Recently whilst scrambling for the roots of my sadistic music obsession I realised my first real turn-on was watching a video by five gangly men performing their latest single, ‘Count In Fives’. This band later turned out to be The Horrors. Fuzzy guitar cut through in a vein of The Sonics which tussled with a pulsating organ and coarse vocals. So, as they celebrate the tenth anniversary of their debut album Strange House, I look back to those early days to piece together why it meant so much to me.

The opening conversation of the Counting In Fives documentary begins likes this: “So what do you think about The Horrors? [The answer] They scare me.” This is where my story begins. I have always been enamoured with music that scares me; music that somehow creates a sense of dissonance between myself and the immediate world around me. The type of music that forcefully demands your attention and pushes you around, bullying you for a reaction and leaving you in a state of shock – it won’t offer you any empathy or remission but rather just continue to assail you time and time again. Some people find satisfaction in escapism through the delicacies of music, accepting it as a medium that can transport them to another, often happier, place. This is understandable, yet personally I find such comfort somewhat beige and bland, it is all slightly too vanilla for me.

The Horrors rose through wrestling with the NME’s mid-00s indie landfill. They managed to squeeze themselves into a music scene that was currently obsessing over all things neon or Arctic Monkeys. The likes of Klaxons and Hadouken meandered around in clothing which resembled every colour under the sun whilst wearing sunglasses synonymous to the front windscreen of Doc Brown’s DeLorean DMC-12. In contrast The Horrors were a zombie-fist that burst from beneath the dirt of underground culture and somehow broke through to the mainstream. Ever since Faris ‘Rotter’ Badwan emerged on the front cover of NME, with his stench of hairspray and excessive black dye, he signified a social clique that provided ‘psychotic sounds for freaks and weirdos’. I remember standing outside HMV in Meadowhall, Sheffield on release day, scrambling together an array of small coins from my paper round job to assemble the £9.99 needed to buy Strange House.For an isolated, lanky teenage boy growing up in the outskirts of Hull I needed a musical point of reference with added vigour, something to culturally awaken me to realise my unspent teenage kicks. The image and venomous music of The Horrors provided that basis for me. I began listening to Strange House obsessively, using it as a release. It reeked of uptight angst and punk rock tension which fell upon both the noir image and the lamenting music.

Firstly, the outrageous clothing – a mesh of steam-punk and drainpipe black jeans provided an image that gave a style reminiscent of The Addams Family. What screams ‘I’m a pissed off, self-centred teenager’ better than black jeans, black eyeliner and back combed hair? It allowed me to source a countercultural identity that I felt comfortable with, regardless of how it contrasted with my friends’ Fred Perry polo-shirts.

I remember their 2007 performance at the Welly Club in Hull, it was to be one of my first live experiences and it is one that still pinches me on the arm, elbows me in the ribs and cracks me in the shin nowadays. The terror in their clothing aesthetic is something that would bleed into their live performances – an abrasive mix of organs pummelling in a house of horror tone with guitars slathered in fuzz cutting between them, all the while this Slender Man-like figure hurried around the stage. Who wanted live music with an apology? It was a far-cry from mediocrity and I felt a relentless attraction to it.

I found solace in the noir mind of The Horrors, they were a group that dictated stage names to one another: Faris Rotter, Coffin Joe, Joshua Von Grimm, Spider Webb and Tomethy Furse, each name resembling some bizarre Tim Burton-esque character. It was new and original for me to find a band that were attempting to hide their identities behind gothic pseudonyms.

At the time I vividly remember studying Gothic literature within my English Literature class, which gave me a patchy starting point for decoding the lyrics and the tongue-in-cheek grotesque images that lurked behind them. ‘Draw Japan’ boasted its choral, church-like howl along with it’s car-chase frequency. ‘Excellent Choice’ used a Tennyson-esque Gothic poetry style – telling tales of death, debauchery and ultimately suicide:

“Morgan crunches down the path with regular, driven feet /
Pushing through the grey clouds escaping his mouth /
Approaching the train tracks, he sighs, lays flat across the line, and shuts his eyes”

Their lyrics mocked the middle class ‘safe’ life I had grown accustomed to: “No longer, Morgan’s like a slave, three feet of paper and a family of four / Morgan wonders why his wife is so slow, blames his wife for his slow love” – it suddenly made me very wary and cynical of my social surroundings. This retaliation against the status quo fell in line with my rebellious thinking. It allowed me to further access the horror that I sought in music. That unnerving dismantling of social understanding became addictive to hear, it was the most unnatural of releases. I didn’t know how to work with it but I absolutely adored it.

From Strange House The Horrors would later depart onto an entirely different musical venture in the form of Primary Colours. This was an album that would cement the group as a highly influential shoegaze revivalist group, taking on board all that Kevin Shields taught us. It was a great album in its own right but it missed the point for me at the time, it was more of a critic’s album that was viewed as being the band’s move towards musical maturity. They left the gothic image in the coffin with Strange House too. I didn’t feel bad for not connecting with Primary Colours because many did but at the time I was angry still. My release band had gone and I felt lost and deserted. I was 14 and did not want woozy guitars and lullaby vocals, I wanted tension, rebellion and a reason to despise the norm.

Now I have the benefit of hindsight, I can appreciate that the beauty of Strange House lies within its novelty and isolation in time, caught in its own horrible and strange house, so to speak. For them to regurgitate the image would have destroyed the sentiment it held for themselves and myself. Upon its tenth anniversary I’m sure I won’t be the only one looking back to a time of spray on black jeans, Chelsea Boots and Albert Chains across waistcoats. We are still counting in fives ten years on.
Tom Churchill

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