Mutations Festival Nov5-9 2024

These trying times continue. But there are many pockets of resilience, and stunning new music is thankfully still being released, despite the lack of almost any live action. For the established bands it’s obviously an issue that careers, livelihoods, and simply their love of performing, have been thwarted and stalled somewhat, but for new bands it is even worse. Take Another Sky, the four-piece London based band led by singer Catrin Vincent. Along with a small number of single and EP releases, they had been gigging, and building up a profile and following. And they had recorded an album. But lockdown came down, and live performance was suddenly shelved. It’s a big deal for bands such as Another Sky. Any band’s debut album is perhaps the most important one they will ever release. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lay down a significant marker, to show that you have the creative juices and the necessary drive and commitment, in order to produce a body of work within the format of an album, from which many more fans can be gained, especially with the concurrent touring that pre-lockdown, invariably happened with its release.

And yet Catrin Vincent feels lucky. She says so several times during the interview, displaying a remarkable level of stoicism, and positivity, within this landscape of turmoil; of overlapping political, social and environmental flavours. Irrespective of global events, perhaps her optimism is justified as the lockdown eases and socially distanced live performance becomes a reality, something which the band seem to be keen to pursue later on this year, with a tour of the UK. Moreover, this resilience seems to have been built upon the trials and tribulations that have hampered her development, as a child, teenager and adult. She has faced all this full on, with I Slept on the Floor being a stunningly honest lyrical portrayal of personally experienced mental health, rejection, sexism, and bullying issues, side-by-side with the sweep of the aforementioned social, political and environmental concerns that she, and all of us face.

Not only that but I Slept on the Floor is a beautifully written, arranged, performed, and produced work that will surely go down as one of the best debut albums of the year, topped off by that arresting voice that has turned many heads, and acted as a strong magnet to the band as a whole. As she has said: “A lot of people think I’m a man… I think people are embarrassed when they initially think it’s one of the guys singing, but I love it. It’s like I’ve got two voices – there’s this soft, whispery voice that can go really high, and then suddenly there’s this angry chest voice. Somewhere along the way, I drew the two voices together.”

You must be delighted with the response to the album so far, I ask Catrin. “We’re really happy. We did not know what to expect, especially when we said what the album was about. I thought a lot of people were going to be like, ‘well, fuck this’. But actually, the response has been pretty nice. It feels like it is quite a cathartic album for people, maybe? Just to hear someone say what has also happened to so many people?”

I Slept on the Floor moves elegantly throughout, from the anthemic love letter to London, ‘Fell in the Love with the City’, to the driving epic ‘Brave Face’, before detouring to the electronically manipulated brittleness of the title track, and the cinematic artiness of ‘Life Was Coming in Through the Blinds’, the gentle guitar and strings of ‘Tree’, and the magnificent ‘Avalanche’. It bristles with passion, and a love of music. It is a generous shaft of much needed light in these gloomy times. And for Catrin, music has long been an escape. “It’s totally therapeutic. You never think about that consciously when you’re creating music. You look back retrospectively, and you look at school and when you’re being rejected, your lunchtimes were spent locking yourself away in the music room. And I’ve spoken to so many musicians who said they did that as a kid. It becomes this escape, it becomes not only a distraction, but a way for you to help you with what you’re going through. The only time people ever listened to me was when I performed in the music assemblies. Usually, I had to shut up, no one cared, but people were forced to listen to me. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, almost. That is your escape.

“One way people can interpret the album, is that I have escaped, and I’ve been able to do music. It is a success story in a way, but the meaning I get from the album is that in some ways you never escape how you grew up, and you’re always second guessing yourself. I was really excited to get to London, but by moving to London I am gentrifying London. This going around in a circle… Have you watched Hypernormalisation? The basic argument is that the world is so vast and complicated you can’t understand anything fully. Everything is smoke and mirrors, stacked upon smoke and mirrors. As soon as I watched that a lot of things, ironically, made sense to me. You can tell yourself one narrative that you escaped from this town, but in some ways it will always stay with me. That feeling of rejection will always stay with me.”

What was this sense of rejection? “I think, me as a person. When you are a kid, you internalise bullying, and you think it’s your fault. And when you learn about the wider world, you learn, ‘OK, women haven’t been traditionally able to do this, this is why I was doing that’. Rejection because I came from a left-wing family, rejection because I spoke about ideas that other people didn’t have. I do remember I spoke out about gay rights, and being shot down. A lot of people found it annoying. A lot of kids said, ‘I don’t care people are gay, but I don’t want to see them being gay in front of me’. I remember that shocking me. Because I hadn’t been allowed to fit in, I started railing against everything. It was the only power I had. And I think I’ve taken that into adult life. And it does feel like the world is stacked against certain types of people. But I do feel that ultimately I want to use the rejection I felt as a kid to understand other people’s rejection, and to empower rejection in that way, because you can use it to have empathy.”

You have been quoted as saying you didn’t realise how much silence plays into society, and how much people are indoctrinated to believe that they shouldn’t talk about anything difficult. How do you feel about that now, in terms of your own development? It feels like you are protecting yourself by being silent, but ultimately you never are. It’s just a sign that you aren’t free. I’ve been thinking about it a lot – what can I say, and what can’t I say. These interviews can be really upsetting because I’ve always dived in, head first, and got myself into trouble, because I believe in no silence. It’s about the nuances in what you are saying and it’s about allowing people to have the chance to be wrong, but to learn from it.

“I never want to do small talk. I always dive in, at the deepest end. I get that from my Mum, she’s a therapist. She gets peoples life’s stories in like 12 seconds. I just want to know who people are, and where they come from, and why they are the way they are, and if I can help. I don’t know if that is healthy or not, but when you are silent you can’t let that stuff eat you alive. I know when I am silent that is when I am the most mentally unwell. So, I always feel like facing the dark things to get through them.”

Throughout I Slept on the Floor, Vincent’s honest, and direct lyrics, whilst shining a therapeutically optimistic light, also contain a streak of dark pessimism. Such as on ‘Avalanche’, a song the band released on seven-inch vinyl, their first ever record, but which was only available at gigs, and is now already a bit of a collector’s item. Despite the punchy, dynamic musicality, there’s no doubting Avalanche’s message, that there is a massive task facing us as we struggle to deal with the seismic changes brought on by Trump, Brexit, and climate change in particular. “That song was written at the end of 2016,” she explains. “I think we are realising that power corrupts, essentially. It’s very slow, and it might not happen in our lifetime and it might be too late if it doesn’t happen in our lifetimes, especially with climate change. But I think hanging on, doing good at all times, is the only way to cope, because the alternative is certain. If you’re always doing stuff hoping for the best, there’s a slim chance that the best might actually happen. But if you’re always in a nihilistic headspace – which I have definitely, been in, especially as a teenager – that is absolute. You are going to get what you think is going to happen, because you are not doing anything to change that.

“I’m trying to come to grips with being able to entertain two opposing thoughts in my head all the time. It does feel especially with climate change, that is the big one. That feels inescapable now, we’re just so far off the mark, it’s just gonna happen, and it’s about lessening the worst outcomes of that. On the other side, I read a book, Freedom Is A Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (the American political activist), and a quote that completely stands out for me is, which I wrote out, and put on my wall – ‘sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible’, I try and tell myself that. Trump and everything that surrounds Trump and what he stands for has been around for years, and it has been ignored because you have people-pleasing Democrats in power, who sweep issues under the rug, and kinda look like they are doing something about it, which is exactly why Trump got in. People didn’t trust the establishment anymore. I think these things had been bubbling under the surface, and had to come to light, and everyone has to be confronted with it, and will continually have to be forced to confront it. I think it was this new year’s where I decided myself that I wanted nihilism to go. I don’t want to be despondent. I don’t want to be apathetic. Nihilism isn’t cool. It was cool for a while, but it’s not cool!”

The mix of deep and meaningful lyrics with a strong musicality, is expertly merged throughout I Slept on the Floor. The title track itself, whilst being about a particularly bleak period in Catrin’s life, has nods to several musical influences within its abstract sounds. “It was originally written as an interlude for our Village Underground show in London last year. I just wanted to write as honestly as possible. I had just got a vocoder that I wanted to play around with. I was very aware of ripping off Imogen Heap, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), but didn’t mind for some reason. This song just came out, these chords came out, and we thought ‘that’s a song!’. I was recording my friend Ellen, on clarinet, and she added in these pads, and I thought ‘this is so Talk Talk!’. And then we’ve always been obsessed with ‘pull-stretch’ Justin Bieber. There’s this Youttube video of one of his songs which is 800 percent slower, that’s what that is,” she laughs, “this software, that Jon Hopkins used on ‘Immunity’, which is where I learned about it. It sounded like a choir on a cassette. I know that sounds like a specific reference, but I run these nights called Bedroom Gigs, and someone was messing around with a choir on cassette, and as soon as we pull-stretched my voice, it was like ‘oh my god, it sounds like something it is not.’ And then when we were finalising the album with the Executive Producer Jolyon Thomas, he put my voice through a synth, put some delays in. I could talk about the production on this song for ages. It was the one song I produced, it was really fun to do.

For a band so young, and relatively inexperienced, I Slept on the Floor is an incredibly mature and sophisticated offering, the result of six years of hard graft, beginning with the time they discovered each other whilst at college in London. “We just never gave up,” says Catrin. “It can be so discouraging when you first start out. It can be so slow. We said from the beginning, ‘one practice a week, every single week, no excuses’. We’re just lucky we’ve got the energy to carry on.

“It wasn’t even trial and error,” she says about how the band’s sound developed. “We never spoke about what we wanted from the band. We just got in the room, jammed, and it worked, and I don’t know what that is. Sometimes I think the fact we never spoke too much about it helped us. We never had the chance to fall out and go ‘I don’t want this to be post rock, I want this to be something new’. We just accepted whatever came out. That’s difficult for some people, that can easily go wrong – you can get this mess of music and it has no direction. I think the fact we stuck with these organic instruments, like Jack (Gilbert), who really cultivated his sound on the electric guitar. And Naomi (le Dune) developed what we think is the sound of the band, with her reverb bass, and Max’s (Doohan) drumming is always going to sound like Max’s drumming.

“I had never been in a band, but everyone else had been in ten million bands. I had never played to a drummer, never had to keep in time,” laughs Catrin. “In the beginning I was awful, Max was staring at me, ‘wow, you’re not in time’. But I quickly learnt and took it as a challenge. At the time we were at uni (Goldsmiths). I think Naomi won a competition at the time for being in the most bands at any one time. She was in 13 at one point. Eventually our band was the only band she was in, and we were all really, really invested. So, we’re lucky. I think with every band along the way people have to make difficult choices. We wouldn’t have found each other any other way. Where I come from people were actively discouraged from doing music. So, it’s like when everyone comes to London to do music you’ve had to fight to get there. You’ve had parents tell you it’s stupid. You’ve had all your peers going ‘well, I’m not going to make any money from it, I don’t want to play in a band anymore’. it’s almost like everyone is escaping to this one place where everyone is just as passionate as each other. It kinda felt like this explosion of passion. It feels like a little family now.”

Luck, as she freely admits, plays a part, in any artist’s endeavors. But so does resilience, fortitude, and hard work. Add to that sheer talent, and Catrin’s candid honesty, and it’s easy to see why that has helped the band gain considerable traction. Even the band’s name has probably helped, an unusually meaningful reference to living life. How did that come about? “I’m often inspired lyrically by poetry, and it was from a time in my life where I was taking direct inspiration, and there was a poem by Emily Dickinson, There Is Another Sky. It was just after Brexit, and we were leaving uni, and we were thinking ‘what are we leaving uni to go into?’ There was a song with me singing about another sky we could be under. And when we were choosing a band name, that one stuck out. It made sense, with everything I was singing about. It feels quite poignant. I’m glad we have a name that means something.

Jeff Hemmings

https://www.underneathanothersky.com/

https://www.facebook.com/UnderneathAnotherSky/

https://twitter.com/anotherskymusic

Dublin is a musical hotspot right now, where bands such as Murder Capital, Thumper and Girl Band have been raising the post-punk bar of late, as they explore existential themes, wrapped up in loud, visceral music that sounds fresh, invigorating, and exciting. Like all the best music, it has come out of nowhere, organically produced and very much its own thing, not in thrall to anything in particular, nor following any fad or looking to win favour. And there is a pleasing earnest maturity about them all, where rock’n’roll is wrapped up in art and deeper meaning, rather than the (albeit also pleasingly) more straight-forward sloganeering of, say, Idles. The Irish have a way of being a little bit more coolly detached, and poetic, rather than intently staring or calling you out, as it were.

Named after the crooning Jonny Fontane character in the first Godfather movie, Godson to Vito Corleone, they added DC (Dublin City) when it was discovered there was an American band called The Fontanes. Somehow, adding DC had made all the difference. They sound like they could be from across the pond, and indeed the Americans have taken them to their heart already, following an early live appearance on the legendary Seattle radio station, KEXP.

“I grew up in Spain, in Madrid, in a family with both Spanish and Irish cultures,” says the rather incongruously named Carlos O’Connell, guitarist with the band. “My Mum was from Dublin, and she had moved to Spain in her 20s, trying to find a job. She met my Dad, a Spanish man called Carlos as well, had kids, brought us up there. In the house there was a mixed upbringing, all the Irish traditions, and all the Spanish ones. I went to school in Spain, but also went to Ireland every year, and I always felt more connected with the Irish. It has a deep appreciation for music, much more than your generic Spanish family. There’s not the kind of value for the arts in Spain in that kind of way, anymore. Music was a thing I did since I was a kid, and I needed to explore the Irish roots. As soon as I turned 18 I left Madrid and went to Dublin. It all worked out, I suppose. I met all the boys, and we started this band.”

I tell him he doesn’t sound Spanish at all, it’s a very Irish tone I’m hearing… “Yeah, I know. I did sound more Spanish when I moved here, – ‘hello, my name is Carlos. Very nice to meet you’” he mimics, Spanish style. “There was always that Spanish twang there. I think it comes out if I drink too much. And it’s strange now when I speak in Spanish; the English vowels have crept into my Spanish-ness. It takes me a few weeks to adapt to the language, when I come over to Spain.

“Because of my accent there is an assumption I am Irish. But as soon as I mention my name there is an assumption there is something wrong. I’ve told the story of my parents meeting in Spain a million times in social circumstances. Every single time I meet someone new I have to give the whole backstory…”

Life is one big accidental gamble, is it not? You are born and raised in Spain, come to Ireland, happen to meet four other similarly music mad guys, form a band, and then you go and win awards and stuff, get nominated for the Mercury, sell out gigs, and enjoy almost universal acclaim for producing loud, passionate and meaningful post-punk sounds.

Carlos O’Connell, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan, Grian Chatten, and Tom Coll met in Dublin while attending the British Institute of Modern Music, initially bonding over a love of poetry (inspired by both beat and Irish poetry they have so far released two sets of poetry). Formed in 2017, the band self-released a number of singles, and ears were quickly pricked, their blend of post-punk, garage rock and a gritty poetic narrative zero-ing in on the sweet spot. Which was unequivocally found when the band’s debut album Dogrel suddenly had all tails a-wagging in excitement and appreciation, upon its release in April of last year. A homage to ‘Doggerel’, the poetry of working class Ireland, the sounds of punk and post punk were both underpinned and broadened to embrace a storytellers lamentful narrative on the part of singer and lyricist Chatten.

For sure they were raging, and sometimes caustic, but the band were also tender and above all, thoughtful. If any comparisons could be made, perhaps those with Joy Division, Gang of Four and The Fall were closest to the mark, alongside contemporaries, such as Shame and Idles. Most of all though, they sounded fresh and exciting.

But the pressure of it all started to take its toll quite quickly it seems. The touring, being away from home for long periods of time, away from friends, family and loved ones, was seriously impacting on their relationships with each other. Eventually, the band demanded they divert some of their energy and time into making new music, to save their collective souls, as it were, and also themselves.

“We didn’t want to tour it (Dogrel) that much. And we also saw bands that are pushed by their teams to tour an album as much as possible, to get as much juice out of it as possible. It seems a lot of bands can be drained creatively like that. You become a performer rather than a songwriter. They are two very different lifestyles, and two very different ways of thinking, I think. If you lose yourself in the performer aspect of things, it can be really difficult to get back into a truly creative space when you can write something that comes from yourself, rather than the recognition you get from the public.”

I understand that there were mounting problems within the band, from the constant touring… “Yes, there was. We didn’t know how to do it at the time. We didn’t get time to ourselves, to process any hardship we were going through in our personal lives. And not giving yourself that time makes you very absent. It builds walls around you. So, we struggled through that a lot and became quite bitter and angry when we were touring. Last year was a very important time for us to be in touch with ourselves. Even though we weren’t dealing with it directly – dealing with the problems – they were there. And at least we were emotionally engaged, something which we hadn’t been for a very long time. It was quite hard to maintain whatever we had in our personal lives before. The year started (2019) with four of us in quite serious relationships, and by the end of the year two of us had broken up with our girlfriends, and the other two people got engaged with their girlfriends. I think that’s the only way it can work. Maybe it’s quite dramatic, but I feel you really have to be so committed in a romantic way, or a spiritual way, outside the band. And if you want to maintain that emotional connection while you are on the road, it requires an absolute commitment. By the end of the year all our lives took a drastic change – two of the girlfriends became fiances, the other two became ex-girlfriends. That’s a lot to deal with when you aren’t around, touring all the time. You don’t know why you are feeling so bad.

“It’s good to have this time off, the lockdown and everything, and look back and realise how detached we were from everything. I know that when we go back on the road we’ll have to do it differently. Now, we’re constantly checking in on each other. I think that’s an important thing. As friends we would have always been there for each other before touring. When we started the band and touring, we became colleagues, and we became each other’s reason for a lack of sleep. If you’re not checking in on each other you can build resentment easily. Writing a new album kept us together. We had that thing at the start which was to be inspired by the person next to you so much, to work on you yourself, and be better in every aspect of your life. That dynamic was lost for a bit. But writing the album kept it alive a few days a week.”

It may have saved the day for the band, but recording that album proved to be a longer than anticipated process. In fact, they ended up recording A Hero’s Death not once, but twice. It didn’t sound right, so it was ditched. How many other bands would do that? It just proved again how passionate and truthful the band are, and want to be. How serious they take their music, in the same way they do their poetry. It is doubtful any poet worth their salt, and in control of the process, would ever publish a work he felt wasn’t right, or finished.

“We went to LA, finished the whole album, got it mixed and everything. LA was quite an interesting time. We allowed ourselves to get sucked into LA, to the point where we ended up playing a show, opening an event of Mexican wrestling and burlesque dancing. A lot of big Mexican wrestlers, and a lot of dwarf wrestlers. It was the craziest thing. The burlesque dancers were naked most of the time, and we were in the middle of all this, playing a cover of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ by Iggy Pop for ten minutes, and playing 16 guitar solos. I was topless and covered in baby oil, and wearing a dog collar, something like that. It got to that extreme, and we got sucked into it. It was fun, but when we left LA and looked back, it was like ‘what the fuck?’

“It just wasn’t our record. It didn’t feel like the band that we are. It lacked immediacy. It lacked excitement. So, we went back to Dan Carey (who produced Dogrel), who has the capacity of seeing the excitement in everything we do and bringing it out in the room. The studio is small, it’s just one room. It was all recorded live (on tape, as was Dogrel), with the amps in the room, a big sound. It’s loud, and it allows you to let loose and perform the way the songs should be performed. The superficial aspect to LA culture seemed to put a lot of pressure on us. Also, we recorded in this legendary studio, and with that there was a lot of pressure. There was a lot of insecurity, ‘are we up to this? This is a place that Jim Morrison recorded, with The Doors, and here we are, five Irish lads, opening for Mexican wrestling matches for no reason…’ It was a confusing time. I’m glad we did it though, we completely saw that we do need to stay close to home to maintain the spirit of the band. And so we went back to Dan Carey’s, which I think is a home to our sound. He was a big part in how we were initially perceived, the way the music cut through in that first record. He breathes music.”

A Hero’s Death is a marked departure from Dogrel. It would have been easy perhaps to continue down the path of short bursts of intense garage-punk. But, for any band with creative urges to burn and build upon, no two albums should ever sound the same. Being a young musician is all about development, experience and learning. And that’s what Fontaines DC have done; incorporated all that newly acquired knowledge into A Hero’s Death. And it is a triumph. I’ll never know what the first version of the album sounded like, but I’m confident that a combination of Carey, tape, and on home territory, was the right decision. It sounds even more fearless than the debut, and yet it is much more nuanced, slow burning, and eclectic set that sees the band reach for their inner Beach Boys, big up the arrangements and the dynamic space, and allow some time for contemplation, intertwined with comic moments, to seep into the overall sonic vista. It’s empathic, and comes across as utterly genuine. On the title track, Chatten sings: ”Never let a clock tell you what you got time for, It only goes around, goes around, goes around”. It’s also political, with the hypnotic ‘A Televised Mind’ recalling a less snarly and savage PiL, whilst droningly documenting the debilitating corporate buzz feed of social media, and those endless, endless screens. As Chatten says It’s clear that Fontaines DC take this music lark very seriously indeed, but with just the right amount of inexperience, youthful exuberance, allied to an experimental, and musically non-orthodox attitude, helping to alleviate any possibility of pretension, pomposity or simple repetition.

“We wanted to change the approach to writing,” says Carlos. “When we wrote the first record we had a really clear approach, every single part had to be absolutely essential and immediate, with no room for building up any sort of emotion, all straight up, in your face: ‘It’s right there, and here’s the lyrics, real loud and wry’. The arrangements weren’t as deep as they are now. We wanted to explore music in a new way. We got very influenced by The Beach Boys in that sense, where they created these entire worlds and universes that take loads of time to get into. There was a lot of ambition there in order to please our creative needs. I’m proud of it, I think we achieved something quite new and exciting, whilst retaining some of the rawness and the immediacy of the first record. It allowed us to develop as songwriters and arrangers, and it sounds more interesting than the first one. I find it more interesting, anyways…

“When it was all recorded we then realised how different the record was, and we knew that in order to engage people from the start, into the new ‘trip’ with the record, you needed to make sure from the get-go, that it had nothing to do with the first record. We didn’t want anyone to put on the needle on the second record for the first time and hear it as a continuation of the first one. ‘I Don’t Belong’ (the album’s opening track) is probably my favourite song on the record. It’s an engaging song and it offers a whole new world that we create on the second record, from the get-go. That’s why it was important to have that as the first song.”

While Dogrel was an all guns blazing affair, the sound of intensity and lurking violence, the boys have calmed down a little, certainly in terms of their need to be heard and validated above the humdrum vacuity of the everyday. They are no longer young men. They are continuing to mature as adults, even though Dogrel does explore themes of isolation and disorientation. “We opened up our first record with that song ‘Big’: ‘My childhood was small, but I’m going to be big’, this massive statement of intent. We wanted to make sure that no one felt that we were still trying to build up on that. With this song and the words ‘I don’t belong to anyone’ we went for that statement of intent instead. It’s kind of like now, ‘I don’t want to be bigger, I actually feel quite lost in this world now. Here is actually how I feel, because of the first record.’

We called the album A Hero’s Death after the track, but not in any relation to what the track means, which sounded like it had a lot more meanings to offer than is presented within the song. The song presents this mantra to oneself, ‘Life isn’t always empty’, this positive attitude. In a way they could be seen as easy keys to a happy life, but there is so much repetition in the lyrics in the sense that the sincerity that is in them you don’t know if Grian is being quite sarcastic when he says all that stuff. And that’s part of the point of it – that attitude is necessary, but it’s not what’s going to fix everything. You know, you can help yourself by having a positive attitude, there’s a lot more to life and you have to accept the dark aspects of it, reconcile yourself with them, and be completely present with them rather than ignoring all the negative aspects. We tried to create that juxtaposition in the song, and musically by changing between the major and the minor, juxtaposing the darkness created, with these doo-wop Beach Boys backing vocals. The way they are arranged they are meant to be quite sinister as well. We just tried to create this sense of unease around the positivity of the lyrics.

“And when we were trying to find a name for the record we felt that name, a hero’s death, outside the context of that song, had a lot more to offer. We find a few meanings in it, but the main one is the idea of perception, and how we didn’t want to write a record in order to please the perception that was created in the public with the first album. So, that idea of a hero dying – it’s not only the idea of killing the person, but killing the perception, of what the public would have about a person that makes them heroic. But there’s also a gag in there about the difficult second album! The second album could be the end of that promising band… In a way we also wanted to take the piss out of ourselves, leave a little space for self-deprecation.

Jeff Hemmings

https://www.fontainesdc.com/

https://www.facebook.com/fontainesband/

https://twitter.com/fontainesdublin

On Thursday 2nd July, a coordinated campaign was launched whereby artists, fans and venues posted on social media photographs and films of their last gig or event with the hashtag #LetTheMusicPlay. On the same day a letter signed by artists, including Ed Sheeran, The Rolling Stones, the Gallagher brothers, Paul McCartney, Rita Ora, Coldplay, Annie Lennox and Sam Smith, warned that the UK could lose its prime spot on the world’s musical stage unless the government committed to supporting businesses and set out a timetable for reopening live music venues. The performers said venues are at risk of mass insolvencies and that hundreds of thousands of jobs could be lost. All these artists started out by playing small, independent grassroots venues. They know the importance of them better than anyone.

The joint letter to the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, said: “Live music has been one of the UK’s biggest social, cultural, and economic successes of the past decade. But, with no end to social distancing in sight or financial support from government yet agreed, the future for concerts and festivals and the hundreds of thousands of people who work in them looks bleak. Until these businesses can operate again, which is likely to be 2021 at the earliest, government support will be crucial to prevent mass insolvencies and the end of this world-leading industry.”

Following Music Venue Trust’s warning of the loss of up to 90% of grassroots music venues if funding measures are not put in place, 560 of their member venues also signed an open letter to the UK Government highlighting the need for an immediate £50 million financial support package and a reduction of VAT on future ticket sales.

In this open letter the venues state that:

“Last year there were more than 175,000 events in our venues that gave people the experiences they love and the artists the opportunities they need. Since 20 March there have been no events.

They argue that if the financial support package and VAT is introduced they would :

“…..prevent the closure of hundreds of Grassroots Music Venues. They are the right thing to do. We are a dynamic, innovative, and inventive sector. We do not need permanent government intervention to exist. We are not asking to become a permanently subsidised drain on the public purse. We do not need the government to step in and tell us how to run our venues. We need government to take two simple steps and leave us to work out how to do the rest. “

Once you add in further issues such as a quarter of professional musicians have not been eligible or able to access the self-employed income support scheme, and a recent and comprehensive survey conducted by MVT concluded that well below half of the British public felt confident and safe in going to live gigs at the moment. the situation can only be painted at bleak.

In the UK it is estimated that 210,000 jobs are at risk, and that venues, concerts, festivals and production companies added £4.5bn to the economy in 2019. COVID-19 and lockdown has had a huge and indeed often profound effect on all of us, but not as many,of any sector has been hit quite so hard as live entertainment and hospitality. As we view the future with our crystal balls, the outlook looks very shaky and uncertain, with predictions of a second wave and localised shutdowns a distinct possibility. But, in times of strife, resilience and creativity has a way of finding its feet, looking for ways to move forward and embrace the possibilities that exist in particular via the online world. Brightonsfinest asked some of those intimately involved with venues and promotions, to offer their perspective. All are at one in saying Government support is absolutely necessary for many venues to survive.

Lex Hollingworth, Managing Director, Komedia

Komedia has been at the forefront of comedy, music and theatre ever since it first opened its doors back in 1994 , at the site of what is now Latest Musicbar. Komedia programme hundreds of events every year, and has carved out a reputation as an artist-friendly operation, that is both a receiving house for outside promoters, and an in-house programmer. Lex Hollingworth has been with Komedia for 16 years, and along with Paul Musslewhite, run the venue as co-Managing Directors.

I’m not going to deny it, but it’s incredibly hard. We’re an independent, unfunded venue, which started off as a family, touring theatre company that has evolved into a multi-format arts space.

Since 17th March we’ve had to close our doors, and there is little chance in the near future of re-opening. Pretty much our entire team has been furloughed, and generally there is a big cloud of uncertainty, hanging over our venue, venues in general, our staff, and the performing arts generally.

We can’t open for any events with customers, so the first thing we did was try and access as much government funding as possible – the furlough scheme, rates relief, etc – which is massively appreciated, but that only goes so far. That was step one, get all that in place. We also managed to get some Arts Council funding to support our children’s programme – we’re currently running a live streamed version of our regular children’s club, Sunday Club. It’s monthly on Youtube and is completely free. That is one really nice thing that has come out of all this.

We’ve put a lot of effort into the streaming. We wanted to offer something to the community, and we needed to get out there and start doing that as best as we could. Our sister company, Komedia Ents, has been working to stream our in-house shows, mainly the comedy, which is easiest to convert, and one of the things we are best known for. We’ve managed to cobble together a bit of a programme, which has been hard work, but incredibly fulfilling.

And we’re trying to engage with all our local venues, colleagues, and the industry in general. There’s a lot of talk about proposed outdoor events, probably towards the end of the summer, a link up between local venues, suppliers and performers to try and potentially get something safe operating.. I think that would be such a great thing to be able to deliver for everyone. We’re used to producing, so we’ve kept in that mode the best we can, and keep ourselves above water.

For the small to medium sized venues, the future looks incredibly uncertain, and some form of additional support is desperately needed to get these venues through. Opening in any limited capacity with social distancing will be pretty much impossible. Venues need 60-70 percent ticket sales in order to break even a lot of time. The social distancing rules will reduce capacity to 10, or if we’re lucky, 20 percent. It’s just not feasible. The government will need to do something, and I am praying that they do something for the arts, something extra. At the moment it looks like we are facing a bit of cliff edge in October, which is really scary. Until we can open at least close to full capacity there’s little hope of running effectively.

Out of adversity, creativity flourishes. If we can get through this I’m sure we’ll have a wave of immense creativity coming through.

Chris Lowe General Manager, FORM

FORM is a new music and arts events collaboration between Rockfeedback, an independent promotions company, and Brighton based promoters and event producers One Inch Badge, who manage the bookings at Brighton’s newest venue, Chalk. They produce and stage in excess of 600 shows every year in the UK.

Initially One Inch Badge used to promote solely out of Brighton, and over time we have grown into other regions. We want to position ourselves as a national touring option for artists. Just before COVID happened, we were about eight or nine weeks into the project. Such a shame that things were starting to move, starting to click, and then we all had to stop, and shut the doors. But, it’s good, we’re still doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes.

Our last gig was Jon Hopkins at the Dome on 12th March, which was a special night to finish. From that point onwards we had a mass scramble for gigs in April and May to move to the end of this year. And now we are in the position where everything that was moved into that window is being moved to 2021. The expectation is that it’s very unlikely for any shows to happen this year, sadly. There doesn’t seem to be any clarification for our industry at all, when we are going to get back up and running.

We’re looking at various different options. You’ve got the situation next year where festivals are already booked up, and some artists have albums due next year, but no festival slots, so we might have a lot more touring going on next year. That’s one positive out of it.

It’s very tough on venues. We operate out of Chalk, a venue we look after and manage directly. All venues across the country are struggling and it’s really sad to see.

There’s so many great people behind the scenes. The Music Venues Trust has been great. Everyone knows the situation we are in, in this industry. We’re all calling for support. It’s not just the grassroots venues, it’s the big venues as well. . It’s really really difficult. There’s no support package in place. They can say we can open up theatres and venues, but it’s not possible for live performance, music, or any kind of noise. As somebody said, it’s like opening Clark’s without any shoes. And if the furlough scheme finishes, and there is no income being generated and there’s rent to pay, and all the rest of it, there’s just going to be no venues. And all the gigs that we want to happen, won’t have homes.

But, there’s so many campaigns, and so much pressure for the government to do at least something, I’m sure they will. The music industry is such a big part of everything here in the UK, and the amount of money it generates across the country is astronomical. So, fingers crossed they do.

For the moment Chalk is ok. Looking at the diary there is a lot of exciting stuff booked in for next year. It’s a new venue that we built in the city, with a lot of investment. We were looking forward to The Great Escape to showcase it to the industry. We’ve had some really good shows in there like Michael Kiwanuka and Snow Patrol, and it was really exciting. It was starting to tick over. All the feedback we got was that it was much needed in the city.

Personally, I’m OK. We have these weeks where you stay optimistic and positive. It’s a great industry to work in, and we’re all creative people and all excited for it. I’m personally not a fan of the drive-in thing that everyone seems to be doing at the moment. I don’t want to go to a gig in a car… I guess people are wanting to experiment, with all these ideas being thrown around, but it’s not one for me.

Anna Moulson, Director, Melting Vinyl

Anna has been promoting music in Brighton and beyond for over 20 years now. She’s worked with almost everyone you can think off, from The Great Escape to the Brighton Festival, and has been responsible for curating and programming many events and mini-festivals, as well as managing the music and events programme of St. George’s Church for over a decade.

I’m looking into streaming at the moment, looking for camera and sound crews, and programme myself a few locally profiled artists up at St. George’s Church.

I’m part of this Epic Group (The Brighton Event Producers Committee – a central hub for the Brighton events industry to share resources, best practice and plan for a better future., which includes everyone on the production and technical side), that includes the likes of Ooosh, Electric Star, and C3, and they are looking to get a license up at Black Rock, and programming the whole of August, with other partners including myself and Lout Promotions. We’ll see how that goes.

The Rosehill Pub are doing streams. They’ve got a little simple set up there, and I’ve got one or two things booked in there. One is a local band called Hanya, in September, which is hopefully going ahead. And there are other artists that fall between the gap of being touring artists, and artists that aren’t represented, but who are really interesting, creatively. Touring artists are looking to move to the spring of next year. They just want to return when everything is back to normal. But back to normal may not ever happen. Or it might be 2022. March of next year seems to be the month when agents and artists think everything will change. But they don’t want to adapt, which is really disappointing, because I think they should go online, stream, do a virtual tour. A band can, if they live together at the moment, and go into the venues. It’s legal to do that. Artists could go to a city, and perform, and people will have that attachment to their own city, and watch it. Especially the sold out ones where people already have tickets. But many venues aren’t set up for streaming, and they are fire fighting for their lives, and artists just haven’t got their heads around it. Maybe next year there will be that kind of formula.

People like Dice and See Tickets are developing platforms and aligning themselves with certain platforms, to have a platform for the promoter to tap into. The technology is there in regionalised streams,with unique codes.

I do think we need to start re-modelling the industry. We all have our own brands – the artists, the venues, the promoters – and we just need to keep out there. It’s like a memory muscle, isn’t it? People will get out of the habit of tapping into music. I worry about the Autumn, this vastness of nothingness. Some artists are doing too many streams, and then there are others who are doing nothing. They are all waiting for this miracle to happen, and we all come back to how things were.

Initially lockdown felt like an extended pyjama party, and I’ve got an allotment. I’m so used to building up to something, and making my own decisions, and I’ve had to put my cap out to people and say ‘I’m not going to be able to survive unless you give me money’, and I found that very difficult. But it went really well in the end, and we raised eight grand. We had to go through the history of Melting Vinyl, and remind people of the work we have done. It was a chance to reflect on that, and the body of work I have done, how much promoting and unique events we’ve been involved with, associations with The Great Escape, and the Brighton Festival, and the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne. I did think by now I should be retired!

Andrew Comden

For 12 years now, Andrew Comden has been Chief Executive of both Brighton Dome and Brighton Festival, organisations that deliver across the arts spectrum. Along with Brighton Fringe Festival, the month of May was especially tough.

May was really weird, because for 12 years now, from dawn to midnight basically, I’ve been in a theatre, or seeing a show outside, doing something like 70, 80, sometimes up to 100 shows across the three weeks. At the same time there’s nothing like having an organisation of 168 permanent staff, and several hundred causals to focus your mind when an existential crisis threatens. So, I’ve been very concentrated on how we steer through and protect as many people’s jobs as we can, and also protect the livelihoods of freelancers and other contractors we work with.

I have spent a lot of time looking at various people’s work online which has been great, because when we are in delivery mode we don’t have the time to do that always. But it has also been a reminder that there is only one way to experience the arts, and there isn’t much to beat sitting with a group of people and experiencing it together. I have really missed that, but at the same time it’s made me and others value that even more.

The Brighton Festival events in May went really well. We purposefully didn’t try and recreate the festival online. We wanted to try and engage with audiences but also play with the form and experiment. We wanted to see which things engaged people and how people could participate rather than just watch a streamed event, online. The Guest Director Lemn Sissay (who will be back next year to fulfil his role) did a live event, which had more people than would otherwise attended. There is no substitute for the festival itself, but I think it has taught us a lot about how some of our events can be more accessible in future.

We have started thinking much longer term, and try and think of the ways we can make a positive contribution in the meantime if we are not able to function as we have always done. I really hope we can get back to large scale performance as soon as possible. But, if we can’t, then there are lots of things we can do. Being a festival, as well as a venue, as well as having the Music Services under our umbrella, we have lots of different ways of engaging with people. So, we are currently teaching over 3000 people a week, children and young people, online. We think that can grow. There’s a virtual music centre running every Saturday, which is engaging not only the kids, but families, too. And as the lockdown eases we will be able to do more smaller scale live events. We feel the appetite for live performance isn’t going away, and our job is to find the ways in which we can deliver it, and not simply be tied to a model that relies on 1600-1800 people coming together in a room. We’re determind that the festival in 2021 goes ahead on whatever basis it can.

We are a 5G test bed. The Dome is equipped with 5G, and with Digital Catapult we are exploring that, bringing artists and technologists together, I’m convinced 5G has a huge amount to offer, particularly in music. One of the big problems with doing anything online in the live context, is the latency. It’s just too great for musicians to cope with. As soon as you get rid of that with 5G you can have real-time collaboration, and across continents if you want.

There are a huge number of us across the city, colleagues who are really hurting, and particularly for venues or organisations who have no regular funding, the cliff-edge is particularly steep and massive. I think it’s everyone’s duty, particularly those of us who are funded, and have a little bit of a safety net, to advocate for support right across the sector, and not just for ourselves. It is important that we see the whole city as an ecology, and we don’t just end up with a few funded organsiations and everyone else goes to the wall. But even funded organisations have a cliff edge, and its steep. 67-70 percent of our income is commercially generated through ticket sales and bar sales primarily. We really do need to rapidly develop a plan for what comes next. And those plans will need support in the context of the whole city’s recovery, I think. For me, it’s about what does this city do to recover when its whole economy functions on visitors, and events.

Corn Exchange is due to be finished next year. We know it will have a huge amount to offer for the city. It’s just a matter of timing, and how affected it will be by physical distancing. It will have 500 seated capacity and a larger standing capacity. The studio theatre will have almost 250 seats. Both of those places coming back on board is something we are excited about, but also the city has been craving for a while. We’ve been missing them. That project has been able to continue despite lockdown, and the contractors have made really good headway.

Toni Coe

Toni does the bookings for the Green Door Store and is actively involved in Save Our Venues, the campaigning arm of the Music Venues Trust

We’ve been closed since mid March. I’ve been doing a bit of campaigning, sharing content from the saveourvenues website, and try and tell everybody what we’ve doing. But, we’ve been closed, everyone has been furloughed.

The Government has said that everyone can be open from the 4^th July with restrictions, but we can’t have any live performance which just completely rules us out because we were never a venue that was open when we didn’t have something on. We don’t have an audience that would be willing to come to us if we were just a bar. We very much agree with the Music Venues Trust that we should be looking at a relief package from the government to stay closed until October, and if we can safely implement social distancing, and we know more about sterilising equipment and how often we need to do that. At the moment we don’t really know anything, and there still isn’t any guidance from the government. It seems irresponsible to open not knowing how we can make it safe for the public. Our license depends upon keeping the public safe, and none of us can say we can do that yet.

I don’t think the Government are listening. They are focussed on getting the economy back open without there being any real plan in place at the risk of people’s health and at the risk of many people’s licenses. I don’t know if they will listen to us but I think it’s pretty outrageous they give so much money to Wetherspoons to protect their 750 pubs or whatever, when there are 850 plus venues that need less support than they have already handed over to Wetherspoons. I’m a bit dumbfounded by it all, I can’t understand the logic at all.

It’s not just performers and venues, it’s the community that use these spaces to socialise and to meet like-minded people. We fulfil a lot of social objectives and we are leaving all those people isolated at home, a lot of people who don’t have access to computers or the internet. We’ve been undervalued historically.

I’ve been working the last four months as Campaigns Co-ordinator for Save Our Venues, working with the Music Venues Trust. And we’ve just put on a massive Scottish festival with some huge artists, including Fran Healy, KT Tunstall, Fatherson, Wet Wet Wet, Hue & Cry, X-Certs. Honeyblood, loads of cool names, and we sold tickets for only £5. It was an experiment, and made around £10,000. But that money was supposed to be divided between 60 venues in Scotland. It was nothing. It was an interesting experiment to see what streaming fatigue was like at the moment, and to see whether people were willing to buy tickets. I don’t think there is a lot of money to be made in live music streaming. It was good to do, but it just proves to me that nothing can replicate the live experience.

I think live streaming is great. But, it’s not representative of what we do as venues. There is so much content online, I just don’t know how long we can expect people to stare at their laptops. We want to encourage people to get out and socialise.

Sally Oakenfold

Sally runs the Hope & Ruin, owned by the Laines Company, one of the most iconic of Brighton venues, with a long history of putting on gigs. It is where the likes of The Strokes and Adele were able to perform when relatively unknown.

Because the Hope & Ruin is a Laines pub, we aren’t the rental and rates payers, so we’re not responsible for any of that outlay. From the Laines perspective, the Hope & Ruin isn’t going to die. However, everything is postponed, rescheduled, cancelled, up in the air. The calendar for July and August is empty, and there’s a few shows pencilled in for the Autumn, but I don’t know if they will be able to happen until we get more clarity form the Government.

We’re involved in the Save Our Venues campaign, and we’re asking the Government now for three months of support so that we don’t have to open, but maybe in October if that is an option (if live music is allowed with a socially distanced audience) I’ve spoken to all the promoters in Brighton, and they don’t want to do shows, and bands don’t want to do shows, and touring artists won’t be able to do shows under those restrictions. It won’t be cost effective, and it will be just rubbish.

We did get an Arts Council grant, so that when we can re-open safely, we’ll be able to put some sort of local events to support the community of DIY promoters, and local bands.

We’ve got a few people who are putting on some streaming events on our behalf, but it’s too costly for us to set up. We’re about live music in the venue. I haven’t actually had many people want to perform in our venue to an audience at home. I don’t think they are comfortable with the safety angle yet. And we would have to unfurlough staff, which we don’t want to do. I don’t know if any of the engineers would be interested either. So, at the moment we’re not going down that route.

I think it’s a really positive thing to stay shut until we can actually do what we do, properly. And if we have the support to actually do that, I think that’s actually the best way to go, rather than risk safety, and doing things badly. A lot of people don’t want to go back to shows yet, not until it can be done in the way they enjoy seeing shows in small venues like us. If we can stay shut and then come back when it’s safe to do so then I think that’s without doubt the best way forward. I think that’s a positive way forward.

Before lockdown we had so many sold out shows, more than we’ve ever had, and some really good ones. There are so many Brighton bands that are right on the cusp, breaking into the big time, bands like Penelope Isles, Squid, Fur and Gender Roles, who I love. All of this just seems so sad. I was supposed to be going to the End of the Road festival, which I do every year. I miss putting on shows. I miss the excitement of making things happen, and having load of people coming and enjoying themselves in the venue. Not being able to do that, sucks

Jeff Hemmings

musicvenuetrust.com/

saveourvenues.co.uk/

It’s looking grim out there, like the veritable Ghost Town that The Specials so eloquently put it back in 1981 (albeit in response to the spate of riots at the time and rising unemployment). In terms of live music, it is grim. Beyond grim. Suddenly, after decades of uninterrupted live rock’n’roll, there is none to be had. Literally zero. Venues have shut their doors to live music, and as I write this the 50th anniversary of Glastonbury Festival is supposed to be happening. No festivals will be taking place for the foreseeable future. And while pubs are tentatively opening their doors, there will be no live music (the act of singing itself is deemed dangerous to other people’s health…) and probably not even piped music, as it is being guided that people need to be able to talk in normal tones and volume, rather than having to shout to get their point across.

God, it’s bad. There are no two ways about it. And for musicians, those who main raison d’etre is to perform in front of an audience, it’s nothing short of disastrous.

Resilience, however, comes in many different forms. And for Dream Wife, it currently means spending more time cooking and gardening, and doing the sort of things you meant to get around to doing pre-lockdown “Me and Alice are in the house together in South East London, and Rakel is in Reykjavik, says Bella, of the current whereabouts of Dream Wife. “It’s a tremendously unsettling time, especially with getting the government updates,” she says. “That’s very strange, and very unclear, and ugghh, yeah…. But, in terms of day-to-day life it’s pretty nice in the house, in this routine of having house meals every night. Basically, we’ve been cooking, eating, crying, reading, gardening, dancing, walking in the woods, biting nails while watching the news, making music, yoga, meditation, having meetings, lying really still for a long time, watching TV, DIY, tattoos, knitting, doing interviews about the album, watching the plants grow, drawing, baths, cleaning, worrying and so on.”

Alice Go, Bella Podpadec and Rakel Mjöll released their self-titled debut in 2018, earning support slots with the likes of Garbage, Sleigh Bells and The Kills, securing syncs in shows like Orange is The New Black, all the while using their platform to lift up other womxn (as they like to term women in general, including those of a gender fluid aspect) and non-binary creatives with empowering messages and their “girls to the front” ethos. Now, in the midst of lockdown and no live music, the band’s second album So When You Gonna… is out, dealing with topics such as abortion, miscarriage, and gender equality, and produced entirely by a non-male team of producer and mixer Marta Salogni, engineer Grace Banks and mastering engineer Heba Kadry. Like their debut album, it’s full of energy and spice. And in line with the album title’s meaning: “It’s an invitation, a challenge, a call to action.”

From the explosive cartoon-like energy of ‘Sports!’ along with its sister-in-arms title track, through to the sparser drive of ‘Hasta La Vista’ and coiled sprung-punk of ‘Homesick’, through to the David Byrne-inspired vocal delivery of ‘Validation’, and the gentler meanderings of ‘Temporary’, and electro-pop foundation of ‘Old Flame’, the album positively reeks of the fun-filled DIY approach that they have wholeheartedly embraced since forming whilst all at Brighton University in 2016. It’s just a shame that we can’t see them doing this live for the time being, although their UK tour is now expected to happen next spring. All we can do is keep our fingers and toes crossed and do what we think are the responsible actions. It’s so painfully obvious to even bring the subject up, but inevitably the question is popped: As a band it must be incredibly frustrating to not play shows… “As a band that likes to play live, it is obviously frustrating,” says Bella, stating the all-too-obvious, whilst hysterically cackling for effect. “What can I say!?

“Obviously, as a band who essentially built their career off playing live, we’ve always centered that as part of the experience of being in a band, and the importance of people coming together in a physical space. 2020, in all of our minds, was when we were going to be touring constantly. It’s been a very fast change of pace and perspective. I think the mental journey in accepting that that’s not going to be the way for now, is a difficult thing.”

Have you got any plans in terms of performance? Is it even possible for you in the online world? “We’re working on some ideas for some live performances that is semi-live, layering different people’s parts. It’s very much figuring out how to do things differently. A band that is a rock band, it’s about that full experience. It’s very hard to do the stripped back things that are appropriate for this time.”

We do have the album, thankfully. And equally thankfully, new music hasn’t suddenly disappeared. Since lockdown there has been a tremendously creative and invigorating outpouring of new music released, from all quarters. If nothing else, lockdown is affording greater opportunities for people to dive into a new release. Like Dream Wife’s new album.

“I think that in times of isolation and dislocation, music is a tool for bringing people together and not feeling alone,” says Bella. “I guess it’s hoping for finding ways to do things differently, and work with the situation. I really do think that limitations can be really interesting in breeding creativity. Everyone has to be creative in how they go about these things. And it’s such a constantly shifting situation as well, it feels like you are always trying to get to grips with it all.

“In terms of adversity people really need music,” continues Bella, “and I think sticking with the original release date feels really important in terms of being able to provide that. There was definitely a conversation about moving the date, and obviously we’re not going to be able to do the touring that was intended around that. There were tour dates around October this year, but it feels inappropriate, and disrespectful even, to be even thinking about touring. It feels that for the live aspect of the music industry, it’s such a full stop. With so many venues are under threat, it’s like who even knows where people will be playing when live shows come back?”

After performing over 200 shows in 2018, Dream Wife took the pedal off the gas in 2019 to concentrate on the all-important second album, the so-called sophomore album. When a band releases its first album, they’ve got all the material they’ve been working on for years to draw from and all the energy of youth behind them. To make a second album that’s any good, they need to start writing new material and be able to handle the stresses of being in a band full-time. Was there a different approach to the making of So When You Gonna…? “Oh yeah! The whole process was completely different. The first album was written over a much longer period, and actually largely written during shows. We would have an idea, try something out, and workshop it in this live environment. At the start of last year when we had finished touring the debut album, we did all these little trips away to write songs, and it was much more focussed, and getting into a zone, really working through something and digging into it.

“Just doing the first album we understood stuff about pre-production, and we worked on that, talking about structure and sounds. In the studio, with the first album, we recorded everything within the space of a week, on tape, whilst we also had a bunch of live shows on the go. They were incredibly long days, incredibly busy. With the second album, to be able to spend the time to make sure something was right, was good. And with the tape (analogue tape) you would practice something 20 times, your hands would be swollen. We worked with a producer, Marta Salongi who is the most incredible person – so intuitive, so technically proficient, so humorous, so emotionally engaged in everything we were trying to do, and working with someone so dynamic and creative, that was also pushing you to the point where you were in the zone. Not pushing you too hard, but helping you to find a place where everything is as natural and comfortable as it can be.”

“‘Sports!’ is a really fun, silly song, really high energy. We wrote that at my parent’s house. All of my siblings are massively sporty. Two of them have played international rugby, one of them is a black belt in karate, and then there is me over here, this kind of arty weirdo. So, we were in that environment, surrounded by all of those things. The song is acknowledging the ‘silliness’ of sports, and the kind of ridiculousness of it, and we’re drawing parallels between that and other things, expanding the idea of what sports can be, and where you can get those things which you can get from sports. Playing sports is great, if that’s for you, but there are so many other ways to be physical, to be with your body. For us, more often than not, it’s the rock show. Rock’n’roll is an extreme sport and we’re a team.”

I can hear the musical ghost of Prince here and there. Like on the Prince-like title of ‘U do U’ and the haunting album closer ‘After the Rain’. “We spoke a lot about Prince during writing! ‘U do U’ is about following your own path, the heartache of not being able to be truly present for loved ones while touring and all the other places you can pour love. And ‘After the Rain’ is an exploration of the thought processes following abortion. It’s a look at personal response, and social response. It questions the existing narratives surrounding abortion and body autonomy more generally.” 

It looks like it was important to have an all-female production team. “We did a bunch of producer dates with different people, and it happened in a quite natural way. Marta felt unquestionably like the right person to work with. But it also felt really important to support women in the industry. There are still crazy statistics like less than five percent of albums produced last year were produced by women. It’s shocking that is still the case. To work with women who are powerful and acclaimed in their field, it’s good for everyone.” Indeed, the subject of empowerment is very close to Dream Wife’s bosom, as epitomised by their excellent podcast series which sharply focusses on those developing their creative impulses, each episode a one-to-one interview with a different creative person, connected with Dream Wife, about how exactly they managed to start, develop, and hone their craft. Bella, Alice and Rakel take it in turns to interview friends, collaborators and people who inspire them across multiple creative fields. Having always been outspoken about holding up other woman and non-binary people in the arts and creative industries, the band have – as they say on the track ‘Sports!’ -“put their money where their mouth is” with this both informative and engagingly conversational series. What would you call the opposite of gate-keeping?” reflects Bella. “Facilitator? Enabler? It’s all about opening the gates.”

It’s this DIY, no-nonsense, direct action approach that has informed the band ever since they devised the band as an art project whilst at Brighton University. Brighton is where it all took shape, including meeting their manager, Tim, and releasing their first EP on his fledgling, incubator label, Cannibal Hymns. “We played a lot of live shows before ever releasing any music. One of these shows happened to be a very last-minute booking to support Karin Park and the now closed Bleach venue in Brighton, which was, at the time just across the road from where Rakel and I lived. Tim was running the venue at the time. Despite a promoter fuck up and literally five people showing up to the show, we gave it our all and developed a sweet camaraderie with Tim. It wasn’t until we were setting ourselves up to self-release our first EP that Cannibal Hymns stepped in at the last minute to release it. We started working closely with Tim from this point and developed deep mutual trust and respect.

“Yes, Brighton holds a very sweet important part of our hearts. We formed Dream Wife while studying various art subjects at the university. Honestly, the band was formed around a desire to travel; specifically to visit friends in Canada. It was kind of a joke but ended up being incorporated into an art piece and our first show was an art show on the uni campus. While I wouldn’t ever have described this project as a ‘fake band’ it did initially have a singular purpose of getting us to Canada and it wasn’t until we did that tour and came back that we realised we enjoyed making music together so much it would be a shame to let things end.

Dream Wife have just announced that all proceeds from digital Bandcamp pre-orders of So When You Gonna… will be donated to Black Minds Matter and Gendered Intelligence. Black Minds Matter connects Black individuals and families with professional and mental health services across the U.K., and Gendered Intelligence aims to increase understandings of gender diversity, working with the trans community and those who impact on trans lives, with a focus on supporting young trans people aged 8-25.

Jeff Hemmings

https://dreamwife.co/

Sports Team are the rising indie stars, a fun-filled guitar band, who romantise about Middle England, who like to sing about fishing, pubs, motorways, and the everyday in our lives, and who are at once dismissive of some of their fellow musicians, whilst being fully paid up members of the I Love Music club. Coming up on the back of word of mouth live hype, the six-piece band (made up of singer Alex Rice, guitarist and songwriter Rob Knaggs, drummer Al Greenwood, keyboardist Ben Mack, guitarist Henry Young and Oli Dewdney on bass) released their first EP, Winter Nets, just a couple of years back, the cover of which features a mock tudor house, sitting behind a flowering front garden. It is decidely a suburban setting. And it set the template for what was to come after; fleet of foot, and energetic indie music, the band consistently setting themselves apart from the acts they came up playing with, always pulling out the stops on the live stage. Although according to Alex it was tough at the beginning, with guitar music seen out of favour with many. “When we did our first gigs, our mates didn’t want to come and see guitar music. You’d have to drag them down and buy every single one of them a drink. You’d have this audience that was basically not interested, so it was a case of, ‘Ok, tell a few jokes, have some bizarre gimmicks, really go for it.’”

There’s no doubt there is some amazing guitar orientated bands out there, flying the flag, as it were, but doing it utterly on their own terms, organically. The flamboyant and charismatic frontman loves his guitar music, is obsessed by it even. And he makes no apology about that. “Shame, Working Men’s Club,” reeling off a couple of acts he really likes. “Sorry’s album is amazing. We’ve never been the people that needed convincing. We’ve always liked that sort of thing. We’ll listen to Pavement B-sides… I do think guitar music has a problem, where it’s always quite keen to pat itself on the back. ‘Ah, brilliant’. I remember when we did the Scala, which is just a bit bigger than a pub, and people were suddenly saying, ‘Indie is back!’ ‘Really!?. This is 600 of our mates’. It’s not troubling the singles charts, these new bands aren’t playing stadiums. I do think there are some incredible, absolutely unbelievable bands, but it’s nowhere where it should be now. It should be really permeating the national consciousness. It should be what your parents know. ‘Do you know Fontaines DC, Or Sorry’. ‘No…’

“We’d be the weird kids,” says Aex, “sitting around listening to Pavement all night, rather than a house playlist or something. It’s not cool, guitar music. We’re very aware of that. I think that’s what we all bonded over, this love of it. We’re not musicians, although maybe we are now. It’s always been a big part of the appeal, the kids who may have hanging on the wall, ‘my first Fender’, that sort of thing. You might have taught yourself AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’, like a YouTube tutorial, that sort of thing, when you’re 16. And then just left it.

However, a strong underlying belief, allied to a series of cracking singles and eps, all self-released, got tongues a-wagging, swiftly cementing the band as one to watch. Their debut album Deep Down Happy looks set to deliver on all the promise that first came to light with that exquisite tale of vivid mundanity, ‘Winter Nets’. It’s 12 tracks add up to a savagely satirical yet sympathetic survey of contemporary society. It’s also about being young, the hopes, dreams and fears of young Brits. “I don’t think we were conscious of doing it but the album maps the journey of moving in together in Harlesden, moving back to home towns to sleep on floors for 18 months, then coming back to London, weighing up whether being in a band with your mates, being young in London is still the best thing in the world. I think it probably is.”

“You can always go to London.” That phrase occurs both at the beginning and at the end of Deep Down Happy, a record that alternately celebrates and excoriates the banality and mundanity of suburban life. Everyone in the band has experienced it, and sought an escape route. First in Cambridge, where they met at university, and then in London. They have, despite their educational credentials, become synonymous with some kind of authenticity, stemming from their organic-DIY background, their passion, and indeed calling out others who they see as being inauthentic.

And the love of London manifests itself in all sorts of ways. Like on ‘Fishing’ for instance, which came about due to Alex and Rob’s love of long walks, exploring London and it’s incredible diversity of life and culture, in this case the city’s canal system. “Me and Rob are really into walking. Like a lot of kids, I grew up in towns, rather than cities. When you get to London, there’s a sense of escapism to it. All we did for the first week was pick a direction and walk, as far as we could go. We walked from central London to St. Albans on the first weekend; 20 miles. We came back with bleeding feet. Even before we all moved to Harlesden, me, Rob and Ollie were in Queens Park, just off the Harrow Road. There’s the canal system – Regents Canal, Little Venice, Camden – you can walk all the way through London. I’m sure it was a dead river, basically. But there were all these commuters coming back from work who would fish in it. It always seemed like this bizarre, aimless thing to do, fishing for nothing.

“I think we are more conscious of writing for live than anything else,” he says. “You release an album, upload it, Spotify it, it’s very abstract, until you are playing it to a crowd, and the crowd are singing it back to you, and the moments when they go nuts. ‘Fishing’ is like that, people just rolling over themselves, when the chorus kicks in. I remember, when were doing that in the studio, consciously putting it together that way. ‘Alright, this will kick off’,”

Opening track ‘Lander’, meanwhile is a strong statement of inventive intent, exploring, as much of their music, their love of American guitar music. “I think it’s deliberately surprising. For a start, it’s got Rob singing on it. This is different, already not quite what you expected. But, it’s what we do. It’s got that driving, American guitar sound to it. It’s aggressive, it’s punchy, visceral guitar sounds. It’s like Parquet Courts, Iggy Pop, that sort of stuff. But it’s the very lyrical stuff we do, very English, John Betjeman, Pulp, things like that. It’s one of those tracks that’s very us.”

Then there’s the almost anthemic, sorry-state-of-the-nation ‘Here’s The Thing’. We were touring in the US, sitting in the van, reading the news, election coverage was coming in, Brexit was happening. This tendency to have a legitimate view, where everyone is going to get heard – an extreme poll, and absolutist view, especially on social media, you see a lot of that. I was doing my challenging, my sardonic piece around the lyrics, condemning both sides, you know.”

Sports Team is very much a group effort, although centred on the gifted ideas man Rob Knaggs, whom Alex formed a musical partnership around which the group quickly developed. “It will be Rob who will come up with the main idea basically, and we workshop it as a band. I’m aware that there is a lot of chance, mistakes, things like that. When we first started playing we genuinely couldn’t play our instruments, and when we went into a studio, we had no idea what we were doing. And now we can! For a few years years, I was like ‘professional musicians, ugghh’. It’s trying to maintain those rough edges, that unpredictability which gives it all that charm. We try and consciously do that, from a musician’s point of view. It’s been quite different on this album.

“We worked with a guy called Burke Reid (Courtney Barnett’s producer) He’s very good, very committed, and doesn’t do any of the studio tricks, none of that ‘we’ll just run it through this’. Everything is played live, and if that means doing 200 takes, then that’s what we will do.

“No one wants to hear a tight band live, no one wants to hear true renditions of the songs. A lot of people do the recordings first, and then think ‘I’ve got to do this live’. For us, it was the other way around. We didn’t put tracks out for ages. And then we had to go and learn how to record.”

On the surface it looked they came from literally nowhere. Form a band, play a few gigs, release your own music… “If only it was that simple,” syas Alex. “We, probably more than anyone, like to give the impression we sauntered towards it. Actually, a lot of it’s been… we had jobs in London, coming home, rehearse ’til 4 in the morning, have a couple of hours sleep, go back to work. It’s always been a lot of graft.” As Alex sings on ‘Fishing’: “If the band doesn’t work just get a regular job.”

The DIY ethos of the early days was a key bonding experience, and which got stronger and stronger as the band played live show after live show, also forming lifelong bonds with a growing, teenage fanbase, who got off on the energy, spirit and fun of the Sports Team way of life. Iggy Pop apparently went undercover to witness one of their gigs, while Noel Gallagher enlisted them as tour support. In the meantime they wrote a bagful of inventive and snappy pop songs, all imbued with a passion and social incision, detailing the lives of smalltown Middle England, were escapism is the holy grail for the young and young-at-heart. They know this because, even though they were at Cambridge University, they hail from the four corners including Cornwall, Leeds, Tunbridge Wells and Sheffield, and have taken a keen interest in what surrounds them, as well as poet John Betjeman, who combined satire with observation in detailing the eternal within the ordinary. Sports Team are, in some ways, the musical equivalent, albeit a great deal more raucous.

This is a band in the true sense, a bunch of people that have lived and breathed together, under one roof, in a tour bus, and on the live stage. “We all lived in a house in Harlesden, North West London, together,” says Alex, who on stage comes across like a hybrid of Mick Jagger and Jarvis Cocker. “And we all moved out. Last year we did think about 150 tour dates. Every other night, basically. So, it didn’t make sense to rent a house, we were always away. We were about six to a room for about a year, which was awful. I think this whole deep down happy thing,” he says, in referencing the album, “is like weighing up, ‘is this the dream?’, sort of stuff. ‘Is it alright, are we still friends’? Do we like this, or are we living in some kind of young professional hellscape in Camberwell (which is where they all live now, again under one roof), with our overnight oats in the fridge, doing workout routines, things like that. It’s questioning the spirit, you know?”

Certainly, when they are on the road, playing gigs, it’s where they meet head-on, the underlying reasons why they put themselves out there, rather than fall back on safe, but unfulfilling jobs. “We meet all our fans and they are by and large young, and it’s a real community,” says Alex. “The thing that really comes across is that what they most hate is being patronised. Our fans are much more switched on than when we were, those aged 15 or 16. It’s much more subtle. They’ve heard enough of this fuck Boris style politics. I think the press have got a problem where as soon as you have a kid fanbase, people start writing about you as cheeky funsters, or kooky whackos. Really, as if that is what we are! Our fanbase is quite fun. And I think that the reason why guitar music has got any life left in it is because there’s this identity to this group of people, a dynamic, and you can buy into it. That’s surely the most appealing thing about any band, and always will be.

“For us, its more harking back to these formative experiences – Egyptian hip hop, having your first beer, coming out of a mosh pit. We see that with people in front of us, having these same formative experiences around seeing a band, which is incredible.”

For the moment however, the band are in lockdown mode, writing and demoing new music, carrying on with the other stuff they have always done, like designing the artwork, and coming up with ideas for videos. Of course, they hope to be back on the road, where they truly flourish, before long. And their fanbase must surely be desperately itching to get out and see some live music. I say to Alex, that living, and working together, it’s a minor miracle that you are loving each other, and working beautifully together. “Oh, fingers crossed! You wait… I always remember that Peep Show episode where Jez is fighting about royalties over that FIFA soundtrack for £100, that football montage. That’s where I see us in about six months.”

Jeff Hemmings

https://www.facebook.com/sportsteamband

https://twitter.com/SportsTeam

When challenged, in 2018, by a fan via Twitter with the question “WHAT are you?”, Ghostpoet responded: “So Interesting. Why is it so important for me to be part of a predetermined genre with its parameters and rules? I’m just an artist who experiments with sounds and loves guitars. It’s ok to be confused, not everything in life needs explanation, sometimes we just have to go with it”.

And that’s Obaro Ejimiwe in a nutshell. He’s the metaphorical offspring of Massive Attack, but more valium than dope. He’s the antithesis of karaoke pop, an uncompromising artist, whose signature awake/asleep languid vocal and bleak outlook has infused his four albums to date. He was one of the most important and arresting artists to have emerged in the last decade. As we enter the 20s, and as he surveys the social and political landscape of his own psyche, as well as of the nation, is Ghostpoet still up for the fight? Are his thoughts and thinking still relevant in the Covid-19 age?

From the album title alone, it’s clear that Ghostpoets’s fifth album, I Grow Tired But I Dare Not Fall Asleep, is a record that speaks of the turbulent times we are living in, and not just pre-Covid-19. Ever since his startling debut album Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam, this two-time Mercury Award-nominated artist, has always musically and lyrically tapped into the more chaotic and uneasy states of his psyche. But this time around, and rather presciently, he has branched out. “It’s stuff on a micro level, but also a major level – politics, immigration, anxiety, mental health, sexuality”, he explains. “Friends and family in the wider world, observing them going through things. Men in general don’t talk about their feelings – I don’t talk about mine as much as I should – but at least with my music I have an avenue.”

As we speak, in early March, the virus is on most people’s minds, and is becoming a major talking point. Although we aren’t yet at the point of lockdown, some of us know what’s around the corner, and my Facebook feed is littered with anxiety and foreboding. I feel that his music, whilst not at all about the virus and its implications, speaks indirectly about it. “I’m not sure,” he responds. “But, yeah, there’s a lot of that going on. I don’t know. Is it the world getting older, or me getting older?” he ponders philosophically. “There are big questions. what should we do, and how should we react?”

I tell him I have recently revisited the video for ‘Freakshow’, a track off his previous album, the bleak, anxiety-ridden, but mesmerising Dark Days + Canapes, and which features mostly actors wearing full PPE. Although the song is primarily about mental health, it is also rather prophetic, in its video form. “Yeah, that’s quite funny, actually. I saw that the other day. I thought it would be wrong for me to self-promote by putting that out there again,” he laughs.

Inspiration, it seems, was initially in short supply for I Grow Tired But I Dare Not Fall Asleep. But, a break from the hubbub of London, to the small coastal resort of Margate, a major attraction these days for emerging artists and creatives, helped to recharge his batteries. “I was in a kind of No Man’s Land after I finished touring the last record,” he says, “There was nothing I wanted to write about and I was kind of getting sick of music. I needed to do something else for a bit, and then see if that helped bring back the love for it.” Upon his return, he started work on what would become I Grow Tired… but which saw him take the helm for sole control. And with the influences of artists such as David Bowie, Serge Gainsbourg, and in particular Talk Talk informing his thoughts, he began work.

“Even saying ‘I could do it myself’ out loud filled me with fear, and so I felt like it was what I should do,” says Obaro. “I’ve always had control, but I think the decision to go down the co-production route on the previous albums was about not having the confidence in my own self to just do it. This time around, I wanted to do something that would challenge me. I felt that if I went down the same route again, would it really be a challenge? Would I be able to push musically? I thought that this time every decision would be down to me, and let’s see what comes off the back of it. That was my thinking.”

How does he make his music? “Sometimes it’s memo ideas, some kind of melody. Sometimes it comes from an acoustic instrument. And from there I get my friends involved to develop them further, and put them into a structure so that I can start writing. With this record, because I don’t know theory that much, it was a case of ‘OK, I’ll get players in’, and I’ll get them to jam. It was inspired by the last Talk Talk record (Laughing Stock), and the book I read (Are We Still Rolling?) by the engineer of the last few Talk Talk records, Phill Brown. It was basically hours of jams, where back in those days they would splice the tapes, and use those to create the songs. That was inspiring to me. It felt like a way I could do it. I was more kind of director and conductor, directing it in a particular way, around themes and patterns, and getting them to play for hours. Off the back of that I cut up the songs, and worked out the bits that I wanted. There are a lot of layers, a lot of nuances. I wanted it to sound more cinematic, more sonically rich, and experiment with it at the same time.”

I Grow Tired But I Dare Not Fall Asleep continues Obar’s growing penchant for collaboration. He’s previously roped in the likes of Lucy Rose, Daddy G and Nadine Shah, while this time there’s guest vocals from Art School Girlfriend, Skinny Girl Diet’s Delilah Holiday, SaraSara and Katie Dove Dixon. He’s always felt it particularly important to feature women on his records. “I will never understand what it is to be a woman, but I’ve always been inspired by them. As someone who is marginalised, too, we are all stamped on and dismissed. But also we didn’t need my fucking dirge of a voice for the whole record.”

From the Trickyesque, dope-cabaret tones of Concrete Pony to the bleak ””’ the album is unmistakably Ghostpoet. Yes, it’s dark, but it’s also more defiant than before. And, it’s also infused with an upgraded musicality that is a long way from the almost solely produced and performed electronica-infused debut album. Why did he name the album I Grow Tired But I Dare Not Fall Asleep? “It’s a statement, I guess,” he tries to explain. “We as a society are tired of the status quo. People are very confused about what the future holds, or what the future entails, and we are all continuously going through the same trials and tribulations. We have to stay awake. We can’t afford to switch off and let things happen. It’s important to be awake and alert as much as possible, I feel. It’s rooted in the fact I just want to talk about things that we can all relate to, because it’s real, and I was always want to make sure that my music is based in reality.”

With his parents from Nigeria and Dominica, Ghostpoet’s lyrics subtly address immigrant identity and racism in the present day too – “Wind rushed and chilled me to the bone”, he says over the gliding strings of ‘Rats In A Sack’, a none-to-subtle reference to the Windrush generation. On ‘Concrete Pony’ he interrogates how we seek value from internet likes (“there is nothing”, he refrains), while opening song ‘Breaking Cover’ has the chorus – “It’s getting kinda complex these days, we better get our hard hats ready.”

“That was the first track I had arranged (‘Breaking Cover’) and it felt like when I did that one, it was ‘OK, I can do this shit’. I’d arranged before, but not really all on my own, my vision, since the first album. So, when I arranged that one, I thought, ‘OK, this is me putting my flag in the ground now. This will be the springboard for the rest of the record.” It also sounds more layered than before, the influence of Laughing Stock shining through. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of layers, a lot of nuances. I wanted it to sound more cinematic, more sonically rich, and experiment with it at the same time.”

The album’s striking artwork subtly nods to womanhood, too. Based on an 18th century painting by Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuselli, ‘The Nightmare’, in which a woman reclines, as if in a deep sleep, while a small demon (or incubus) sits on her chest and a frowning white-eyed horse stares. For I Grow Tired But I Dare Not Fall Asleep, the image has been reimagined with Obaro in place of the woman. “Actually, it was my manager who came up with the idea. He said, ‘I’ve been checking out this artwork out a lot since listening to the record, and I think this could work’. And the moment I saw it, I wanted to re-create that. It really spoke to me. I can’t explain it. I guess it plays with the title, the idea of somebody in an awake/sleep state, and I think it reflects the music, the richness and opulence of the music. The original painting looked like how the album sounded.

“For the time, that painting was seen as completely controversial,” he says, “Because the incubus was seen to have sexual undertones.” There’s no incubus on the album artwork, though the horse remains – and the floor is strewn with fruit (representing “the fragility and beauty of life”) and other references to other parts of Obaro’s influences and identity. For example, there’s a copy of a book, Safe – a nod to last year’s seminal book of essays about Black British men reclaiming space (“I could relate to every story”). Elsewhere, there’s a prayer candle with cult Nigerian musician William Onyeabor’s image – “It’s a nod to my Nigerian roots and Onyeabor, an artist who naturally broke the rules and flew in the face of what was expected from an African artist at the time.”

Subsequent to the interview taking place, the nation – along with most of the rest of the world – went into lockdown. The album is still coming out, but alas, there will be no live dates for the time being, impacting substantially on his and many musicians careers and livelihoods. Including, sadly, his much anticipated appearance at this year’s The Great Escape Festival. Just prior to publication, Ghostpoet issued the following statement, a strong statement of positivity, resilience, and yet anxiety, as musicians in particular, and performers in general, struggle to make sense of this extraordinary world and time we live in world, as well as struggling to make ends meet. “This is the best album I’ve made thus far in my career and I don’t say such things lightly. I’ve stubbornly tread my own path for over a decade now and this album feels like the most concentrated version of what I’ve been trying to achieve since day one. I’m humble but I’m honest and I can’t stop raving about this body of work.

Please support in any which way you can, the current situation for artists is dire and I know that my woes are the least of your worries but I really do need your help to keep the wheels on the track so to speak. I’m very lucky to be an artist, I love what I do for a living and just want to keep making my art and sharing it with you all.

Despite all this madness lurking in the shadows, I’m really looking forward to you hearing this record in its entirety. It’s a monster.

Stay safe, stay well, speak soon

Jeff Hemmmings

https://www.ghostpoet.co.uk/

https://www.facebook.com/ghostpoetfb/

https://twitter.com/ghostpoet

Needless to say, these are weird and wonderful times. They are also extremely stressful for many, as the implications of COVID-19 insinuates its way into the hearts and souls of billions of humans on Planet Earth. But life goes on, as it must, and as it has evolved to. As always, our animalistic spirit shines through the desperation, fear and bewilderment. As the famous psychotherapist Carl Rogers observed, even the most malnourished and deprived plant will continue to strive towards growth and fulfilment. Is it any wonder that Keep Calm and Carry On is such an enduring mantra for the 21^st century? Except that it’s now more Keep Calm, and less Carry On. Less going out, for instance. In fact, there is now no going out to see a show, a live gig, or festival. For musicians, along with everyone else, the times have changed, and no-one knows quite for sure if we’ll ever get back to anything approaching pre-CV (pre-Coronavirus).

Blaine Harrison, guitarist, keyboardist, frontman and singer with the much loved Mystery Jets, sounds stoical. Perhaps his spina bifida condition (with which he was born with) has infused a remarkable resilience and philosophical spirit within him, as he struggles to maintain his artistic bearing, one who found music to be a major driving force with respect to his creative needs. When you add in the fact that the band’s new album A Billion Heartbeats, and concurrent tour of late last year, was cancelled because of Blaine’s ill-health, and that the re-scheduled tour for this spring has also been cancelled, well, whoever it was who said these things are meant to try us, is really taking the proverbial piss.

But out of the gloom of cancellations, monetary concerns, isolation, and a general lock down, positivism and opportunities continue to present themselves. As they must.

It’s 9am, an unusual time to be interviewing a musician. After all musicians are often the last in bed due to gigging commitments. And Harrison seemingly enjoys a nocturnal existence. “Generally, I’m a bit of a night owl. When I’m writing I very much work at night. I have a nocturnal routine where I go to sleep about eight, nine o’clock, then wake up and work till the sun comes up, then go to bed. The whole thing is upside down. But the rest of the time I try and lead a conventional life.”

I tell Blaine that just last night I woke up at 1.30 in the morning, probably as a result of the stress and nervous energy caused by the coronavirus pandemic, stayed up till about 5, enjoyed the quiet, and proceeded to be very productive in that time. “At night you can access parts of your creativity in your brain, and you can get those lucid thoughts coming through.” Indeed, on a nightly basis, it’s like the veritable calm before the storm, before the world kicks into action in the morning.

“I keep a journal, and I was looking at it last night, going back a week, where we last played a show (11 March), and at that time there was still no conversation about events being cancelled. It feels like we’re a couple of weeks behind some other European countries, and the prospect of it coming into effect, what we did, still felt quite distant. But, that has all changed in the course of a few days, opening ones eyes and seeing how it encroaches into your own world and into what’s going on in your life. Suddenly this festival isn’t going to happen, and this show isn’t going to happen. And we had some press interviews last week, and our label said everyone at the label had been sent home, and that was the moment I thought, ‘wow, this is a much bigger beast than perhaps we thought it would be’.

“When it came around to Monday (March 15), my girlfriend, all her studies were cancelled. Yesterday (March 16) I put her on a coach back to the west country where her parents live. She was very emotional, and what she was experiencing, I experienced by proxy. Until that point I was managing to be very pragmatic: it is what it is, everyone is suffering, we’ve all got to find our coping mechanisms. But then when I saw her emotional reaction that was the first time it hit me on an emotional level – ‘I’m not sure when I’m going to get to see you again’.

“And my Dad is 70 (Henry Harrison, who encouraged his son, was an original member of the band, and is still active for them, mainly in the writing department), so I’m being told it’s best to stay away from him. And my Sister has young kids, and they are self-quarantining. When it starts to come into your inner circle, that’s when it starts to become quite difficult. These are the people you normally turn to for that support, and strength in numbers.”

Such are the profound life changing aspects of this virus, that for the first time in living memory (or at least since WWII), we are not able to freely visit our loved ones and significant others. Nor join in the communal atmosphere and experience of a pub, or a gig. Our communal relationships are having to be mostly conducted and maintained via the internet: 4G, 5G, and wireless. Or, as happened last night at 8pm (March 26), the remarkable and rather moving hand clapping – outside front doors, and open windows – around the nation, in support of NHS workers, and others. Those who are putting themselves on the front line, and therefore placing themselves at heightened risk.

“We had to move the tour last year because of me getting unwell. This has never happened to us in 15 years. We’ve never moved a tour, let alone moved it twice. It’s going to be hard. I just hope people will be understanding. I’m sure they will, it’s happening to everybody. What’s difficult is that you can’t give any indication of when you’re going to return.

“We’ve got an idea which is just starting to crystallise. We’ve got our own studio in Clerkenwell, where we made the album, which once upon a time was a tramshed, and it’s got this lovely, big, cavernous space upstairs, with all the studios underneath, and we’re talking about finding a way to do a live stream of us performing the record, for everyone who bought a ticket for the tour. Not instead of a refund, but as a gesture, really. And finding a way for other people to tune in as well. There’s another bonkers idea, which we literally thought of last night, and that is something that could involve other artists. It would be more like a festival, but a festival that could be attended, like germ-free. It’s bonkers, but we’re just starting to chat about how that could be possible.

“Out of really difficult times, there are always good things that could come out of it, and is a good chance for independently spirited, creative thinking people, to find solutions to make the most of the situation. I think all of us are going to have to do that in our own way. And it’s not just artists, but anyone freelance, who maybe runs a club night, or a venue, cafe. Everyone is going to have to find their own way of navigating this. I think the truth is the world will be a different place when we come out of it the other side. And hopefully, it will be a good place.”

While gigs will have to be transformed, and be essentially non-contact events, for the foreseeable future, music will still be released and consumed in pretty much the same way as before, albeit not nearly so much in public settings. Listening to music will become even more of a solitary, personal experience, perhaps with a loved one, or a family in tow. It will perhaps be more akin to how it was often consumed back in the 60s and 70s, in particular – the classic image of a young person listening to their 45s on a portable deck player springs to mind.

“One of things I think about a lot is, so much of the way music is consumed now is on the move. We all have the entire history of music at our fingertips, in our pockets, and so music is something that accompanies us on our everyday travels, and that’s fantastic,” says Blaine. But, I think also it’s very much wrapped up in this constant need to be entertained, the myriad sources of distraction that the modern world provides us. And life is so busy and full of noise, and full of distractions these days. Music is wrapped up in all that. But this time, perhaps it will give us a chance to re-establish a new connection with art, creating a new space for records to be appreciated in a slightly more contemplative manner. That’s what music was when I was growing up, that’s the relationship that my parents generation had with music, you would sit around and you would put on a record, and it was enjoyed communally. I found my Dad’s record collection when I was a teenager, and I thought ‘what the hell are these things, these spaceship shaped discs’. And when I put on the first record, that moment, that connecting with that format, putting it on and flipping it over, it blew my mind, and it really created a whole new relationship with music. I still have a record player, and I still love to put a record on in the evening. Lots of people have very busy lives, and don’t necessarily have that luxury, But, yeah, this may give us the chance to connect with records in a more intimate, or shared way. Going to festivals and gigs is off the cards now, so maybe this is a way of reminding ourselves that music can be enjoyed with our loved ones, or anyone in our immediate surroundings. Chucking a record on, that can be the strongest medicine there is. I still think music is stronger than any antibiotic that anyone has ever invented. It has a way of reflecting back whatever we need in life, whether that’s something to channel our anger, sooth us, to comfort, to articulate what we’re feeling, to channel whatever it is going on in our lives. That’s a positive way of looking at it, I think.”

Blaine has also recently connected with social movements and politics, in a way that he has hasn’t done so before, the Mystery Jets essentially being a band that wrote many autobiographical, playful, opinionated, and personal songs, scattered throughout their catalogue, from the debut single ‘Zootime’ of 2005, through to their debut album Making Dens in 2006 and subsequent albums culminating in 2016’s Curve of the Earth.

“The building I’m living in at the moment is the Tramshed, and it’s a Property Guardian space,” says Blaine, detailing the inspiration for A Billion Heartbeats. “It’s really another way of finding affordable living in a city. At the time I was feeling a little out of love with London. Spaces for artists were becoming fewer and fewer, and people were being pushed further and further out, lots of friends were moving town, moving to Brighton, Margate, Hastings, just trying to find affordable living spaces. I was right on the edge of leaving (London), and then thought about what about becoming a property guardian? I got in touch to see what was available, and they said ‘come on down, we have a viewing today’. It was the whole floor of an office building, overlooking the strand, and ran the length of a whole block, like the size of five-a-side football pitch. Me and my girlfriend at the time said we’ll take it. It was slightly more than we could afford at the time, but I saw this immediately as an opportunity to not only experience London in a way that I probably wouldn’t get to experience again, but I also saw the creative potential. It was a space I could work in and live in. and I thought ‘what about making a record about the world around me?’, because our last record, Curve of the Earth, was quite an inward looking album, about changes we were all going through, coming into our 30s. I thought with this record I wanted to turn the lens the other way. Not even that I wanted to, I just felt at that time it was impossible not to.”

Potent and politicised, A Billion Heartbeats already feels like an album for the times, even though it was made pre-Coronavisus. The album and tour had previosuly been scheduled for release at the end of 2019, but Blaine had been hospitalised for much of the summer of 2019, spending much of his time in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, a place that has been something of a home from home for him over the years as he struggled to deal with his condition, and his fluctuating health. At the time he put out a statement praising the NHS…

The band had wanted the new album to “feel like it was punching you in the face, and there is certainly a heavier, rockier feel throughout, on tracks such as ‘Screwdriver’ and the strident call-to-arms of ‘Petty Drone’, but still mixing in their quintessentially psychedelic and progressive rock foundations, in forming what Blaine calls “psychedelic anger.” It is in essence a collection of songs about what’s going on in the outside world.

“I moved into that space at the end of 2016, and we had just had the EU referendum and Trump had just got into office,” says Blaine. “It was the beginning of the craziness of the last four years. I had never been particularly engaged with politics, and I felt that my opinion wasn’t worth anything, or that I could articulate my views. But then I discovered protests, and started attending protests around the end of 2016. Because I was on the Strand, which is one of the main arteries to Trafalgar Square, which is the home of protest in the country for the last hundred years, these protests would literally pass under my front window, and I would come down and join them, really as a means of educating myself, and see what people were feeling, as a barometer of what people were angry about, what people were passionate about, and what drove them to take to the streets. The feeling you get is akin to a festival. I’ve always felt that a protest is like a festival of resistance, it’s got a similar feeling, it’s strength by numbers, a place to shout and sing, to feel empowered, and I think that’s fantastic. And I felt I was looking for an alternative to the media narrative on whatever it was, like the shortage of NHS beds. The songs on the record were each inspired by what I saw and the songs and chants I heard. I wanted to hear what the public had to say about that, and what the messages were at street level, and what wasn’t being reported in the news.”

The album’s lead song ‘Screwdriver’ is essentially about the far-right, and figures within that, such as Tommy Robinson. Screwdriver is also the name (actually spelt Skrewdriver) of the notorious white supremacist punk rock band of the 80s. “I didn’t know that at the time,” says Blaine, “but it’s quite apt in a way. That song came about from a Britain First protest, which I saw advertised on Facebook, and the name of the event was ‘Let’s Go Throw Bottles of Piss at Fascists’, and I thought ‘is that how you deal with fascism? I don’t know, let’s go and find out’. The protestors outnumbered the Britain First attendees, by about 5 to 1, as you would expect. But, it was an interesting thing to observe, and I followed it along, and managed to end up in the journalists and photographers holding pen, which was right where the Britain First speeches were taking place. And the protestors were bottlenecked, a little further away down the embankment, and as all the speeches were going on, the English Defence League showed up, with Tommy Robinson, from the opposite direction, and they got bottle-necked. And Britian First started harrassing the EDL. I think what Britian First were trying to do was separate themselves from the more traditional football hooligans associations of the far right. It was fascinating seeing this happening, in the press pen, finding myself separated from the protest. It afforded the luxury of having a degree of objectivity amongst it all. The sang came from posing that question, ‘an enemy is only what you fight them with’. And at that time they were being fought with by milkshakes. Every other week there would be a different figure, whether it be Nigel Farage or Tommy Robinson, people were getting milkshaked. As much as that has comedic value, I started asking, ‘well, how do you deal with this?’ Maybe what you need to do is listen to them, and maybe that’s something we’re not getting right, and I think that’s perhaps why lots of people in working class communities, who are probably traditionally Labour voters, have moved over to the right end of the spectrum, and haven’t been listened to, and they do feel disenfranchised. Those attitudes are maybe coming from places of fear, and those communities feeling like they are losing their identity, and they are losing their wealth. You can then zoom out even further, and the finger of blame points very much to capitalism. And I think that links through to where we are at now. I think that’s one of the changes we are going to see after this has all blown over, society is going to have to take a much closer look at itself, and how we got here.”

As an album A Billion Heartbeats achieves a balance of passion, fear and hope. Amid the colourful melange of rich harmonies, heavy guitars, pastoral interludes, and rallying cries, the album’s essential message is about personal responsibility, and the power in becoming engaged. In these extremely trying times, it really does feel like an album for the moment, perhaps Mystery Jets most powerful, and yet eloquent work yet. It’s also a fitting testament to their enduring staying power, one of the few active survivors from the last great indie guitar generation of the mid-00s.

The album title-track itself, ‘A Billion Heartbeats’, features the line “In the cold silence between their words”. I asked Blaine what he meant by that. “That particular line is from a quote I had in a journal, from somewhere. A lot of these quotes lose their origin and I can’t always remember where they come from, but it came from ‘The English have their real conversations in the cold silence between their words’. I thought there was something in that, something in our Englishness. For example, having spent time in America making albums or touring, I think people are much more frank about what’s going on with them, talking about how they’re feeling, and the English have a tendency to bottle this stuff up. It’s something you see on the tube, people don’t really make eye contact, they lock down into their own worlds. It fitted the song. So ‘A Billion Heartbeats’ is a song about Grenfell, about the way communities came together in the wake of Grenfell, the resilience that those communities showed, and the way that London actually came together, and somehow managed to heal itself. I think we’re seeing that again now, and that song could equally be applied to what’s going on now. We always need reminding of how resilient we can be, and when we see outselves as a whole rather than separate entities, or divided in our politics, or in our generations – ‘oh, it’s Gen Z versus the Boomers, or Gen X’ – all these different human constructs we put up, ultimately all they serve to do is to divide us. And that is perpetuated by the media, and by social media, and I think what that song is trying to do is remind us of our oneness. It sounds hippy dippy, but we do need reminding that we are more powerful together.

Jeff Hemmings

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The Dublin four piece have been kicking around for more than a decade. With vocalist Dara Kiely, guitarist Alan Duggan, bassist Daniel Fox and drummer Adam Faulkner, making up the band. They have two albums under their belt, both released on the Rough Trade label: Holding Hands with Jamie (2015), and last year’s The Talkies. With a loud, tightly coiled aggressive sound, the band are literally manipulating their instruments, while Kiely howls his way though via impressionistic lyrics. Portraying themselves as ‘the least macho bunch of people you could think of’, the band’s name has also caught the imagination. Brightonsfinest Jeff Hemmings caught up with Dara Kiely, chatting about the importance of noise, Leonard Cohen, and how he became a singer.

You’re at home, in Dublin?

Yeah, we just came back from Switzerland yesterday, played a festival there, Antigel, It was a fly-in, fly-out thing, had to be at the airport at 4am to go out, and then 8am in the morning to come back. A little tired. It was good fun though, they treat you really well.

What’s the band generally up to?

We’re writing at the moment. We take ages to write anything. We’re going to the Album of the Year thing in Ireland (Choice Music Prize – Girl Band have been nominated, alongside Fontaines DC, Lankum, Daithi and Soak), and doing the odd show here and there.

It took four years to write the second album, and all our lives to write the first one. So, it’s not going to be out this year! We’re just doing a lot of demos. Dan, who records us a lot – our bass player – he’s got a really nice recording environment. It’s nice doing the random gigs every now and then.

We played in the key of A on the second album. Is this too much, are we selling out? I do manage to do a bit of writing when we’re way on tour, just to fill the time. But, yeah, we do need to be in the same room at the same time!

Do you jam away in the studio, see what happens?

It’s the best idea in the room, regardless of who it comes from. Everything is analysed. Everything is played over and over again until we think it’s actually good. We constantly demo stuff. A lot of the time someone will just play something (mimics noise). Play that again! (mimics noise).

Writing for the second album was kinda scary – are we ever going to finish a song? Now, it looks like we are going to be able to, which is cool.

Girl Band has been around in one form or another for quite some time now….

We’ve been in bands since we were 16. Yeah, we’ve been together for a very long time…

You were originally the drummer, but somehow became the singer. How?

I’m a very limited drummer. What basically happened was that I was having singing lessons. My sister is a singing teacher. I was doing it for confidence reasons. I am naturally very shy. I was doing that to try and be more comfortable within myself. And after Harrow (the pre-Girl Band band that included all current members except Adam) we tried several singers, which didn’t work out, and we didn’t have a name for the band. So, we went to Leeds to visit our friends, and we did the Otley Run, this 17 pub crawl thing. It’s chaos, but we are 20, 21 at the time. The next day we were completely destroyed, and booked tickets late at night, to fly back the day after. And myself and Alan started to write joke songs, under the name ‘seasons’. We wrote a song about Pancake Tuesday, and on that I started to shout. I didn’t think much of it at all, just having a laugh. But Al showed Daniel, and Daniel was like ‘shall we try and get him to do the singing’. My response was, ‘if we get a better drummer, and I can’t sing, can I please still be in the band’.

The first practice was quite terrifying. I’m getting a bit used to it now.

You really give it some on stage, must be hard on your voice?

Yeah, I do my warm-ups, which I learned from my sister. They are really embarrassing. I make sure I get an hour on my own beforehand. I do the warm ups, and then I do my rugby stretches. I used to play rugby. And I also do a bit of mindfulness meditation, which helps me to stay in the moment, instead of freaking out, like a lyric that might come up that you can’t remember. You basically stay in the moment, focus on your breath, focus on the lyrics. And it kinda works, you just have to trust it. That’s my process of getting ready

Jonny Lydon also gives it some, when singing live. I think he gargles brandy in-between songs…

Speaking of Public Image, we played a gig, and we were with this journalist friend who we knew, and he said ‘Keith Levene wants to meet you’, the guitarist from PiL. ‘OK, cool!’ And he brought his guitar to our soundcheck ‘Alright… that’s cool’. But, we hadn’t added up why he had brought his guitar. We were playing our cover of Blawan’s ‘Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?’, and he just comes up on stage, and plays guitar, and then just leaves. He did not want to be introduced, or anything like that. So, we accidentally had a collaboration with the man from PiL. He was a nice guy. It was very cool, but a bit strange.

Why did you decide to do a song that was palendromic (‘Aibophobia’) ?

We learned it one way, and then reversed it, and recorded it. I don’t even know if I said that correctly…. We wanted to get a David Lynch type sound for the vocals – back and forth. So I thought palindromes could be the way. But none of them worked except Navan, which is a place in Ireland. We can’t really play it live. Which is unfortunate, because it’s my favourite one on the album! It was a lot of fun doing it. I gave it a go.

And you did everything in the key of A?

I think so, Al just came in one day, and juts said ‘let’s play something in A’. And then it all fell into place form that…. You’ll have to ask Al about that! I think it was just an experiment to see if we could do something more melodic, or something. I know it doesn’t sound that way! But, it made things flow a bit more.

Anything new for this album, any new process, gadgets or anything?

I’ve got a couple of pedals, for the vocals, which is a new writing tool for me. I’ve got this Echo Master thing, like a delay. These French guys came up to us at one of our gigs, and gave Al a guitar pedal, called the Black Hole Collision Device, which is like a multi-effects, weird pedal. Al said I could use it for my vocals. That alone has taken me out of my comfort zone, and I’m making something a bit different. Yeah, loads of new pedals for the guitar and bass. And Adam’s kit just keeps getting weirder and weirder; broken cymbals, a hubcap, and a drum machine that we might start using. Still the same band really.

How important is noise to you, the level of it…?

It’s huge. We’ve played venues where there has been a dB limit. We go over it before it goes through the PA… The way they get their tone from the guitars is because it’s cranked to the max. Daniel’s broken, I think, nine bass heads, in the last ten years or so, and blown many a speaker. Adam beats the shit out of the drums, and I shout my head off. You can’t really turn it down.

I don’t actually listen to much noisy stuff at the moment. I’m a big Leonard Cohen fan. I need to calm down after a gig, like Death of A Ladies Man all the way through, or something.

I love Leonard Cohen. So glad I got to see him live…

I got to see him in Ireland. He said, ‘thank you friends. Last time I was here I was 60 – I was just a kid with a dream…

Jeff Hemmings

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In existence as the current line up for little more than two years, London-based Dry Cleaning brought together longtime friends bassist Lewis Maynard, drummer Nick Buxton, and guitarist Tom Dowse, before they recruited vocalist Florence Shaw at the end of 2017. An artist, university lecturer, and photo researcher, she had never performed live before, and had never been in a band. But she always kept notes and lists, for her artwork. Lists of headlines, neuroses, grievances, advertising copy; words, and comments culled from the media, social media, youtube commentary and the like.

Dry Cleaning was properly born when Shaw got involved, her matter-of-fact, conversational spoken word delivery somehow perfectly gelling with the spiky, tight, expressive, post-punk grooves of the band. They have become that rare thing, a late bloomer in musical terms. While Lewis, Nick and Tom had been making and playing music for a number of years, and Florence had never performed before, they have nevertheless hit the veritable nail on the head with Dry Cleaning. Their records have sold out, and their gigs are selling out. There is a lot of love for this earthy outfit, as they get your bodily bits moving to the unpolished sounds, whilst listening to cut-and-paste tales of modern anxiety, and modern mundanity. It is indeed interesting that they largely eschew social media – their Facebook presence is minimal, and they have no Twitter or Instagram accounts. So far, the artist-friendly Bandcamp is really the only virtual place where you can properly check the band out.

“We’ve been to Gibson, so Tom could get a new guitar,” says Lewis, a few days before he heads out with Dry Cleaning on a headline UK tour. “And we went to the pub to celebrate!”

Is it a freebie, I ask? “It’s a freebie for a couple of months. And then you have to give it back.” That doesn’t sound right to me. It might be scratched or scuffed, or something… “I was thinking that when I was in there. They all look brand new. I mean he’s taking it on tour… They were like, ‘you’re just using it for recording, right?’ ‘Umm, no, I’m going to be taking it on tour for a few weeks’. ‘OK’. I said to Tom, ‘that’s not going to come back in the same condition’. If anything, it’s going to smell more.

Yes, the joys of touring, smells and all, something that Dry Cleaning are getting increasingly used to, as they juggle jobs with music, but with music quickly taking over their lives, to the point where they may soon be jacking in the remnants of any jobs they currently have (Florence and Nick both lecture).

After their UK tour they head out to the States for a few weeks, including a visit to the legendary SXSW festival, before returning to the UK to get their heads down again with recording. There is a new deal with an esteemed record label to be announced soon, and a selection of festival dates plus a UK tour for the Autumn have already been hatched.

“We’ve just finished recording the demos for the album,” says Lewis. “We’ve got the songs kinda down, and we’re looking to record when we get back from the states, April time.”

I understand you recorded your previous two EPs in your Mum’s garage? “It literally was a garage that had been converted illegally; there was still a garage door on the front. It looked like a functioning garage, but behind was just a brick wall, and inside it was very small. You could probably get a Smart car inside it. And that’s where we wrote the first two EPs. But the property has since been sold, and we started writing the album in a normal studio. We were in a very large room, and we missed that small space. So, we decided to downsize that rehearsal room, and I think it suits us very well, in connecting with each other. But, it also makes everything a bit more… if you don’t need to play it, don’t play it.”

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that that both the Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks (no, not the Boundary Road here in Brighton…) EPs were both in effect demos, both recorded at the Total Refreshment Centre in London. They were recorded by a guy called Kristian. For the first one we told him we wanted to record some demos. It took us about three hours, doing five tracks. And because we still had lots of time, we decided to work on a song that became ‘Magic of Meghan’. We thought they were going to be demos, so they were just a snapshot of where those songs were at the time. And Florence had never recorded before. So, it was all very fresh and new. And now were at the same phase with the album. We’ve done that again, tried to keep it quite snapshotty, to the point where we’re like maybe we can release these, they sound good enough. But, I think we’re going to take it into a studio and try and re-create it.

We’ve been so fortunate with our position, everything keeps happening, that we’re constantly learning to try and understand what works best for us, writing and recording wise. So far we’ve just recorded snapshots of where the songs are at the time, mistakes and all. There might be a bit of a bum note, but that’s what we settled on. We’re very happy with the demos, so maybe we’ll just try and re-create that in the studio.

Before Florence joined, what was the plan? “There was never a plan to be a band. Nick the drummer had been in bands, and we had played as a drums and bass section for various people, for I guess like 12 years, and we’re such close friends. Nick goes out with a girl called Alice, whose twin sister Elizabeth goes out with Tom the guitarist, and we hung out a lot, talking about projects, and one day we decided to just jam, and caried on jamming. Mainly because my Mum kept feeding us (hence the Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks title). We’d get a free dinner out of it. We did that for a few months, tried some vocals ourselves, which sounded horrendous, and only then started thinking about who could do vocals on top. And even when Flo did get involved we only thought we would do a cassette, just for ourselves.”

It sounds like you are influenced by old school American new wave and post-punk…“Yeah, especially when it was just the three of us. One of the reasons we all started playing together was because of The Feelies, early REM, The Neccessaries, B-52’S. We all have fairly similar music tastes, but at this same point we were all listening to those bands at the same time. It is quite strange to be a British post-punk band, but more influenced by the American side of post punk.”

So, it’s been a pleasant surprise how it’s all turned out! “Yeah, that’s a bit of an understatement!” It wasn’t that long ago when you played a gig for the first time with Flo… “It was about a year and half ago. I mean at the sound check, the sound engineer was like ‘can you test your vocal’, and she just turned around to me and asked ‘what do I do?’ That’s how unused she was to that environment.

I mean she had never been in a band before. She quit the band about three times before she actually joined. She has always worked with words, as an artist, but had never thought of doing anything with that, musically.

“Myself and Nick have known her for the best part of ten years, through friends, and we knew of her other work. Her and Tom studied together, and lecture together… we knew her vibe, and we knew it would be something interesting. We’re very lucky in how well it’s landed, yeah!”

She’s not going to leave now, is she? “Hope fucking not,” Lewis laughs.

So, how does a typical Dry Cleaning song come about then? “We realised that no matter how long we give ourselves in a day to write or rehearse, its always at the beginning or the end where things happen. But, we normally just jam and we record everything to our phones, or more recently I’ve bought a little multi-track recorder, and we press record, and good or bad we record everything. And while we’re jamming, Florence will have multiple pieces of paper, lots of sketches of sentences and words, and she’ll work her way through it, and after a jam, we’ll listen to it, and highlight moments that we like.

Florence’s words are a selection of snapshots, conversations culled from a variety of sources, and then she jumbles them up and somehow makes a song out of that material. And her vocal delivery doesn’t give much away in terms of the emotion behind the song, apart from perhaps highlighting, and even celebrating, the surreal mundanity and banality of life in the 21st century. ‘Goodnight’ is a collection of comments culled from an Aphex Twin Youtube binge, while ‘Traditional Fish’ is a spliced together montage of signage, and newsstand headlines. And while there is long history of musicians railing against the monarchy and establishment, the ‘Magic of Meghan’ is a much more nuanced and multi-dimensional lyrical interplay between Shaw’s break up relationship, and the million-miles-away fantasy of this rather interesting royal – or rather, soon to be ex-royal – member.

And then there’s the surface lyrical mundanity of ‘Sit Down Meal’, which again juxtaposes ideas, this time mixing personal memories of a break up, with hyper banal greeting card messages. “You cling to details, things you did together and reel at their significance,” Florence has said. “If you smell their perfume on someone else you feel overwhelmed, but immediately and painfully aware of how lightning quick a relationship can evaporate into thin air.

“There’s something really interesting about things written from a marketing perspective or written to a template,” Florence continues, “and how that makes up so much of what you actually read. It tells you a lot about how people’s brains work. It’s that thing of ‘how do you write something that’s tantalising, and makes you want to know more, and doesn’t give you enough information, and is still a bit mysterious?’ I find that really compelling, I think so much writing on the internet is like that…”

The mystery of the mundane… A bit like the band’s actual name, Dry Cleaning. I mean, how everyday, mundane, and yet slightly exotic is that. At the same time it is suggestive of working class, artists and students, doesn’t it? I think it’s brilliant and it’s what immediately drew me to the band, before I had heard a note. Does Lewis have any idea where it comes from? ”No… But, another band we were listening to at the time were called Suburban Lawns. They have a song called ‘Janitor’, which is amazing. And we were trying to think of a name around that.

It’s come around accidentally – although it is a bit of a blessing – if you slightly know about the band, you see our name on every high street, which I kinda like. We also get lots of messages from other dry cleaners, trying to promote themselves, or selling dry cleaning products. And I hope that even people who hate it, see it more!

Jeff Hemmings

Paul Pascoe has been a stalwart of the Brighton music scene since the 90s, featuring in a number of bands including Mudlow, Fire Eyes and Palm Springs, as well as working at Church Road Studios, recording, mixing and producing many artists who have come through their doors since it was set up back in 1996. Another band of his, Beat Hotel, has been recently resurrected again after a lengthy hiatus, and which also features Arash Torabi (The June Brides, The Granite Shore), Stephen Brett (Mojo Fins) and drummer Dave Morgan (The Loft, The Rockingbirds). They have a mini-album ready for release at the end of January, and a launch gig at The Hope & Ruin. Paul chatted to Brightonsfinests’ Jeff Hemmings about the studio, Beat Hotel, songwriting and music in general.

I’m looking at the walls, and recognising some of the album and records, music that has been recorded here. Fujiya & Miyagi, Shrag, Jane Bartholomew, Barry Adamson…

What is your role here, exactly?

Engineer, producer, mixer – recording, mixing, mastering. Whatever people want me to do, basically! It’s usually me or Julian Tardo, who owns the studio, with a couple of others who do some work here. We do the full range of audio – music, audiobooks, sound mixing for film. But music is our bread and butter.

Tell me about the history of the studio

The studio started in 1996, and it was analogue then. It was a bank vault, part of Barclays Bank. It still has the ‘jail door’. Still got the tape machines, still got lots of outboard analogue equipment, old mics. Our selling point is a blend of recording capability, combined with vintage gear, a pleasant atmosphere, and calm bedside manners.

What else do you do?

I’m also doing some teaching – music tech and events management at DV8. Teaching is a good thing to dovetail besides creative efforts! Teaching young people, passing on our experience, that’s a really positive thing.

You are known for being a part of Mudlow, another stalwart of the Brighton music scene…

Mudlow has been my main band. it’s been going years. It’s going from strength-to-strength! Amazingly. Maybe not physically… In terms of output we’ve got another record coming out this year, a mini-album, which we are finishing this week in fact, before handing it over to the record company. We’ve got some festivals booked for the UK and Germany. We did a UK tour last year, with some good friends of ours from Ireland, The Bonnevilles, a great two piece trash-blues band. That helped to galvanise things.

Mini-albums from both Mudlow and Beat Hotel. You sound like a trend-setter?!

Well, yeah! I’ve heard people talking about this as a good thing – the old idea of 10 inch EPs. In the 80s there were mini-album maxi singles, with six tracks on 45, and 12 inch vinyl. The Cramps’ Smell of Female live album is exactly like that. I think people like the shorter form because of the way we consume music nowadays – track-by-track rather than album-by-album. So it’s like an in-between step. It works for us. The 12 inch 45 rpm format allows you to have good quality over six tracks.

Beat Hotel have been around in one form or another for a while now, haven’t they?

Years… the story of Beat Hotel is myself and Arash formed this band, this idea of a band, back in the mid 90s. They say youth is wasted on the young, and in our case, it was definitely wasted. And so we didn’t achieve very much in those days. We loved the rock’n’roll lifestyle, and we maybe cut into that too quickly before we remembered to actually make any meaningful music!

Fast forward to about 2010, 2011, and we made a collaboration record with Jim Shepherd from The Jasmine Minks, a band who were on Creation Records. They were one of our heroes. Arash and I met at a Jasmine Minks gig in Plymouth in 1988. Arash has played with lots of other bands including The Jasmine Minks, The Distractions, The June Brides. We ended up making a seven inch double A sided single with Jim. We provided the music, and he did the vocals up in Scotland. We did a couple more collaborative records, and now we’ve got this mini-album which is coming out at the end of January. I miraculously started writing songs again, which I hadn’t done for a long long time.

Why is that?

I had got into a very bad place. But I was inspired by the darkness, and writing was a way to re-discover myself, and connect with music, book and films, that I had grown up loving, and which shaped me the first time around. I used that as a starting point to re-connect with who I was, or who I felt I should be, at this point of crisis… Writing suddenly happened, and it was a very cathartic thing. I ended up with a bunch of songs which I think are very strong, and very honest, and have a universal quality to them. I think it was what I was searching for when I was younger, but I didn’t have the experience or the vocabulary, or the will or the drive to do it. I think that’s quite common.

One of the tracks, ‘Low Slung Loser’, was actually started in 1997. In fact the drums, bass and main guitars, were recorded here in this studio, by Julian, in 1997. I always liked it, and eventually Stephen Brett, our ace lead guitarist, put the final overdub on, 22 years later, just as we are about to send it to print.

It’s nice that the things you committed to when you were younger, you can still hold onto that, and resolve something, complete something. For me, that has been a positive part of the process.

Do you find that sometimes you need to be angry, or down, to be able to produce creative work

Certainly for me that’s how it happened. I think you have to feel something. I think you go through a lot of times in your life where you are focussed on things which seem important then, and it takes something external to kick you out of that comfortable orbit, into a place where you can actually process, who you are. For me it was really about a sense of identity, and being in such a place where I felt I needed to start again, and re-learn everything. Because I had found myself in such a desperate state. But, yeah, you do need to feel something, in order to create, and it’s not always easy to do that with the lives we lead.

Music as therapy, a catharsis… For me, there is nothing much better than going to a gig.

Particularly live, it’s an immediate reaction that the artist gets from the audience, and the audience gets an instant intention of the music as well. Listening to a record, if the songs are good enough, and they touch you… all that you can hope for is that what you write, and produce, somebody somewhere, listens to it and gets what you are saying, or more importantly relates it to their own existence, their own lives. We can’t feel what other people feel. We can only feel what we have inside us, How other people react to that, we can’t possibly predict or know. My whole thing about music has been, whether I am listening to it, or making it or producing it, if the song is good, it doesn’t matter how you play it or deliver it, you’ve got something. If the song is no good, and doesn’t work, you can put whatever production values on it, PR behind it, and it still won’t make it good. It’s all about the song. Maybe that’s why we take so long to produce these things. I have to really believe that something is good. And if I believe it, then I don’t really care if other people like it or not!

How would you describe the music you make with Beat Hotel?

Raw garage, rock’n’roll, a wide ranging stuff, it’s quite an eclectic thing. I’ve always been conscious, worried even, that each song has a different identity in terms of influence. I really used to be hung up on that, but now I just feel you give each song what it needs. For me and Arash, as the driving force behind this band, we met and bonded over early Creation, mid-80s Primal Scream, The Jesus & Mary Chain.

Beat Hotel mini album EP is out at the end of January, on Occultation Records. They play The Hope & Ruin, 29^th January, in aid of Grassroots Suicide Prevention. Tickets are £5.50, include a free download of the album, and available via

https://www.wegottickets.com/event/487582

https://beathotel2.bandcamp.com/album/beat-hotel

One of the most welcome comebacks of recent times has to be the return of London four-piece Bombay Bicycle Club. During a whirlwind opening phase of their musical lives they released four albums, the last one, So Long, See You Tomorrow, reaching number one in the album charts, in 2014. But soon after the wheels started to come off, and by January 2016 they had made the decision to call a halt. “Well, I think you have to look at why we stopped doing it,” says Ed, backstage at Concorde 2, before their ‘outstore’ show in celebration of their new album Everything Else Has Gone Wrong. “At the end of 2014 everyone was tired out and we really didn’t want to do it, and everyone wanted to do different things, and do the things that they had always wanted to do. Like, Jamie went to university, and me and Jack made our own albums. And I think in doing that, during those three or four year years we realised that what we had was incredibly special and perhaps we had taken it for granted before.”

Perhaps not surprising really. Music was mostly what the members of Bombay Bicycle Club had known throughout their teenager and adult years, Singer, guitarist Jack Steadman, drummer Suren De Saram and guitarist Jamie MacColl, had all met at school in London, formed a band when they were just 15, and before they had even left school, had released well well-received two independent Eps, and had performed at the V festival, after having won a Channel Four competition, The Road to V. And along with bassist Ed Nash, the band (named after a now defunct chain of Indian restaurants in North London), became a full time proposition once they left school, releasing their debut album in 2009, followed quickly by Flaws in 2010 and A Different Kind of Fix the following year, garnering bucket loads of acclaim, awards, and a rapidly expanding global fanbase in the process.

“We all took stock, and it was the 10^th anniversary of our first album,” says Ed, “which was why we started talking about it again, and everyone realised it was an amazing thing we had.”

“We had just had a number one album,” says Jamie. Some people might have thought you were crazy, I say. “Yeah! But, I think if we had carried on, we would have stopped, but just on more acrimonious terms probably. So, I think it was good that we did.”

“It’s a miracle we’re all still talking to each other,” says Ed. “When bands are doing it for the wrong reasons… for most people it would be a no-brainer if you’ve just had a number one album and you’re selling out shows. It’s quite lucrative, and a really cool thing to do.. But, I was tired, and I didn’t want to do it.”

It was in January of 2016 that the band finally put out a simple message on Facebook, citing that “after ten years of doing this we thought it was time for all of us to try something else”. Whilst they didn’t say they had broken up, it felt like, for many fans, and for at least some of the band members, that they had, and that was that. “From my perspective, I thought that was it,” says Jamie.

“We sold all our gear,” says Ed. “If you do that it kinda points out that you don’t have any plans to do anything. Funnily enough, six months after we sold it, we started talking about doing the band again.”

“I think we called it a hiatus because partly we did end on good terms,” say Jamie, “but we also didn’t want to do what some other bands have done recently, which is make a really big deal of splitting up, and then come back a few years later… people have that big emotional outpouring when the band stops. There is this catharsis, and then you move on. And then a band turns around and says, ‘Surprise!’ We didn’t want to do that if there was a small chance we would do it again. I mean even the way we stopped was relatively low key. We just did a post on social media, saying we don’t have any plans to make any new music in the future. And that was it. There was no ‘So long. Farewell,’ tour or anything.”

“Motley Crew broke up recently, and they signed agreements to say they would never do it again,” says Ed. “And about six months later they all ripped up the agreements! I think I’d feel a little short changed if I was a Motley Crew fan. I’m not a Motley Crew fan, by the way…”

“For a variety of reasons,” laughs Jamie

Certainly, Bombay Bicylce Club are not overtly about sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Well, maybe they are about rock’n’roll. After all, in Jack Steadman, they have one of the most creative songwriters of recent years, a man dedicated to music in all its manifestations, as can also be heard on his love letter to soul, funk and r’n’b via his recent solo vehicle, Mr. Jukes. And the band as whole are all tremendous musicians and writers in their own right. Watching them play live, straight after our interview, I was struck by the tightness, the clarity, the energy of a band, no doubt helped by the fact they are all genuine music lovers, have been performing with each other since they were at school, and know how to write a good tune. Moreover, they have grown up together, physically and mentally. There is a rare chemistry here. They are a proper band. A brilliant rock’n’roll band, in fact, and one who have never seemingly been afraid to experiment, and grow, along the way, incorporating a lot of electronica within their sound,as well as plenty of unexpected left turns in their music. At its hearty, it’s pop, but with a much deeper sophistication than can be found in your average indie landfill, as their music was once described.

Take ‘Is It Real’ from the new album. It’s a song about taking a trip down memory lane, reminiscing about the old times and cherished memories, and wondering, when sat next to the responsibilities and struggles of adult life, how any of those fondly remembered days were real. Musically, it;s underpinned by a faint motorik groove, pop licks, and leftfield electronica flourishes. And then there’s the title track ‘Everything Else Has Gone Wrong’ the last song to be written for the album. “It seems to encapsulate everything the album is about,” says Jack. “Like the album, the song is about hope and renewal, about finding safety in what brings you comfort, in what you love the most, while all around is crumbling. “Keep the stereo on, everything else has gone wrong,” the chorus declares. “For my whole life, I haven’t been very good at expressing myself with words,” he says. “The irony is that the song is about not wanting to write lyrics, but it has lyrics I’m really proud of. And after that, we realised a lot of the other songs had that theme, of music as a cathartic refuge.”

“It is about catharsis,” agrees Ed. “There’s a lot of worrying about your place in the world, and talking about finding that within music, and using that as a place to escape.”

“It’s interesting being in a band now compared to then,” says Jamie. “There’s a lot more people making political music, and journalists are more willing to ask questions about politics. In 2014, when we were doing the promo for the last album, that just never came up in interviews. We’ve just done loads in the last two weeks, in Europe, and everyone there wanted to know about Brexit, and asked us to explain Brexit, as if we would have any insight into it,” he says (perhaps not telling the whole truth here, as Jamie, post band, went to university to study politics, and also set up the high profile campaign group Undivided, which aimed to give the under-30s the chance to have their say in the process of Britain leaving the European Union). “It feels more of an anxious political and social landscape than before,” he says, “and I’m sure it has seeped into our music a little bit. Or, in the sense that we feel that we are responding to that sense of anxiety and change, with positivity and the idea that music can be a remedy for those feelings. The album title ‘Everything Else Has Gone Wrong’ does sound like it’s a commentary on contemporary politics. It’s not, but you can construe it that way if you want, in the sense we’re saying music can be an escape from feelings of anxiety or dislocation, whether it’s about politics or Brexit or your own personal life. Even making the choice of making a hopeful and positive record in a period when that is not the prevalent feeling, can be a political act of itself.”

Recorded out in the US alongside Grammy Award winning producer John Congleton, it was Ed and Jack who were heavily involved in the initial writing of the album. “Jack and I went away to Cornwall, we had a friend’s house out there, in a place call Portwrinkle, where there is no one around, and the pub quite literally burnt down.”

Damn! I say, quietly thinking about what one would do otherwise, in an isolated part of the world… “Otherwise, there would be no album, I don’t think!” Say Ed. “I burnt it down,” laughs Jamie.

“I had a set up downstairs, and he had a set up upstairs, and we just wrote music throughout the day and watched a film at night. Having no distractions meant there was a huge amount of music written and thrown around. If there was a song that was felt to be ready it would be sent to Jamie and Suren. And then they’d start sending back feedback, and we would work on that in Cornwall. And when we got home, we started playing the songs together in a room, which is always how it has happened, working the songs as a band.

“The band still works the same, and has the same processes, but within that everyone has grown up a bit, which sounds cheesy to say, but beforehand all we had in our lives was the band, but now everyone is a bit more rounded and confident. We can have more adult discussions. It has felt a lot easier, and everyone is better at articulating themselves too, having found their own way themselves. Coming back to it was a lot easier.”

“We actively discussed the lyrics a lot more than we have done in the past,” says Jamie. I think I cajoled Jack into thinking about them more, than in the past, which he hated. I definitely think they are his most interesting lyrics, and his most personal ones since the first couple of albums. There’s a lot to do with getting older, and change, and finding your place in the world, which is what we’ve been trying to do for the past four or five years, successfully and unsuccessfully. We’re all 30 or approaching 30 and, I see this with friends: if you’re wondering if you’re doing the right thing, and are you with the right person… I know those feelings are present throughout people’s lives, but it does feel at the moment like a real period of change.”

After they had recorded the album, the band moved on to the initial reason for getting back together, celebrating ten years since their first album, with a short tour last November. “We moved on pretty quick,” says Ed, “from some of those songs when we did the first album. We toured it for about six months, and then because we were so young, got bored of that, and released another album pretty quickly. Some of those songs we hadn’t played for eight or nine years. It was very nostalgic playing those songs. When that album came out, some people liked it, but it wasn’t a big album.”

“It wasn’t even a top 40 album,” says Jamie, “but it sold 100,000 over six months, because we kept bubbling away under the surface, and we kept doing more gigs. It is a record, and particularly those who are our age and were teenagers at the time, that I have a strong emotional connection with. It was about being young, and the various things that you do when you are young, which in retrospect aren’t particularly interesting, but which at the time seemed like the most important thing in the world. Like falling in love for the first time. Obviously, that is important! It’s funny, but even then there were songs about being anxious about getting older, and we were only 17!

“One of the best things about doing those gigs was that it was clear that another group of younger people had connected with the album, as teenagers. It was great to see that it resonated. At the time it was pigeon-holed as indie landfill by some members of the music press. At the time I thought that was unfair, and listening now I think that’s unfair.

“I guess you see four middle class from North London with guitars,” say Ed

“Well, it’s even less fashionable now than it was then,” says Jamie

Nonsense I say, the forthcoming tour is practically sold out, and you might have another number one album under your belt. I dunno, yeah the last album went to number one,” says Jamie, “and because we’ve already done that, I don’t really care about doing that again. It was amazing thing to do, but I don’t really feel the need to try and do it again.

This album isn’t as accessible as the last one,” says Ed. “That was an intentional thing.

“We were trying to make pop music last time, and making more radio friendly music,” says Jamie, “which was a conscious decision, and which we have consciously chosen not to do this time.

And as Jack sings on ‘Everything Else Has Gone Wrong’, “I guess I’ve found my peace again, and yes, I’ve found my second wind.”

Jeff Hemmings

Website: bombaybicycle.club

Facebook: facebook.com/bombaybicycleclub

Twitter: twitter.com/BombayBicycle

 It’s been a bizarre year. While Parliament, social media and the country-at-large have been tussling with Brexit and elections, the musical landscape has somewhat reflected that turmoil via a fragmented po-pourri of emotions, feelings and heightened surreality.

For sure, it’s not been a vintage year. Although music sales remain healthy in general, outright classics and bangers were few and far between, as even the hip hop and r’n’b scenes started to sound tired, and a little muted. But as always there has been plenty to get your ears around, some surprises, and a general willingness to keep on pushing the boat out, experiment and fuse disparate genres and moods, a reflection no doubt of the increasing fragmentation of tribes, and influence of the world wide web, where literally everything is now within easy grasp.

Sharon Van Etten may have upset some of her fans who were expecting more of the same, aka melancholic acoustica, but with Remind Me Tomorrow she delivered an electrifying pop album that won over many new fans, helped along by the stunning coming-of-age track ‘Seventeen’. And Vampire Weekend were similarly re-energised with Father of the Bride, their first album for six years, a sophisticated, heavy, yet bright and fun work. Meanwhile Richard Dawson continued his most fruitful journey from solo avant-blues to alt-pop, with another stunningly sophisticated collection of songs on 2020, morphing the everyday (jogging and football) into works of oddball genius.

Big Thief delivered not one, but two superb albums this year. The New York based, 4AD indie rootsy rockers outfit released U.F.O.F (>nominated for >Best Alternative Music Album for the 2020 Grammy> >Awards>) >and Two Hands, while contemporary Irish folk band Lankum followed up their Rough Trade debut album Between the Earth and Sky with the even more beautiful and haunting The Livelong Day.

Notable debut albums released included The Murder Capital’s rich, dark and literate post-punk debut album When I Have Fears, which for the most part captured their extraordinary live sound (perhaps my highlight set from last year’s The Great Escape), a terrific, melody-rich, no frills debut album from King Nun, The Isle of Wight’s Plastic Mermaids dream-psych-folk-pop mash-up Suddenly Everyone Explodes, and Brighton’s very own Penelope Isles’ debut on Bella Union, Until the Tide Creeps In.

And post-punk continued on its merry journey into deep, abstract, noisy yet strictly funky forays that showed no creative bounds. Bands like Squid, Black Midi, Black Country, New Road, Working Men’s Club and Dry Cleaning, displayed more creative juice in one song than most bands can muster in a lifetime. They may not capture mainstream hearts, but buy do they live and breath sweet sweet music.

Jeff Hemmings

There’s absolutely no doubt about it, we’re currently wading through an intense purple patch in the music industry. Which is a relief in a world where everything else seems to be falling apart at the seams. Across a multitude of genres, through brand-new music and legends of the industry, both on record and in rooms large and small, we’ve been walloped by wall-to-wall classics of the era. Nevertheless, it’s still a surprise to me that, in 2019, two of my favourite records have come from legends who, by right, should have already experienced their peak. That certainly wasn’t the case, however.

Ghosteen, the seventeenth record by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, continues his remarkable streak of five-star records since 2013’s Push the Sky Away. A remarkable, pain-stakingly candid expose of grief, it caused leakage from the eyes and a severe ache of the heart. A hard listen at times, it showcased Cave’s brazen knack for beautiful poetry and Warren Ellis’ conducting skills doing a good job of reigning in the passionate project. Likewise, Thom Yorke’s ANIMA was without a doubt his most coherent solo album so far. An anxiety-riddled electronica album littered with clever Thom Yorke-isms and an unexpected bubbling pop sensibility, it was an utter joy from start to finish.

Elsewhere, US hip-hop’s outrageous consistency continued with Tyler, the Creator’s best album yet IGOR, Denzel Curry’s 90s throwback ZUU, and Kanye West’s gospel inspired record Jesus is King. But the UK proved it’s still a creative hub for all things rap and grime with Little Simz GREY Area, Kano’s Hoodies All Summer and James Blake’s Assume Form.

In terms of new music – and the sort of music you can expect to hear on our brand new new music show Totally Wired – Fat White Family side project PREGOBLIN proved they’re far more than sleazy post-punk with the disco-inspired beats of ‘Anna (Flowers Won’t Grow)’ and ‘Combustion’, while Manchester band Mealtime were my surprise package of the year releasing dizzying and diverse electro-pop that feels both sinister and sunny. My new music artist of the year, though, has to be Arlo Parks. At just nineteen years of age, she’s released two beautiful EPs brimming with brilliant R&B licks and modernist lyrical licks and provided the main support for Jordan Rakei and Loyle Carner. The future isn’t just bright for Parks, it’s absolutely blinding. A little closer to home, Brighton bands Thyla, Squid, Youth Sector and RALPH TV all look likely to conquer nationwide domination in 2020.

In the live sphere, everything revolved around my first ever time at Glastonbury. A creative hub for everything music and performing arts, the likes of Lizzo (who certainly takes the crown for the music icon of the year), Tame Impala, Slowthai and Janelle Monae provided the perfect soundtrack to one of the hottest weekends of the year. Pure bliss. Thank god for music.

Liam McMillen

Formed in 2014, the London all female four-piece hit the big time when their stunning debut album Love in the 4th Dimension was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, a recognition that here was a good old fashioned indie rock and pop band who had the tunes to back up their enticing female gang imagery. Since then they have indulged in their various solo projects, played backing band to Marika Hackman on her I’m Not Your Man album, toured with The Pixies, and are about to release their second album, Walking Like We Do, followed by a tour with Bombay Bicycle Club and their own UK headline jaunt. Lead singer, guitarist and songwriter Juliette Jackson took some time out to chat with Brightonsfinest.

Obviously, it’s been amazing for you guys. Spring 2017 was when the first album came out…
Yeah, nearly three years ago. Weird. I didn’t even think of it.

Seems like quite a long time ago!
After it came out we spent a year on tour. I didn’t even try and write any songs then. I don’t like writing when on tour. You don’t ever get any privacy. I like to have my speakers around me, and all that shit. It’s easier to have one brain as a performer, for that period. And then come home from tour and use a different kind of brain.

Touring is about putting on the clothes, putting on the makeup, and pretending that your really confident, that your brave enough to be a singer in a band. Being the writer is all about being introspective, being shy, and trying to understand all your deepest, darkest thoughts, and not really talking to people that much. I like to be alone. I like to think that nobody is listening, otherwise I feel shy

So, we were on tour for a year, and then spent a year writing, and then recorded it in January of last year (2019), so we’ve been sitting on this egg for a while, but just going through the record label machine.

That must have been frustrating.
Yeah

But you’ve been road-testing some of the new songs?
Yeah, we’ve played the singles, and then there’s this song called ‘Why’, and ‘Don’t Think’, which is quite a big live-y song, and ‘Waves’, which is a bit more chilled and ambient, which is nice. Nice to play something a little more downbeat.

While the first album was concerned with love and being in love, this one strikes me as being more about turbulence in the modern world, I guess.
Someone said the other day that the first album was quite inward-looking, and this one is more outward-looking, and that makes sense to me. I feel like when you are writing songs and you are trying to process your feelings, you’re processing and understand the things that are going on around you, the things that you are thinking about. When I wrote the first album’s songs I was really falling in love for the first time. So that was all I could really think about.

In the last three years the world has got a lot bigger, weirder, and scarier. And that is the thing I am trying to process in my writing, the thing I’m trying to understand, I guess.

So, it’s more on a personal level, rather than what is going on around the world?
A bit of both really. The album is about growing up and moving forward. It comes with this sense of instability, which is what has been going on politically and socially, and environmentally. It feels like we are on this cliff edge. I feel like a lot of artists are trying to understand it. Nobody has the answers obviously, but I think there is some kind of solace in music. When you can describe a feeling perfectly, music is a language that is happy and sad all at once. And when things feel stressful and out of your control, and then you find a song that tells you how you are feeling… like freedom from all that. Do you know what I mean?

Absolutely. I mean, music is an escape, in a good way, whether as a performer or as a punter. I mean, I’ve spent the last week processing what has happened post-General Election…
It is a weird period at the moment, and it seems to be continuing. I feel like it started with Brexit, and then Donald Trump got elected. I don’t know, things just seem to be getting more weird and scary. Public discourse has become really frantic and polarised. I don’t know if we can come back from that, to be honest. The goalposts have been moved.

I’m really looking forward to Christmas this year, put my feet up, stop worrying and fretting, get stuck into other things!
Yeah, we really need to see our families, and get drunk! The day after the election we did a radio session on 6Music, and we were feeling all a bit ‘Whoah! What the fuck has just happened!?’ Feeling pretty down about it. But Billy Bragg was also on the radio session, and it was like the 6Music office Xmas party with Billy Bragg. He was like the best person you could meet, the day after a shitty election, because he was so full of energy for the future, like already. Someone who had been campaigning his whole life. It was really inspiring, and it felt really good. In these times you need that kind of space to be together with people, play music together, and get a bit drunk. A tequila!

I got horrendously drunk on election night, which didn’t help matters the next day… So, the song ‘It’s Easy Then’, that’s a bit about what you are talking about?
Yeah, I think so. Sometimes you need to admit that you don’t always want to be able to cope with everything, or to be able to understand everything, whether that’s in your own personal life, or everything going on around you. You do need a space to be vulnerable, a space to not think, or over-complicate things. I feel like when I was writing it I was trying to make myself feel better. The lyrics are definitely a bit of a panic attack, acknowledging quite an edgy feeling, but the music is really rich, and grounding. I find it grounding. Playing it, it’s just these two chords. It just feels really solid

And ‘A Hundred Ways to Land’. “We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re walking like we do” That’s such a brilliant couplet!
It’s the idea of finding strength in what you have around you. Nobody knows what is going to happen, and things are weird at the moment. But we all have our own power, in the communities that we are in. I think that’s really important to remember when you read in the news stuff that is weird, and you feel so disconnected from it, and out of control from it. But really, you are connected to your community, and your town, and your life, and your friends, and you can make a difference, locally. I think it’s really good to remember that.

How did you approach making this album?
It was pretty different. The first album was recorded live, with the intention of recording our live sound basically. We’d been touring for years, and the songs already knew themselves. We were like ‘let’s just record it as it is’. This time around we didn’t tour the songs first. We obviously played them together a lot, but we wanted to make something that sounded less live. I wanted to make something that was deeper, more spacious, sonically. Something that had more levels to it, than just a rock album, or a rock band set up. So, stuff like how sub-bass can go much lower than a bass guitar. We were trying to make sounds that were more hard hitting, or just a bit purer, I guess. We used a lot of drum samples, and worked with the guitar tones a lot more, to try and sound like you could play less of, but still fill more of the gap, if you know what I mean. Working with a less-is-more approach. Because sometimes you don’t need five guitar tracks. You just need one, and you only need it to happen at the end of a song, and it has so much impact, more impact than it would have if you played it all the way through. It was about looking for those dynamics, and trying to make moments.

What is your favourite track?
My favourite song changes every time I listen to it. At the moment it is definitely ‘Your Light’. I feel like that song makes a lot of sense at the moment. We played it the day after the election, and on that radio session. A lot of the lyrics in that song felt really appropriate. When you’re writing a song you never really know exactly why. Sometimes the meaning of a song comes a little later, and what it is for. I really felt it was that song on that day.

And that song went through so many stages, like I had a whole different sheet of lyrics before, to what it is now. But I feel really proud of it. I didn’t really like the lyrics before, but I dug in, and really thought about it, and thought about what I was really trying to get across. And I feel that I did get it across. It’s a nice feeling to have said what you meant to say.

It’s about freeing yourself, would you say, in a nutshell? Are things changing, getting worse, better…
Or you are just growing up and starting to notice them… That song is all those things, but it is about acknowledging darkness… we’re all going to feel bad sometimes about bad things. It’s also about finding hope and joy, and comfort in the things around you, the powers that you do have.

You did an interview with us, years ago, when you had literally juts started, and you name checked The Pixies as one of your influences. And you’ve just been on the road with them. How was that!?
Yeah, it was fine. Amazing! They are my favourite band, and they asked us to go on tour with them, so it was all a bit of pinch myself moment. I got to watch them play every night. So much energy, and they play a different set list every night. They have great fans, who are really into their music. And as a support band, they all arrive early, and stand there and listen and watch. They are interested in who you are and what you are about.

You’ll be doing some dates with Bombay Bicycle Club. How did you hook up?
They just asked us! It’s a big tour, it’s kinda the same size as the Pixies tour. Yeah, we want to play Alexandra Palace, three nights in a row! It’s going to be fun. We’ll be doing a headline tour pretty much straight after, and then another in the Autumn.

For now it’s all The Big Moon. I mean we all have our own things going on. I’ve started writing songs with other people. Celia is playing with Gently Tender, who I’m going to see tonight actually. Soph’s still playing with Our Girl. Fern is making amazing ambient drone music, in a studio in her house. You need that extra stuff to feed into the bigger stuff.

Jeff Hemmings

thebigmoon.co.uk

facebook.com/thebigmoon

twitter.com/thebigmoon

The brothers Brewis, Peter and David, have been operating under the Field Music moniker for a decade and a half, producing a string of acclaimed art-pop works, all on the independent Memphis Industries label, including 2012’s Plumb, which was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize.

One of the few bands to outlast the indie guitar band explosion of the mid-2000s, Field Music’s un-selfconscious, anti-fashion stance has seen them compared to the likes of Steely Dan, Todd Rundgren, Scritti Politti, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel and XTC. They may not have achieved much in the way of commercial success, but for the last 15 years they have been pouring their hearts and souls into Field Music, as well as a number of side projects including Peter’s You Tell Me band – also featuring Admiral Fallow’s Sarah Hayes – and David’s School of Language project, whose third album, 45, was released last summer, a satirical take on the 45^th Presidency, Donald Trump.

As Field Music they are about to release a new album, Making A New World, a work inspired by the aftermath and repercussions of World War I. Originally conceived thanks to a commission from the Imperial War Museum, the Brewis Brothers were intent on producing a live performance only, with no thought of an actual album. But one thing led to another… “We were approached by the Imperial War Museum, the Manchester side of it, to do a commission to do a performance inside the museum,” explains David. “It was all based around looking at the aftermath of WWI. It really grew out of this really strange artefact, a 1919 publication on munitions by the US War Department, which they had found quite by chance, and which gave a graphic representation of the sound at the end of the war. They had this technology called ‘sound ranging’, where they’d place microphones (in effect oil drums with a wire inside) spread out across the front, and by measuring the distance between a wave form of an explosion, the sound of an explosion hitting these microphones, it could pinpoint where any guns were. Some clever person had set this machine away, knowing that the armistice (a formal agreement to stop fighting) was going to kick in at 11am, on 18^th November, 1918. So, you’ve got one minute of guns and noise, and then one minute of near silence, represented by these six parallel wave forms, these vibrations displayed on a graph, where the distances between peaks on different lines could be used to pinpoint the location of enemy armaments. We imagined the lines from that image continuing across the next hundred years, and we looked for stories which tied back to specific events from the war or the immediate aftermath. In writing these songs, we felt we were pulling the war towards us, out of remembrance and into the everyday, and into the now.

“So we started working on this commission, which was going to be a performance. Initially we thought we would be doing some moody instrumental music, with maybe a song to top and tail it. But when we came up with our concept, which was that we were going to try and find stories from across the next hundred years, which we could tie directly back to something that happened in the war, we ended up writing loads of songs because the stories were so interesting. And it turned into something bigger and more interesting. By the time we had written the songs we felt they were as good as normal Field Music songs. And if we record it right this has to be an album, even though it wasn’t part of the initial intention.

“I actually think sadly it was because Mark E. Smith died,” says David about the commission. “I think they had a plan that The Fall were going to do it, and then Mark got really poorly. I’m not entirely sure why they came to us, except that we’re the kind of band that people think we can do this kind of thing. Which is good, because it means we have exactly the right kind of reputation. ‘Have you got a mad idea that we can possibly turn into music?’ Yeah, we’re probably the ones to do it.”

The result is Making A New World, a 19 track song cycle about the after-effects of the First World War. It’s not an album about war per se, and it is not, in any traditional sense, an album about remembrance. There are songs here about air traffic control and gender reassignment surgery. There are songs about Tiananmen Square and about ultrasound. There are more songs about Becontree Housing Estate, about the final WWI reparation, and sanitary towels!

“We got the ball rolling with the commission. We started doing our research in September 2018, and started putting together little snippets of music, which we thought might become songs. We finished those songs, and recorded demo versions of them, and rehearsed them with the band. We then put together some visuals, which Kev (Dosdale) from the band took charge of, with little stories interwoven into the visuals, all ready for these two performances, right at the end of January 2019. And the next week we came into the studio, and ran through the whole 45 minute performance, twice. And that’s the basis for 80 per cent of what’s on the record.”

What about the other 20 per cent, I ask? “We replaced some of the acoustic piano bits, altered some of the arrangements slightly, to give it more variation, and improve the flow, and we did the vocals, which we hadn’t done when we recorded it. Especially for me, playing the drums and singing meant that I wasn’t necessarily doing both of them as well as I could.

It sounds like Making A New World is an apt title for the different working method you employed this time around!? “It’s a lot quicker than how we usually record. Usually, me and Peter will do a lot of recording where the two of us are playing together, so that we can have the feel of playing the song. It’s usually just the two of us until very late in the process, where we might get Liz Corney in, who plays keys, and can do some extra singing. Or we’ll get Andy Lowther, the original keyboard player in the band, on bass. All that happens right at the end. This is the first time we’ve captured the sound of the band. We don’t usually start learning to play the songs until we are about to go on tour. So, it was very strange to have already played all the songs live before we recorded.”

Concept albums are much maligned, aren’t they? Would you describe Making A New World as a concept album? “It is a concept album about the aftermath of WWI. There’s just no way of getting round it,” laughs David. They have a dirty name… “They still do in my head! There is something about them that is so ingrained within me and Peter that we can never escape it. But, because of the way we researched these stories, rather than tell one story in a dense and convoluted way, we’ve been able to tell stories that have been really spread out. I hope we have done something where you can enjoy it on one level, just the sound and the melodies, but that you can keep digging down into it if you wish, and maybe start to tie all the bits together. There’s text in the artwork, which relates to each of the songs. I didn’t want it to be something where you had to do the research to enjoy it, but if you want to do the research, it’s rewarding. We didn’t sit around and think, ‘let’s make this more like War of the Worlds’, although that was something we grew up with.”

That’s one of the few I really enjoy, I say. “It’s got a lot of big tunes! But, it’s more of a musical, isn’t it? The other one Peter and I like, because we see or imagine humour in it, is The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, by Genesis. It does that thing of telling one story, in an incredibly convoluted and dense way, which obscures a lot of the good things about it. We’ve tried to avoid that.

Let’s dig down into some of the songs. Like ‘Money Is A Memory’, perhaps the most explicit example of the consequences of the war. “It is about Germany’s war reparations and is written from the perspective of an office worker in the German Treasury preparing documents for the final instalment on reparation debts, a payment made in 2010, 91 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. The reason why the final repayment wasn’t made until 2010 was partly because Hitler stopped the payments, which didn’t start again until Germany was reunified,” explains David. “The initial premise is a bit comical – the admin assistant going through their bureaucratic duties – but buried away inside those papers you can imagine the echoes of millions of lives being turned upside down.”

And the sanitary pads? “I found myself researching the development of sanitary pads – not a statement I’ve ever imagined myself making – and was surprised at how little the advertising material has changed in a hundred years. It’s still, ‘Hey Ladies! Let’s not mention it too loudly but here is the perfect product to keep you feeling normal WHILE THE DISGUSTING, DIRTY THING HAPPENS.’ And you realize that it’s a kind of madness that a monthly occurrence for billions of women – something absolutely necessary for the survival of humanity – is seen as shameful or dirty – and is taxed more than razor blades! At every stage of making this song, I had to ask myself, am I allowed to do this? Is it okay to do this? And I cringed in the next room when I first showed it to my wife. But I think confronting my own embarrassment is a pretty fundamental part of what the song is about.”

The songs are in a kind of chronological order, starting with the end of the war itself; the uncertainty of heading home in a profoundly altered world (‘Coffee or Wine’). Later we hear a song about the work of Dr Harold Gillies (the shimmering ballad, ‘A Change of Heir’), whose pioneering work on skin grafts for injured servicemen led him, in the 1940s, to perform some of the very first gender reassignment surgeries. And we also see how the horrors of the war led to the Dada movement and how that artistic reaction was echoed in the extreme performance art of the 60s and 70s (the mathematical head-spin of ‘A Shot To The Arm’).

“There were groups of artists who fled to Switzerland, and started Cabaret Voltaire,” and their response to the horror of the war was to say, ‘this is absurd’, and ‘we are going to display all these absurdities’.. That was the start of the Dada movement. That’s the starting point for a lot of conceptual art in the 20^th century. Peter found a story of an artist called Chris Burden who was inspired in a similar way with what was happening with the Vietnam War, and images that were coming back on the television, which he felt were desensitising people to real violence. He asked his friend, in the name of art, to shoot him in the arm,” David laughs. “I think the plan was for it to be just a graze, but his friend wasn’t that good of a shot, and he ended up with a really horrific wound. But that was exactly what he was wanting to do. When the police came, he didn’t tell him it was art, but that it was an accident. It got Peter off on this thing, writing about how desensitisation to violence infiltrates society, and he’s written a song about kids bringing toy guns into school. That all ties in with what Chris Burden was trying to do.

“Each song has two dates associated with it,” says David. When we did the live performance we wanted it to have this steady flow across the century, to the point where you end with Donald Trump deciding he is going to move the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, and how that sits too neatly with some of the awful decisions that were made by the allies in the Middle East, during the war. There, essentially behind the backs of the people who lived there, they decided how they were going to divvy things up, without paying any more than lip service really, to what the people there wanted. Basically, it’s a record about consequences, and unforeseen consequences, and how they still infiltrate what happens now. The museum were really pleased with it, because often that’s what they are trying to do. Not to try and set these events back in the past, as if they’re fairy stories, but make you understand their presence today.

Jeff Hemmings

field-music.co.uk

facebook.com/fieldmusic

twitter.com/fieldmusicmusic

Cacophonous feedback informed the beginning, the guitarist and singer Theo Polyzoides bent over forwards next to his amp, before the band struck out on a stridently noisy punk rock beat, Theo hopping on to his amp, back facing the cameras, before jumping off and reaching the mic in time to yelp the words to ‘Speakerface’. This was my introduction to King Nun, filmed in lo-fi, recorded live, but released as an accompanying video. It was electrifying. I loved it from the first seconds…

The Twickenham four piece King Nun have quickly blazed a trail since the days of effectively being banned from their local open mic, for being too noisy… Their English teacher at college however said that they were going places. It only takes one sometimes…

American Punk influenced tracks such as ‘Tulip’ (the A-Side to ‘Speakerface’’s B-side), ‘Hung Around’ and the EP I Have Love all caught the imagination, as did their raucous, high energy live shows, including a couple of stints at The Great Escape. This autumn saw the release of their debut album, Mass, a slightly less intense, yet still melody-packed unconventional rock record, full of ambition, and the sure signs of a band flowering very quickly into one of the most essential guitar orientated bands these isles have produced in recent times.

“I’m outside King Nun’s bassist Nathan’s house,”says Theo over the phone, as he takes some time out to chat with Brightonsfinest, post album release, and pre-headline UK tour, which will bring them to Brighton once again, in February of next year.

Bit chilly outside, I ask!? “Yeah, of course. You’ve got to learn to love it, otherwise you’re going to live your life as a misery. So, I’m wrapped up for it. Also, I’m a dedicated smoker, so I can stand being outside in the cold for long periods of time.”

Theo is articulate and full of beans, despite the cold. His love of music shines through, as does his maturing head. He (and they) seems to know what they want, and are capable of delivering it. They are having the time of their lives.

You rehearsing? “It’s a new project we’ve got coming up. We’ve finished the album, and we’re immediately writing for a new thing. It’s all coming together very very quickly. We’re very on the ball about this one.”

Sounds good. Mass must have included a lot of old songs? “Yeah, half of them. I suppose when it comes to debut albums you’ve got to look at yourself, like everything you’ve ever done; which bits are the best bits, and which bits get cut, which bits stay, how you are going to present yourself to the world.”

Songs are the key! “Oh yeah. That’s what I’m told,” he laughs. “It just so happens that I thoroughly enjoy the work.”

The musicality of Theo and band (who also include James on guitar, and Caius on drums) is apparent from the get go on the multi-faceted and coming-of-age Mass ‘Mascara Runs’ drives along an unpredictable melody as Theo sings about young love, while ‘Chinese Medicine’ shows the first signs of arena friendly sing-a-longs; the warped ‘Low Flying Dandelion’ while ‘Cowboy’ is a mix of post-punk angularity, and driving indie-rock. ‘Black Tree’ meanwhile displays hints of early The Cure, a slightly more gentle musical stroll, but which has the dark undertow of that quintessential new wave/post-punk band. And recent single ‘Bug’ is simply another example of their songwriting brilliance, simple yet effective, as it powers along slightly distorted guitars, combining playfulness with an uplifting chorus.

Then there’s the album closer ‘A Giant Came Down’, apparently inspired by obscure German folkie Sibylle Baier. “An ex-girlfriend showed it to me,” explains Theo, “and because of that and partly because I’m a serious melancholy junky, it immediately intrigued me. The melodies are so beautiful, and beautifully shaped. Sibylle Baier recorded these songs in Germany in the early 70s. She recorded these songs to herself on a two-track tape recorder, and years down the line her son gave these recordings to family friends as gifts. And eventually they ended up in the hands of J Mascis (Dinosaur Jr). He thought they were unbelievable, and put them out on his record label. That story wasn’t why I necessarily got into it so much, I just loved the music. It does say a lot about what I think it is. It is so selfless. It doesn’t sound like it was recorded for anyone else. It really does sound like she is pouring her heart out, about everyday life. It’s so down-to-earth, and so relatable in a way that I think is so hard to find. I absolutely fell in love with it, and that song plays as a tribute to that artist, and what is to be learned from her, I think.”

It’s this attitude, this drive to be as selfless as the aforementioned Baier, that sets King Nun apart from many aspiring bands. First and foremost, if you don’t do it for the love, then what exactly are you doing it for? For sure, success and repetition might blunt the desire eventually, but for the moment King Nun aren’t worried about such things. Instead, Theo and gang are learning, experimenting, and loving what they do. It’s there on the oddly titled ‘Sharing A Head With Seth’. “When we did our first few singles, ‘Speakerface’ being one of them, we were considerably more punk than we ended up being on the album. Lyrically, I wasn’t too experienced when we did those singles, and I ended up playing into a character, a character very much based on Richard Hell and all of that American punk thing. It got me thinking after those songs were released, about how careful I need to be with the character I’m playing in music, I think. So, ‘Sharing A Head With Seth’ was a response to the character I was playing, and that character I called Seth, after a necrophiliac in a video game.

What!? I laugh nervously… “I was playing a game called the Red Dead Redemption, and there’s a necrophiliac grave digger in there called Seth, who wears this big ripped clothing, this creepy looking old guy. It’s the perfect name. So, it’s all about that, yeah!”

You mention Richard Hell, and punk. How did you find out about all this stuff, that came out way before you were out of nappies. “We were always attracted to rock music, but why it was we got attracted to American punk in particular I couldn’t really say! I do remember there was a record shop in Kingston-Upon-Thames that sells singles for a quid. So, we would go in there, and buy the coolest artwork. And I remember we came across Richard Hell & The Voidoids. The single we bought was ‘I’m Your Man’, and it absolutely split our heads open. And I immediately went onto Youtube and whatever, and found everything we could by them, and which led on to this bigger scene that included Blondie, Television, The Ramones, Johnny Thunders, and The Deadboys, and all that kind of thing.”

More recently, King Nun got the ‘call’ to support American punk legends Black Flag. “Oh my God, yeah we did! When we first heard about it, the email came through and it said ‘Blag Flag’, so we thought it was a tribute act. But it was actually them. I’m sure when you are interviewing people and you ask them about your achievements, they say this a lot, which is, ‘it’s hard to process these things’. It really is. Until I was on stage and said ‘Is everybody ready to listen to Black Flag!’, that was when I realised we were doing it. Holy Shit,” he quietly murmurs, as if the impact of that moment once again strikes a deep chord within him.

“It’s weird how cyclical these things work. After years of being this band, we’ve managed to come back around and play alongside this band who meant so much to us. It was really incredible, and the kind of venue they were playing in was exactly the kind of venue I would have wanted Black Flag to be in, with the exact same kind of audience. American punk. It was beautiful. And we got on very well in that venue, and with that audience.

They’ve also recently been on tour with up and coming glam hard rockers The Struts, an almost entirely different proposition to Black Flag. Theo obviously revels in the glorious diversity of music, but whose best aspects are universal: to have a good time, but to take it seriously, and give it your all. “They are essentially like a Queenesque, performance heavy band, with an emphasis on stagemanship, and these big sing-a-long songs,” says Theo. We’ve never played with a group like that before. They have a very sizeable audience, so we were playing bigger venues more consistently than we had done before. It was such an amazing learning experience. They’ve just got their shit down. They go up on stage, and they pull out their magic trick. Well, damn! We’ve got to get organised!” Theo laughs.

No, don’t do it! Be yourself!! I implore. “It’s all about clarity, how to voice yourself in the best possible way,” he argues. “And playing with them was definitely a learning experience.”

While not as raucous and raw as their previous releases, Mass still sounds like a pure band – just guitars, bass and drums, with no obvious frills. It sounds both live and alive. How was it recorded, live? “I don’t know how much I want to shed the curtains about the recording process,” says Theo, rather coyly. “I would say it was really important to us to get that natural feel of what a lot of bands we were into when we first got into music. The 70s CBGBs thing, those bands were the ones that initially took our hearts. So, that kind of loose, barely being held together kinda feel was really really important to us. A natural performance from wherever we can get it is incredibly crucial to our band. That was something we implemented. The performance came first. How we managed to get those performances was also down to our very talented producers Joseph Rogers and Rupert Lyddon.

I say to Theo that I think the album is very strong, packed full of great songs. Indeed, I don’t think there is a dud one on there. He’s not for taking praise though. “Yeah, why not,” he nonchalantly replies. Why did you call it Mass? “I think ‘mass’ applies to what music is. It’s a sermon, where people come together, and be in the face of this thing they love, and come together and celebrate. And also ‘mass’ has ties with sacrifice and baptism, which I also think has something to do with our music, in particular having to do so much with catharsis. I think ‘mass’ defines music in general, and more with what we were trying to do with this album; have it be something coming of age, and have it be something as a ceremony. So, it made perfect sense. And it came out of nowhere. These things just show up.”

You MUST be proud of what you have achieved with Mass? “I feel the same way that I’ve always felt. The thing that matters most to me is that I like it, and that we all like it. It’s a wonderful thing to hear praise and all of this, and we have had some of that, and god bless it. We are very proud, but the most important thing is that we care about it.”

Music is obviously in Theo’s blood, whether as a performer, or a punter. There’s that symbiosis between the two, isn’t there? A connection that is really hard to describe, The live visceral experience for many (myself included) is often the best feeling you can get. And the mix of King Nun’s melancholy lyricism with a violent musicality, is indeed, like a sermon, and a catharsis “We have quite a violent approach to these things. The kind of thing I’ll be singing about is melancholic, for sure. But the way it comes out is like a way more over the top catharsis.

“I’ve always been into complete escapism. I couldn’t say why. It’s just something I take to quite nicely. So I see a gig as being a complete escape from reality, where all of your issues can be presented as surrealism, almost nonsense. Everything seems more clear to me, whenever you’re in this state of just breaking away from reality completely. I think that’s my therapy, breaking off from the mundane, and being a part of this ridiculous thing. It makes everything easier to deal with. Or maybe just more clear. Yeah!”

Jeff Hemmings

Website: king-nun.tumblr.com

Facebook: facebook.com/KingNunBand

Twitter:  twitter.com/kingnunband

For two decades the Brighton based record label Tru Thoughts has been a prolific force amidst electronic music, jazz and hip hop, with artists such as Bonobo, Rodney P, Ty, Quantic, and Alice Russell gracing their books. Still headed by founder Rob-Luis, they continue to find, and nurture new talent. Tiawa Blackhorse has just signed to the label, and is one of many acts performing at Tru Thoughts 20th birthday celebrations, along with Hidden Orchestra, Anchorsong, Wrongtom, J-Felix, and many more. Tiawa took some time out from touring to have a chat with Jeff Hemmings, about Brighton, music and her musical partner Jack-Chi (Jack Kingslake).

Are you Brighton born and raised? Either way, tell me about your upbringing.

I was born just outside of Brighton and have lived here since I was 7. Prior to that I was back and forth living with my Grandma in Portugal. I have a strong connection to Portugal, as most of my family on my mum’s side live there. Listening to conscious music has always been a strong foundation in my life from an early age, and I thank my family for that.

Tell me about the city you live in, and what you like about it.

It’s always been a town that stood out on the south coast, and held its originality. It’s a great place to make music, as there’s so many different scenes. There is something for everyone.

How did you get into music, what inspired you?

I was raised with a family that would listen mostly to reggae, so I know it well. I have always loved all types of music, especially the kinds of rebellion music that has a strong sentiment and integrity. Other music has inspired me though I’ve always made sure my songs are unique and didn’t sound like anything anyone’s heard before.

You went to Audio Active, which is where you met Jack. Tell me about him, and what he did (does) at Audio Active, and why the relationship works!

Jack is like family to me. We met when I was around 14, ten years ago. The people at Audio Active gave me a solid grounding to pursue my passion for writing rap music and singing. I always got on well with Jack, and I feel that he understands me musically, which is not easy to find when you have a strong and particular vision of what you want your music to sound like. He’s creatively diverse, and I find his styles are a perfect mix for my melodies and writing style.

is it the music first, then the words, or the other way around, or what?

It depends. I sometimes come up with the melody first and then write the words, other times my producers will send me an idea and if I like it I will write to it, and we build the rest of the instrumental from there. If I have my guitar with me I tend to write the lyrics to the chords.

You released ‘Pain Killa’ via local bespoke reggae/dub label Roots Garden, which must have felt good. A 7″ single no less! Was that odd in this digital age? Did vinyl factor into your upbringing at all!?

Yes! It wasn’t too odd for me as I’ve grown up listing to tapes and records as well as CDs. I feel it’s great to not just rely solely on digital form as a release method. It feels good to have the record in your hand, there’s something special about it.

Can you tell me about other releases and collaborations?

I have a new song with Roots Garden coming out in the next few months. We are also going to release an acoustic EP featuring remakes of some Alton Elis and Wailing Soul music, alongside a selection of my original acoustic songs. I am also currently making a hip-hop EP with some talented members of Audio Active that I will be releasing before the album comes out.

Tell me about your style and lyrics. Is there any improvisation? And what inspires your words?

I tend to be focused on writing music that is directed towards liberation for anyone who has been through true struggles in life. I like to write about personal experiences. Music has helped me so much in my life that I feel it is important for people to share their stories through my music in a positive way. I feel that a positive mind state can free people of all kinds of pain, and music can help you get to that.

I understand you have just signed with Tru Thoughts. Tell me how that came about.

We had some mutual friends who were doing a publishing deal with them, and they passed on some songs of mine to Paul Jonas and Rob-Luis. I had been thinking for a while that the album I was making would suit the Tru thoughts label. Once they had heard the songs, and expressed feedback, we arranged a meeting. We all got on well instantly. They embraced the project and it all started from there.

Were you ever aware of them before talk of signing?

Yes, I’ve been aware of them for quite a while being Brighton based, I’ve always loved the music that they put out, I used to listen to Bonobo a lot. When I was a kid I always had a feeling that one day I might work with Tru Thoughts. It’s nice to know my music is going to be looked after by a label with lots of experience in the industry. And knowing that they have worked with a diverse range of artists with many different styles is ideal, as I find my own music wouldn’t fit with a label that focused on one genre alone.

How does it work live, what is the set up?

Usually I would do a PA set. When I first started performing I would play with my guitar and voice only. I like working with bands too, but for this album the production is a mix of live instruments and digital, and it’s nice to hear the backing when on the stage. I plan to perform with bands more frequently in the future, but for now i will be mostly performing with a DJ.

What is in the pipeline? What can we expect in 2020?

I’m very excited for 2020, I will be releasing my album with Tru Thoughts, and travelling to different parts of the world to promote and share the album. We’re currently putting the finishing touches to it, and I cant wait to share our work with everyone!

Jeff Hemmings

https://tru-thoughts.co.uk/artists/tiawa/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xrtkT_p0tQ

This legendary member of Genesis during their classic 70s heyday, and guitarist extraordinaire, is still making and playing music, even as he approaches 70. He joined Genesis in1971, and played on six of their studio albums, including Selling England by The Pound and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Hackett released his first solo album, Voyage of the Acolyte, while still a member of Genesis in 1975. After a series of further solo albums beginning in 1978, Hackett co-founded the supergroup GTR with Yes’ Steve Howe in 1986, releasing one album. Hackett then resumed his solo career. He has released albums and toured worldwide on a regular basis since, his body of work encompassing many styles: progressive rock, pop, blues, world music and classical music. According to Guitar World: “Hackett’s early explorations of two-handed tapping and sweep picking were far ahead of their time and influenced Eddie Van Halen and Brian May.”

He’s currently on tour in the UK, performing Selling England by the Pound in its entirety, as well as tracks from his 1979 album Spectral Mornings, and his recently released album At the Edge of Light. He took some time out to chat with Jeff Hemmings about Selling England by the Pound, the new album, Brexit and working on cruise ships!

You seem very busy!

I’m busy, yeah. I don’t think I have ever been busier. Life is completely nuts, but in a good way. I’m rehearsing, and got a couple of dates in the Caribbean, on cruise ships. I’m cruising, as it were. It’s a lot of fun. I’ve got a new drummer, a German who lives in the States, Marco Minnemann Very powerful, it’s quite extraordinary. We all had to turn up twice as loud to be heard above him! Which is fine. I like explosive drumming.

Tell me about these cruise ship gigs? They seem to be all the rage at the moment.

There were two, one with Yes, and one with The Moody Blues – The Moody Cruise!

It’s very good. Extremely good, actually. You do say goodbye to privacy though, you’re literally all in the same boat, 3000 people plus performers. Breakfast is interesting. You want to get there early, you don’t want to get interrupted. But, it’s a lot of fun and after you’ve been there a couple of days, people say ‘I’ve seen him, I’ve got his autograph’ and then they leave you alone. ‘My Grandmother saw you back in 1918, and she’s still got the picture on the wall’, that sort of stuff.

The new album At The Edge of Light sounds very much like a world music album in places, lots of ethnic musical styles in the mix.

The people on it are from the four corners of the earth. There is a core of the band but they get augmented by people from Iceland, Azerbaijan, India, USA. Some stuff is recorded in Budapest and Sardinia.

Are you firmly in the global internet age, sending files across the ether?

Most of it is still done face-to-face but occasionally we use the internet, mainly for the drumming. Internet drumming, yeah! We’ve got four or five different drummers on the album and they all bring something different and unique to it. It took 18 months to get it done, doing shows in-between. Not 18 months straight! What happens is that you get moments, or pockets, or even the odd month, where you’ve got to work like crazy to meet deadlines. I find that doing deadlines does encroach more these days than they did when I was starting out. It seemed a month was an excessively long time to make an album. But these days the standards of merely tuning and timing are higher. It takes a while just to get everything correct.

The track ‘Beasts of our Time’ sounds like reflections of the growing menace of the Far Right and nationalism.

It is, yeah. We were thinking of the Neville Chamberlain quote ‘peace in our time’. That addresses that in a symbolic way. Some of the other tracks focus on this time of dissent, conflict and potential disaster but the album ends optimistically – cautiously optimistically – with the track ‘Peace’.

Inevitably I have to ask about the current turmoil here, in the form of Brexit…

International musicians tend to come down on the side of being remainers. We know that if Brexit goes ahead it makes it enormously complicated to do tours in Europe. It impacts on us directly. And we still don’t have a deal, do we? So we don’t know what it means. It seems to me at this point in time that those who are talking about honouring the democratic process are unwilling to have a second referendum, with everyone informed what the deal is. ‘Sign up to this’, but you don’t really know what it is. I’ve heard the arguments where people are saying ‘let’s just get on with it’, but what does that mean!? I’m all for honouring the democratic process but with an informed electorate. If it means living on tinned food, and no medical supplies, and trucks not moving, and troops on the street, is that really what you’re voting for? Is your life that dull that you’re interested in all that conflict? There are other dramas going on in my life, just to be able to get out of England!

My family were immigrants and came here in the late 1800s, and if they had not been allowed to come in, I wouldn’t be here. I’m a direct product of a Jewish family on my Mother’s side, who managed to escape pogroms and all that, so I feel I am honouring the ancestors to some degree. I am for honouring on-going democratic processes, especially since we’ve reached deadlock. The idea of crashing out without a deal would be reprehensible. It’s like jumping off a cliff and saying, ‘bring on the financial crash’. The whole connection to Europe, the idea of – in the aftermath of World War II – the peace, if not the prosperity, ought to be a major priority.

Tell me about this tour

We’ll be doing the whole of Selling England by the Pound, most of Spectral Mornings, and highlights from At the Edge of Light. It’s the 40^th anniversary of Spectral Mornings, which I did in 1979. And one of the live favourites is Selling England…, which was released a very very long time ago in 1973. John Lennon said at the time they were one of the bands he was listening to. And I’ve always felt it was the best Genesis album that we did with the five man team, which included Peter Gabriel. I have enormous affection for that very British album. It’s got some great moments on it, from everyone in the band. Everyone got the chance to shine. I think the band was at its peak then.

There is certainly a big revival of interest in music from the 70s.

It seems like a long long time ago but then I think of albums like Sgt Pepper and Dark Side of the Moon. I grew up listening to music in the 1950s, and the 60s and 70s were an extraordinarily creative time. Musicians have always been creative, but whether they’ve been allowed to get their ideas across, I don’t know. I grew up listening to all sorts of things. We had two radio stations, The Light Programme (the precursor to BBC Radio 2), and the Home Service (which became BBC Radio 4). Why would you need more than two stations! We had everything from Glenn Miller to Elvis Presley. It’s all music. They’re all making a noise for a living…

Have you adapted well to the Spotify generation?

I think that whatever format people want to listen to music in, they should be allowed to. If they want to shout at the wall and be answered by a robot, or actually physically get off your arse, and put something on, I don’t mind! It’s all valid.

It’s enabled many more people to reconnect with Genesis and your older solo material.

That’s right. When you bought records they were in a cardboard box and you were lucky to get them in alphabetical order. I bought some very interesting albums that way, out the front of electrical shops on the King’s Road. I picked up Eric Satie. I thought ‘interesting cover, I’ll take a chance on this’. It was cheap, and it sounded wonderful. It features classical pieces that I had no idea who the composer was. That was a voyage of discovery, when music was marginalised. I guess it’s marginalised in a different way now but I’m very happy for music to get out there. But whether a live show advertises an album, or an album advertises a live show, live tends to be the way forward and I’ve kept touring, either with an orchestra, or a band, rock stuff or acoustic stuff, ‘Risking it’ is what motivates me. Sometimes I’ve gone on stage without a script at all. When I worked with Evelyn Glennie (Scottish virtuoso multi-percussionist) we didn’t have a single note agreed for that rehearsal in the morning. She wanted to keep it spontaneous, and I thought I’ve been a complete fraud here, on one level. I’m without a script, never mind a good verse and chorus, as we used to talk about in Genesis. That was an eye opener. Anyone who does that is really brave.

What do you listen to?

I listen to everyone and anything, from Bach to Blues and beyond, and even earlier music, like William Byrd.

Will there be any element of musical freedom in the upcoming tour?

Some solos are improvised. I’m currently rehearsing up ‘Supper’s Ready’ (for one of the cruise gigs), and I do a long improvised thing at the end of it. But I want to do authentic versions of the songs we’re playing. I’m not trying to hoodwink people. I’m not trying to do an orchestral suite, loosely based on the work of… or atonal jazz versions of the songs you once managed to sing along with. I won’t be doing that!

You’ll be performing ‘Firth of Forth’ which you had a big hand in.

It’s the most well known Genesis guitar melody. It was a great moment, and I look forward to playing that again. Previously I cherry-picked across Genesis music, but this time we’re doing an album, because for me, this is the one, or this is the time that we got feedback from Mr Lennon, who we had all grown up listening to. If any one says, ‘is this 70s stuff relevant?’, well you might as well say ‘is all this Beatles stuff relevant?’ For young budding songwriters, it was seminal. It was more than important, it was the air that we breathed. It was a game changer for the world. Rock and pop’s shoulders had become sufficiently broad enough to encompass other forms: raga, classical, you name it. So, I’m very thankful to those guys for blazing the trail for us.

And you’ll here in Brighton, at the Dome!

There is one track off the new album, ‘The Hungry Years’, which reflects a club in Brighton, which both my wife Jo and her sister Amanda (who sings with Steve) used to go to, and listen to loud music!

Jeff Hemmings

Website: www.hackettsongs.com
Facebook: facebook.com/stevehackettofficial
Twitter: twitter.com/HackettOfficial

Who said guitar music is dying? Haven’t we heard this before? Yes, a million times and counting. When synth pop and the new romanticism hit the airwaves back in the early 80s, when dance music took the UK by storm at the turn of the 90s, when Britpop fizzled out in the late 90s and when the mid-noughties four-string revival hit the veritable brick wall. We’ve heard it time and time again. There are no new pastures, no exciting bands, the well is almost dry, and we’re all going to have to deal with the purgatory of computer driven music, soulless auto-tuned r’n’b and probably much worse. And yet, like the Phoenix from the flames, it refuses to die, instead re-inventing itself into new and exciting forms.

Recent bands such as Shame, Idles, The Murder Capital, and Brighton’s Penelope Isles, have re-moulded, re-configured, and re-booted this rock’n’roll music, into fresh, inventive, exciting, and powerful news sounds, that while often harking back to an older band or era, exist purposefully in the here and now, drawing in fresh-faced youngsters, who like nothing more than music with punch, soul and meaning.

But, hold on! While Working Men’s Club have been somewhat lazily lumped in together with the new post punk zeitgeist, their aim is now broader, taking in electronic elements, mixing up hints of psychedelia, with motorik, and new wave synth, as they quickly look to change their initial post punkish bearing, into something… different.

“The reason there aren’t as many popular guitar bands right now is because they keep reproducing the same shit. No one should be surprised guitar music is dying” says Working Men’s Club lead singer Sydney Minsky-Sargeant.

Of course, any really great guitar based bands are far more than just the sum total of its constituent parts. Anyone who caught them at The Great Escape will have surely been impressed also with their youthful swagger energy and mature songcraft, epitomized by songs such as ‘Teeth’ and ‘Bad Blood’. Minsky-Sargeant may still be in his teens, but there is a remarkable beauty in his writing, allied to a vulnerability and anger, that speaks clearly to an increasingly disenfranchised and fragile youth.

The last 12 months has seen the band on a meteoric rise, including their debut single ‘Bad Blood’, released at the beginning of the year, a few festival appearances, and a tour with their good friends, Fat White Family, before eventually signing to legendary indie label, Heavenly Records, who released their second single ‘Teeth’, back in the summer. “We’ve worshipped the label and its bands for a long time, so it’s nice to be part of the family.”

A lot of people are talking about you and the bands you evoke, such as The Fall. “A lot of the comparisons that get made I never thought of. There’s a lot of weird music I like, and a lot of dance music, like afrobeat, and a lot of stuff that was going on in Manchester in the 90s, which I was listening to in, my early teens. But yeah, post punk is good. I guess it is quite post punk, what we do. But, we’re into the more electronic side of things now, like the band Boy Harsher, who are really good. Suicide are a massive one for me. If anyone is going to give me an influence, that would be mine. Genius, that band. Fucking genius. Very underrated.”

I admit to Syd that I didn’t get it when I first heard Suicide way back. But, now I do. “When I hear bands like The Moonlandingz, and Fat White, I think of Suicide. Beautiful and dark. A lot of bands in the New York scene hated them. No one liked them. But, I do. Not that it matters!” he laughs.

But just as the band seem to be making considerable headway, the make up and sound of the band is currently being radically overhauled. “We’re putting an album out next year,” says Minsky-Sargeant. “It’s not all recorded yet, we’re finishing it in December. The reason we haven’t recorded it yet, is because we don’t know what the album is going to be, what’s going to be on the album. We know half of what it’s going to be, but the rest may not have even been written yet.

“We’ve got a new line up, including Mairead O’Connor from The Moonlandingz, on guitar, and Rob Graham, from Drenge, on guitar and keys. We lost two members. Jake and Guilia, who are doing their own thing now. It’s different. In some ways it’s better. It’s definitely not worse. It’s more electronic. There are no live drums. It’s all very syncopated, and very tight. Not in terms of how we play, but the music is very tight. And, it’s a bit weirder. It’s different! It’s good. It’s nice to be thinking on my feet. Keep the show on the road!”

The engaging, politically aware, says-how-he-sees-it, Minsky-Sargeant, has been writing music from a very young age, it seems. “I started writing songs when I was about four,” he says. “The first thing I remember hearing was probably David Bowie, in my Dad’s car. I thought, ‘this is alright’. And I started to do really shit impersonations of it and that’s how I got into music, trying to write songs like David Bowie when I was four years old, and failing.”

I bet he wasn’t writing very good songs when he was four, I say. “No. I’m still trying to write good songs now. It’s all a bit of a learning curve.”

Songwriting is both an art and a craft, isn’t it? And you seem to be able to do it quite naturally. How does it work for you? “I find the best time is when you are sober in the morning, as soon as you wake up. I write and record at the same time. Seems to be when I am most together, when I feel most alive, probably about 8.30am. Once I pass midday it all gets a bit hazy…”

’Teeth’ laid down a big marker, for their future development as a band, incorporating electronics into their post-punk sound, and recalling Gang of Four, The Fall, and Joy Division, as well as more modern electronically-minded post punk bands, such as Squid and Warmduscher. On ‘Teeth’, a robotic drum loop is broken up by jagged guitars, distant synth and echoing vocals, giving the song an urgent energy. Lyrically, it deals with insanity and subconscious despair: “Running around the house, crazy / Nothing seems to go my way / Everything’s a myth / Don’t know what to believe.”

“It is a metaphor,” Minsky-Sargeant says of ’Teeth’. “It could be about going insane, or about being depressed, and wanting to kill yourself, or thinking someone else is going to kill you. It’s about insanity, really, and how dark you can go inside your own head. How dark you can take yourself to, the extremity of it. It’s not a nice song.”

Do you see music as your form of therapy? “I’ve gone to real therapy. I do see it as some form of therapy but as an expression more than therapy. But, it is therapeutic, at least the anger behind it is. When you can release your anger with music, it’s good. It sometimes saves you from doing terrible things.

“There’s a lot more of an emotional connection in live music, on both sides. I appreciate it when some people come to see us, it feels like they care. I see that more as therapy. It shows you’ve got someone off their bed, or out from behind a desk. It feels mutually beneficial, when you go and watch a band or play to a group of people. That’s like therapy, like counselling. You never know, you could be counseling someone else. Or, maybe they are counselling you.

“We’re so far apart nowadays, humanity. Look at this country, look at how divided it is. Maybe music is the only true form of unity, at the minute. Creativity is unity, it brings people together, in one way or another.

So, what inspires your writing? “Depression. Life. How fucked up this world this. Yeah, how fucked up this country is in general, not just the politics.”

You following Brexit? “What is there to follow! No one knows what is going on. No one knew what they were voting for. It’s abhorrent. Government has destroyed this country. They are killing people. That’s what’s not talked about. Too busy faffing over Brexit. People are dying. From the cuts. People are too busy faffing over egos. Slowthai gets censored by the BBC for waving a severed head of Boris Johnson around. How many people of his Government have they killed? Now, its just a joke. I find it disgusting.

“I find the times we’re living in disgusting. I find the fact that people and musicians are censored, disgusting. That’s what I think about politics at the moment, they don’t give a shit about it at the moment. They get far too much attention. They should be punished. They should face up to their actions. Bullshit.”

In your neck of the woods, is that the general feeling you have just expressed? “I think there is a lot of feeling. There’s a lot of working class people who are told what to feel, and told who to direct their anger to. I don’t blame them, really. I don’t think they are dumb, but the fact that politics has become something that people weren’t really bothered about before, have to be bothered about now, because they have to be angry at something. There’s a reason why people are hating but they are hating on the wrong people. Around my area there are a lot people who vote for the right people and there’s people who vote for the wrong people, but I don’t ‘enemise’ any of them. There’s a reason why they are hating on those people. And it’s because they have been indoctrinated by people at the top. There’s a lot of people who vote for the far right, and half of them are horrible people, but half of them have been indoctrinated by propaganda.

“Around where I live there is a lot of racism, a lot of hate crime. Actually, I don’t mean hate crime, but I think there’s a lot of not nice things said, and not nice beliefs and I understand where they get it from. And if you’re just raised on that, who is not to say you wouldn’t believe that, do you know what I mean?”

I think Boris Johnson and his bunch of cronies are a bunch of fascists, if you really iron it down. Boris needs to die! Where’s David Cameron!? He’s the one who got us into this mess. Vote Green!

Are the climate change protests happening up your way? “There are protests here, but what scale does it need to take to change anything. Even when stuff does change do we really have a say on it? Do we really have a say on what goes on? I think Britain is too self-conscious, and socially awkward to riot, and there won’t be a rebellion, They’ll never be that. So what is going to fundamentally change? That’s a question that troubles me as a young person. Is anything going to change, whether there is an election or not, whether Brexit happens or not?

“How is anyone meant to hope for anything? We can hope but I don’t think we can believe. I don’t believe what anyone says, because I don’t think they believe what they are saying. That’s why it’s in such turmoil.”

Working Men’s Club are a political band, although they certainly don’t want to be earmarked as such. “I’m not going to put that tag on Working Men’s Club. If people choose to interpret my lyrics politically, they’re probably not wrong. In this current climate we’re in, you’d be stupid not to have an opinion and speak up on it.”

Are you still at college? “I got kicked out of one college, then dropped out of another,” he says. “I did get one qualification, so I’m not totally clueless. In songwriting!” he laughs.

Just stick with that then, I reckon. “Yeah, fuck everything else.”

You think you might go back to college? “Nah, fuck that, man! Fuck education.”

School of life can be more interesting? “Yeah, you learn a lot more when you just do it. They don’t teach you about life, at school. They teach you about taxes. Hate and crime, and shit like that, tell you how to do stuff that you don’t really need to do.”

It’s the band, and the music all the way, then! “They’re either gonna fucking hate it, or love it. It tends to be good either way.”

Jeff Hemmings

Facebook: facebook.com/WorkingMensClubb

Twitter: twitter.com/work1ngmensclub

The Isle of Wight, it’s in a bit of a time warp, is it not? I ask Douglas Richards, who along with his older brother Jamie, and Chris Newnham, founded Plastic Mermaids earlier on this decade, with bassist Tom Farren, and drummer Chris Jones eventually completing the line up. “Yeah, definitely a little bit. There’s definitely some warped sides to it. There’s a lot of chavs and then there’s a lot old people and a lot of Brexit voters. And generally, anyone I went to school with who had half a brain, left the Isle of Wight,” he laughs. “Some people decide to come back, when they have kids and stuff. But, there’s also quite a creative community. I think there’s quite a few hippies from the 70s festival who ended up just staying in Ventnor (on the South Coast of the island) and breeding. There is a lot of really good music here, but not masses of people to go to gigs. It’s a slightly strange dynamic.”

The Isle of Wight is to some minds, a somewhat old fashioned place, home to boats, birds, and even more boats. It’s also known for its music, most particularly the Isle of Wight Festival, which first dropped anchor in 1968. In 1970 it famously hosted Jimi Hendrix’s last ever UK gig, an estimated audience of 600,000 descending on the small island. But by then it had become too big for its boots, and in 1971 Parliament added a section to the Isle of Wight County Council Act 1971 preventing overnight open-air gatherings of more than 5,000 people on the island without a special licence from the council…

But the Isle of Wight festival was revived in 2002, and along with Bestival (which had its home here until 2016), has helped put this small island of just under 150,000 people, back on the map. Music wise, the Isle of Wight has been punching above its weight of late with acts such as the Mercury nominated The Bees, Champs, and now Plastic Mermaids, who dropped their debut album Suddenly Everyone Explodes to great acclaim, earlier this year.

“It’s alright, really. Me, Jamie and drummer Chris all surf a lot as well,” says Doug, extolling the delights of the island. “So we keep ourselves busy between music and surfing. There’s not too much time to get bored. It’s quite nice when you go surfing, and all the people in the sea, you know them all. No one wants to get the ferry over, it’s £40/50. So, it’s got its positives. But, it’s not so good for like, dating…”

Born and raised here, and seemingly very happy to be still living on the island, Plastic Mermaids have been somewhat of a slow burner, their first EP, Dromtorp, released back in 2014. A succession of EPs followed, also released on the tiny indie label Cross keys, before Bestival founder, DJ, and label boss, Rob da Bank, expressed an interest in releasing some of the band’s material. “We met him a few times, and he came to a couple of our gigs,” says Doug, “and he just messaged us out of the blue, ‘You guys got any new music?’ It was literally the day we had finished recording the album. The timing was ridiculous. He’s a good person to be on our side.”

With influences ranging from Flaming Lips, Sparklehorse, and Grandaddy, Plastic Mermaids have developed an intricate, orchestral, and psychedelic inspired sound that is both harmony rich, and melody-driven, but also full of abrupt twists and turns that means their debut album is a rewarding and rich listening experience. How did this all come about then? “We never had any vision or direction,” explains Doug. “We just love music, and that’s where we ended up.”

How does a typical Plastic Mermaids song materialise? “It’s pretty random. Sometimes I’ll have come up with something sat in my bedroom, on my guitar, and then we’ll go from there. Sometimes we’ll be jamming at a practice, or maybe a sample loop that someone has come up with, and build on that. There’s no normal way. We record and self-produce it all ourselves, so we have time to mess around, which is quite nice.”

‘Yoyo’, the new single, is an example of the adventurist, and unpredictable nature of the band, as well as their introspective-yet-grand lyrical tendencies, At its centre is a spoken word vocal, overlaying a slow beat, with twinkling guitars, synths, and repeated gospel inflected harmony vocal refrain, adding to a sense of wonderment. It’s about Doug’s mother. “I wrote some of the words, when my Mum was ill. She was dying of cancer. I don’t really believe in God or heaven, and I guess I was thinking about how energy moves, and what life is, and how a person isn’t just their physical thing, how they’re also the effect they have on the world around them. And when they die, the effect kind of lives on. I spent a lot of time thinking about life and death, and what it is to be alive.”

It follows on from the Grandaddyesque indie-pop hazy rocker that is ‘I Still Like Kelis’, a song that sums up their penchant for homely-yet-universal truisms, As Doug says, it’s about, “Two people who used to hang out and now are in different places.” In it he sings, “But in a microscopic way we’re entangled up eternally, I’ll spin the same as you”. He says: “This is a reference to quantum entanglement, a phenomenon where two particles are linked and move in the same way even though they’re on different sides of a room, or universe even.”

Plastic Mermaids’ sound has grown very organically over the years, from the lo-fi rustic-psychedelic approach of their earlier material, to the grander, more sonically adventurous arrangements and production of now. But they still do pretty much everything themselves, from self-producing their music, to creating the artwork, As Doug says about their trial and error approach, they “just keep coming up with ideas and try to make them happen.” And if they ever come up against a technical problem, Jamie is on hand to build or fix whatever piece of kit they need to give life to their flights of fancy.

“Jamie and I, we’ve got a bunch of synthesisers. He’s got this big analogue beast with a sequencer which he built himself, and I’ve got a couple more keyboards and samplers, and we all run that into a ‘thing’. He’s a bit of a wizard with the electronics. Half the stuff we gig through, he’s made. We’ve also got two guitars, bass, drums, and vocals. We switch around a bit on stage.”

Such is Jamie’s wizardry, that the band have developed a neat sideline in effects pedals, which has caught the attention of many-a-well known rock guitarist. “Yeah, he’s sold about 90 of them. He got an email the other day: ‘My name is Kurt Vile. I really like your pedals. I play guitar, too,’” Doug laughs at the memory of it. He’s given them to the guitarists out of Wilco, Grandaddy, and we bumped into Flaming Lips at a festival last year, and we sent one to them. “Yeah, it’s going well!”

So, what is it about this pedal that is so attractive? “It does something slightly different. It’s a big stereo reverb, with a sidechain input, so you can run a drum input, and can make the music pulsate to the drum. And, it looks quite cool. It looks like a little old synth. it’s not your standard box,” explains Doug. “The whole band has been working with Jamie during the summer, trying to help make them, like a production line.”

A Plastic Mermaid’s live show is, much like their fans the Flaming Lips, laced with theatre and visuals, the band often dressed in matching gold capes, with copious amounts of lasers and confetti often eating into their miniscule budgets. Again, it’s all homemade. I caught the band at this year’s The Great Escape, performing a free show, outside Jubilee Library, the band’s mix of melancholic-tinged joy, and visuals, somehow perfectly coalescing with the noodles of cables protruding from weird and wonderful synths and various gadgetry. They like the analogue approach it seems. Does it sound better? “A portion of it probably does sound better. And some of it is more just the process of how you use it. You end up working in a different direction, and ending in a different place, because the process is different, if you know what I mean. If you go through that process it affects the creative process, I think.”

Such is the communal and friendly small-town feel of the Isle of Wight, that they ended up making the album in a place that had once been their Dad’s boatbuilding shed. “Jamie and I grew up in a house near Newtown Creek, on the west of the island, in a house down the woods. We left there when we were eight and six. Our Dad used to have a wooden shed in the garden, to build boats in. The new owners had taken the boat shed down, and renovated it into this modernistic barn, slash open plan living space, slash garage. My Dad was walking past the house, and he was looking over the fence, admiring it, and happened to bump into the people who lived there. They got chatting, and he mentioned he used to live there. We were looking for a space to record the album at the time, and he mentioned our band, and they said we could use it to record in. They lived in London and weren’t there for most of the time. They just lent us their space for free.

“We’ve also got a room in our Dad’s house, which we practice in, but it’s a lot, lot smaller, and the acoustics aren’t amazing. If we want to record the drum tracks, sometimes we’ll go to a church, or just find an interesting space that we can rent out for a day, maybe a boat shed or something.”

And the name, Plastic Mermaids? “I couldn’t tell you to be honest,” says a half hungover Doug, whose birthday it was the previous day, when we spoke. “I know it was kicking around for a while.” Then, through the blur of an alcohol comedown, he recalls… “Jamie made a website, plasticmermaids.com, before we had the band. People kept visiting it. ‘This must be a sign!’ There was nothing on the website…”

Any mermaids off the coast of the Isle of Wight?! “Not that I have seen yet, but I live in hope. Some people get a bit too nautical with it (the bands name), the shell bras connotations,” he laughs. What about that mannequin you have on stage? Does she have a name? “Yeah, Patricia,” says Doug. “We had that for a video we made (‘Playing in Your Mind’, from the 2015 EP Inhale the Universe). “I don’t know, but it may have been my idea. Can’t remember why… I have no idea!”

She’s the band’s sixth member, I say. People are falling in love with her as well, I’m sure. “Yeah, she’s a babe!”

Jeff Hemmings

Website: plasticmermaids.com
Facebook: facebook.com/plasticmermaids
Twitter: twitter.com/plasticmermaids

The times they are a-changing, sang the Duluth bard, more than half a century ago. But even that visionary would have struggled to foresee a rock’n’roll world being turned upside down by passionate young men, singing about male vulnerability with a seething intensity that can be both exciting and unsettling to watch and hear. The Murder Capital are one such bunch, the band visually coming across like nattily dressed gangsters whilst they theatrically weave around each other, singing about suicide, romance, fear, impotence, mental health, and weakness, but set against a sometimes violent musical maelstrom. As singer James McGovern says about the brooding and propulsive ‘Feeling Fades’, the first song they released as a fully formed studio recording, “I like brutalism because it’s not trying to be beautiful.” Indeed, their beautifully brutal music brilliantly encapsulates their pent-up emotions, before being released in a torrent of controlled chaos and turmoil, with McGovern repeating the refrain “the now elapsed ‘round you and me, and it kept us all together.” Joy Division, The Pixies, The Birthday Party, The Sound, Savages, Idles, and Shame all come to mind, post-punk old and new, adding new and interesting layers and angles to this most dexterous of genres. A certain genre has proven itself to be a saviour of music, one that allows the political, to mingle with notions of art and the avante garde. The profound social changes we are currently going through are being encapsulated by this Dublin five-piece’s heart-on-sleeve music, along with fellow Dubliners Fontaines D.C., with whom they shared a practice space, and Girl Band.

Via a controlled campaign that has only allowed a small amount of material to seep out on the web, The Murder Capital are about to release their eagerly awaited debut album, When I Have Fears, produced by Flood, and which includes the track that brought them to a wider world, beyond the environs of Dublin, where they had been working out exactly what they wanted to do. It had taken a bit of time, but ‘More Is Less’ became a statement of intent, captured by a session video they made at the time. “We played at The Prince Albert – in Brighton – October of last year, just a few months after we recruited the new bassist and drummer. By that time we had written maybe 20 songs together, all of different qualities, and broad in terms of sound, and genre. ‘More Is Less’ felt like an arrival moment – ‘this is the first actual decent song we have written’,” says guitarist Damien Tuit.

Forged at Dublin’s BIMM, The Murder Capital took some time to find their feet, and to forge a sound they felt right, and true to their selves. Being a democratic unit, where all five members have an equal say, has its ups and downs, but at the end of the day it often allows for the cream to really rise up to the top, the band becoming more than the sum of its parts, as they dispense with material that may only be ‘OK’ or ‘not quite good enough’.

Songs come about in different ways,” says Damien. “It might be your average rhythm; ‘let’s all play this one rhythm and see how it feels’, and then someone may play something slightly against it, and that will be enough to get the ball rolling. Other times, it will be just jamming and pulling ideas out of that. It’s different every time. Keeps it kind of fresh, I think.

In the beginning we were fumbling around, trying to figure out what it was we wanted to do. It wasn’t until we wrote ‘More Is Less’ that we thought we had come across something that had lasting power, and it became an opening statement for us. We thought we had arrived at some original sound. Before it was all derivative, I think. We were tough on ourselves. It’s all instinct, and we have a five way system where all of us have to be happy. If one person isn’t feeling the same, then it’s a flag that something isn’t quite right.

Sonically everything is trial and error. Creating music is like a time thing, putting in the hours. And then you pass the plateau to the point where the song happens. Most of the songs happen like that; a period of drought, and then just boom. I think we are very lucky to have met each other. Good chemistry.

“’More Is Less’ is actually a capitalist anthem,” says singer and lyricist James McGovern. “A good musician knows when not to play. We’re always aware of the economy,” says James. ”And the Dow Jones!” adds Damien.

It’s a universal emotion, loneliness and isolation,” says James. “I imagine it is something everyone has felt in their lives. For me it was something I felt in the lead up to writing it. It was personal. If you become unsure of who you are, and maybe you struggle to understand your past as it was, then things can become skewed. If something bad happens in your life, and you start looking the wrong way, the world can start looking like a dark place.”

It’s funny, but when people talk about the song they talk about it as being “more or less” says Damien!

Following the release of ‘More Is Less’, they finally released their first proper studio track in the form of ‘Feeling Fades’, McGovern’s razor-sharp voice coming to the fore, while follow-up track ‘Green and Blue’ is held together by a rumbling bass line and drum beat, before the bands urgent twin guitars underlie McGovern’s freewheeling voice and lyrics about mental isolation, promising someone “I’ll correlate the blue, the green and blue, the green for you.”

The album and album title When I Have Fears is an extension of their overarching concerns. “It’s taken from a John Keats poem,” says Damien about the album title. “We found it early on and it was inspiring in a lot of ways. It became the structural pillar for the album. When we were writing a song we would ask, ‘does this fit the world of the album?’ Obviously, it’s a lot easier to write two or three songs that fit together, than 10.

It’s a poem that is important to all of us. It encapsulates all joy and fear in any existential thought. It brings forth all happiness of life, but also it’s that fear of dying before you’ve communicated and created everything before you possibly can. The joke is you will die, because you’ll never be done.

There are overarching themes of grief, mortality and fear, all that fun stuff,” continues Damien. “We wanted to explore lots of different sides of one thing, we didn’t want it to be just fast-paced, like with ‘More Is Less’; we wanted it to be more three-dimensional. You can listen to it from start to finish and it brings you into different worlds.”

“The homelessness, the suicide, the mental health issues,” says James, about some of the issues that permeate When I have Fears. “ The lack of services available to people who aren’t from even middle class backgrounds. We just want to talk about it as much as possible, and make sure that the government knows that we’re not happy with the standard of where it’s at. People have real issues in their lives, and they need somewhere to go and talk about these things beyond their friends and families. I know bad things that have happened to people that were avoidable.”

As for the band name itself, Damien says, “It’s a commentary on the lack of mental health services around, and suicide is a result of that, a lot of people dying. It’s becoming a big issue, especially among young males. You see it everywhere.”

“You can think, ‘What am I contributing to society by doing this, in relation to, like, a nurse?’” James has said. “But I think we all think we’re contributing at least something to someone. We’ve all had those moments with albums where they’ve changed our lives, or helped us see a completely different perspective on things. It’s all a process of communication and understanding.”

“It’s trying to reach that fucked-up 15 year-old kid at home, alone, and change their perspective on something,” Damien sums up.

Romance is also inherently integral in how The Murder Capital view the world, even with such utterly devastating events such as suicide. It’s something they explore with immense passion and vulnerability on ‘On Twisted Ground’, as they showed when putting in a truly spellbinding performance, again at The Prince Albert, at this year’s The Great Escape, McGovern visibly overcome by the gut-wrenching emotion towards the end, re-living through the song and performance, the tragic passing of a friend. “You can find the romance in any situation depending on how you look at it,” says James. “There are many romantic ideas in life, but also tied in with death as well. You try and go through your life, looking at things romantically, and ease the pain in some situations. Without that romance, life would be unbearable. You can see the romance in things, takes away the sting a little bit.”

With the album about to be heard beyond a small coterie of friends and family, is Damien experiencing nervous anticipation?

No, I don’t think so,” he says without missing a beat. “We made the album we wanted to make, and whatever happens, will happen. I don’t have any goals in mind for how it will be perceived. The record is as it should be. Because we’re such a young band, it was great to be able to draw on that pillar, that poem, deciding on the title early on.”

There wasn’t any big plan hatched to crack the industry or some shit,“ says James. “We knew ‘More Is Less’ was our opening statement, so we did think about what we wanted to say first. But if you’re doing it for any other reason than because you love it, you’ll only get so far.”

“We just got a feeling of authenticity from ourselves,” says Damien. “It feels like we are true to what we wanted to say.”

Jeff Hemmings

themurdercapital.com

facebook.com/MurdrCapitalBand

twitter.com/MurderCapital_

Started in 2013, and billed as the first outdoor jazz festival for over 20 years, Love Supreme has always been about combining contemporary and old school jazz flavours, with crowd pleasing pop, along with a little bit of soul, funk, hip hop, electronica, and r’n’b. And while it took a few years to really find its feet, the festival has since become relatively stable and established, albeit within a toxic atmosphere of austerity and Brexit, the main socio-economic-political signposts of our times, pulling negatively at both the economy, and spending power. But, in the main, people know roughly what to expect, and that is a high quality, ‘mature’ music programme, in a safe, none-too-cluttered child/teen friendly space. Although camping is part and parcel of the experience for many, Love Supreme is definitely more Latitude, than Glastonbury, the hedonism toned down.

How much of a commercial success it was this year is hard to gauge, bit it certainly did not sell out, and Saturday’s numbers were well down on previous years, while Sunday looked very busy. But, as usual, there were some stunning performances, with actual jazz actually providing most of the highlights this year, including the eagerly awaited Chick Corea , the jazz fusionist pianist extraordinaire and awards-laden elder statesman. Now in his late 70s, but looking a lot younger, his skill and ability barely diminished, the set is firmly rooted in new material (he has just released a new album (Antidote), along with an encore of ‘Spain’, from the 70s, and underpinning the Spanish/Latin nature of his music, and the maestro himself. In particular, his re-imagining of Paco de Lucia’s ‘Zyryab’ is a prime example of the man and band at their best: dexterous piano solo, nestling in with band workouts, beautiful flute playing, superfast flamenco guitar, fluidly working together in creating this mini-masterpiece of progressive jazz.

The large American ensemble Snarky Puppy are also progressive jazz fusionists, albeit one of a more contemporary nature, and prolific to boot, Immigrance being their 13^th album since their 2005 debut. Michael League and collective (including their trademark two drum attack) have been here before. Tight as the veritable hell, there is a good natured vibe to their sound, as on ‘Palermo’, what League says is based on an Argentinian music, inviting us to get involved with the rhythm via handclaps. While ‘Chonks’ shows their more modern side, a dirty great organ underpinning this warped jazz-funk grinder. And, as added spice, flamenco dancer Nino de los Reyes stalks and pounds the stage with much pride, the crowd lapping it up.

Multi-instrumentalist, producer, DJ and label owner Edward Cawthorne aka Tenderlonious, has just released a new album Hard Rain, and here with a small ensemble, he takes jazz to outer space, employing his love of spiritual tech-house, whilst adding improvised jazzy elements, while love Supreme favourites Go Go Penguin got the party started late on the Friday, with another spellbinding, instrumental, groove laden jazz orientated set, songs such as ‘Ocean In A Drop’ displaying their tip-top chemistry, with the extraordinarily inventive drummer Rob Turner, the tasteful double bass of Nick Blacka and the silky piano motifs of Chris Illingworth coalescing into a trip-tastic whole.

There’s a review out there that says you need to be stoned to appreciate Joe Armon-Jones’ indulgent jams. Wrong! I haven’t been stoned for over 15 years, and Armon-Jones may come across as a consciousness-infused stoner (in a good way), but this performance ranked as perhaps my favourite all weekend, a super inventive, and groove laden workout, with some truly superlative playing, and top vibes throughout, a little bit of dub book-ending the show, carried along by the witchdoctor-esque Asheber (who gave a powerful Grenfell Tower tribute), and both a cracking brass section and rhythm section, bringing tracks such ’Starting Today’ and ‘Icy Roads’, into exuberant life.

Reggae rarely gets a look in at Love Supreme, but Jimmy Cliff is no ordinary musician. An extraordinary singer with his voice largely intact, and one who has been making records since his early teens, Cliff is perhaps, after Bob Marley, the most recognisable name in all of reggae, with a large repertoire of famous songs to his name. Looking like he was having the time of his life, along with some nifty (if unusual) dance moves, he completely enthralled a sunshine audience with classics such as ‘Vietnam’, ‘The Harder They Come, ‘Many Rivers To Cross’ and ‘Wonderful World, Beautiful People’. Easily a highlight of Love Supreme, one that had huge crossover appeal, and a prime example of the festival’s cultural musical diversity.

Less successful was Louie Vega & The Elements of Life, a band led by the esteemed house DJ, who did little more than ‘conduct’ the band throughout, a less-than-tight ensemble that lightly grooved along Latin, salsa and house grooves, topped off by an even lighter spirituality. Strong on religiosity, but weak on substance, Vega however delivered an excellent house orientated set late on Saturday night, the first time I had seen him DJ since way back in the halcyon days of house music in the early 90s, and still easily able to lure thousands onto the grassy dancefloor.

Mahalia, still only 21, drew the youngsters to the main stage for a set that highlights how much she has grown, musically and as an adult. She performed here back in 2016, to a half empty tent, but there is no doubting how much interest there is in her now, as she took control of the stage, provided some funny and poignant anecdotes, and demonstrated what a fine songwriter and singer she is, circling around the environs of pop and r’n’b on songs such as ‘Proud of Me’, and ‘One Night Only’, eliciting a joyous response from the largely teenage girl contingent at the front.

Saturday night’s headliner Gladys Knight was definitely one for the older elements of Love Supreme. This legendary singer may not have quite the across-the-board popular appeal of previous headliners The Jacksons and Earth, Wind & Fire, but what the commensurate pro she is, delving into a ballad-heavy repertoire that included such standards as ‘Help Me Make it Though the Night’, ‘Memories’ and ‘(You Make me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’, as well as lesser known songs such as James Ingram’s ‘One Hundred Ways’, the more widely known Bond theme of ‘License To Kill’, and a rendering of Sam Smith’s massive modern hit ‘Stay With Me’. Largely eschewing the more upbeat numbers she is also know for via the Pips, this was still a tear-jerking masterpiece of vocal control and dynamics. She still has it, at the age of 75, the likes of which we may never see again.

Surreal, but damn funky and full of beans, were relative newcomers Tank & The Bangas, lead singer Tarriona ‘Tank’ Ball resplendent in some kind of green superhero outfit, their lively fusion of spoken word rap, hip hop, funk and rock, all wrapped up in magical, childlike concepts relating to their outstanding new album Green Balloon, the singers throwing mad shapes throughout. This truly organic and musically inventive group were a delight from start to finish.

Towards the end of Sunday night French jazz-swing-dance outfit Caravan Palace literally got the place jumping, the overall vibe on Sunday much more upbeat (and significantly busier) than the Saturday, but were victims of an unseemly rush towards the end of their set, as Lauryn Hill took to the stage. I’d be a rich man, the amount of times people wondered out loud to me whether of not she would turn up. But turn up she did, and proceeded to give a powerhouse vocal performance that somewhat divided an audience, her raucous delivery grating for some, enlivening for others. A mystery to most, but one who achieved lasting fame with just two works (via The Fugees’ The Score, and her one and only solo album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill), Hill nevertheless blazed through an exhilarating set, finishing of with The Fugees ‘Ready or Not’.

A brave, but ultimately successful choice in Sunday night headliner, Hill encapsulated what the festival is about; an eclectic, mature, high quality musical jamboree that mixes up different forms (hip hop, jazz, soul, pop, funk, r’n’b, reggae, and the like), old and new, stars and newcomers alike, to largely triumphant effect. The weather was once again kind, and the atmosphere warm and enticing. Roll on 2020.

Jeff Hemmings

Formed around the chemistry of siblings and dual songwriters Jack and Lily Wolter, Brighton based Penelope Isles are a classic four piece of guitars, drums and bass, with some keys thrown into the mix. Debut album Until the Tide Creeps In is an album informed by shared experience. Raised on the Isle of Man, Jack moved away to study art at university at 19, when Lily was 13. As he puts it: “Lily was not so much of an annoying younger sister anymore and had grown up and started playing in bands and writing songs. We soon became very close. I had written some songs, so we started a band called Your Gold Teeth. We toured a bit and then Lily left for Brighton to study songwriting. A couple of years later I moved down to Brighton and we started Penelope Isles together.” And along with long time members Jack Sowton and Becky Redford, Penelope Isles have become something of a very welcome fresh breeze on a stiflingly hot summers day, their beautifully constructed dream-pop, and fuzz-rock is by turns blissful, warm and fierce, sprinkled liberally with gorgeous harmonies. Their music is by turns gentle and grand, loud and quiet, rocking and rolling, ebbing and flowing, and made up of the distinctive songs of both Lily and Jack, worked on by the band, and via the live stage. Released on the Brighton based Bella Union label, Until the Tide Creeps In is simply brilliant, a reminder of the power of rock music that combines all the essential ingredients of melody, harmony, space, dynamics and passion, into songs of the highest quality. It is, in the words of Jack, about, “Leaving home, moving away, dealing with transitions in life and growing up. We are six years apart, so we had a different experience of some of this, but we share a similar inspiration when writing music.”

Normally, at 10.30am on a Sunday morning I might still be in bed, or relaxing with a coffee, taking it easy. But instead I am down Brighton seafront, at the iconic Meeting Place cafe, on a warm late June day, chatting with Jack and Lily, with a tea of the builders variety in hand, looking out to a calm and inviting sea. “You went in yesterday, Jack,” says Lily to Jack, after I express my interest in diving in. Jack says: “I’ve got a new tattoo, so I had to hold my hand up. I couldn’t get my tattoo in the water.” He shows me. It is of a bird, beautifully drawn, and in mono. “Cool, isn’t it? Lily did it. Pretty fresh.” “That’s Buzz (his bird)”, says Lily. “He’s bright green, yellow and orange. But I kept it black and white. Those colours are a bit rasta.” “Rasta bird,” laughs Jack.

Lily is covered in many tattoos. I discover she is actually a tattoo artists in her spare time. “You got any tattoos?” she asks me. ’No’, I say. “Well, if you want one, you know where to come!”

I tell Lily that my Mum got her first tattoo while in her fifties. ‘If my Mum can do it, so can I. Maybe I’ll get a big anchor’.

“Yeah, do it!” pipes in Jack. “I’ve got an anchor on my foot. Weighs you down.” I was joking about the anchor, but now I’m thinking maybe…

It is a joy, meeting Jack and Lily Wolter in the flesh. They are both friendly and funny. Signing to a very cool and highly regarded independent label, and suddenly becoming a full time proposition, doesn’t seem to have fazed them. They never expected this, but are loving it all the same.

Phil Nelson, veteran manager of many a band including The Levellers, Aqualung, and Duke Special, was an a enthusiastic and regular attendee at Penelope Isles shows. He thought they were brilliant, and invited Simon Raymonde, head of Bella Union, to check them out. “We met Simon a good year, year and a half ago,” says Jack. “He asked us what we wanted to do, and we said we wanted to make an album. And he let us use his studio, and a year later we had a record. We weren’t really even looking for a record deal, that became less important when we moved to Brighton. We just wanted to play gigs. And then suddenly there was this opportunity. ‘Oh, shit! Yeah! That would be fucking amazing’! It really was like that. But, having a label behind us means we can go up a notch or two, and get help to do that. Being on a label has given us opportunities. It’s a privilege to do just your band, and not have a job and try and keep the band going. It’s nice to be able to concentrate on what we fucking want to do,” says Jack. “It’s knackering trying to juggle it all, which so many of our friends do,” says Lily.

“There’s such great contrasts on Bella Union. Have you listened to Jambinai? (Korean) They are so epic, like metal and beautiful, film score indie elements,” says Jack. “There’s them, and Father John Misty, and Beach House. One band that everyone needs to check out is Lowly, “ say Lily.

“We did a bit of work in the Bella Union studios in London,” says Jack. “It’s in the same office. When we first met all the team, one of their things is that you can take any records you want. So we walked out with a massive stack of new music on vinyl,” says Jack. “We’re just blown away that we are in this family of bands, and it’s all awesome,” smiles Lily. For the remainder of this year they’re off to both Europe for a two week tour, and a tour of the States, plus they’ll gracing a few festival stages including Green Man and Iceland Airwaves, before the year ends with their own UK headline tour, finishing off with a date in Brighton, in mid-December.

Back when Lily was still at BIMM, they got a gig at Together the People festival, in 2016, in Preston Park. It was the first time I’d seen them, on the recommendation of my colleague, and big fan of the band, Iain Lauder. Scarcely attended, they instantly captivated, not only via their songs, but through their stage presence, a band obviously having fun, and taking control of the stage, immersing themselves in the sonic textures of their music-making. “Can I just say that for that gig I was the most hungover I had ever been up to then,” says Lily. “She was like crying,” informs Jack. “I couldn’t stop being sick: in the van, in the portaloo before I went on. I had a Sainsbury’s bag on stage. ‘How am I going to do this’?

“To be fair, as soon as you started playing, you were great,” says brother Jack. “The adrenaline kicked in and it turned out to be a great gig, actually,” says Lily. “And then I got pissed right after, watching Hiatus Kaiyote and The Beach Boys.”

In fact they are a little sketchy when I meet them this Sunday morning, the day before they go away on a two week tour of Germany and France. “Lily got us drunk last night, fed us a meal and drank loads of wine, “ says Jack. “I got given a box of wine, such a dangerous things to have. A massive box,” says Lily. ‘I had to buy a bottle of wine, but it’s not the same, is it?’ I say. “It never used to happen, but in the last six months we’ve suddenly got riders, so we just pack the van full of goods,” says Jack. “I’ve never acquired so many boxes of lemon and ginger tea in my life,” says Lily.

‘Do you write your own rider now?’ I ask. ‘You could order what you want, and stockpile’. “We’ve been saying what we want on our riders from the start,” says Lily, “but it’s only like now that they actually provide it.” “We added whiskey to see if it worked, and it did!” says Jack. “We realised, when we were touring with The Magic Numbers, who have this amazing epic rider every night, the point of that is so that all your friends and family at the gig can come and enjoy the rider with you,” says Lily.

The Magic Numbers (also made up of siblings, two pairs of them in fact) are one of a number of bands who have taken a shine to Penelope Isles, inviting them on tour, and giving them the veritable leg up. “They were lovely. When we were toured with them we didn’t have a dressing room. They said, ‘Our door is open, come in and help yourself to any beers and food’,” says Jack. “We didn’t hold back on helping ourselves,” says Lily. “We’ve also been playing with British Sea Power, supported them for a bit, which was really cool. Martin (Noble) saw us play and he invited us to play a few shows with them. We’re playing their festival (Krankenhaus) later this summer, somewhere in the Lake District.”

Self-managed until they signed with Bella Union (label bosses Simon and Abbey Raymond are now effectively their managers), they still take control of many of their own affairs. Until the Tide Creeps In was produced by Jack, and he, along with Max, their sound engineer, are in charge of gig production, and even the driving. You got a van then? “Yeah. A big white van,” says Jack. “We couldn’t do any of this without a van, we’d be fucked!” says Lily. “I love my van. Whenever we go away in the morning, and I’m picking up all the gear, I just get that lovely little feeling when I get in the van,” says Jack, with Lily purring in appreciation. “I get a sense of like, home. My little place. I really do feel that. I don’t know if that is a good thing,” laughs Jack.

Between me and Max, we’ve got the production side of it nailed,” says Jack. “Max is Lilly’s boyfriend,” he informs me. “That’s the trick. You’ve got to sleep with the engineer, and then he’ll do it for free!” says Lily. “Free what, free blowies?” laughs Jack. Free blowies, free mixes,” says Lily in her dry-as-a-bone tone. ‘He could make you sound a bit dodgy on stage though, couldn’t he’, I say. “He wouldn’t sabotage us, he would know he’d get a bollocking. And no more blowies. You can put that in the mag!”

“He’s invested in this band emotionally as much as we are,” says Jack. “He’s the fifth member,” says Lily. ‘Is he fit and healthy?’ I ask. “He needs a bit more sun on his face,” says Lily. Sounds like a true sound engineer. ‘I bet he wears all black’, I say. “He does!” says Lily. “We’ll be on the beach, and he’ll be indoors, Googling microphones, and gaffer tape. Lots and lots of gaf. At Christmas time we don’t have a Christmas tree, we have a gaf tree. Stacks of gaf, with smaller electrical tape at the top…”

Max obviously knows what he is doing. I tell Jack and Lily that I saw them play in St. Mary’s Church, as part of Brightonsfinest’s Great Escape showcase, in 2017. Churches are notoriously difficult places to get the sound right, the snare drum and bass often reverberating all around the place. But, they put in a spectacular performance, that was both epic and mesmerising. In particular, ‘Gnarbone’, a track off the new album, was simply brilliant, 15 or so minutes of melody and huge guitars. “Try doing that every night with the meat sweats,” informs Lily. “That was the first time Max did our sound,” says Jack. We’d seen Deerhunter play in a church in Hove, a few weeks before. I was in denial at the time because I’m such a fan of the band, but it sounded absolutely terrible in there. People were actually saying, ‘it sounds shit’. I was going, ‘It doesn’t! It sounds great’! Deep down, I was protecting them, but I think they knew as well. We talked to Max about it before the St. Mary’s gig. Max is very clever,” says Jack. “Just keep it dry, you don’t need any reverb,” says Lily.

Siblings often make remarkably tight partners in a musical setting. Think The Carpenters, Arcade Fire, Sparks, Tegan and Sara, Radiohead, and of course, both the aforementioned British Sea Power, The Beach Boys, and The Magic Numbers. Jack and Lily were raised on the small island of the Isle of Man, a self-governing British crown dependency nestled between Ireland and England. “I left before Lily. We’re six years apart. I left to go to uni in Cornwall, and studied art down there. But my main reason to go to uni wasn’t to study, it was to get off the Isle of Man and play some music and meet people. Lily did the same thing a few years later, but she moved to Brighton. And I moved down here and we started the band.”

Have you ever played on the island? “We played a gig there recently,” say Lily. “It was the first time we’d been back to play a proper show. It was amazing.” “Lily and I grew up there and we played in lots of bands. It’s a small place, everyone is in the know about what we’re doing here, and really supporting us. So, when we went home, it was fucking ace.” “There’s nothing to do there,” says Lily. “So, everyone booked their tickets like two months in advance. The event of the year!”

How does it work, being siblings in a band. You obviously have a fantastic chemistry, I say. “I can’t really see myself in a band without Jack,” says Lily. “You’d be nothing without me,” says Jack in ribbing-of-sibbling manner. “But, that’s one thing I really notice. When we were in the same place again (Brighton), I had already written some songs, and she started to write some songs. And jamming with her for the first time, getting to know the way she works. The thing I found fascinating was the connection. Because we’re blood, there was something you don’t need to work on. It was natural, and fascinating to experience that. We’re kinda best mates, so it’s pretty cool.”

Jeff Hemmings

Website: penelopeisles.com

Facebook: facebook.com/penelopeisles

Twitter: twitter.com/penelopeisles

As an early mentor of Jesca Hoop, Tom Waits described her music as, “like a four-sided coin. She is an old soul, like a black pearl, a good witch or a red moon. Her music is like going swimming in a lake at night”.

Stonechild, her sixth studio album, is another masterly statement of musical intrigue, sophistication, subtlety and beauty. Although commercially she has never gained the rewards the critics and fans demand, she continues to make some of the best music on the planet. And now she is with the Memphis Industries label, a label known for their simply fantastic alternative pop music via the likes of Go! Team, Field Music and many others.

Stonechild is a departure for Jesca. For the first time she did not go back to her native America to make a record, and for the first time she employed the services of fellow vocalists to help embellish her songs, and natural inclination towards self-harmonising layering. “I spent a few weeks down in Bristol with John Parish (Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey, This Is The Kit), which was fun,” says Hoop. “All of my other records were with the same group, based out in Los Angeles.”

Parish “was a gentle collaborator until he killed one of my darlings,” Hoop laughs. “I’ve never been so brutally edited, and I wasn’t shy about expressing my discomfort at the sight of my work on the cutting room floor. He said, ‘you will forgive me’, and in some way I think I actually enjoyed that treatment, being stripped back to the bare basics.”

Parish’s singular approach helped to clarify her ideas, which had previously been subject to more densely arranged productions, as well as just her voice. “I brought in different singers this time. Usually I do my own backing vocals. I brought in Lucius, from the United States. Jess Wolfe And Holly Laessig are the front of that, and they’re just spectacular singers. They can offer something that I can’t necessarily on my own, in the way that everyone is different in their voice. I wanted some voices that could get big. I referred to them for some, what I call, soulful, churchy singing. And I also got in Kate Stables (This Is The Kit) and Rozi Plain, and they were helping me with the more rustic, folky aesthetic. I can do that on my own, but I just think when I back my own self up, it’s not giving the contrast that I am looking for. I think it’s important, and something that I am going to continue to do, bring in other singers.”

Additionally, and aligned with so many other artists of this time, her music has also become a little more social-political. Such as on ‘Red White and Black’, which has more than a hint of the Aldous Harding about it. “These are not new issues, they are as old as time. But I think it started to be more concerning in me. As a white person, or as a person who grew up the way I did it was very easy to just carry on with my life and not look outside my myopic little circumference, that I roll around in. It started to take affect when people were voting on that measure, when race was used as a card to get people’s votes, or given a platform to basically re-erect the Confederacy. But, it was also an insight from watching the film 13^th, a documentary about the 13^th Amendment, and the emancipation of slavery, and how it’s connected to mass incarceration. The insight from that documentary was like a new history had been provided for me, and one that was withheld from me in my education. My sense was that it was withheld in general, a suppressed history. And, it’s important knowledge, and can help break down people’s prejudices. So, from that point on I became more concerned, and recognising part of the problem is wilful ignorance. I’ve always known racism is a deep sickness that doesn’t just run through my country, but every country. It seems to me that was is happening in the United Sates is being mirrored in France and other places. There is a lot of talk of white nationalism especially. This is our corner of the world, it’s what we can see. It’s the same thing, it seems to be the same issue. To me it echoes a people who are grasping for what they think is theirs, and they are afraid someone else is going to take it away from them. I don’t necessarily understand it but the pendulum is swinging. So, I decided to write about it.”

Meanwhile, ‘Outside of Eden’ is mainly concerned with those young ones whose development is now guided by technology. “It’s hard to say what my songs are about. They are often about multiple things. I started writing that song when I started learning about sex robots, and then also thinking about sex workers. In the first line there is something called ‘the girlfriend experience’, which was explained by a sex worker, who said she won’t get work unless she kisses. I found that insight heartbreaking, that she can’t preserve that one element of her own autonomy. And then looking at where that is coming from, why men are turning to prostitution for emotional connections. And that brought me to pornography, and to smartphones, and children, and watching the culture change, and being concerned. It’s like a frontier. Children are at that frontier, they understand technology intrinsically, they pick it up so easily. The content is being provided by us, and we’re not protecting them in the process, and we’re not talking about that either. In sex education, pornography has to be talked about because it is at their fingertips, and it’s affecting their lives, their relationships, and the way boys view girls, and the way girls view themselves, and it needs to be put in perspective. I guess what I am talking about is lifting a taboo on pornography, and kids getting a chance to see it for what it actually is, rather than what it is projected to be.”

I tell Jesca that I have 12 year old son, and that I’m always concerned about how easy it is for people of that age to find stuff like pornography. “Couples don’t even talk about pornography, so how are you going to talk about it with your kid?” She asks. “I don’t know how we deal with it, but it has to be addressed. We girls are getting the short end of the stick, and so are the boys: that pornography doesn’t paint the actual picture, does it. I just want to give them the best shot at having proper, intimate relationships.”

Hoop’s relationship with her personal history, the burdens she has carried, and her place in the world, is further explored via the title of the album itself, Stonechild, itself taken from the song ‘Passages End’. She has said: “When I look at the history of my life, I realise I have the breakdown of not only my parents’ marriage, but also the breakdown of their parenting to thank for the wild and unexpected course that my life would take. I went looking for a raw and rugged world. the opposite of what I was raised in.

“I feel quite odd and misfitted in the realm of music, if I look around me. It’s hard to find the slot that I fit in; the unexpected turns my music takes, which is related to the unexpected turns that my life takes. I wasn’t conventionally educated in any sense of education. My education comes from experience, from whatever information I have mined, and that’s the same for music. I don’t have the conventional do’s and dont’s. And, I’m also quite willing to take a whimsical turn. I don’t use whimsy in the meaning of ‘to be thrown away’. I mean it’s a spontaneous action. A lot of my music is intuitively drawn out, in the same way that a lot of the moves in my life have been spontaneous. Moving to England was a spontaneous action. Music happens to me like a lot of events in my life, where things pop up, and suddenly the song is turned. With Stonechild, I think I entered the songwriting process with that same sort of curiosity, and open mindedness, and hopefully find myself on a path that I hadn’t entered at the beginning.”

With little in the formal education behind her, as a self-taught musician Hoop has perhaps developed a freer take on the world, and what music can be. Certainly, it is not about orthodoxies that continue to ensnare less adventurous musicians. “There was no formal training. In any realm of education I’ve been all self-taught, since 14 really. I’ve come to a certain understanding of structure, and how important it is, and I also want to join in the group of voices that are willing to push the boundary of what is structurally possible. I’m interested in playing with the standard song structure, just fuck with that a little bit. There’s a bunch of that happening throughout the album. The song ‘Passages End’ doesn’t really have verses and choruses. It’s kind of like a trance, it has a thing that keeps repeating, with a wake up call in the middle of it. It’s not verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus.”

As an 11 year resident of Manachester, how did this Californian born and raised artist end up here, in England? It was one of those chance meetings that can completely turn a life on its head. A meeting with Elbow’s tour manager (and with whom she has partnered to this day) led to a meeting with that band’s frontman, Guy Garvey, who not only championed her music via his radio show, but also contributed vocals to ‘Murder of Birds’ off Hunting the Dress. They have remained firm friends ever since: “Yeah, I’ve just spent some creative time with him recently, and his family, which was really beautiful. You might hear a little bit about that in the future.

“It’s grey here, I gotta say, but I like it for the most part,” she says, lest we forget dropped the wide open spaces, the ocean edge, and tree-heavy environment of California, for the rather starker North West of England. “I actually prefer England when it’s cloud covered. I had to get used to the fact the sun went down at 3.30pm in the winter time. I felt that should have been part of the information that was given to me, before I decided to move,” she laughs. “In some ways I feel at home and some I don’t. Can a California girl ever get used to this rain? And the drinking culture. I find that people do everything with alcohol – they don’t tend to do much without it. I wasn’t used to that, but I am now!”

It is her unique combination of voice and self-trained acoustic finger picking that has entranced this last decade or so., with a series of stunning albums that defy easy categorisation.“I came along just at that turning point and it was a really difficult place to enter. Everybody just lost their spines, everybody became chicken shit. Even still today, it’s like people are still afraid to just fucking back something. How many times have I been dropped, you know what I mean? It’s really hard for people to champion stuff these days without that fear of losing their job. Anyhow, we just keep going, that’s what we do. And I’m looking forward to hearing from those people who feel aligned with me aesthetically. More than any record in the past, this feels complete.”

Jeff Hemmings

jescahoop.com

facebook.com/JescaHoopMusic

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“The bigger the stage, the better it is. For me, as a vocalist, I see the stage as a playground. So, the bigger the stage, the more fun I have.” So says Anastasia ‘Stars’ Walker.

For Bang Bang Romeo the stages will soon be truly massive, some of the biggest in the UK. Supporting Pink on her Beautiful Trauma Tour, they’ll be gracing venues such as Wembley Stadium, Glasgow’s Hampden Park, Cardiff’s Principality Stadium, and Liverpool’s citadel of football, Anfield. “I’m dead excited about that. And Ross (Cameron, guitar) is a massive Liverpool fan. Crazy!”

Today, however, it’s just another day at the office, the hard working band fitting in two shows. Later they’ll be driving to Sheffield’s Don Valley Bowl, for MosFest, a fundraiser to support homeless and vulnerable people in Sheffield. But now, at 11am, the band have just arrived in York, for York Pride. This annual celebration of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community is also organised by a charity and run by volunteers, and it’s something that is very close to Stars’ heart, as a gay woman, in an openly gay relationship. But even with Pink on her mind, she is excited about the prospect of meeting Gareth Gates, who was also due to perform. “Child Anastasia is trying to hold back the tears,” she says. “I just want to go and meet him. I’m going to creep around…”

The Doncaster band even have their own Pride, a fact that surprises me when told of this. “Yeah, I think Doncaster was the first ever Pride in Yorkshire.” That strikes me as unlikely, I say. “I know! It was so unlikely, I think that is the beauty of it. It’s why it had to be done, and why the organisers did it. It desparately needed it and now it’s amazing. You get thousands and thousands of people every year.”

Have things changed for the better with respect to diversity, do you think? “Yeah, absolutely. You’ve got to give people no choice but to accept it, and that goes for allegiances with the straight community, and the gay community. If we all stand together, and support each other, it works. I think that’s what has happened in Doncaster. But, because it’s Pride month in Doncaster, I’m seeing a lot more things in the media that are infuriating me, and making me realise why we’ve still got Prides’. But Doncaster is rolling with the times, which is really nice. I’ve never been subject to hate crimes in Doncaster, so I’m very lucky. Doncaster as a town is growing, and it’s really exciting to watch.”

Fronted by vocal powerhouse Anastasia Walker, Bang Bang Romeo are a very tight three-piece that also includes Ross Cameron on guitar, and Richard Gartland on drums. It’s been a long journey, but their endeavours are bearing some ripe fruit. Not only are they about to tour with Pink, but their debut album will be with us very soon, despite a delay. “We haven’t got a specific date yet, we just know it’s going to be after the Pink tour. We’re perfectionists! There’s a few things we need to change. It’ll be worth it!”

The album was originally slated for release to coincide with the Pink tour. But you don’t sound disappointed? “No, we’ve sat on this album for a long time. With it being our debut album, these are songs that we’ve carried with us from the start. We’ve got about four albums worth of material that we’re sitting on as well, but this being our debut, it’s our baby, and we just want everyone to meet it!” she laughs that great big hearty laugh of hers. “At the same time, we just want to make sure that they are listening to the final product that we want them to hear. It will be worth it. Promise!”

If past songs are anything to go by, such as the electrifying brace of ‘Shame on You’ and ‘Chemical’, Bang Bang Romeo are about to deliver a stunning debut album, full of the passion, power and energy that they have become known for, both on stage, and on record. “There’s brand new tracks that no one has heard. The album was recorded in so many places between here and the US: New York, LA, London, Birmingham, Doncaster. New York and Doncaster! That’s pretty cool, isn’t it! Yeah, both have their shit holes. Who’s the real winner here!” Stars laughs. “The title of the album (A Heart Breakers Guide To The Galaxy) is based on a song we’ve got called ‘Natural Born Astronaut’. And visually, we’ve put just as much effort into that as we have with the music. We really wanted to take it back to the day when you got a piece of music and you got a piece of art with it. So, we’ve created this universe and we’ve transformed each song into a place. Each song has it’s own artwork, and its own planet. Whenever we write songs, we say this song sounds like, you know, a foggy water with a red light. It sets the scene. We are really into soundtracks, so we’ve tried to create this galaxy, this universe. So, for songs people have already heard, they are going to be able to see what the song looks like, which is pretty cool.”

The band first formed around Stars and Ross in 2010, when they met at a festival they were performing at. “We’ve been writing since then. Pretty soon after we met, the acoustic guitar came out. Then we started to take it seriously about four years ago, to be a career rather than a hobby, and we put the band into fifth gear.”

Both Stars and Ross write the songs, their songwriting partnership the absolute key to their ongoing development as artists and performers. “We know what each other is thinking, which is pretty cool. Ross will write a song separately, or I will, or the bones of a song, and we’ll bring it to each other and say, ‘I’ve written this song, I really believe in it’, and we’ll both work on it together. We’ve got a really good relationship when it comes to songwriting. The rest, he’s an absolute arsehole, but as a songwriter he’s a really nice guy!” before exploding another of those infectious laughs. “I’m sat right next to him now! He’s like a big brother to me. And that comes out in our songwriting, the love and passion we have for each other as a band. We’re very good at writing about it.”

What do you write about? “We tend to write about love and death. Only the light shit, Jeff!” she laughs. “Passionate songs. You know, you’re passionately loving someone, or passionately hating them, and wishing the worst on them. My songs are like diary entries. A lot of the songs I write are based on what has happened in my life, love interest, and family affairs. Ross tends to write stories, and really paints a picture. We’d love to write screenplays. There’s a song that is called ‘Over My Dead Body’, which is going to be on the album, and which Ross wrote, and which is about a western bar fight. It’s very Tarantino, very Westworld as well. So, yeah, stories and diary entries.”

I’ve heard that you’re big Tarantino fans, and the music that often accompanies his films. “Yeah, we’re huge fans of film soundtracks. We’re huge Tarantino fans. And Tim Burton.”

I just saw a trailer for Tarantino’s new film, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, I say to Stars. “Yeah, can’t wait! We’ll end up going to see that together!”

Do you see songwriting as a form of therapy, as lots of songwriters do? “Totally. Being on stage is therapy. I often say to my Dad, ‘I’ve got a therapy session this weekend’. You get all your frustrations out in your writing. They come out at three ’o clock in the morning sometimes, which is really kind of them. Then you wake up, piss the missus off, turn your phone on, and hum a melody into it. I’ve got so many recordings of (Stars hums a typical melody), which is both pretty cool and annoying. It’s a curse!”

I suppose it depends on how good the melody is, I say. “You wake up the next day, and you’re like ‘that’s shite! I’m not recording that’. But sometimes you wake up and you’re like ‘Yeah, that’s worth working on’.”

Before they head out on tour with Pink, they’ll be visiting the Isle of Wight festival once again, for the fourth consecutive year. The festival organiser John Giddings, is now Bang Bang Romeo’s agent, so while it’s not such a surprise they get asked back every year. the festival did provide a key moment for the band when they were practical unknowns. “We were very lucky,” says Stars. “This Feeling, which was created by someone called Mikey Jonns, and is an amazing club night for up and coming bands, gave us a chance on the This Feeling Stage. And very luckily The Mirror were there, unbeknown to us, and gave us an incredible write up. It was quite bizarre really. It said ‘Fleetwood, Mac, Blur, and Bang Bang Romeo have stormed the Isle of Wight’. Obviously, we were just this band on this tiny stage at 1pm, so we were blown away. John Giddings, who became our agent, saw it, and fell in love with it, too. Now, it’s the back garden for us! We know where all the shaded areas are.”

That show, however, will be but the hors d’oeuvre before the main course. No show with Pink will be smaller than 55,000, with the biggest being, according to Stars, 97,500. How on earth did that happen!? “We were playing a show at The Social in London. And again, unbeknown to us and our team that were there, Pink’s agent came in. It was probably a good thing that we didn’t know she was there. She threw our hat into the ring for the Pink tour, as one of the supports. We were like, ‘this is amazing, but this is where it’s probably going to end’. But how amazing is it to be given that opportunity. How many bands get to do that? So, we saw that as a win anyway. But then we got the phone call, and that Pink had actually picked us. I’m a huge Pink fan as well. I’ve grown up learning and listening to her. She was different to other pop stars. Her songs are so fucking good. We knew there would be a London show, we thought maybe the O2, and then when they said, ‘no, it’s Wembley’, we were thinking Wembley Arena. ‘No, no, no. The stadium’. What!? ‘Yeah, two nights in a row. My manager is called Guy, and I was like ‘fuck off, Guy. Stop pulling my arms, Guy’! He wasn’t at all. So, yeah, ever since then we’ve been rehearsing, prepping, and learning new experiences of what it is like to be a proper band!

“I hope it has a domino effect on the music industry, in terms of other acts, who are Pink’s legendary size, who will take a leaf out of her book. It’s not very often that you see an act of Pink’s size, with an act you’ve never heard of. It’s normally someone you are aware of. It’s one of the only ways that new music’s going to break through the barriers, these known artists giving unknown artists a platform, a golden ticket. I’m just so happy she liked us, and we had worked hard to be in the right place, at the right time. That wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t adamant on gigging across the country constantly. So, really proud.”

As a band, they have every right to be proud. There is also no doubt a growing confidence in the ranks. Obviously, being asked by Pink to come on tour with her can only be read as a huge confirmation of their talents. But, it seems that Bang Bang Romeo refuse to let it go to their heads. As Stars says about their recent The Great Escape show in Brighton: “We were on at the same time as Friendly Fires, Foals, and Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes, and we were in a 500 capacity venue on the beach, and we thought there would be no fuckers there. But we walked on stage, and it was beyond capacity, absolutely rammed. We’re very grounded, we do not blow our own trumpet, we don’t believe our own hype. We just enjoy ourselves. That’s our rules of thumb, really. But when you do shows like that, the penny kinda drops, and you are allowed to think, ‘this is actually going well’.

“And then it’s back to work!”

Jeff Hemmings

Website: bangbangromeo.com

Facebook: facebook.com/bangbangromeo

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