve been locked up for so long on this record and worked so hard on it. But I feel pretty overwhelmed by the great response that’s been out there as well. I’m a very humble kind of person, so I’m just thrilled that the response has been really great. So it’s been both, I mean it’s my first record and I’m a human being, so I can’t be just like, ‘fuck it, I don’t care’. Maybe I will be more like that on the second album!”

Likewise, the record has drawn a lot of comparisons to specific bands and movements, primarily the shoegaze genre, and these are comparisons that Maria is less happy to court. “For example, many people have compared me to M83 and I haven’t listened to them at all actually,” she says, “so it’s difficult to say really. I mean, shoegaze is just one small fragment, but I didn’t create this record with the intention to make shoegaze music. It’s not shoegaze. I can’t understand this need for people to label music, but people seem to need to. I can understand the comparison, but it’s a mere fragment and I wouldn’t call this shoegaze music.”

In response to this lazy branding she says: “Just listen to the fucking music! Why do you need to label it? I think that’s just bad journalism. But I just want people to listen to the record and know that this is not shoegaze music.”

The fish shit is done, Maria needs to go, and she leaves our interview as charmingly as she entered it, simply deadpanning: “I will not enjoy my dinner.”

By Daniel Dylan Wray

—

Originally published in issue 31 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. September 2011.

Photography by Gabriel Green

RETURN OF THE HEARTBREAKER: RYAN ADAMS ON GOING SOLO AGAIN

The first time I saw Ryan Adams was in January 2004. He was touring his albums ‘Rock’N’Roll’ and ‘Love Is Hell’. He had died his hair a bright orange, looked suitably dishevelled yet exuded a ramshackle cool. Within minutes of being on stage he had knocked a full beer over. A roadie ran out and mopped it up as Adams staggered and seethed his way through ‘So Alive’. He was inebriated. I remember shouts to people stood side of stage for vodka, even proclaiming at one point, “No fucking Red-Bull this time!” As he sang ‘Sylvia Plath’ he climbed speaker stacks and hung within tangible distance, crooning and smoking hellishly.

Then he begins the majestic ‘The Shadowlands’. About half way through he vanishes from the stage and a thud echoes through the microphone like a gunshot. He has fallen off the stage and into the six-foot-plus opera pit below, severely breaking his wrist in the process. He’s helped up and back on stage and rushed off the back. The band – bemused – finish the song and say goodnight. I, like everyone else, was bewildered as I left the building, but I was also transfixed.

Fast forward seven years and I saw Ryan two months ago, solo, slightly less eventful –  sober, drinking tea and quietly strumming an acoustic guitar as he sweetly sang. I was still transfixed. Ryan Adams has been an artist that has managed to succeed at either end of the spectrum.

If all is to be believed, Adams has been a magnet for trouble for most of his life.  Supposedly excluded from high school for wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a melting ice cube that read Christianity is Stupid…Give Up. His first proper band, Whiskeytown, collapsed under a sea of booze-fuelled fall-outs. He has had a tumultuous relationship with the press, even leading to a disgruntled Adams leaving an angry voicemail on Chicago Sun-Times journalist Jim DeRogatis’ machine after a scathing review, which still to this day is available to the public. And he’s had many public feuds with Paul Westerberg, Jack White, and Jeff Tweedy, as well as years of drink and drug problems that had him once tell the New York Times “I snorted heroin a lot – with coke. I did speedballs every day for years. And took pills. And then drank. And I don’t mean a little bit. I always outdid everybody… It’s a miracle I did not die.”

However, Adams, once a poster boy who was labelled ‘The Kurt Cobain of Alt-Country’, an artist that everybody once loved to love, soon became an artist everybody loved to hate. A good looking man in his twenties, drenched in critical acclaim, dating movie stars (see Winona Ryder, Parker Posey), gaining celebrity fans and friends, it doesn’t take a lot to work out why some people may be resentful, bitter or plain jealous towards him. But this was coupled with some behaviour and actions people railed against, including a much discussed GAP advert he took part in. Adams has often been seemingly and simultaneously wild, angry and reactionary, yet sweet, gracious and endearing. Which means accounts and re-tellings of his past can often be as misleading and erratic as his supposed behaviour in the first place.

He has always been – shall we say – emotionally earnest in his songs: he doesn’t so much wear his heart on his sleeve as slice a part off and stick it in the album inlay for you. This has lead to equally revealing and open interviews in the past, all told with varying states of mood and detail, meaning that researching an interview for him is a little like trying to extract the real Ryan Adams from a series of impostors, especially as Adams, now clean and sober from drink, drugs and even cigarettes, is not the man he once was, by a long shot. He told Mojo in 2009 that, “I was an asshole. A total fucking prick. I fucking hated myself.” He has since married pop singer/actress Mandy Moore, moved to L.A and, as many people do at the age of 36, settled down. This has resulted in a calmer, humbler and generally quieter Ryan Adams, who has no interest in being the man of old, which means that, as I soon find, trying to get him to affirm anything resembling a remotely definitive statement can be tricky. He is clearly a man who has played the press game long enough and is cautious in his approach, something that is made all the more apparent when we compare how he charmingly jokes on our photo shoot (his greeting: “Excuse the right side of my face. I’ve slept on it for years so now I look like an old fish, washed up on a sea of despair… or an old Rick Moranis”), only to clam up somewhat once the Dictaphone is rolling.

Adams declared a sort of retirement in 2009, leaving his then band The Cardinals and stating, “maybe we will play again sometime and maybe I will work my way back into some kind of music situation…but this is the time for me to step back now, to reel it in and I wish everyone peace and happiness.” This announcement was coupled with the fact that he had contracted Meniere’s disease, an inner-ear disease (a very disturbing illness, presenting patients with hearing loss, pressure in the ear, tinnitus, severe imbalance and vertigo). He wrote two books in the process, Infinity Blues and Hello Sunshine, and had an art exhibition of his paintings, but as many suspected he couldn’t remain away from his guitar.

While he has messed around with the metal genre and released hundreds of tracks on-line through his website, in 2010 he released his “first fully-realised sci-fi metal concept album”, ‘Orion’, followed by a Cardinals double LP entitled ‘III/IV’ recorded during 2006.

‘Ashes & Fire’ is Adams latest album, a record that shares the intimacies and delicacies of ‘Heartbreaker’ or ‘29’ with a polished and classic production more akin to ‘Jacksonville City Nights’, marking his thirteenth studio album in eleven years (probably fiftieth if you include the bundles of unreleased albums). Yet for the first time in his solo career, he is free from a record label. His previous label Lost Highway has been a source of constant pain and frustration for Adams. They famously rejected his career zenith and masterpiece ‘Love Is Hell’ and forced him to turn in something new, so, in some coke-fuelled sessions he and some friends bashed out ‘Rock N Roll’, a fun, throwaway guitar romp recorded in mere days that played homage to Adams’ musical heritage – he called the album “A joke. A record I had to make in order to release ‘Love Is Hell’.”

This latest record sees him self-releasing through his own label PAX-AM, so how is that working out for him?

“It’s really good,” he says, “because my departure from Lost Highway was not an easy one, but I left and there was nothing that they could say about it anymore; I just went back and I was able to get back a bunch of my unreleased records. I didn’t have any fun working with that company, they rejected more albums than they put out.

“It’s great to be running my own label and working with major label distribution (Columbia) who are in the business of making records and actually get the music I am making and want to put it out. If my former label didn’t want to release my records they should have been a gentleman and released me from my contract so I could have worked with people that did.”

So, with Adams owning his own unreleased material and free from Lost Highway, will this infamous box-set of unreleased albums now see the light of day?

“I think when people talked about this box-set in the past, I don’t think anybody understands that the box-set wasn’t my idea. It was basically a way for them [Lost Highway] to try and find a way to not pay me and put out those records and make them Universal Records property. Once they were released in that box-set it would have devalued each record for what it was originally intended to be. Plus, they would have owned the copyright for the box-set, so I would have never gotten paid for each individual album. They need to be properly released, as they should have been – with the artwork, the mastering and giving them the attention to detail they deserve – so, I wouldn’t put them in a box, I would release them as archive records with dates, so people know this album would have come out between this and this.”

With regards to his ear disease, Adams tells me, “I’ve basically been learning to deal with it, and I’ve got it down to a science now.” Crippling as it once was, though, it’s not why ‘Ashes & Fire’ sees him return to his solo acoustic setup.

“I can still play loud when I want, in my own time,” he says, “I just wasn’t having any fun in The Cardinals anymore. I needed some time off because I had been working non-stop since the symptoms started in probably about 2006.” [In actual fact it was 2005 – Adams cancelled a string of UK and European dates, including a John Peel Stage headline slot at Glastonbury Festival. His replacement was the infamous cocaine-riddled John Peel-bashing Bright Eyes show].

“Well, people never believed that I was really suffering from [Meniere's disease],” he says, “which was really sad. I think they thought it was an excuse because I was taking drugs or something, which wasn’t true – I really, really struggled. My hearing has actually started to improve since I’ve actually started to deal with this disease, because I don’t have this roaring sound in my left ear anymore. But it was very real and I really went through it. It’s very hard to explain to people what it is – I guess you don’t know what it is unless you look it up – but it’s a very real thing. It makes people very very sick.”

Not a reaction to his Meniere’s disease then, but Adam’s first solo record since 2005’s ‘29’ has seen him found solace in working alone once again. “It’s really wonderful, actually,” he says. “What I’m doing right now is just writing on my own and going and playing on my own, that’s kind of how I wanna be. I think that’s enough for me.

“All in all, when I go back to pick songs that I want to do for a show, I find more than I can play in one night, so that’s a really positive thing. I’m finding more good than I am bad. It’s been interesting going back to songs that may have been too difficult to play with the band or maybe the dynamic wasn’t right – I really enjoy it.”

In his original blog post declaring his step back from music in 2009, Adams expressed a disdain and disillusionment with the music industry as a whole. I query if this was one of his reasons for having a rest. Again, it’s a ‘no’.

“Not really,” he says. “I mean, it would be very wrong for anybody to misunderstand or mischaracterise who I am based on blanket statements. I’m a human being; this is my job; there is a lot of variables, it’s not cut and dry, you know?”

How about your forays into the literature and art world – have they given you any further thoughts on the music industry, as a comparison?

“I don’t really think about the music industry – it doesn’t concern me. I don’t think about it as a whole. What would I want to be thinking about that for? I don’t have an opinion on it, I just know what my experiences on it are.” Of which it seems Ryan is a little hesitant to share. So, I ask him specifically about his relationship with the press, which has been up and down, to put it mildly. A long stony silence greets the question. “Erm…” A little more silence. “Yeah, again I don’t really think about it. I kind of let all this go. I don’t really have an opinion on what it’s like to talk about my records. You’re making kind of generalisations, so I don’t know what specifically you are talking about.”

At this point, Ryan is being somewhat evasive – a country mile from the man who boyishly asked us (as Brits) to explain what a ‘wanker’ was earlier. It seems he really is attempting to shed his past. “I just live my life moment to moment, day by day and maybe [in the past] I could have been talking about not wanting to talk about my personal life or whatever,” he says.

“I think there has been this exaggerated idea of who I was,” he continues. “I mean, everybody has a night or two or three in their twenties during rock’n’roll that are a little extreme, and I certainly had my times. But all the shows that went off great and the songs that sounded great, all the years of touring that were cool are never really mentioned. It’s just people talk about the one or two times they think that somebody is fucked up or wasted or whatever. But I don’t really hear any evidence of this stuff in my work. If somebody else does they can tell me what they hear, but I don’t think a drunken person writes the records I write.”

Adams’ prolificacy over the years is certainly testament to this argument; it would indeed be difficult for a severe drunk to write at such pace, quality and frequency. But I want to know if revisiting songs with drug-induced lyrics is an odd thing to do now he is so far away from this? Again, a silence rings out. “Erm… It would depend on what song you mean, and what do you mean by drug-induced lyrics?”

Well, you have publicly spoken about the dark time surrounding such records as ‘Love Is Hell’.

“Well, I think from your question you would have to assume I was in a dark place when I wrote the song.”

I point out that I am questioning based on previous (and numerous) quotes about this, such as one in Q magazine from 2003 that went, “I wanted to make a druggy suicide record; a record that really sounded like cracking up”, and in 2004 from UNCUT, “I was in a deep depression, and I wasn’t dealing with it. That was a really interesting place to be, and that’s where the record came from.”

Adams replies: “Yeah, absolutely. I’m answering you for the benefit of the people who read the article, not necessarily addressing you. I’m trying to make it more so people can understand what it really means. I think it’s important to state that there was no time in my life that I was ever sitting in some dark room, drooling from the side of my mouth in a chair, wasted on drugs for long amounts of time, only broken up by smoking a cigarette or writing a song or something.

“I think when talking about [things I’ve said] in the past, maybe my social skills were less adept. I think I didn’t realise that by describing me being in a dark place I was… I think what I meant to say was, ‘When I was writing, I wanted to express more things about sadness, grief or loss than I did about joy’. Maybe I was honing in on those reflections in my life. Many people do go through their lives completely miserable – I am not living that life. I have chosen to write about the darker sides of life sometimes and unrequited feelings that some people can have, as I seem to have been drawn to it in some weird way. I opened up about it, and it seemed special and important for me to do that.

“For the sake of not over-romanticising any more than I ever accidentally or maybe even purposely did, that just wasn’t my life. While I have certainly seen those sides of life and I have stepped through them, no person exists solely in that.”

I’m beginning to understand why Adams once said that although he felt his music was very self-explanatory, he felt he spent ninety per cent of his time explaining it to people. Considering it a simple question with an expected answer, I ask if he still feels the same. Another long silence hangs, adding an ever-increasing edge to proceedings. “No. I don’t feel any way about it. This is what I do and there are certain parts of it that have to be done.”

It seems that Ryan is interested in simply and solely immersing himself in his current climate and current songs, moving on from his past, which is hardly surprising considering the several years of sobriety. When I asked him how true that may or may not be though, the longest silence yet slowly suspends. “No. I don’t wanna agree or disagree with any statements like that. I understand what you’re asking and I’m not trying to be difficult, I just don’t want to paint myself in any kind of ‘place’. I’m just being me, I don’t really consider these things; I just sort of do what I do”

In an attempt to change the subject, I finally broach the prospect of the rumoured Whiskeytown reunion.

“Whiskeytown will never get back together, ever. Never, ever. If it was going to happen it would have been last year, I discussed it with Caitlin and Skillet and neither was really interested in doing it. It makes sense for me to let it go, besides it would just be for money – they don’t care about those songs anymore than I do. We barley played them when we were together. So no, it will never happen and I’m quite happy about it.”

And then, just as time is called and we begin to part ways, Ryan professes to the benefits of ginger tea to me as he sweetly offers some advice for my cold and how to “feel better”. It’s as if the affable, unguarded Adams of an hour ago is back; the same Adams that roared with laughter as he told us how Kim Gordon thought the Metallica/Lou Reed album was “a miserable idea” and asked the waiting staff at Soho House “does my hair look rubbish?”.

Ryan’s defensive mood once in interview mode today seems to be not so much out of offence he takes to anything, or any anger or hostility he is holding on to; he frankly just seems tired of the spotlight and sick of people’s misconceptions, views and opinions on him, so by giving as little in terms of definitive and finalising statements, he can avoid this reoccurring. While he gives the impression of somebody behaving in an aloof and nonchalant manner, when it comes to certain subjects, I can’t help but feel he does really care what people think about him – not necessarily in a vain or narcissistic way, but as an extension of his natural gravitation towards sensitivity and emotion. Perhaps years spent in the public eye with multiple and notably outlandish interviews has left the undeniably matured Adams having to clean up his own mess somewhat and spend more time clarifying than giving further or new found insight.

Understandably – due to his wife’s famous stature – having paparazzi camera’s thrust in your face when you try and get groceries or go for a walk has perhaps resulted in a need to keep as much of himself to himself. And even if he won’t affirm such a thing today, his new record seems to find him in a content, stable and loving place, which is enriching to hear on both a sonic and personal level.

Ryan Adams has moved at leopard-like speed throughout his career and been almost chameleon-like in his ability to change musically, lyrically and – ultimately – personally. So him winding down is both expected and well advised. Second-guessing him would be, and has proven to be, impossible, which is what makes him such a relentlessly fascinating and intoxicating artist. He’s undeniably a musician that has frustrated as many people as he has mesmerised over the years, but like a drug himself, we keep coming back for more.

By Daniel Dylan Wray

—

Originally published in issue 31 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. September 2011.

Photography by Owen Richards

THE DANISH POST-HARDCORE BAND THAT’S GOT EVERYONE TALKING… EXCEPT FOR THE BAND THEMSELVES

The kids are alright, if a bit knackered. In the dressing room of a Shoreditch pub, the quartet that has been hailed as heirs to the legendary hardcore rapid deployment force that was Refused sit around, popping open bottles of import lager and lighting cigarettes. From reading other, mainly monosyllabic interviews, I’ve gathered that the band aren’t really the sort to sit back and open up about their hopes and fears, but the opportunity to face the group who, according to The Quietus, had produced “one of the best punk rock albums in recent years” was too good to pass up.

So down I sit, staring into the heartbreakingly sleepy faces of Johan, Dan and Jakob, the guitarist, drummer and bassist of Danish buzz magnet Iceage, a few days before their debut, ‘New Brigade’, is due to launch in the UK. The record is a fiery 24 minutes long and features the kind of hypnotic, fat-free post-punk Joy Division played when they were still called Warsaw and the contemptuous, no-hope-no-care wave noise that was made almost simultaneously in NYC squats by people like James Chance & The Contortions. It’s great, is what I’m trying to say, and while parts of the internet and industry excitement revolves around the fact that none of the band members are over 20, a lot of it is also about how incredibly well (in)formed their sound is. This, combined with their bruise-inducing live shows and martial aesthetics should make for engaging interviews, but you have to remember that these boys a) don’t speak English as their first language, and b) are still kids, and thus resent few things more than having to explain anything to anyone more than two years older than themselves.

With this in mind, I try breaking the ice by asking them what they thought of America (they have come back from a two-month jaunt over there just this afternoon).

Johan: “Some places are nice, some places are not so nice. Austin is nice.”

Jakob: “The mountains and the deserts and the forests are beautiful.”

Cool. Your US tour montage video for ‘You’re Blessed’ looks pretty, erm, boisterous. Do you have any “crazy” tour stories to share?

Dan: “One of our amps caught fire.”

Johan: “But we weren’t actually using it at the time so it wasn’t too bad.”

You must have seen and talked to tons of people over there. Are you tired of giving interviews now?

Johan: “Yeah, I hate everything about it. People just ask the same questions over and over.”

Like what?

Johan: “Like, ‘So what did you make of America?’”

Burn. It quickly becomes clear that the three of them (Elias, the singer, is off somewhere else) are not big fans of the British way of making conversation. The rings under their eyes visible in pretty much all press shots are even more prominent up close, and their mumbled, often elliptical answers, delivered in Scandinavian High-School English (which admittedly is far better than most Brits’ Danish) adds to the impression of a band that couldn’t give a shit about interviews. Considering they seem to have grown up partly in lefty-run Copenhagen youth clubs, partly on message boards dedicated to black and death metal, but without monthly printed music magazines, this makes perfect sense.

We chat a bit about the August riots in the UK (Johan: “I think sometimes it can be fun destroying things. And obviously if you have a good reason, that’s OK, too.”) and how the devastating throb of ‘White Runes’ would have made a great soundtrack to the Sky News video footage. But when asked about their influences Iceage are not as forthcoming.

“We didn’t have any particular bands in mind when we wrote our songs”, says Jakob, while the others shrug or light another cigarette.

By now, Elias has joined us, looking unfeasibly cool considering how dishevelled he appears and sounds. I decide this is as good a time as any to ask them about their perceived fascination with fascism.

In another interview, you mentioned the German right-wing pagan metal band Absurd’s ‘Facta Loquuntur’ as one of your favourite albums…

Elias: “Yeah, we got a lot of shit for that. I don’t know. We just really like that album.”

Johan: “Ok, I would now like to say now: I hate that band. No, seriously, it’s just that we have enough intelligence to laugh at ridiculous things, like National Socialism, which I think is a ridiculous theory. It’s not about the politics at all.”

At the time, I take their answer at face value (Fucked Up’s Damien Abraham got into similar trouble when expressing a liking for some of [British white power band] Skrewdriver’s music), but it’s only later that I come across a blog post drawing attention to Johan’s Death in June tattoo, another band with murky links to Neonazi ideas. I’m no longer sure that Johan’s initial answer – “I know that these people are idiots, but I can’t help the fact that they make music I like” – will be enough to dispel rumours that Iceage are riding the hype wave on a board made of race hate.

It won’t do their intrigue any harm, however – after our brief conversation, I’m still left scratching my head as to who these guys are and what they want. They know enough about obscure punk rock to use aural characteristics of the genre to indie-cred-baiting effect, and they are well-read enough (Elias has just finished the filth classic The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille and is currently getting into Joseph Conrad’s jungle nightmare Heart of Darkness) to create a Ballardian dystopia very much of our time. They are also, despite the jetlag and the dullness of my questions, very polite boys. I finish by asking them what it feels like to be professional musicians. Johan shoots back: “We’re not professionals. In the sense of where we make a living out of our music? No. We make a bit of money, but nowhere near enough to live off.”

Would you like to get to that stage at some point?

(Everyone) “Nah.”

What do you want to do?

Jakob: “Don’t know.”

Johan: “Go back to school.”

Dan: “Sleep.”

Told you they were knackered.

By Matthias Scherer

—

Originally published in issue 31 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. September 2011.

Photography by Lee Goldup

THE LIGHT AND DARK TIMES OF BENJAMIN JOHN POWER

Ten minutes into an interview with Benjamin John Power, we broach a subject already dogging Blanck Mass’ embryonic stages. As one half of the circuit-splitting Fuck Buttons, the comparisons between the two are starting to come mindlessly thick and fast. Derived more from lazy association, as opposed to contrast and context, it’s an aspect Ben is prepared for, if not overly exasperated by. Yet.

“I like the way you noticed that,” he says. “I haven’t done too much press yet for this so I’m still… fresh. The main difference between Fuck Buttons and Blanck Mass – apart from having another mind to bounce ideas off that might morph into something you never imagined before – with Blanck Mass, it’s much more direct and it was quite a secluded recording and writing process. I think that obviously allows it to become more personal.”

The result of an intensive writing and recording process that regularly saw Ben delve into 12-hour sessions. His self-titled debut is one of a black, bleak beauty. Enthralled with the defining work of Ennio Morricone and taking inspiration from nature, science and discovery, ‘Blanck Mass’, as Ben admits, isn’t an album to make a snap judgement on. It requires time, space and – a rare commodity in the face of current consumption – patience.

“It was such an intensive process, writing this record. I’d been spending 14 hours a day in the old place I was living in and I went at it quite hard. By no means was it me getting something out my system, but I did want to finish it in a certain time frame.

“The flat I was in before was not the friendliest of environments – there was no natural light and it felt quite sterile, like walking into a hospital. It was like a live/work unit with all this strip lighting that gave you a headache and I don’t think someone on the other side can empathise with that if they’ve got a few days to review or listen to a record. There are intricacies there that you won’t hear with a quick blast and I think it’s an album that needs to be listened to through headphones in the right environment.”

The importance of the right surroundings and environments play a prominent part in the Blanck Mass makeup. These aren’t songs chopped and hacked to fit; they’re scores and compositions created to evoke and elicit; inspire and introspect; delve deeper than your archetypal verse-chorus-verse. With the absence of lyrics, and a depth of theme and inspiration for the album, there’s a reliance on the instrumental journeys Ben creates to entice and hold your attention.

“I actually got asked an interesting question the other day, whether I thought the Blanck Mass album was a dark album or a light album and I thought about it and realised that I kind of see both of those things as not being separate from each other. Nature and science are really big things for me, and they go hand-in-hand, but I also think there’s loneliness in greater understanding and a happiness that can be found in isolation.

“I’m a huge fan of Ennio Morricone. His work was quite cold, quite isolated but it was also triumphant and quite hopeful as well. It’s the way I like to envisage Blanck Mass and would like to think the tracks on the album touch on those ideas.”

So here we are, faced with an album attempting to convey a deeper exploration of subjects that requires a willingness to step off the merry-go-round and invest in it. It shouldn’t be a lofty expectation but, as happens so often, when we’re faced with something we need to take the time to understand, we still want instant closure. We want context. We’re so smitten with immediacy that patience becomes even more of a virtue.

“It’s a pretty rapid time we live in,” nods Ben, “but I do feel like it’s a creeper. But it’s an interesting point. If I don’t start writing another one now… Blanck who?” he laughs.

“But I also think things don’t disappear as easily now too. I think the Internet is a perfect platform for things to get shelved and not go away. It’s endless but that’s a good thing. You see music-hosting blogs with records from the 70s that people are getting into now, so if I think about it like that, I think I’m alright.”

BLANCK MASS – ICKE’S STRUGGLE from Alex Turvey on Vimeo.

And so we come full circle. Do you pander to the pattern of modern consumption or take your chances that the blogosphere will immortalise you? With themes of nature, landscapes, isolation, loneliness, triumph, and cerebral hypoxia, it’s not an album that invites easy access, but it’s still an open invitation to use your imagination and paint your own picture. Open your mind and take your time. It’s a simple request. Let’s hope it isn’t beyond too many of us.

“Around the time I started to write ‘Sundowner’, I was speaking to a friend about the supposed feeling of euphoria that someone experiences before drowning – I really like that mental imagery and it rang quite strong with me.

“I’ve had the concept album thrown at me, but I don’t like the idea of a concept because you’re forcing an idea of what an album’s about. I think it’s important to be able to take your own impressions away from it. I didn’t want to say, ‘this is what it is and this is what you should think’. It’s nice; the idea that music can complement any kind of human experience and that it can change. You want to make your own story and make it personal.”

“It’s an interesting thing – it’s the unknown and that’s where the cerebral hypoxia comes from. It’s a juxtaposition. On one side, I hate the idea of it, but it makes sense. It’s a thinker for sure,” he smiles.

By Reef Younis

—

Originally published in issue 30 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. July 2011.

Photography by Gabriel Green

IN CONVERSATION WITH A ONE-MAN PUNK BAND

Rory Attwell is a very busy young man. He’s got at least three previous bands under his belt, including day glo punk outfit Test Icicles and darker, post-punkers KASMs, and in recent years he’s also become a much sought after DIY producer.

At the beginning of this year, he took his DIY ethos just about as far as it could go without building his own studio equipment (that is, we don’t think he did that, although we wouldn’t put it past him) and started a musical project called Warm Brians. For this, Attwell wrote the songs, sang them, played all the instruments, recorded all the parts, and put them all together. Even now, as we sit down to discuss exactly how many screws this guy’s got loose, he mentions that he’s spent the entire day working on the cover art and liner notes for the forthcoming Warm Brains LP, ‘Old Volcanoes’ – a record that takes on the warm grunge fuzz of Dinosaur Jnr., the complexities of Graham Coxon’s playing style and various alt. influences like Pavement and 60s psych. It’s a record underpinned with themes of heartbreak, and it’s virtually 100% Attwell.

Now, when we last checked in with Rory, he was doing the production thing full time and, while he confessed to frequently missing being on the other side of the soundboard – and even sneaking in the occasional backing vocal – he seemed slightly more stoked about recording other people’s music than he did about making his own.

Rory Attwell: “Did I really say that?”

Polly Rappaport: Something to that effect, yeah.

RA:      “I think at the time I was still in KASMs. We were having a break at the time and I was quite happy to be working on other people’s music – not having the worries of being in a band, especially because things weren’t working out at the time. It was quite refreshing to not have to bother thinking about it – it was like an opt out clause from the stress of it all. And I was getting things done! Other people had already written the songs, and I was just producing them, and it felt really productive, really satisfying to be getting so much stuff done, whereas in my band at the time, we’d hit a bit of a rut.”

PR: But now you’re back making the music again. What happened?

RA:  “I got bored of just producing – well, not bored, I still like doing it, but it’s quite hard recording other bands all the time, and you’re enjoying what they’re doing but you’re also thinking, I could be doing this as well, I’ve got all these ideas but I’m not doing them. So that kind of gave way to this, wanting to do my own thing.”

PR:  So were you still writing, even when you were essentially just producing?

RA:  “Sort of. I was kind of writing stuff even when I was in KASMs – things that were a bit different, that didn’t always translate that well into band practice. I was writing things that weren’t necessarily turning into songs when we were trying to play them, so I must have had about four or five songs that I’d roughly written, and when I left that band I thought I’d take those five songs, and I’d made six, seven more, and try to do something with them. I was quite happy with the way they were going, they were quite different from what we were doing anyway. And, yeah, I always tend to be fucking about with something, walking around with a Dictaphone, wandering down the street by myself, then something comes into my head and I start singing it into my phone, like some kind of weirdo, singing to myself – singing guitar parts into a phone. So normally I have a lot of crap that needs filtering down into songs.”

PR: And yet the record is all you – you’ve done everything on it yourself, bar a few female vocals. How does that work, and how did it happen?

RA: “I don’t really know what I was thinking when I first started doing it. The idea of playing everything – not as an ego thing, but as an experiment – I’d always wanted to try it, and then I’d make these demos, but then I’d get bored because it was quite a laborious thing to do all by yourself, so then I’d get some other people to play them and that would be that. This time I thought I’d really have a crack at it, and it’s quite hard to do everything yourself. When you’re in a band and you’re all there together writing stuff it’s really fast and it’s really easy because if there’s something slightly wrong someone can ask to change one bit or change the structure a little, but when you’re all by yourself, you can basically end up doing the whole thing and then think, ‘Shit, that’s not very good,’ and then you have to do the whole thing again so it’s quite hard work… But I quite enjoy it. Plus I’m not the best drummer or singer so it’s an interesting challenge.”

PR: What would you say is the hardest bit in the process for you?

RA: “It’s all kind of hard – It was hard recording the whole thing myself, but more because when you’re in a band you practice it loads, play it loads, play it live, then, when you come to record it, it’s basically a finished thing anyway, so there might be a few little changes you make when you’re recording, but generally you’ve got most things sorted out. Doing it yourself is like, say a band, a big band, has been on tour for three years then someone says, ‘Right, you’ve got to write your second album now,’ they go, ‘Oh shit’, and then they go into the studio and they just have to… do it. It’s kind of like that, really. So I was in there, and I had all these ideas, and I had to throw them together, and you can lose perspective a little bit doing this stuff, and at the same time, as I say I’m not the best drummer, so playing the drum parts I’ll be struggling a bit with the idea that I’ve got in my head and actually translating that onto the drums, and when I finally get it down, I’ll think, if I could have practiced that for, I dunno, three months, playing it live, it would have been a lot better. After playing these songs live a few times, I realise they sound a lot better than the recordings, but that’s just the nature of the beast at the moment.”

L&Q: How many live shows have you done so far?

RA:  “Not many, but it’s getting better as we go along. I’ve got this bad habit of doing things too quickly. I think when we played our first couple of gigs they were a bit shit because… well, I finished the record, then I wanted to release it, and I was going to try to release early this year but there was obviously no time to do that, and I decided to start playing live straight away, so we had about three practices and it was like, ‘Right, let’s do it,’ so it was a little bit odd for the first few shows because it was all sort of thrown together. Like, I share my studio with Tom Vek, and he’s been playing really big gigs and practicing all the time – I keep seeing him practicing, like, three times a week for something like eight hours a day and I’m thinking, I have to play my first gig and we’ve got three practices that are about two and a half hours long each… Gotta change my quality control level.”

PR: Have you got a set band that you play with now?

RA: “Yeah, it’s changed around a little bit – we’ve got two different people playing the drums at the moment, but essentially it’s a three piece. Joe Ryan out of Fair Ohs is playing the drums and Lewis from Colours is playing some drums as well, and Anna’s playing bass… I might get in another guitarist – I’m trying to sort that out. I’ve asked a couple of people – you’d think it would be easy to get a guitarist because there’s loads of them, but for some reason it’s not that easy. I don’t know why, maybe I’m being fussy, but I just can’t find the right one. The couple of people I’ve asked, they might be busy with their other twelve bands – everyone around here is in about fifteen bands so I don’t really know who to ask, but we’ll get there eventually. It works as a three piece, just about.”

PR: Don’t you find yourself being a bit precious about the music, though? It’s essentially all your own work, after all.

RA: “I try not to be too much of a dick about it. I know what it’s like with some people who write all the stuff, playing with them it’s like a dictatorship where they have to tell everyone exactly what to do, so I try and leave it a little bit, unless something really bugs me. Most of the time I’m just happy for people to interpret what they’re hearing on the record, play it how they see it, and it’s nicer in a way, it’s more exciting for me – feels like I’m in a proper band.”

PR:  So do you see this as being a long-term project? You do have a bit of a history when it comes to bands.

RA: “That was the whole point, really. The whole point of why I started doing it was because I always felt like I was in a band and then something would go wrong. We’d make one album and then, well, generally we’d be quite happy with what was going on the first record and then the shit would hit the fan and we wouldn’t have a chance to build on it. For me, a band’s first album might be quite good, but you can’t really get the measure of a band until they’ve made like four, five albums, then you can tell it’s a great band because they’ve managed to make a good record five times on the trot – varying levels of that anyway. I was getting quite frustrated of being in bands. Even if it seemed like it was going really well, it just all fell apart, and I couldn’t really deal with doing that again – I didn’t want to start another band just for it to end, seems like such a waste. So the whole point of this is that it’s just me, so there shouldn’t really be a problem. I want to try to make at least three records, ideally five albums, and then ask myself what I’m doing next rather than making one album then moving on to something else again. I’ve always liked bands that have been around a long time and have got something to show for themselves, so I’m trying to do things a bit more calmly this time and just try and make some good music. I’ve nearly finished the second one already – I just need to find the time to record it… I’m so busy!”

PR: You’re still doing lots of recording for other people, then?

RA: “Yeah, I’ve started to book time in for myself now. I always figure I’ll have a few days the next week to do something then I’ll get a call from someone who needs an album recorded in, like, two days, and I’ll think, yeah, I can squeeze that in, and then I think, shit, I’ve forgotten to do my own stuff. It’s a bit weird, getting out the diary and booking yourself into your own studio. Soon I’ll be talking to myself in the third person, having little producer/artist debates.”

PR: That could be interesting…

RA: “There’d be a lot of arguing. I don’t think I’d get on very well with myself to be honest – I’d probably get quite irritating.”

—

Originally published in issue 30 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. July 2011.

Photography by Frankie Nazardo

“THE WAY FORWARD IS TO ABANDON GUITARS”

Speaking to John Maus is a little like running after a freight train with your teeth gritted, out of your gourd on amphetamines. It is, to say the least, fast paced, intense and exhausting, albeit somewhat exhilarating too. He speaks with a rabid intensity that can be simultaneously intoxicating and perplexing. One thing that remains evident throughout our interaction, however, is passion; this is a passionate man, not only in his music but also in his views, and he expels them all with zest, his voice an often relentless series of accentuations that make him sound like a more wired William H. Macy in Fargo. There’s lots of ‘Ahhhs’ and ‘Y’knows’.

Formerly a member of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Maus is now on his third solo LP, ‘We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves’, which is by far his greatest, most comprehensible body of work to date. The record is a slick, sleazy piece of sci-fi-pop – infectious and stimulating in equal proportions. His early work was wild, often alienating and perpetually challenging; Drowned in Sound thought his first record sounded like “a man crapping out of his mouth.” He has not necessarily eradicated his experimental tendencies, but rather refined them on his new record. They are buried under a rainbow of sparkling production.

It’s been a lengthy evolution for the man from Minnesota.

“Yeah, I’ve been working on it the past couple of years,” he says, “so it’s taken a long time. I probably could have taken some more time on it though. But y’know it’s never done, right? It’s never finished, there are just certain moments when you have to put it to bed.”

Of the fact that Maus’ work is largely made up of synthesisers and processed sounds, John says: “I think the way forward is to abandon the guitar, y’know? It challenges this idea that we have to continue using a guitar, y’know?”

Is it still possible to make experimental music with guitars?

“Y’know, I just regard them as separate procedures. There are a lot of people doing very interesting things with them, and I wouldn’t want to make a mockery of what they are doing. I think one side is just losing its sense of advancing power. I could be wrong of course, and I invite anybody to vilify me on it.”

The latter statement is something that John reiterates throughout our conversation – he has crystalline ideas and theories that he executes with both power and conviction, but seems happy to understand he could be wrong and seems to relish in the idea of discussing such matters. Perhaps this is his PhD in Philosophy creeping in. Maus, in a recent interview was disparaging of the ’90s as a whole, regarding it as “one big mistake.”

“It was edited,” he says of the video interview, “so it’s a little un-contextualised. I mean, I’m 31, so I grew up around a lot of that stuff and I think Nirvana are perhaps the most interesting group, in terms of pop music to exist in the last twenty years, but I think there was this real lack of pop sensibility… I mean, there were some kids who thought they were doing really experimental music by doing drones and throwing their lot in with Glen Branca and stuff (presumably a reference to Sonic Youth), and I could be wrong but I thought that was off the path. It just felt like that was a bad bit, y’know?”

He later continues in reference to the spate of current bands who are living under the influence of such ’90s guitar bands, “That stuff is just so off my radar,” he says. “I find it extraordinarily un-extraordinary. We’ve heard it a thousand times – there is no option there, no violence, no dissonance, not in a musical sense but in a socio-political sense or something. There’s no rupture. It’s boring. There’s no surprise there.

“I definitely could be wrong though, when I say things like this, it is with all due respect.”

Quantum Leap by John Maus by LoudAndQuiet

John’s live shows, though, they do contain violence in some senses: a self- imposed violence as he pumps his fists and contorts his body in a seemingly endless fit of energy and vigour. The first and only time I saw John perform the roof collapsed above him when playing. It seemed ultimately fitting to the manifestation of energy and power he was exuding.

“My performances are a form of confrontation,” he says, “but confrontation not in the sense for just being confrontational, but hopefully in the sense of becoming another human being.”

In other words, becoming possessed.

“Everybody seems to have this idea of what a live concert should be like, and I’m just not satisfied with that”

We speak on and on for some time late into the night, weaving in and out of topics, all of which are presented and retorted with frightening enthusiasm and, more often that not, fascinating insight. And yet there’s still a sense that we only scratch at the surface of the complexities and thoughts displayed by John Maus. He is a true individual in an increasingly non-individualistic occupied industry. The notion and existence of the eccentric pop star is not as dead as you might think.

“I’m sorry for not being more concise and coherent,” he apologises as we part ways. Of course it’s not necessary, and for all his speed, rampant declarations and tangents he has taken me on, paradoxically he’s the same person responsible for creating one of most thought-out, coherent and intriguing albums of the year.

By Daniel Dylan Wray

—

Originally published in issue 30 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. July 2011.

Photography by Owen Richards

THIS IS (TROPICAL) HARDCORE: THREE YOUNG PUNKS WHO GOT BORED OF THRASHING

As the first few lines of a Prince record start to crackle out, Eddy Frankel, the Jewish frontman of Fair Ohs, starts clapping and swaying by the window, while telling us a joke about a Jew and a Japanese guy in an airport. “I’m not so big on this particular one,” drummer Joe Ryan mumbles at the record player. “This one’s good!” proclaims Eddy, attempting to dissuade Joe from moving the needle along. Meanwhile, bassist Matt Lewendon (or Matt Flag, as he’s known) is fretting about the room with a cigarette hanging loosely out of one side of his mouth, trying to figure out where’s best to smoke. Joe makes a beeline for the kitchen to put a pizza and chips in the oven and beers in the fridge.

They come across as a somewhat motley crew, Fair Ohs. Sure, they look like they’re in a band together, but their personalities and backgrounds couldn’t be more varied. Eddy, for starters, who was born in Africa and raised in nine different countries before settling in England at 18, comes across as cocksure and jocular, while Matt is the down to earth guy who just loves garage rock and America’s Next Top Model; Joe seems sweet-natured, frequently checking up on everyone and ensuring a steady flow of funk and soul. “Is there anything we can do to make things better for you?” he asks. “We’ve got a pizza on the way and chips aaaaaand really good music, we’ve got beer… I think we’re good to go.”

“Matt can give you a head massage,” offers Eddy. Matt suggests doing it with his head.

“Look.” Joe points at Matt’s bald patch. “He’s practiced so much he’s worn it away.” And they all erupt with laughter so infectious that you can’t help but join in.

It’s been a couple of years since we last caught up with this east London trio. Back then they had only just settled on their name as it is now – discarding five other variations – and were about to release the steadily building, chant-heavy, bright and breezy pop number ‘Summer Lake’, which is steeped in Congolese soukous rhythms and is their oldest song to hold a firm spot on their debut album, ‘Everything is Dancing’. However, it wasn’t until earlier this month that the LP finally found its way onto shelves.

“We didn’t record the album like I suppose a lot of people would do,” begins Matt. “It got to the point where we thought, ‘Oh, we’ve got enough songs to do an album, we should do an album now’, but I don’t think we’d been labouring on the fact that we’d been writing a record.”

In a series of stints with London producer Rory Attwell – and former band mate of Matt’s when they were in post-dance-punk outfit RAT:ATT:AGG together – Fair Ohs bashed out enough material for two albums and a few singles. “We pieced all the sessions together of the stuff we liked,” explains Matt, “and the stuff that we didn’t like we didn’t include. It was almost like we grouped together the first set that would work as an album. There were songs that we’d written and recorded and finished that we could have added but we left for the next record or a seven-inch.

“The new stuff we’ve written is – to us – quite far removed. I’m sure there are a lot of people who’ll think it sounds just like Vampire Weekend – that’s fine – but we feel like we’re changing and I think that’s because we’ve got really short attention spans, which comes from playing punk music, where everything is quite quick. We write songs quite quickly – if a song isn’t done in an hour or two we’ll sit on a riff for a few weeks, but then…fuck it. We’re not going to sit there and plough on it for months. I don’t understand people who will spend months or years writing a record. Our album came out officially on vinyl last week and will in two weeks time for the CD, but we’ve almost, almost done the second one.”

As well as coming from a punk and hardcore background, Fair Ohs also count jazz, Latin, soul and more among their influences. In fact, when they first started out, they were a free-jazz band. “True. Disclaimer that I was not involved,” laughs Matt as Joe points the finger at Eddy.

“We’re very eclectic people who like loads of different kinds of music,” Eddy justifies. “It’s certainly not just hardcore, African music or garage rock and I’m very into free-jazz and jazz in general.” Matt tells him that’s the most pretentious thing he’s ever said and they all have a chuckle. “Awww look, he’s trying to be serious,” Joe says in a mothering tone. “Don’t listen to him. He’s just old and bitter.”

“I’ve known Joe for a while,” continues Eddy, “and I wanted to make music with him and it was the farthest removed thing I could do from my old band as possible.” Which was a grindcore band he informs us, as Joe says he thought he would be able to do some “ridiculously fast double-pedal drum thing and then [Eddy] was like, ‘How about we do some free-jazz?’ and I thought alright then, that’ll be good,” he mutters sarcastically.

“We’re really into challenging ourselves, musically,” says Eddy, seriously, “so we thought, ‘Let’s do something ridiculous’ and that’s how it started out. Then it morphed into hardcore with our friend Fessey and that evolved and Fessey got Matt in and then we told Fessey to piss off.”

For those of you in the dark about the elusive Steve Fessey, he was their old bassist who wasn’t kicked out for being a racist, as joked about by Eddy in our previous interview with the band, but because he wasn’t happy. “Yeah he was miserable all the time,” Joe points out. “It didn’t fit in with us.” And if you haven’t already noticed in the way that they comfortably torment each other, this is one tight-knit, happy group.

“All we ever want to do is make each other happy and to stand in a room and feel content in what we’re making,” says Eddy.

“We have a thing within the band where if one person doesn’t wanna do it, we don’t do it,” says Matt.

“It’s not democracy,” says Eddy. “All three of us have to agree. With how we write songs, if someone said, ‘I don’t like that verse’ we would drop it.”

Similarly, if a giant label offered them a big deal but one of them wasn’t up for it, they wouldn’t take it, not because their DIY ethics wouldn’t allow it, simply because they’re only in this for themselves.

“Who cares what other people think?” asserts Eddy.

“I don’t care,” announces Matt. “I know it’s easy to relate us back to DIY because this album has come out in Europe on our label, so yes we’ve done it ourselves; we’ve all been in bands who’ve existed on small labels and we’re friends with bands who’ve all done that as well. But I don’t think it defines us in the music, it’s just that nobody else was there saying, ‘I’m going to give you loads of money to put out a record’.”

“The reason Matt says he doesn’t care and I don’t care and Joe probably doesn’t give a fuck either, is because it has fuck all to do with anyone else,” Eddy rants on. “DIY is only about you and I don’t care if someone thinks we’re not DIY enough. It’s only about us. We released our own record in the way we did [on their own Honey High label] because we don’t care how other people think we should release our record.” He pauses and everything is silent for a moment except for the record spinning in the background. “That was a bit of an intense round,” he laughs and the others laugh with him.

If you’ve yet to hear the album, it’s a handful of summery, tropi-punk songs with some silly lyrics – “I really wanted to have a song about Chevy Chase because he’s fucking awesome and ‘boat race’ is obviously Cockney rhyming slang for Chevy Chase,” reveals Matt of ‘Summer Lake’ – and some not so silly – ones of fear and paranoia that we’ll come to later – so, with the horrible amount of rain we’ve been having this summer, this record might just be the lift we all desperately need.

“We make everything better,” assures Eddy. “Good summers are better, bad summers are better. We take winter and add warmth to it, spring we add anticipation, summer we highlight the beauty of it, autumn – we are the memory of summer. This is the worst answer ever,” he peters out with a chuckle.

“I’ve been starting to get annoyed with the summery thing,” huffs Matt, “because I think people might listen to [the album] for a month and then realise they’re in England and go back to listening to Cold Cave. It’s us just trying to write pop songs – it came out summery and that’s probably because we don’t wear shoes on stage.”

Eddy coyly smiles and tells us that it’s more comfortable not to wear shoes on stage, but it can lead to horrible injuries. “I’d like to say now that I’m the only member of this band who hasn’t had to scalpel an object out of their foot,” declares Matt as Eddy goes into a story of his post-album launch show wounding. “The next day my foot hurt, so the day after that I had to take a scalpel to my foot and get glass out of it,” he says.

“I stepped on a sewing needle,” adds Joe, which led to him being stuck in hospital while Eddy and Matt went to Sardinia with Attwell to play a festival. “It sounds like the sissiest kind of injury, but basically it was two days before the festival and this needle went right up into my foot and snapped in half. It was lodged there and I walked to work – about a 40 minute walk – and lodged it in even more, but I didn’t think it was still in there because I couldn’t find it! So then I went to A&E and this guy looking at my foot was like, ‘I’m sorry my friend, if I can’t get this out in the next 10 minutes I think it’s surgery for you’. I had surgery the morning of the flight and I thought, ‘Ok, this is ridiculous, I can’t do this gig, can I? I’m not flying’, but they were like, ‘No, it should be fine. You’ll be out by 10am’.”

Fair Ohs were supposed to be flying at 4pm, so Matt and Eddy waited for Joe at the airport, and waited, and waited… “We freaked out,” Matt affirms. “We were being paid to go to Sardinia, so me and Eddy went – me, Eddy, Cold Pumas and Rory. And so just before we took off we thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s buy him another flight out of our own band money because Joe’s gotta come’. But when we landed, me and Eddy turned on our phones and both had voice-messages saying, ‘By the way, I can’t walk, I’m not being let out of hospital, I’m not coming’ and we were like ‘whaaaat’.” Eddy interrupts with a groan and whines, “can we change the story and say that Joe stepped on a hypodermic needle in his crack den?”

“Gotta stop doing that,” says Joe before telling us that up until the other day he still had the needle, but he ended up throwing it away. “I’ve got some pictures of it if you’re interested?” He gets out his laptop to show us bloody bandages and him in his hospital gown.

But going back to the positive vibe of their record, Eddy explains that it comes from a background in hardcore. “When we started, it was a really specific decision to make positive music, which came from growing up listening to Bad Brains and Minor Threat and things like that. We didn’t want to sit around feeling sorry for ourselves, we wanted to make music that was fun to be around and we didn’t wanna feel miserable in the rehearsal room.”

“I think it would be a real effort for us to write a song like My Chemical Romance – all ‘woe is me’,” smiles Matt. “And I don’t think this is a band we ever expected to live off, so you’ve gotta have fun while you’re doing it.”

Eddy also points out that no one wants to be around someone who’s miserable. “Say I wrote a song that was sad,” he says, “and there are a couple of sad songs on the record – it’s not nice being around someone who’s constantly feeling sorry for themselves. I think the sadness in the record is tempered by being like, ‘Well, I can’t feel sorry for myself’, because you have to keep moving forward and I think that’s probably a good way of looking at it.”

The sad songs that Eddy is talking about are tracks like ‘Yah’, which is even musically more downbeat with an extended garage-y ’60s psychedelic garage rock section and its lyrics “don’t turn your eyes away, you get older everyday”, paired with ‘Helio’ and its poignant lines “we could’ve tried, but we got old”.

“A lot of people are very quick to dismiss the lyrics on the album because there are maybe only five lines per song that aren’t necessarily about anything,” Eddy elaborates, “but other than one song, which is literally about nothing – just us trying to have fun in the rehearsal room – everything else has a lot of meaning and the old thing is my fault.”

With Eddy only notching in at 26 years old – Joe at 27 and Matt at 29 – they’re not exactly old-timers, but he elucidates on the fear and misery you can fall victim to without a sense of direction in this foreboding city. “If you’re unhappy and in your mid-twenties in London, which I was during the last period of the album, you’re probably going to start thinking, ‘I’m just getting too old to start doing what I’m doing’. Because I wrote most of the lyrics I can really tell where I was at each point [in the album] and with the last four [songs] I was quite unhappy and the ‘old’ thing is just something that was weighing on me.”

But in terms of lyrical influences, Fair Ohs also reference Eddy’s youth and various artists. “The earliest songs were about really specific memories,” he clarifies. “‘Almost Island’ and ‘Eden Rock’ are very much my last years in France when I was 17/18, so they’re very happy, sunny memories, which is why they’re such sunny, happy songs. Then ‘Baldessari’ is about the artist, but it’s actually a song about getting old as well. It’s about losing how young you’re being and not knowing how long you’ll feel young for, but it’s based on a piece of art called ‘Goodbye to Boats’ by John Baldessari – he’s one of the inventors of conceptual art. The other stuff is just normal shit, either memories or worries. ‘Helio’ – that’s another one about an artist.”

“There’s a lot of references to water,” Matt interjects.

“I think the water is quite an apt thing because the weird thing I’ve noticed with the newer stuff we’ve been writing – I’ve been using the word ‘river’ a lot and I think the words ‘sea’ and ‘lake’ were used a lot more before,” ponders Eddy. “There’s a difference between things being very still and feeling stagnant and over and stuck, compared with something flowing. Two of our newest songs that we like a lot both have the word ‘river’ in them and I think that’s the idea of moving forward and it’s quite nice. That makes me feel a lot happier about stuff.”

Another thing that bares questioning, and Matt skimmed over it earlier, is the Vampire Weekend references. In terms of the African-infused music they’re making, and a shared love of Paul Simon’s seminal 1986 album ‘Graceland’, it’s of course easy to compare the two, but with their New York counterparts hitting it big back at the start of 2008, do Fair Ohs feel like they’ve perhaps missed the boats they sing about?

“That’s actually quite an interesting question, in that it implies there’s a boat to get and that we were writing to get on it,” says Eddy. “Do you really think that in east London, amongst the people who come to our gigs and the friends that we have, they’re coming up and going ‘I’m really into East African guitar music’? Joe’s really into Latin stuff – do you think that’s going to go down well? No. We weren’t doing it to get on any boat; we were doing it because it’s in our heart and because it’s what’s fun to play.”

“I’m actually glad we get to answer this,” sighs Matt, “because everyone writes about it, but we’ve never been asked it before actually. It’s annoying because there is validity in comparing us to Vampire Weekend because yes, they do like some of the same music as we do, like, what’s the last song on the first Vampire Weekend record?” Eddy explains that ‘The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance’, the last track on Vampire Weekend’s eponymous debut album mimics the Kenyan benga band Orchestra Super Mazembe’s song ‘Jiji’, which upon hearing, does, in that the riffs are almost identical. “Kenyan guitar music is wonderful,” enthuses Eddy, “but the thing that’s hard about the situation is that we get accused of ripping Vampire Weekend off, but it’s just not true. They’re into Kakai Kilonzo, who is a Kamba musician and my first release on Dream Beach [his label] is by a Kamba musician and this has been planned for a long time. We weren’t trying to get on the Vampire Weekend boat because we never planned on doing this beyond our group of friends in east London.

“If we were another garage rock band doing the most generic music we could, nobody would bat an eyelid because there’s so much of it around. No one’s going to go, ‘They sound just like Thirteenth Floor Elevators’, no ones going to say it, even though it’s true. But there’s one band who has African influence in their guitar playing. There’s one band who have a similar delay sound and so they go, ‘You sound like Abe Vigoda and Vampire Weekend’ and it’s like, ‘ohhhh we don’t, we sound like Kakai Kilonzo and we stole from Africa, I didn’t steal from America’. I should feel worse about that really.

“No one talks about the straight beats we have,” he rages on with a mouthful of pizza. “The song ‘Marie’ has the beat from Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ and the bass line from Talking Heads’ ‘Naïve Melody’. Nobody mentions it – that we stole from Kate Bush and Talking fucking Heads and Thirteenth Floor Elevators, instead of going Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend,” he repeats while gesticulating wildly. “It’s just frustrating.”

Joe laughs and asks: “Do we sound bitter?”

The truth is, Fair Ohs still hold a very valid position in the current music scene, despite what may or may not have already been. They’re open and honest, they play whatever the fuck they like and because of that they’re becoming a huge success. Not that they’d know that, of course. “That’s not true,” Eddy responds in disbelief when I mention their cult following. “Who’s the cult?”

“Does cult mean ‘no’?” chuckles Matt heartily.

But all your shows, in London at least, are increasingly wall-to-wall rammed.

“As far as we’re concerned,” Eddy carries on, “we think we’re still playing to our 10 friends who we first started playing to.”

“We’ve done a lot more than the expectations of this band were when we first formed,” Matt discloses. “I’m still really shocked that we’re going to be on a cover. Think; every band – no matter how good or bad – can get written about online, on a blog, everyone’s got an opinion, everyone’s got a friend who will write about you, everyone can get into a magazine or somewhere at some point – it’s not about getting a bit of coverage from someone because everyone needs to fill their content, but actually being on the front cover makes it a valid thing. It’s that step up.”

“What we’re doing now,” pronounces Eddy, “this Loud And Quiet thing – it’s a weird mixture of surprising and not surprising. Because we’ve been doing this for long enough to think that – because we love our album – it deserves to be looked at and read about and listened to.” Agreed.

By DK Goldstein

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Originally published in issue 30 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. July 2011.

A QUIET EVOLUTION IN LONDON’S FORGOTTEN BORDERS

Even a stagnant pond teems with life around its damp and fecund edges. There in the broken reeds and rainwater tributaries you’ll find all sorts of chary and reclusive fauna, shrinking from your gaze and retreating deeper into the undergrowth to tend to their offspring and forage for sustenance. So I find myself in Peckham on a rare visit to this oasis of cheaper living and isolated artistic indulgence, atmospherically a million miles from London’s arid centre but really only a few streets south of the priapic new Shard development, a glassy-eyed visual metaphor for the recession if there ever was one.

Vondelpark, despite being named after a green space in Amsterdam, are a distinctly British proposition and a band that have made London’s anonymous southern borders their home. Though apparently influenced by a trip to America’s West Coast (as hinted at by ‘California Analog Dream’, the opening track of last year’s ‘Sauna’ EP), there’s something about the mottled patina of their songs – warm yet cool, fond yet distant – that’s exactly the opposite of the Golden State’s freewheeling optimism. The vocals are submerged and rarely decipherable, floating above reclaimed garage rhythms on ‘Hippodrome’ or trip-hop shuffle on ‘Jetlag Blue Version’, and seem to be calling back to warmer, easier times. The ‘Sauna’ EP is a document of that longing – for sunshine, a younger youth, a smoother toke.

This is the sound of Britain’s new bands. Have you noticed? They’re young, as always. They’re sad, sort of, but also happy at the same time, in the same moment. They like to look back, to reflect. And perhaps more than ever they’ve got no clear future, no reason to stay in school and get a job, ‘cos there are no jobs to be got and it’s starting to seem like there never will be. In the boom years there was a risk, a desperate thrill, in pissing about with guitars for a few years before knuckling down to the inevitable. But now? Bands like Vondelpark are taking it slow. They’re productive, prolific even, yet they don’t crave overnight success, perhaps because there’s little else out there for them, and the future seems to stretch out indefinitely.

Alright, this portrait may not be exactly how it is for Vondelpark, but it’s a common enough attitude among bands of their vintage. We’re sitting out back at Peckham’s Bar Story with the railway station in our sights. Lewis, the guy commonly mistaken for the only member of Vondelpark, is frontman and ringleader of the porous group that includes regular members Bailey and Matt. A recent Boiler Room set saw them joined on drums by Will Archer, a friend and musician who operates under the moniker Slime and has collaborated with Vondelpark on the tracks ’2Player’ and ‘Gals’.

So is this the birth of a ‘scene’? “All of our friends are creative in some way, like our friend Ciaran [Wood] who does the videos. It’s good to be inspired by people, you kind of bounce off each other,” says Lewis, explaining that it’s a “friendship group” first and foremost. “We don’t even go to all these nights in London, we just use the amenities to do our own little world.”

Asked how they put their dense and dreamy songs together, there’s little to go on. “Just from hanging out,” Bailey offers amid the ums and ahs. It’s part of their defiance against the hype machine, one that they share with some of their contemporaries. They’re relaxed and purposely slow-moving. The songs too are languorous but not luxuriant, seeming to wallow in time, not as an opulent fuck-you to the ever-quickening treadmill of globalised commerce but more as a consequence of being left behind by the gobbling Pac-Man of credit, debt and default. If the under-25s have had free time foisted upon them because of the recession, at least the musicians can take the opportunity to go slowly, add more layers, play low-key shows and retain their privacy.

Vondelpark haven’t appeared from nowhere though, having had a taste of success with their previous incarnation in a more straight-up art-rock band. Pretty brave to just chuck all that away and start again, anonymously? “It wasn’t representing what we actually wanted to play,” says Matt. “We had the greatest intentions with that, but we were very young, we didn’t want to go down a path that we weren’t completely comfortable with,” explains Lewis. “We had offers from major labels who wanted us to be something that we weren’t, so… that’s all really. There’s not many bands that start with four years of experience of playing live around the country. I think we’re just quite comfortable with the experience we got from that, and we’re not ashamed of any of it.”

It must have made you more clued up about the pitfalls of the industry as well. “Yeah, I think people care about music and we didn’t realise that as much when we were in that band before, ‘cos everyone around us in East London… it was just like, a darker place, to be completely honest.”

How so? “It was just a weird time,” says Bailey, as they all quietly nod. “Yeah. Not very nice.”

Still, Internet buzz being what it is, the idea of anonymity quickly overtook their intentions as cut’n'paste culture turned the reborn band into ‘mysterious south London producer Vondelpark’. That’s what happens when your only web presence is an interview with Vice magazine.

How important is anonymity, then?

“I think people really get that wrong, to be honest, about forced mystery,” says Lewis. “In our case, we actually did do an interview about a month after we put up our first MP3.”

Lots of artists seem to be quite clearly choosing to hide their identities, though. Maybe it’s a reaction to all that in-yer-face pop and the risk of sudden ‘success’ and over-exposure on the blogosphere.

“You don’t need to be anything more at first. It’s just having really good songs so people care enough about the music to want to hear more,” says Lewis. “I just feel with the mysterious thing it just comes from people not wanting to waste away with an image, just wanting people to take the music for what it is.”

Bailey offers a harsher assessment.

“There’s a lot of people that just keep regurgitating the same article over and over again, and I think people need to like… live a little bit more.”

“With Burial, he did it in his own way and it’s completely original, so the music is the actual important thing,” says Lewis. “And it wasn’t intentional, he just honestly doesn’t like doing that [promotional] stuff because it’s not that important to him, and it’s not actually that important to us, ‘cos we enjoy listening to our records.”

Wu Lyf tried to go down a similar path at first, too.

“Now they’re saying they’re pissed off they even started doing press, ‘cos it’s taking away from them being in their bedroom making songs.”

What about the musical mood that pervades London bands at the moment? I’m thinking Ghostpoet, James Blake, Echo Lake – musicians of all genres evoking a similar melancholy feeling through mumbled lyrics and dreamy production right down to blurred press shots. Is there something in the water or what?

“Yeah, you could take that quite pretentiously and say it’s because of England, but it probably is,” says Lewis. “I was talking to someone from San Francisco about this the other day, and he was saying, ‘I couldn’t live in London ‘cos it’s so grey.‘ But on a serious level, it is pretty grim, there’s only like two months where it’s warm in London and I mean, it’s not really a great place to sort of… at the moment everyone’s just like… yeah, getting emotive,” he laughs.

It’s a sound that the classic Belgian techno label R&S has spotted and embraced, signing up diverse acts of the ‘post-dubstep’ non-genre like James Blake and Space Dimension Controller, giving the label a new lease of life as it nurtures London’s fresh talents. “The label has some amazing musicians at the moment,” they remind me later. “Keeps the momentum up to improve every record.”

The band are about to release their second EP through the imprint, titled ‘NYC Stuff and NYC Bags’, but still plan to steer clear of the limelight. “We’re keeping it pretty low key. Hopefully the album will be out around Christmas time,” says Lewis.

“We don’t want to release an album until we’re completely happy with what we’ve done,” adds Matt.

Our conversation concludes with Lewis setting out what could be the band’s manifesto, if only they were the type of band who would put their name to something as declamatory and earnest as a manifesto. “We’re just really, really, really into making music, and we want to play to lots of people. I just want people to be able to listen to our music and relate in some way, and make them feel better about being in shit situations. That’s the main intention.” And in its own small way, that simple rejection of cliched rock and roll living and industry indulgence sums up the quiet evolution ticking over in our cities’ undergrowth.

By Chal Ravens

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Originally published in issue 30 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. July 2011.

THE FOUNDER OF THE VELVET UNDERGROUND ON SNOOP DOGG, PRODUCING PATTI SMITH, BETTERING HIMSELF AND WHY GETTING BACK TOGETHER WITH LOU REED IS A BAD IDEA

Just imagine… it’s 1967; the same decade that ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ by The Beatles has reached #1 – the very essence of sunshine, feel-good pop music, almost throwaway in its fleeting, child-like sentiment. You go down your local record store and see an album cover with a big banana and Andy Warhol’s name on it, so you give it a whirl out of intrigue. Ten minute’s into that record you are greeted with the demonic, demented screech of viola on ‘Venus In Furs’. For all those years your parents told you that rock’n’roll was the devils music, maybe now you started to believe them. Well, tonight I meet the architect: the devil himself, John Cale.

John Cale has recently signed to Domino records subsidiary Double Six Records and is back with a new EP out in August entitled ‘Extra Playful’, which is an apt title, with the record itself being a smorgasbord of sounds, styles and musical endeavours that accesses the many sonic portals and palates within Cale’s brain. An LP will follow around September time with a tour after that. This comes six years after his last record. So, was the break intentional?

“No, no,” he says. “There’s been some things with EMI, and that was like watching a boxing match go sour.”

Oh dear.

“Yeah, I mean, I don’t know, Guy Hands got his hands on it and it just sort of went up in smoke. It’s a shame; there were some very good people at EMI, they took care of me, and I appreciated it. I mean… but look at Domino Records, they could be the next EMI; they have the right attitude towards it, and just look at the music. Although I have to qualify that by saying I don’t want anybody to be the next EMI!”

In his gap John has also been given the prestigious honour of an OBE, which was “totally bizarre. I never expected it,” he says. “I have no idea how it came about. The greatest thing was being there on the day and standing alongside all these people who were receiving the same honour as you are and they’re not there because they are wealthy or famous – some of them are quite poor and they are there because they’ve helped their community a lot. It’s outstanding… that was really inspiring to me.”

Cale has also recently been taking his 1973 seminal album, ‘Paris 1919’, across the globe for the last two years, performing in each city with a brand new orchestra in each one he visits. A pleasant nostalgia trip, one presumes.

“Nostalgia only lasts for a little bit anyway and really it sounds pretty different [to the record],” he ponders. “You’re not doing it to recreate it, you’re breathing new life into the songs.

“That’s a very special kind of show,” he continues. “You can only do that every once in a while, with getting the orchestras and rehearsing and stuff, although they’ll probably continue [once the new record comes out].”

Over the years (almost 45 since The Velvet Underground’s debut) Cale has worked with a huge array of people, as a band member, producer, collaborator and composer. The key to successful collaboration, he says, is “that both parties involved end up going somewhere they didn’t expect to go.”

“You get something out of other people by working with them, and in turn get something out of yourself you wouldn’t have normally done,” he continues. “It’s always a very revealing experience.” He speaks as though he knows the answer to the question, rather than offering an opinion. “If you think you know what you’re doing at any particular moment, if you have that moment with other people you’ll find that you may be wrong,” he says. “They may have one objective idea about what you’re doing and that’s always interesting to see how that develops and comes together.”

That’s quite a trusting attitude to have in regards to other people’s opinion. Surely it could be them who are wrong?

“But the trust isn’t personal, it’s in something creative, somebody else’s vision and it’s really interesting to see and hear other people’s views.”

So does this belief extend to when you are producing records and are essentially the objective voice, not the original founder of the idea or music?

“I mean when you get a band in the studio, quite often they are hearing things completely differently for the first time. They’ve never been on stage and heard themselves so clearly or so manicured, and that can be a daunting experience for a lot of people [when they come in the studio]. When we did Patti (Smith – John produced the seminal ‘Horses’) and the band, they had been playing this stuff on their own guitars and their own guitars where often warped, and when you start to deal with that and hire in equipment, it’s like a baby out of bath water. It took a while to settle that, because they all wanted to play the instruments they played on stage. They worked their butts off to get these guitars that they loved and then you come along in the recording studio and say, ‘Sorry, no. We’re going to be spending more time tuning them than we are recording them.’ So that changes things, because there is a lot of stress on the band, who are trying to make something work that they’ve never thought of before, because they’ve been used to getting whatever they want from their own instruments.”

Largely responsible for shaping the best sounds of the ’70s (Cale also produced The Stooges, The Modern Lovers and Nico), he modestly plays down his role as producer as “evolution”, even if those relentlessly pounding piano keys and sleigh bells that can be heard thrusting their way through ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ were at the hands of him, arguably creating the moment punk was born, eight years before 1977. “Well, I mean, I’m telling the truth,” he says. “I didn’t write it. I don’t feel I’m responsible for their output, they are the original owner of that content.”

In terms of his influence, both as a member of The Velvet Underground and as a solo artist, it’s remarkably evident in so many records we hear today, and that has to be strange?

“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I can understand why they are trying to figure it out because there’s a great deal of disappointment involved in it. You know, we thought [The Velvet Underground] was going to be around for a while and they weren’t. But they’ve really latched onto something – the inability of four people not really being able to agree on anything or much of anything and still produce some music is a puzzle. It’s like that advertisement that slowly shows a glass of water tipping over, it’s the kind of thing that grabs and holds your attention while they tell you what to buy. It’s that same kind of thing, that same disappointment that got everybody hooked on The Velvet Underground, I think.”

So, do people to this day still try and get you guys back together?

“They don’t try, they ask if it’s possible and generally the answer is one big question mark. You couldn’t really do The Velvet Underground anymore without Sterling anyway.”

I ask if the interest is baffling or flattering and John suddenly becomes sombre. His voice drops softly and a sincere degree of emotion coats his every word. “It’s kind of saddening really, it just reminds you of something you can’t do anymore.” A silent pause awkwardly hangs in the air.

“You mean as a collective unit or the inability to write the songs as you once did?” I finally ask.

“Yeah, in regards to without Sterling…we’d always look at each other on stage and hear him peel off a solo, you know? You’d have to wait there for it to unravel. He would unravel a solo and it would take him a while! He would reach these heights, and I was just enthralled. I don’t know how he got it, there was something about him… and something about us in those days.” John sighs. “It just wouldn’t be right to do it.”

So there’s no intrigue there? You wouldn’t want to do it?

“No, not really. I think Lou and I together, unfortunately bring out nothing but the worst in each other. That’s a sad fact of life.”

John’s tone remains undeniably sad through these parts, almost uncomfortably so. I feel awkward in my questioning, as though I’m asking him personal questions about lost family members, when it dawns on me that in many ways I am. Lou Reed, Maureen Tucker and Doug Yule (John’s replacement when he left The Velevet Underground in 1968) all got together for a public convention and interview at the New York public library in 2009. Was this something that John was interested in being a part of?

“Well, it was something that I was not very interested in, but I also sensed it was something other people were not very interested in me having a part of either,” he says. “I didn’t miss it.”

Clearly saddened by the subject matter, I decide to move on before I push my luck or John goes all Lou Reed on me (Lou point blank refuses to talk about anything other than his latest projects when giving an interview. Sometimes even a mere mention of The Velvet Underground or details of his past is enough to make him walk out of a room).

John’s previous collaborations are plentiful and duly noted but is there anyone he would still love to work with? Immediately the tone picks up.

“I don’t know, I think a lot of the people I’m already fascinated with are already doing it [by themselves]. I mean Eminem is really outrageous, he’s so strong, and Snoop, I always get a giggle out of Snoop. There’s this other guy who works with Snoop called Kokane and he’s outrageous – he’s got this voice, it’s very much like Sly Stone; it can be very deep and soulful one minute and then very high and beautiful and romantic the next. The range he’s got is really excellent. But he’s already doing it. Lupe Fiasco I like a lot too.”

Slightly dumfounded, I was expecting to hear a list of strange avant-garde composers, but instead it turns out John Cale gets a kick out of Snoop Dogg. But, then, knowing the strong focus on lyrical content Cale applies to his own work, it’s hardly surprising that he feels attached to the lyrically superior genre of hip-hop.

“Yes, absolutely,” he agrees. “Some of the lyrics are extreme. I mean, Eminem, I can’t believe that guy can stay angry for so long, but he does it really elegantly”

Angry lyrics elegantly constructed? Sounds familiar, so I ask something I never in a million years thought I would ask John Cale: is he familiar with Odd Future?

“Odd future? That name rings a bell.”

The full title is Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All.

“Hum,” he quips with genuine thought. “Are they the rap outfit that were at Coachella?” Quite possibly, I respond (they were).

“I think there’s about seven or eight of them and they make videos?”

That’s them, yes.

“It’s a shame I missed them. I was out of town. But I’ve read about them, it sounds fascinating. When I read about it I thought, ‘Hum, how do you keep something like that together? So many people doing so many different things.’”

I explain the age group of the outfit – some are teenagers and that the oldest member is 23.

“Wow! There’s hope for us yet man! Really, I mean it. What’s their website?”

So as I instruct John Cale on where to look for Odd future, I query the latter part – is originality something that he still considers or thinks about when writing and making music?

“I’m careful, in that I don’t listen to the radio. I only listen to things I like. I guess make it personal. If you make it personal then it’s yours, you know? I mean it’s really about working out your own thoughts as you go along and only you can do that, so it’s your own business.”

John was on The Culture Show in 2009 being interviewed by Miranda Sawyer when he had one of his moments of complete sincerity and honesty that I too have experienced whilst speaking with him. It’s difficult to convey in print, but on multiple occasions he will slow down, and very softly and thoughtfully respond to something with such a gentleness but complete conviction that it’s very difficult not to be humbled by such emotion, honesty and insight. One such moment came when he told Sawyer, “I have ambition…ambition to fulfil my full potential, which I don’t know if I have yet.” It was a remarkably vulnerable moment, one that opened up a whole world of questions by turning the key of self-doubt, but it was met with childish giggles from Sawyer and an inability to follow up the question because it was “very serious”. The interview terminated at its most vital point. After two frustrated years, I follow it up. Is this really how he feels? John Cale, founder of The Velvet Underground, pioneer producer, the original creator of one of the world’s greatest and most popular cover songs (‘Hallelujah’), OBE, nearly twenty solo albums made, collaborations with Eno and Nick Drake amongst many others, film composer, festival curator and still recording at nearly 70 years old – this man really feels he hasn’t reached his full potential? “Yes,” he says. “I still haven’t found the perfect topic to take control of, the perfect balance of music and words. This is something I’m still looking for.”

Is this something that you have never found, or that you have but are looking to better? “Yeah, to better it I guess. Not in terms of competitiveness. I take lessons from other people; I don’t try and imitate them as I think that would be the kiss of death, but I take lessons from them.”

What John clearly likes to absorb he is capable of imparting too, and he has provided many lessons whilst speaking to him, the main one being that he likes “surprise endings”, and it’s clear that the end is not in sight yet.

By Daniel Dylan Wray

—

Originally published in issue 30 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. July 2011.

Photography by Leon Diaper

HAVING STRUGGLED WITH CRIPPLING STAGE FRIGHT FOR TWO ALBUM CAMPAIGNS, ZACH CONDON IS NO LONGER AFRAID

You walk out on stage. The volume hits you. The scale hits you. The front row can see the whites of your eyes and the tremors coursing through your limbs. This is when the nerves incapacitate. Debilitate. Reduce you to a quivering wreck. Or at least that’s how I imagine the on-stage jitters hit from the comfort of a hack’s armchair.

For Zach Condon, it was a grim reality. About to embark on the European leg of a tour promoting Beirut’s EP ‘March of the Zapotec’ back in 2008, he found himself suffering from panic attacks to the extent that the tour had to be cancelled. Back in 2006, on the eve of another European tour, he was hospitalised with exhaustion. They should have been early watershed moments to put a halt to Beirut’s rapid rise, but after charming with Balkan brass-infused debut ‘Gulag Orkestar’ and the sombre ‘The Flying Club Cup’ in the long run the cancelled tours did little to derail an otherwise successful trajectory and steeled Zach for the future.

“You probably know, one of the very first European tours I had to cancel because I had really bad panic attacks,” he starts. “I was young and I had no ideas what my limits were. I was saying yes to anything and everything. ‘You want me to go to this city? Yeah, sure. You want me to go to that city? I’ll go to that city.’ That would mean being on the road another few weeks and then at one point it hit me. That was when I had to start paying attention. It was very haphazard and I’d play it by ear and sometimes it would really shake me up.”

It’s the afternoon after Beirut’s show at Hyde Park and Zach, understandably, looks pretty shaken now, after a celebratory night out. Having shared last night’s bill with friends Arcade Fire, and spent the day bouncing from radio station to promo interviews for forthcoming album, ‘The Rip Tide’, he’s remarkably lucid and eloquent. It’s also telling that even after Beirut’s already colourful history, Zach’s comfortable referencing what could have been an uncomfortable past.

“The moment I stepped out on stage last night, I was absolutely terrified,” he smiles. “I remember I shook violently for the first two songs and then I don’t know how but I was able to brush it aside and centre myself and it actually went off really well after that.

“You can’t really imagine what 60,000 people will feel like. You just can’t picture that if you haven’t done it before and we’ve done big shows to 10,000 people but there was a force when we walked out last night. It was a shock to the system and it takes a few minutes to adjust.”

Adjustment seems to be a prevailing theme in Zach and Beirut’s timeline. A man once content to roam the world soaking up everything it had to offer, he’s admittedly more settled and centred as a result of his meandering experiences. But that isn’t to say his drive or sense of spontaneity has been totally diminished just yet.

“The funny thing is it was the first show of the tour so it was kind of like being thrown straight to the wolves. I hadn’t seen the band in about two weeks so it was like, ‘Fuck, let’s just get out and do this! But they’re pros and it was great.

“We’ve arranged five songs from the album that we can play,” he continues, “and so we’re trying to spread them out until the new album’s released. We always play ‘East Harlem’, ‘Santa Fe’, ‘Vagabonds’ and it’s good that sometimes people do seem to take an immediate liking. There was a little faction of hardcore Beirut fans who recognised the songs, so they’d probably Youtubed it or something. You can always recognise them – they’re the ones waving a ukulele or something,” he laughs.

Four years on from the ‘The Flying Club Cup’, the ukulele-totin’ die-hards have something new to immerse themselves in. The result of a self-enforced hiatus, ‘The Rip Tide’ is an album that burns much brighter than the more solemn offerings of Beirut’s earlier work and it seems that the time taken to re-focus and re-energise has been well worth the investment – both personally and musically, for Zach.

“I knew a lot of things coming off the last tour last summer,” he says. “I knew that I needed to sit still for more than six months in one place and that the next project was going to be a really big one for me – a really important one – and I already knew that I wanted the next album to be a straightforward pop album. But I needed a lot of time. I bought a house, I got married… so I needed the time to set the stability in my life to do this without going crazy.

“The time in the studio recording with the band was so good for me and so healthy. It made me realise all the struggles and pressures I’d put myself through before was easily lifted off by approaching the whole system differently. As a kid I was scared of studios; I was scared of session musicians; I was scared of chord theory; I was scared of vocal lessons because I thought it would contain something I had that was unique. Who knows what could have happened if I knew more than I did? But I’m over that now.

“I actually had a vocal injury when I was in Brazil, a little polyp, and the option was either have surgery or go to a vocal coach to learn how to sing around it until it heals. So for the first time in my life I saw a vocal coach and she was amazing. I can do things with my voice now that I never thought I could do. I had no idea I could sing in a falsetto or sing in a higher range or give notes character. I think some of the vocals on this record are probably the best takes I’ve done. I’m no longer afraid,” he laughs.

“So given that time and stability, the brighter side was always going to show through in the music. And I meant it to. The funny thing is I wrote this album in a farmhouse during a particularly snowy winter in upstate New York and I had to promise myself I wasn’t going to make a wintery, folky album.”

‘The Rip Tide’ is anything but. It holds the rich variety and old country warmth of the albums that precede it, but there’s also a healthy sense of contentment and optimism that doesn’t just feature; it radiates.

“I’ve just really dug into it and crystallised it and tried to bring it to the forefront. I’m glad to have flirted with a lot of different styles, that’s never a bad thing, but I knew after ‘March of the Zapotec’ – I knew during – that my next album would be a much more straight forward affair. It’s funny – I always thought ‘March of the Zapotec’ and the other EPs were much more playful, but people were confused about what I was going to be doing. I don’t think they realised it was just giving them a fun little gift.”

Daring to be different comes loaded with stereotype, as much as it does anticipation. Having been tagged as the chief purveyor of Balkan-brass to a champion of French culture, the expectation for the alternative has followed Beirut from the outset. It’s an aspect Zach enjoys but also finds one of his biggest challenges – not the exploration of new musical styles but shedding the expectancy that it will always have to be something that doesn’t necessarily walk the line.

“Yeah I definitely dug myself into a hole,” he smiles. “I made it too easy but it’s something I’ve struggled with because to me melody is melody and it should just boil down to how good that melody is. I remember when the first album came out people didn’t know where to put it, but now genres are so burst, record stores don’t even try. They’re just like, ‘fuck it, this was easy in the 90s’,” he laughs.

“I’ve been recording music since I was 15, but the first one to catch on and the one that introduced me to the public was ‘Gulag’ [Orkestar] and it was during a phase when I was head over heels in love with Balkan music, so I was trying to write pop tunes with these flourishes of the way they use brass because I find it really fascinating and I think they use it in a much more interesting way than most Western bands would. At the time it was a big discovery and a big deal to me. It was also my big first step into the public.

“What’s also funny is that for the next album I’d been listening to French music my whole life and to me the French had that style of music down and I looked up to it. It’s funny that I have to try and shake that off again this time round. I put those albums down to youthful indiscretion, but I’m also very proud of them. It’s a nice feeling – with this album I don’t have to act as an ambassador to some culture I don’t belong to.”

It’s arguably a pressure that contributed to some of the early tribulations. At 20, Zach was already facing the exciting prospect of travelling the world off the back of a celebrated debut album. A few years later, the expectation and interest had increased to whole new levels. Having come out of those experiences with the appetite and drive to continue to strive is commendable in its own right – continuing to apply an unyielding personal pressure makes Zach a glutton for punishment.

“I put a huge amount of pressure on myself for this album,” he says. “You always want a masterpiece. I think this album is all about centring myself a little and not haphazardly roaming the world with no plan, so the starting phase of this record was one of the hardest ones I’ve had to deal with. I’ve known what this album was going to be for a long time but because I was having too much fun with the other albums, I knew it was going to be hard this time.

“For ‘The Flying Club Cup’ I’d gone back to New Mexico to kind of recover from the tour cancellation and other shit and while I was doing that I was writing the record and it never felt like it was hard to get going. It was hard to finish but it was really flowing out at the beginning. For ‘The Rip Tide’, probably because I’d taken some time off and didn’t know what to expect, there was a couple of really rough months of self-doubt and frustration, but when I found the groove, oh man, that’s when it got interesting.

“It was actually recorded in three stages: first was writing alone in this farmhouse and then when I’d finished and I’d had enough ideas I scrapped all the demos I’d recorded and just took the chord progressions, melodies, harmonies to the band and we locked ourselves in another studio for two weeks, non-stop. We actually played most of the instrumentals live to tape with all of us in the same room with microphones set up and me conducting and we’d arrange it on the spot. Then I took a long time off settling in to do vocals, which I did in New Mexico. It was a really intense, awesome couple of weeks.”

It’s difficult not to be enamoured by Zach’s enthusiasm. Still only 25, he’s got a world-weary quality that extends beyond his music into his presence. Where ‘Gulag Orkestar’ inspired Baltic cobblestone streets and old men playing accordions for pennies, and ‘The Flying Club Cup’ dropped you into a Parisian backstreet, reliving George Orwell’s ‘Down and Out In Paris and London’, it’s always been more than a simple case of evocative imagery. There’s a sense of a wider displacement; a search for something that’s not quite tangible made richer by the wandering personality Zach has fiercely retained throughout Beirut’s chameleonic life.

“As a teenager I grew up in Santa Fe and there’s this strange disconnect there between me and my home town, so it’s almost like I was homeless from the beginning. It’s a tourist town and the culture’s largely Hispanic/Native American, so there’s all these things that come together that made me some white guy that doesn’t belong there.

“I’ve been back and my opinion on that has changed quite a bit, but because of that it left me looking for a home, and one of the first things that grabbed me as a teenager, and kind of soothed my aching hormones and all that other horrible shit, was the fantasy of the movies I was watching. I was working in a movie theatre that was playing maybe 90% art house European films and I think that had a deep effect on me, maybe deeper than I realised at the time. Maybe it is a bit of a fantasy but I’ve always liked to play with it.”

Tired, happy and increasingly fulfilled: it’s a dangerous combination for complacency but here it’s the catalyst as Zach Condon proves that a troubadour’s spirit never dies.

By Reef Younis

—

Originally published in issue 30 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. July 2011.

Photography by Pavla Kopecna

VIA THE VIOLENCE OF NEW ALBUM ‘W H O K I L L’, MERRILL GARBUS HAS CALMED HER NERVES

Merrill Garbus is brand new to Spain. She’s never been before and since arriving four hours ago she’s spent two hours completing a thirty-minute drive and a further two hours asleep. Jetlag is to blame for one, while the other can be attested to the ongoing fucked-up state of the world, where the angry and disappointed are motivated to take to the streets. Today, following weeks of mass protests and acts of police brutality, the people of Barcelona are marching, and it’s playing havoc with the flow of traffic.

In the lobby of The Hotel Princess – the kind of establishment that’s too pricey to pay for yourself, but not so posh that your trainers blush – it’s as if the thirty-one year old from New England is well rested, even though she isn’t. She runs to the bar to order a couple of bottles of water, but returns with just one. “I couldn’t work out how to order two,” she says. “You can have this one.”

Merrill is extremely easy to talk to, and photograph, it turns out – when she’s asked to stand in the hotel’s rooftop swimming pool she says, “Sure”, not, “Guys, I’ve had two hours sleep!”; when asked to climb a ladder, she does so in order to lower herself into a bin for a better shot. Sonically, at least, her second album, ‘W H O K I L L’, is equally as playful, full of endearingly skewed pop brick-a-brac loops similar to those that made up her 2009 debut, ‘BiRd-BrAiNs’. Beneath the innocent veneer there lurks a world of violence more fitted to song titles like ‘Gangsta’, ‘Killa’ and Riotriot’, though. Blame it on the ongoing fucked-up state of the world, I guess, and Merrill’s relatively new neighbourhood, of which she says: “Oakland is a gritty city, and the energy of it has influenced the record. In fact, I don’t think the album or the recordings would have turned out the same way if I’d moved to anywhere other than there.”

Merrill grew up in Massachusetts before living in Vermont as a puppeteer (“I had a sincere resentment towards puppets for a long time,” she told us of that experience last year), followed by a move to Montreal, where she lived for four years, joined and left a band, and began recording under the purposefully mistyped moniker ‘tUnE-yArDs’. She also spent time living in Africa with her uncle, which is where her love for tribal rhythms comes from. Merrill and her home country have an odd relationship. She’s never totally sure how she feels about the United States of America.

“I’ve just moved back after being out of the country for four years,” she says, “so it’s felt like this really important thing for me to go back and plunge into whatever ugly reality is there right now. I hate to say it, but I can imagine the country going in a direction where I just wouldn’t feel comfortable living there anymore. I wouldn’t want that to happen, but I can see that as a possibility.”

California seems like the best place for her. “It’s its own version of America,” she says. “Much of America doesn’t think it fits with the rest of the country and would like to see it fall off into the ocean. But if you’re in California you realise a sense of the American Dream in many ways. This dream of highways, LA and convertibles. It’s a very different America to the one I grew up in on the east coast, which is older and much more tied to England, actually.”

‘My Country’ – the opening track of ‘W H O K I L L’ – is loaded with swipes at the States, some plain and simple (My country, ’tis of thee/Sweet land of liberty/

How come I cannot see my future within your arms? chirps Merrill at the song’s opening), others more ambiguous, like, The worst things about living a lie is just wondering when they’ll find out. It’s the record’s most memorable lyric, even if we’ve got no idea what or who it refers to.

“That song is definitely a tug of war,” says Merrill. “I haven’t been asked about that line yet though, so thank you for asking. With the lyrics that I write, often I want to keep them open so there can be multiple interpretations. Because I could damn my country and say, ‘The United States is… this… or living a lie, or whatever’, but when I wrote that line it made sense when it happened in my head on a number of levels. That line can apply to a country as much as it can to me or some people in my audience. But that song is funny because it’s a bit spastic with who it’s talking about.”

‘W H O K I L L’ bubbles on, taking in Beck’s white funk on ‘Es-So’, marching hip-hop drums through ‘Gangsta’, reggaeton by ‘Riotriot’ and flurries of toy keyboards come ‘Bizness’. There’s a couple of fleeting synths, but it’s largely a record made from acoustic instruments being frantically crammed together, like Merrill’s ukulele and the saxophones that make up her new brass section. It’s twee and weird and angelic and irregular, finally giving some use to that awful term ‘wonky pop’. It’s music that a toddler would lose it to, providing they don’t listen too carefully to Merrill’s yodelling vocals – Hear a scream, hear a sound in the dark of the night/But right or wrong I’m a new kind of killer (from ‘Killa’) are not for your average Tweenies fan. This is a record that, despite its obscure spacing, does have the word ‘kill’ in there.

“The whole time through it was called ‘Women Who Kill’, in my mind,” says Merrill, gazing at the lobby ceiling. “That’s what fuelled me, and it was a very strong impulse that I had, and then when I told everyone what the album was called, a majority of people would go, ‘Really? Do you have to call it that?’ Because the songs really don’t…. I dunno. I see what people meant – that it felt kind of limiting to call it that, because I am a woman and I think a lot of the songs have to do with being a woman, but certainly you don’t have to be a woman to enjoy them. I hope you agree?” she asks.

“A majority of people that I spoke to about it were people I love and trust, and they said that you’re basically limiting your audience by placing a gender on it. So then I was playing with how to write first of all ‘Women Who Kill’, then ‘Cities Who Kill’ and ‘Who Kill’ was always squashed together, and my friend Alex who did the artwork said, ‘That’s your title, right there.’ What I like about it is that it becomes a nonsense word that still has a little bit of violence in it. It’s confrontation in an abstract way, which is a very tUnE-yArds thing. It’s not an Odd Future thing,” she laughs.

A proud hip-hop fan, Merrill is “extremely curious to see Odd Future tomorrow night. I’ve not heard any of them yet,” she says, “but I’m very curious to see them. It’s just so scandalous!”

Much of my hour spent with Merrill involves recounting an interview she gave us last April. It was a transitional time, full of doubt and unease. On top of her new move to Oakland, the surprise success of ‘BiRd-BrAiNs’ had changed everything, simply because it had gotten record labels involved.

Merrill had originally self-released her debut album, which “was recorded on something like what you’re holding,” she says, pointing at my crumby Dictaphone. Fans were asked to pay whatever they like, as if her homemade record, made largely from clanking household objects together, was some sort of church collection. It netted a thousand dollars and the attention of Portland indie label Marriage Records who then released a limited run of ‘BiRd-BrAiNs’ twelve-inches. It wasn’t until 4AD (the Beggars Group imprint home to the likes of Deerhunter, Bon Iver and The National) re-released the album (twice!) that Merrill started to question how much control she’d have of tUnE-yArDs from now on. Records labels, from my knowledge, don’t really like it when their artists allow fans to choose the price they pay for an album. Merrill agreed, but insisted on not ruling out the pay-what-you-like model when it came to releasing what would become ‘W H O K I L L’, regardless of if she put it our herself, continued working with 4AD or signed a new deal with another label.

tUnE-yArDs did stick with 4AD, who had elevated the project to much greater notoriety through 2010. So? Did she discuss the commerce of her new record with them?

“No,” she says, “and I’ll tell you why. There’s been this need for me to see how they do things. It took us a really long time to sign with the record label again, and throughout the recording of the album I hadn’t signed with anyone, so there was a sense of where is this album going to go. So I felt like I’d made them wait for a very long time for that decision and they’d put a lot into tUnE-yArDs over the past year, so in a way I just wanted to be like, ‘do what you do with this, and show me’, and maybe, once I’ve established myself over the next five years, I can be in a position to discuss that.”

Merrill says she’s “currently choosing her battles”, and if there is one clear difference in how she now feels about tUnE-yArDs, it’s that she’s realised it’s now too big to be controlled by just her. “On a practical level, I don’t have the energy to do everything on my own now.” A self-confessed control freak who spent years as a puppeteer, manipulating marionettes, she doesn’t even say it through gritted teeth.

Glastonbury Festival 2010 was a particularly rude awakening for Merrill. She describes it as “one of the most difficult moments of last year for me,” a “growing pains moment.” With a new band (until then a tUnE-yArDs live show consisted of Merrill sampling sounds live and looping them through pedals, like Feist) but no tour manager, sound man or help, she found Worthy Farm to be a daunting “medieval city of flags,” which is a pretty accurate description of the place.

By the time it came to recording ‘W H O K I L L’, it was clear that the days of recording an album on a twenty dollar Dictaphone were behind the project, so Merrill willingly (kinda) entered a proper studio for the first time, not alone, but with her bassist Nate Brenner and sound engineer Eli Crews. tUnE-yArDs losing its sense of lo-fi fun, musically, was Merrill’s next – and biggest – fear. But the album she came out with, while nowhere near as distorted and trashy as ‘BiRd-BrAiNs’, hardly sounds like a slick studio production. And that, in many ways, is down to the layers of found sounds and field recordings (the sirens of ‘Gangsta’, the percussive use of children’s climbing frames) that Merrill considers sonic tools that connect tUnE-yArDs to the real world of the listener. “I hope the aesthetic is still the same cut-n-paste, patchwork, do-it-yourself vibe [as on the last record],” she says, “but with more space to breathe. I was conscious not to make it sound like a band in a recording studio a long way away.”

For two albums that couldn’t have been made more differently, ‘BiRd-BrAiNs’ and ‘W H O K I L L’ share a definite spirit. Merrill, with a little help, has made the transition from lower than lo-fi to studio recording artist seem effortless.

“Well,” she ponders, “NO, I wouldn’t say it was difficult. Someone said to me, ‘Y’know, you sort of whine a lot in your interviews,’ and it was true, because I found myself saying, ‘it was a really hard process,’ but the truth is, there’s hard and there’s hard – there’s struggling to get fresh water for your family and there’s making a fricking pop album. But it did feel like hard work, like a job, and my job was to stay true to my vision. I had to adjust to the studio, and Eli was very sensitive to me not wanting to hear a lot of reverb or anything. He could tell what my aesthetic was, so in that sense it was easy.”

“It’s interesting, looking back at all of those things we spoke about last year,” says Merrill, shortly before we take the lift to the pool on the twenty-third floor (a trip that will have her approached by fellow Montreal band No Joy, a member of The Fresh & Onlys and a journalist with a video camera requesting an interview). One dread we failed to discuss last year, though, was that of evil, corporate sponsorship. It almost didn’t seem worth it – Merrill’s songs are too weird to sell things. The guys at BlackBerry didn’t seem to think so. They wanted ‘Fiya’ to flog their latest handset, the Torch 9800, and they got it.

It’s safe to say that Merrill didn’t bite their hand off for her song to appear on their TV commercial, though. It was a decision that she wrestled with then, and still does now, to some degree.

“I was spending a lot of time with a musician friend of mine at the time, and I was like, ‘what do I do?’,” she explains, “because with those things you have to decide within a day or less. I mean, for me and my career it wasn’t going to ruin it if I got judged harshly for it, and it was not going to make my career, but for me it was a really hard choice. And my friend just suggested to me that I could give it all away. You can do good with that money. And I’d never thought of that. I thought, oh that’s selfish, selling a song that means so much to a product that I don’t necessarily believe in.”

Merrill did exactly what her friend suggested – she took the money and dished it out. Some to female drum magazine Tom Tom; some to a rock’n’roll camp for girls in her local area; some to Haiti and Japan relief concerts. She also used a chunk to pay fairly the musicians that play with her and on her album, and BlackBerry’s cash also enabled her to pay Eli Crews to engineer ‘W H O K I L L’, because while pressed, marketed and released via 4AD, it was an album self-funded in its production.

“I wouldn’t say I was pleasantly surprised,” continues Merrill, “but I was surprised at the effect that it had on me. It was like me killing this very purist part of myself, and it sort of felt good to be like, ‘okay, I can’t peg myself as that – I’m going to make questionable decisions, and it’s my job to do what I will.’ But I did always intend to give a large chunk of that money to things that I believe in.

“I thought it would be horrible, and that I’d be damned by it, but a great amount of good has come out of it. And my view is that, there is a corporatisation of everything around us, in case we hadn’t all noticed. Even a festival like this is sponsored by corporations, and it wouldn’t happen without them. But I don’t want people to think that I’m saying, ‘It’s all okay now, it’s always ok to sell your songs to ads.’ I don’t mean that or want to have that influence. I don’t think it’s totally fine and I still question it, and I’m still like, ‘I’m selling BlackBerrys, so what do they support? Who inserts the tiny chip and manufactures them?’ I still want to dissect what I’m supporting, but no one can know that that’s your thought process, they just know that you’ve sold out to BlackBerry.”

Perhaps most unfortunately, ‘Fiya’ now carries different meaning for Merrill. When she hears it now, she says “there’s part of me that thinks, I can’t believe I’ve seen this on TV with a narration behind it.” But she’s right when she says that a lot of good has come from it. The death of her fundamentally purist self is a particular triumph, because as the successfully nutty ‘W H O K I L L’ proves, tUnE-yArDs is too hard on herself.

By Stuart Stubbs

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Originally published in issue 29 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. June 2011.

Photography by TOM COCKRAM

FORGET CONCEPT ALBUMS; THIS IS A CONCEPT BAND

“First he called me a fucking cunt,” blurts Ryan Hendrix, the bearded and bespectacled frontman and guitarist of Oklahoma troupe Colourmusic, who happens to be sitting with little white headphones in his ears like David Lynch’s Gordon from Twin Peaks, so that he can test the sound on our Dictaphone – something that is serious business to these guys. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s get back to the effing cee. “He was trying to hit on me,” the percussion cum bass-toting Brit Nick Turner exclaims in defence. “He thought everyone was hitting on him at the time,” huffs Hendrix, “it was a delusion because he’s British.”

The two are of course discussing the time they first met, back when Turner was an exchange student in English literature and American studies at Oklahoma State University and Hendrix was studying to become a broadcast journalist.

“We met at a party,” Turner continues, “and started talking about Aphex Twin, and I thought, ‘whoa, somebody from Oklahoma likes Aphex Twin’, so automatically we had a bond. Then Ryan came over to Keele University where I was studying, but to cut a long story short, we thought that it would be a good idea to try and do music to colours.”

Hendrix butts in to tell us that initially he didn’t want to write music with Turner. “I thought he was snob,” he states matter-of-factly. “But we started talking about this colour idea, so I told Nick to come over for a couple of months to write. We thought it would sound like Can – we were really into Krautrock – but what we wrote in the end sounded nothing like that.”

What it did result in was a couple of high-energy, psych-driven powerful folk-pop microcosms of the colours ‘Red’ and ‘Yellow’ –their first two EPs that carried an Of Montreal-esque collegiate tone.

Their first ever jam together, Turner reveals was while watching Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi. “It has loads of shots of nature landscapes,” he enlightens us, “and the soundtrack is by Phillip Glass, but we’d put it on mute and try to invent our own really bad soundtrack to it,” he smiles, telling us that they thought it was going to be ambient. “But then we realised that ambient music doesn’t sell!”

“No, that’s not true,” Hendrix is quick to correct. “There’s nothing ambient about anything that we did. We were trying to be cool, but the reality is that we didn’t know how to write songs. So we forced ourselves to write and the demo that we sent out got some good reviews from a little label called Twisted Nerve.”

The pair decided then that it was probably time they got a proper band together and so they recruited Hendrix’s flat mate Cory Suter on drums, who in turn introduced them to Nick Ley, who took up keys and brought in Colin Fleishacker on bass. But a series of disagreements ended in Suter leaving and Ley taking over drumming duty. “We couldn’t work together anymore,” explains Hendrix of Suter’s departure. “We fought all the time, constantly, and he was an amazing guy, but just crazy. He was the kind of guy who would say, ‘I’m the greatest drummer in Stillwater’ and mean it.”

All this, however, was way back in 2005, which begs the question, why has it taken so long for their debut album to get released? “Good question,” Ley finally pipes up. Until now he’s been brooding at the edge of the sofa in silence, broken only occasionally to tease Turner about his English accent. “We like to pretend we’re him when he was a little kid,” grins Fleishacker while Ley and Hendrix mimic a young Turner asking his mummy and daddy for noodles before falling about in fits of giggles. “I get this all day long,”sighs Turner in faux-exasperation.

But getting back to the album, Hendrix justifies that “it’s not for us to say. It’s about working with a good label to promote the band and do the marketing stuff. It’s all about connections and it’s real easy to be taken for a ride. A lot of people like to release records on their own, but I still don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Eventually the group started working with Scott Booker – the man who also manages fellow Okies The Flaming Lips – and they set about recording ‘My ___ is Pink’ in a shop in the business district of Stillwater, OK. “Because it’s downtown, you can make as much noise all night as you like, there’s no-one living there. You could never do that in London, it would be a pain in the arse,” notes Turner, while Ley informs us that they’ve never recorded in a studio. “The best place we had was this carpenters union,” he enthuses. “It was amazing, it was a giant gymnasium with a stage built into it and it had a control room. I think it was built to be a recording studio at some point but had been used for various other things. But we got bought out by some dude who teaches Kung Fu.”

Taking influence from the colour pink for the record, the guys also drew inspiration from Iggy Pop and sex. “We all agree that ‘The Idiot’ was a great record,” Hendrix raves, “because it exposed ugliness, but in a powerful way. We were also really interested in how you think about the tempos and the shape of sex, so there is a lot of undulation in the way that chords are expressed – that was a big influence on us and it still is. We’re working on another record right now and that’s still part of the sound.” Here he attempts to express it to us by making heaving, regurgitating noises. “That’s what it sounds like when we have sex,”laughs Ley, before joining Hendrix in the odd noises.

The idea of this writhing organism is definitely portrayed throughout the LP. The track ‘Dolphins and Unicorns’ is a series of layered, echoing primal yells paired with wah-wahing guitars – representing an animal-esque ecstasy, while ‘The Little Death (In Five Parts)’ is angrier, with seriously scuzzy, Death From Above 1979-styled riffs and almost terrifying cries. The traditional song structures of their EPs have been replaced with a continuously evolving sound that doesn’t stop just because the track changes. It feels like one big audible progression, rather than 14 little ones. And as for the innovative title, well, that’s something that Hendrix describes best.

“We spent quite a lot of time trying to come up with the name,” he begins. “The negative space is all about your interpretation of it. I actually wanted to call it ‘The Man Who Had Nipples’ because the male nipple is our only indication we could have been women, you know what I mean?” Turner informs us that Hendrix originally suggested ‘My Blank is Pink’ as a joke. “See, I never heard it as a joke,” admits Ley. “Anyway,” continues Hendrix, “so, I was all about the male nipple, and everyone said, ‘that’s stupid’. But it’s got male nipples in the photos” – their nipples – “For me, ‘My Nipple is Pink’ is the title.”

“I like the idea of leaving it blank,” adds Turner. “Each person interprets every song they hear, every film they see, everything in their own way. If somebody says to me, ‘oh, I listened to your song and I think it means this’, I’m like, ‘fuck yeah! It didn’t mean that to me when I wrote it, but that’s amazing because you’ve taken it somewhere else.’ That’s probably the best compliment that could happen to your music.”

One thing we’ve only touched the surface of is this idea of colour. Their collections may be themed, but how does it affect their writing process? “We have a vision of what we’re trying to create, sonically,” details Hendrix of their approach to music-making. “We start with an idea of what the record is going to sound like.” Turner clarifies that they try and find a “common ground”, a colour and a way of being creative with music by thinking outside of musical terms. “We don’t sit down and try and write what a colour is,” explains Fleishacker. “We pick a colour and think about what it means to us. Then we come up with key words and go from there by creating those key words musically.”

“It’s really not that difficult,” Hendrix assures us. “I mean, a lot of music producers do this. Asking what instruments we’re going to or not going to use, how we’re going to approach our view towards the songs. It’s just us producing ourselves, basically.”

“It’s not like one of us comes up with lyrics to a song and a few chords that we flesh out,” Fleishacker throws in. “It just doesn’t happen that way.”

And as for the concept, Hendrix puts it down to an old buddy of his who wanted them to change their name to something with the word colour on the end of it and suddenly the idea of writing music based on colour lit a match in his head. “It just makes sense to me as a musician,” he gushes, “how a certain sound has a certain colour to it. But also, certain emotions have a certain colour to them. Take pink, the colour we’re playing around with right now – for us, pink is a very sexual colour. Obviously you can interpret it in different ways, but for us pink represents a very savage form of sexuality.”

Originally, Turner tells us, they wanted to call themselves Colour, but a band in California had already nabbed it. “I like our name,” Hendrix defends, “but I can understand how it doesn’t make sense to people after they hear our kind of ragged music. The word colour has happy, quirky connotations – qualities that we had, I guess, when we first started. But it’s not the kind of band we are now.”

Having come from a fairly musical background collectively, the interesting thing about Hendrix as a frontman is that he’s never been in a band before. “The only public performance I did before I was in the band was when I was running for student council president in Piedmont, Oklahoma, and I played guitar instead of making a speech. I won by a landslide,” he beams, but at the mention of his hometown he faltered. “Piedmont, where I’m from, is in the headlines at the moment,” he starts, “because it just got completely destroyed by a tornado and my childhood home is smashed. It’s true. I’m really depressed right now,” he says to the floor. “I’ve actually been crying all morning thinking about it. I’ve never even seen a tornado – it’s always when I leave that really bad stuff happens.”

Here, Hendrix reveals that in a way to avoid touring he’s thought about another group of people with beards posing as Colourmusic. “In a lot of ways I wouldn’t have a problem with it,” he ponders. “Especially in the States, because it’s so boring. Twenty-three hours of the day you’re not doing anything and then you’re on stage. Part of me would like to bypass that 23 hours and just get to the meat of it.”

For now, however, they’ve got their minds set on the next album, which will be dealing with the colour purple. “We really want it to come out this time next year,” states Fleishacker, but this isn’t something that they intend to do annually. “I don’t know if we’ll be a band that people will want to follow forever,” interjects Hendrix soberingly. “Because when we finish, we’ll want to wipe the slate clean and start over as a band. I don’t know if fans will stick around for that. That’s the reason for the colour concept – we wanted to change colours with the records because it forces us to change what we’re doing.” With this in mind, you might want to hop on the Colourmusic wagon and see them while you still can, but be sure to check it’s not just any old group of men with beards.

By DK Goldstein

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Originally publishing in issue 29 (vol. 3) of Loud And Quiet. June 2011.

Photography by DANNY PAYNE

NO ONE ELSE HAS A NAME LIKE IT

Sat on the grass, outside Leeds’ Leftbank venue, the sounds of gentle acoustic guitars wafting out the doors, it feels like the first day of Summer, or the last day of school, which for guitarist Gwilym Sainsbury it kind of is. This week he’s completed his Art Degree.

There’s a relaxed feeling surrounding the band with the unusual name, as they are about to embark on something new. Preparing to leave Leeds behind for leafy courtyards of Cambridge or to chance their arm in the big leagues of London, their final destination is yet to be confirmed. For now though we settle down to the serious business of the science behind their song writing and why they are definitely not ‘geek chic’.

Affable frontman Joe Newman first met ‘Gwil’ in their first year at Leeds University, before joining up with fellow student Gus Unger-Hamilton on keyboards, with drummer Thom Green completing the line-up. Previously playing under the name FILMS, having flirted briefly with the name Daljit Dhaliwal (after the Al-Jazeera newscaster), they only recently changed their name to ∆, which is what you get when you hold down alt and J on your computer keyboard. It follows a series of mishaps leading to them being mistaken for South Carolina garage band The Films, most recently at local festival Live at Leeds.

Gwil shrugs at me, resigned. “We knew that might be a problem long-term,” he confesses, “but when the Live at Leeds publication came out, they’d taken the bio from The Films and put it on ours. I think we then realised that that could carry on happening.

“We’ve always had a bit of a thing about triangles,” he continues, especially Joe. [A love he pays tribute to in ‘Tessellate’, with the line “triangles are my favourite shape”]. It just happened that I was trying to make a triangle on my computer. You press alt-J on the keyboard and you get a little symbol called a Delta sign, so from now on our band name is that Delta sign, but we refer to ourselves as ‘alt-J’.”

I mention the hours, or at least many minutes I spent, tongue between teeth, trying to get it to appear on my lowly PC. Gwil smiles the slightly patronising grin of the knowledgeable. “Ah, it only works on Macs.”

Setting themselves apart from the prevailing local hardcore/metal scene with their minimal style, ∆ are divided by their differing tastes in music. Where they come together is with a shared passion for Radiohead, former Leeds band The Peppermint Lounge and tastes that mix fine art with the more lowly appeal of TV and Film; naming songs after classic thriller Leon as well as ‘The Gospel of John Hurt’, about the unfortunate chap in Aliens who has a creature burst though his chest.

Of these, the most compelling is the heart-breaking fragile strum and stuttering beats of ‘Matilda’, dedicated to Leon’s other main character. “I’ve been heavily influenced by cinema throughout my life,” explains Joe. “I originally wanted to write all my songs about film and have that novelty, but as I’ve developed I’ve got more self-involved and started writing about break-ups and being beaten up. [Gwil mocks in the background, “Boo-hoo!”] So it’s gone down the more traditional path, but I haven’t retired the idea of doing more film-based music.”

Recently they’ve been busying themselves recording tracks available on their Soundcloud as free downloads, as well as spending time in Universal producer Charlie Andrew’s Shoreditch studios and nearer to home at Subpark Studios. Despite all this, ∆ is still very much a “DIY band” that don’t own any amps and often resort to using Thom’s bongos instead of drum toms on stage, and this enforced minimal approach allows space for the intricate, brooding hip-hop beats of songs like ‘Tessellate’ to flourish, with Joe’s voice veering from a dancing falsetto to a bassy rumble. “We don’t have a structural approach to song writing”, explains Gus.

“We’re a bit cowboyish in that respect,” says Joe. “We’re not qualified songwriters, we’re just cowboys!”

With the band’s odd name also comes an odd approach to photo shoots – they insist on not showing their faces.

“When everything’s on Twitter and Facebook… I think it can be more of a powerful thing to hold something back,” says Gus. “We just don’t want to be looking down a lens, leaning against a building. I don’t want to see my face staring out of some blog. That would be horrible!”

Trawling through reviews, the band’s sound has been compared to everything from Wild Beasts and Anthony Hegarty’s dreamy melancholy to Hot Chip style electro ‘geek-chic’. “That was pretty funny,” says Gwil. “Only two of us wear glasses!”

“Yeah, geeks, I’m a jock!” laughs Joe.

Instead, they’ve coined their own terms – ‘jump-folk’ and ‘trip-folk’ – although, even now they are unsure what it means.

Gwil: “When you’re on a train and people ask, ‘So, you’re in a band. What do you play?’…”

“It avoids saying, ‘well you’ve heard of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, well imagine Thom Yorke and this kind of beat…’” Gus trails off. “It was basically, like, ‘don’t call us a genre,’” he says. “We’ll fuck you up and make up our own.”

By KATE PARKIN

∆ by alt-j

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Originally published in issue 29 (vol 3) of Loud And Quiet. June 2011