ian steadman – AmeliasMagazine

Amelia’s Magazine | Stars and Sons – Interview

stars and sons brighton mike interview

Hailing from Brighton (there’s a veritable smorgasbord of great bands coming out of there at the moment, thumb aren’t there?), order Stars and Sons are an indie pop band who specialise in fun-filled tunes packed with extra layers, of instruments and noises. A bit like a very nice cake, in a way – a musical cake. I chatted to lead singer Mike about his band and their dancing triangles.

Hi Mike – you are Mike, right? How did Stars and Sons begin?

Yep, I’m Mike. I basically started the project off in a dark bedroom, recording stuff on dodgy software, and then realised it needed to go somewhere other than my bedroom so I got in Stuart, Sandy, Paul, and later on Luke, because apparently playing live is quite important. And it’s nice to have the company!

Who does what then in the band?

I play piano, Luke and Sandy play guitar, Stuart’s on drums and Paul plays bass. We’ll hopefully expand a bit when time and money come our way. The thing with our songs is that they’re quite densely recorded and it’s hard to recreate that live – there’s glockenspiels and strings flying around. The energy makes up for it, really, of all us playing together live, that kind of makes up for any lost details at the moment.

Listening to your songs they do seem packed with quite a lot of things for indie pop – would you call yourselves indie pop, or something along those lines?

I’m happy with that. I called it pop for a while but a lot of people met that with disapproving looks, but I don’t care really.

That happens sometimes – quite snobby, isn’t it?

Yeah, I mean, I just want to make catchy music, though sometimes I don’t make catchy music – there’s a lot of balance there. I like pop, that’s all.

You’ve just finished recording your debut album – how did that go?

It went really well! It was really stressful because I’ve come from a position where I had endless hours of being able to record things and mix things and program things and suddenly we have two weeks in a studio, and you record things and you don’t really have much time for judgement as to whether it’s fine or not. That sort of pushes parts of you to be more spontaneous. It was a great experience, but still, stressful.

You were working with Dave Eringa. Did it help to work with an experience producer?

It did, it did. He’s into big-sounding things, massive drums, big guitars, that sort of thing, and he really rocked up the recordings a bit. They were a little bit sterile before, just being recorded in my room.

He’s worked with people like Ash…

Yeah, and Manic Street Preachers, and even Tom Jones. He told about this time he was recording with Tom, setting up the microphones and things, and asked him what kind of microphone he wanted. “The biggest one you got!” he said. So they just started recording and Tom Jones was clipping and peaking on the signal but he couldn’t really turn it down… I think it turned out fine in the end.

The single you’ve just put out is ‘If It’s Good For Me’ – the video looks like it was a lot of fun to make.

Hah, yeah, it’s one of those things we tried to spend a lot of time over. Matt is very much into his video production, and he spent a long time thinking about props and shots and trying to make it interesting. It’s fun doing that kind of thing, a change from just doing the music.

What’s your next single going to be?

‘Future Proof’ should be the next one, we’ve just been making the video for that…

Ah, what’s that one like?

Well… there’s some dancing. Some dancing triangles.

Dancing triangles?

Yeah. Um. Well, it’s pretty weird, because it’s shot in this MTV sort of style, whereas before we’ve tried to keep things in quite a DIY style. We’ve got a new director, Jess Stead, doing this video. It’s going to look slick, but it’s going to weird too.

When’s the album actually out?

Not entirely sure yet – it’ll be online first, before the physical release. About a month after ‘If It’s Good For Me’ is out, I think. Just get it out there, and hopefully then it’ll slow build.

You’re on the XFM playlist now, I noticed, which is pretty good.

I’m chuffed with that, yeah. The single isn’t something that I’d consider conventionally radio-friendly, a verse-chorus song. I guess it is in its own way, but the other songs there are more conventional, maybe, but I think it’s a nice introduction. Getting radio play is definitely nice.

Any festivals lined up so far?

We’re playing a small festival in Leicester, but nothing else booked just yet though we’ll be hopefully setting those up soon. And we’re playing London this Saturday [the 3rd], that’s our next big show.

Ta, Mike, and good luck.

Cheers!

(You can catch Stars and Sons this Saturday at Carnivale this Saturday – check listings for more details)

Written by Ian Steadman on Thursday April 1st, 2010 3:58 pm

Categories ,Ash, ,brighton, ,Dave Eringa, ,Future Proof, ,Home Recording, ,ian steadman, ,If It’s Good For Me, ,Indie, ,Indie Pop, ,Jess Stead, ,Manic Street Peachers, ,Mike Lord, ,Radio, ,south coast, ,Stars and Sons, ,Tom Jones, ,XFM

Amelia’s Magazine | Malachai – Ugly Side Of Love – Album Review

Do you remember Woodstock? It’s said that, page if you were there, you shouldn’t. Something like six million more people claim to have been there than actually were, if I remember rightly – I’m not sure. A number somewhere in that region, I imagine. Can’t be bothered to check exactly, and Malachai probably wouldn’t either, so I’m acquiescing to their style. Ugly Side Of Love is a rough-hewn 60s throwback that sounds like (what I imagine) what waking up at Woodstock on the final morning felt. I say waking up, I mean coming up with the dawn as Jefferson Airplane stumbled through their set at around 8am, Grace Slick’s voice distorted by many things more than just the distance and the tent canopy and a whole bunch of reverb. Malachai have managed to make an album that is, no word of a lie, entirely summed up in the album cover. Just look at that blue-smoke psychedelic vision (capturing the sound of blue smoke is a terrific achievement, it must be said), those terrible eyes, those colours. Just look at them. Wow.

Malachai are one of those extremely loud duos, a couple of guys who sound like a whole bunch of pissed-off bastards making deliberate noise. They’re from Bristol and have been championed by Geoff Barrow of Portishead, and that makes a lot of sense by the 1:30 mark on opener ‘Warriors’. I say this because they’ve reminded me just how limited, how narrow-minded, most of the current ‘alternative’ music I’ve been listening to is – I may wax lyrical on ‘breadth of influence’ or some similar critically pretentious descriptor, something that is essentially just a re-hashing of ‘they’ve got horns/strings/lots of members/synths’, but we’re talking about bands who pretty much listen to nothing outside of a narrow range of post-punk, 80s indie, 90s indie, and a few token world acts (or possibly just Paul Simon) for good measure.

Malachai – coming from a city that is arguably most famous these days for being something of a hippie outpost, a place spoken of with reverence by those who are really into their psychedelics yet find procuring them a frustrating experience – don’t exactly keep their cards close to their chest, revealing themselves as dedicated acolytes of this intoxicant culture. Ugly Side Of Love reminds me intensely of the (occasionally maligned) Magical Mystery Tour EP by The Beatles – a lot of people only listen to that soundtrack for I Am The Walrus and Strawberry Fields Forever and all those big hits, but there are a couple of instrumentals on there that are pretty, well, weird, even by the standards of the Beatles’ LSD phase. Lots of tape loops and odd psychedelic twinges, and that kind of attitude gets stretched here to something approaching the length of an LP. It’s even got the feel and texture of something you might expect served up by DJ Shadow, but it’s also undeniably a straight-up rock record – a strange combination, but one that clearly isn’t tried often enough if this is indicative of the potential in such experiments.

So we have the stoner-rock and garage-rock foundational stones, but adorned with the tricks and treats that can be found within Bristol’s various musical communities. Barrow’s influence, being producer and all, is evident, and certain tracks bear familial resemblances to Portishead’s trip-hop (‘Only For You’), but there’s also a fair bit of turntablism (‘Fading World’) and hip-hop sample play (‘Meeches Theme’). There are horns lifted straight out of the Arthur Lee playbook on ‘Lay Down Stay Down’, and dancehall drum patterns on ‘Only For You’. In fact, the only place where it’s nothing more than just a plain ol’ garage-rock record is on ‘Snowflake’, which could easily pass on any new Nuggets compilation.

Ugly Side Of Love is, as the name suggests, ugly. It’s all over the bloody place, but, by god, it’s wonderful for it. Every listen suggests new hooks, an extra level of depth that you’d never expect from music that’s usually something so simplistic. A lot of care has been paid here – this sloppiness, it’s intentional. Give it the attention it deserves.

Written by Ian Steadman on Wednesday April 7th, 2010 10:56 am

Categories ,Arthur Lee, ,Beatles, ,bristol, ,DJ Shadow, ,Garage-Rock, ,George Barrow, ,Hip-hop, ,ian steadman, ,Love, ,Magical Mystery Tour, ,Malachai, ,Portishead, ,Psychadelia, ,Psychadelic, ,the beatles, ,Trip-Hop, ,Ugly Side Of Love

Amelia’s Magazine | The High Wire – The Sleep Tape – Album Review

high wire sleep tape feedback dreamy album review cover

Is it really such a curse to receive the praise of Chris Martin? Does supporting one of the world’s biggest bands on an arena tour constitute something to be embarrassed about? Is success off the back of somebody else’s recommendation, visit this especially when that person is about as cool as blue rinse, clinic to be played down or avoided? If you answer in the affirmative to any of these questions then chances are you’re part of that group who chose to emphasise this part of the High Wire‘s back story over more trivial things like, say, their music. I will not be doing that, because it’s asinine; anyone who thinks that success this way should only be talked about as being of questionable worth is, as far as can be determined, an ass.

What we have here in The Sleep Tape, the band’s debut album, is an assured group of songs that melds droopy acoustic harmonies with a milder form of feedback than found with bands like My Bloody Valentine (but we’re talking *really* mild here – this stuff won’t ever cause anyone to aurally hallucinate). This is not really shoegaze as I’m used to it, though it’s a record that dreams like Slowdive, or hazy-pop group Galaxie 500, or even like psych-rockers Mercury Rev in places – it’s not cruel of me, whatsoever, to say that it’s called a ‘sleep tape’ for a reason.

This is narcolepsy, this is fatigue, this is a yawn and a stretch. It is deliberately designed to be so very sleepy. It is not boring, because those things aren’t synonymous with boredom. They are synonymous with, of any single word, ‘contentment’. This record feels very content. If this summer turns out to be a hot one (and I damn well hope that it is) then I want to spend at least one night falling asleep on a beach with these songs wrapped around me.

Their opening gambit, ‘The Midnight Bell’, is a slow 4/4 drumbeat accompanied by chimes, harmonies borrowed from the Byrds and what sounds like an acoustic guitar plugged into a reverb pedal. This is the format for pretty much every song here, but it’s to the High Wire’s credit that this doesn’t tire or bore, mostly because every few songs there’s something of a change in the air and along comes a thumping tune like ‘Odds & Evens’ to break the spell. It’s the highlight track, that one, and it’s obvious why it was chosen as the lead single – whilst this is hardly radical music to terrify and alarm most listeners, it is still slightly odd by many usual standards, and ‘Odds & Evens’ is exactly the way to lure in the punters.

It’s the closest thing to rockin’ out on The Sleep Tape, but there are other highlights – like ‘It’s No Secret’, where the male/female vocal overlap really comes into its own. The refrain, “yesterday/yes, I was kissing somebody new/but my baby/I wish I was kissing you,” loops around a country-tinged ballad where it’s not sure who’s been wronged, or who wishes for a second chance. That gender ambiguity drives the dreaming, the sense of sleep – everything’s a whisper in the ear from someplace just out of sight.

As the ‘Bodyclocks’ comes around and ends the album with that same refracted nursery chime that opened it, I can safely surmise that, if the High Wire have gone from three friends to this within two years, then their next record must be eagerly anticipated. It’s just so accomplished, so pretty! I commend Chris Martin, and I recommend listening to this woozy summer package, but please – pay attention. It’s worth not falling asleep listening to this.

Written by Ian Steadman on Monday March 29th, 2010 4:55 pm

Categories ,album, ,album review, ,Coldplay, ,debut, ,Dream-pop, ,dreamy, ,feedback, ,high wire, ,ian steadman, ,indie my bloody valentine, ,london, ,sleep tape, ,The High Wire, ,the sleep tape

Amelia’s Magazine | The Pipettes – Interview

The Pipettes were a pretty big deal a few years ago, prostate bursting onto the indie club scene with their 50s and 60s-influenced polka-dot pop song album Meet The Pipettes and its hit singles like ‘Pull Shapes‘ and ‘Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me‘. That was half a decade ago, information pills though – since then, and they’ve had several members come and go, leaving the band in its current incarnation of sisters Gwenno and Ani [right and left, respectivaly, in the photo above], along with the boys who play the instruments and help write the music. After a long delay they’ve managed to get a second album ready for release, so I caught up with them earlier this week to see how they’ve been coping with all this commotion.

I thought that we’d start with just clarifying something that I’m not entirely sure about, which is the songwriting – who writes what?

Gwenno: It’s the same as it’s always been. How it works is that one person will write the song, and they’ll bring it in, usually in something like a finished form – it might need a few more chords, or a second verse – but they’ll bring it to the band, and we’ll all interpret it in our own way.
Ani: Everyone’s a songwriter in the band.

I’ve been listening to the new album. It’s an interesting change in direction because it’s not as doo-wop any more, is it? There are a couple of songs that still have that Phil Spector kind of sound, like the first album, but there’s a big change towards synths and electronics and stuff. Almost like moving forward through time a bit? That’s kind of what it sounded like to me. It’s called Earth vs The Pipettes which, in my mind, means space and sci-fi and lasers and things like that – futuristic things. Is that roughly what the thinking behind the album title was?

Gwenno: Well, we were going to call it In Colour, but then there was the whole sci-fi thing – there’s this b-movie called Earth vs The Flying Saucers, and there’s a poster for the film, with all these monsters coming down and people on the floor, and we were going to imitate it with the boys all on the floor and us coming down as the monsters. The album is slightly more grown-up and more serious to a certain extent, but there’s still that silliness and that sense of ridiculousness.

There’s a lot less playground-romance in the new songs.

Ani: [whistfully] I think we should be honest that our school days are well and truly gone…

Time to put the photos away in the album?

Ani: Heh, yeah. Although I never liked school much. We were 100% losers.
Gwenno: But now you’re a winner!
Ani: Yeah! Um. A winner all the way.

So there’s the sci-fi influence on the new album, but what else was coming into your heads when you were making it?

Gwenno: Well, everyone had different takes on it, really.
Ani: When I first came into the band…

Sorry, how long have you been in the band now?

Ani: Two years. When I first came into the band I thought, “yay, I’m in a 50s pop band,” and the first songs that I wrote were songs like that, but they’re not now, they’re more disco.
Gwenno: But also there was a natural evolution, if you’re wanting to be pseudo-academic about it, but at the same time it was a natural thing for us to move in that direction. And of course, being in a band together for so many years, you start to think…

Something different?

Gwenno: Well… Actually, I don’t know.
Ani: It’s not going to be the same, is it?
Gwenno: I know, but I do think that it’s a development anyway, in a way. Everyone can be themselves more.
Ani: Who are you?
Gwenno: [Laughs] I don’t know… Well, I really love a lot of British 80s bands, Bananarama and things like that.
Ani: Which you reference on the first album quite a lot.
Gwenno: Not sonically, though.

Lyrically?

Gwenno: Yeah. And I like old Kylie songs and things like that, and I think that you can hear that more.

So are you saying that you weren’t as keen on the Phil Spector-influenced stuff from the first album?

Gwenno: No, it wasn’t that. There was a point to it, and it was a really good point. I remember seeing the band play in Cardiff and thinking it was absolute genius, and that I wanted to be in this band. None of us were massively into 60s pop music or anything like that, but it was about the history of pop music. Like, if this makes sense then we can make our own year zero here. It was a slightly more intelligent approach than just, “oh, I like playing, I like singing.”

And with your new songs you don’t feel tied down to a single aesthetic?

Gwenno: No. I think it feels… The longer you make music with someone, the more that you trust them, and the more you understand, and you can trust their input. It’s not as controlled.
Ani: And also, with this album, everyone in the band now is at the same point. You [gestures to Gwenno] came in later than the start, I came in even later, so everyone could start from the same point and everyone worked together as a unit, wrote it as a unit.
Gwenno: I guess the common thread is Martin [Rushent, producer], apart from the space theme, of course.

I was watching your video for the first single off the album, ‘Stop The Music’ – you’ve got your dance moves in that, and lots of costumes…

Gwenno: Yeah, and again, it’s quite an organic development, and I don’t think that that song is very ‘Bam! We’re Back!’ – people have been a bit slow to get behind it, and me too. I didn’t write this song and it took me quite a while to actually understand it, to really, really get into it. It’s such a grower.
Ani: It’s a much more confident approach. I don’t want to undermine ourselves, but it doesn’t sound as desperate, like, “hey, we’re in a band.”

So you’re more sure of yourself? The album does sound very cohesive despite the change in direction, I think.

Gwenno: Well, it was a move away from songs like ‘Pull Shapes’, which we ended up feeling quite defined by. Putting ‘Stop The Music’ out first is quite a deliberate thing from us, as in, “here’s a song, we really love it, and it stands on its own and doesn’t need gimmicks.” Which, again, is what this album is about. You have to take it as it is – you like the music, you like the music, if you don’t, you don’t. I think ‘Stop The Music’ confirms that statement, really. The video, too, I don’t think is at all a gimmick, I just think it’s shot very beautifully. It’s probably the proudest I’ve ever felt in making something, visually. I don’t feel like I’m being stupid, jumping around clapping my hands.

You don’t worry at all that the change of direction will alienate some of your fans?

Gwenno: Well, I think that was inevitable. I think, even had it been the same lineup, someone isn’t going to like the new direction anyway. It’s easy to think that we’re alienating fans with a change in direction.

But you’re picking up new ones, too?

Gwenno: I think so, too. To be honest with you, the only reason we’re still here is for the songs. We knew it was going to be difficult with the new lineup, but had we not had so much faith in the songs we just wouldn’t have done it.
Ani: Yeah, and I’m not going to lie – over the past two years it’s not been easy to keep going, at all. There’s been no reason except that we’re making this record.

A labour of love?

Gwenno: Well it is, but having done the first record and having had people respond to it by saying, “it’s a bit gimmicky, it’s a bit throwaway,” it just made us feel that we wanted to do quite a serious thing. Yes, we do dress up and do silly dances, but we feel very passionate about that!
Ani: And then there’s the whole thing that we’re doing it independently, by ourselves, not on a major label or with co-writers forced on us. We would never do that, even though it was an option.

You said that the first album was a bit gimmicky – but surely that’s the point of pop music? To criticise pop for being throwaway and fun is a bit like criticising water for being wet.

Ani: Yep. That’s a thing I find with pop, that it can still be great music, it’s not just throwaway. Someone’s writing it, it’s someone singing someone’s emotions. Just because it’s pop…
Gwenno: I do think it’s completely different, though, when you have artists drawn up in a marketing board meeting.

But that’s still someone’s words that they’re singing, someone’s emotions.

Gwenno: I suppose. I just have a real detachment from modern pop music at the moment.
Ani: I’m not talking about Rihanna – I love Rihanna! I love Girls Aloud! But I’m talking more about…

Straightforwardly manufactured acts who are designed deliberately to make sales?

Ani: Yeah…
Gwenno: [To Ani] I don’t get what you’re trying to say…
Ani: I’m trying to say that just because it’s pop music that doesn’t make it less good, or less credible, than indie or whatever. I think that because we clap hands and dance and wear silly things…

Lots of bands wear silly things, mind. You guys seen Of Montreal?

Gwenno: Hah, yes!

Just because pop music might be, as you say, manufactured, doesn’t make it any less worthy, does it? But you guys are clearly not that kind of mainstream pop music, you’ve got that weird twist to it still by bringing in elements of disco and soul and so on.

Gwenno: I do think that it’s important, with this album, that even though it’s four to the floor most of the time it has still be played and written by a real band. I was talking to [former member] Rose about it yesterday – I like that in songs like ‘Stop The Music’ it’s grounded in very good music. It’s not just an electro-dance-slash-hip-hop song, it’s clearly grounded in 60s soul and all of that stuff. We were having a discussion in studio the other day about having a backing track – obviously Martin has done a lot of stuff to make us not really sound like we’re real, which is brilliant, we love that, and you can never recreate that live unless you played along with a backing track, which we would never, ever do. I really dislike bands that play to backing tracks, on the whole, and I have yet to see a band I’ve enjoyed the feeling of who have played along to a backing track. I would rather have less instrumentation, and see what everyone is doing on stage, and have that being what I hear.
Ani: It loses a lot of its soul. The way it feels, when it’s played in a certain way…

Like having an old record where it always skips in a certain place, and when you hear it on the radio and it doesn’t have that little clip in it, it feels less real?

Gwenno: Yeah, and I think where we differ, as a pop band, to a producer in a studio just making up something for a hired songwriter, is that we don’t have to justify ourselves by saying, “we’re real.” I think that’s an interesting distinction.
Ani: You always feel like you have to validate why you do something. I feel like we’ve thought a lot about the point of us doing this now.
Gwenno: Yeah, because the point is different now. When we started we were sort dressing up and being all anti- those indie guitar bands that were around, but they’ve all gone now, so where do we stand in the grand scheme of things? [Laughs] You need to know who your enemies are, you know, who the bad man is, fighting against what system. It’s finding out what your context is, sort of doing that all over again, really – and I think the songs are wicked. I genuinely do. I think Martin’s done a really good job.

He’s been around for a while – almost old to enough to have worked on some of the original doo-wop records.

Ani: Yeah he has. There’s just some amazing stuff that he’s done. The thing that I love about Martin is how ridiculously enthusiastic about music he still is. He’s not at all cynical, which is just great, because you’d think that you’d lose enthusiasm by then. He’s kind of done more than anyone I’ve ever met.

So who’s he worked with?

Gwenno: Well, I think his biggest thing was Dare by The Human League. Buzzcocks, Stranglers, Shirley Bassey, Altered Image… I think he turned Madonna down.

Really?

Ani: A guy called and said, “I’ve got this girl, Madonna, do you want to make a record with her?” and he said he was too busy because he was doing another Human League album. Even if that’s not true, I think it’s great.

Rehearsals for your tour are going well?

Gwenno: Really good, actually. We’d done a gig as a duo in October at S?n Festival, Huw Stephens’ festival… it seemed a bit of a curse, the S?n Festival, because we couldn’t do it the year before because a girl left the band, but this year we decided we were definitely going to do it because my mum was there, my dad was there, my friends… And then we hadn’t rehearsed, and rehearsing as a duo has really changed the dynamic of the band which I hadn’t expected so much. There’s a lot more singing in unison – I feel so much more confident about it. Obviously, it’s good because we’re siblings, and if we’re singing out of tune we’re going to be harmonising out of tune, if that makes sense. I remember with Rose and Becky that it wasn’t always in tune, there wasn’t that natural instinct, and we were always counteracting each other, we weren’t really harmonising. This is good, I’m quite excited about this new thing, there’s more of a unified voice.
Ani: And also with the old songs we haven’t found that it massively affects them, and we were worried about the old songs mostly because of the freaky harmonies, but there really weren’t any three-piece harmonies anywhere. I do Rose and Becky’s parts, though – I rock ‘n roll AND I hip-hop, which is great.

Does this mean that you’re not looking to find a third member of the band, to get it back to how it was before?

Gwenno: No, not really. I think it was quite nice realising that we’re not the Sugababes, and you can’t just fill that gap. It feels like an evolution, because obviously having a third person who you don’t know can be really weird. They’re not Rose, they’re not Becky, and that’s just not how it is any more. Getting a randomer doesn’t really work…

Kind of like a session musician?

Gwenno: I think that’s what happened, by the third girl who came in. She ended up being really more of a session singer, really, because they couldn’t join in the writing because we’d already written the album, it was finished, they could only sing along with us. It was kind of a redundant thing, and there was no point in them joining the band if they couldn’t help to create anything. Much more of an urge to get the album out, because it’s been going for the last couple of years, and now it’s finally coming out…

Scary?

Gwenno: Yeah, actually! I’m just so happy, that we’re not sitting on this album. It was recorded in the spare bits of studio time that Martin had, which is great, we appreciated that so much, but I remember we read a book which mentioned him, talking about when he made Dare. He said it took him more than a year to make it, and were already three months into recording so we were a bit worried because he was comparing our album to Dare – though obviously it’s probably not going to be anywhere near as big! – and in the end it took him, I think, one more day to finish than for Dare.
Ani: It’s just so good to have the album out really. I’m not nervous at all. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but we have tried our best.

(All images courtesy of the band, taken from the shoot for their latest album)

Written by Ian Steadman on Friday April 9th, 2010 3:02 pm

Categories ,50s, ,60s, ,70s, ,Ani, ,Bananarama, ,Becky, ,Dare, ,disco, ,Doo-Wop, ,Earth vs The Pipettes, ,Gwenno, ,Human League, ,ian steadman, ,interview, ,Kylie Minogue, ,Madonna, ,Martin Rushent, ,Meet The Pipettes, ,pop, ,Pull Shapes, ,Rose, ,Shirley Bassey, ,soul, ,Stop The Music, ,The Human League, ,The Pipettes, ,video, ,Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me

Amelia’s Magazine | The New Pornographers – Together – Album Review

ew pornographers

“When I found out our record was coming out the same day as Broken Social Scene‘s I wanted to call Kevin Drew and shoot a little promo video, viagra where it’s like the two of us just facing each other on a windy day and then we embrace to the strains of ‘Wake Up’ by Arcade Fire. That would be like a dual ad for both of our albums. But I’m too lazy. I was distracted.”

I like this story, pharmacy partly because it’s so lovely, viagra but partly also because it illustrates something I’ve always wondered about the Canadian music scene – what’s the rivalry like? What kind of tension is there? Is it like West Side Story, with every band and artist split off into one of two camps and every now and again they’ll have a stand off in the street, Kevin Drew and AC Newman squaring up before one of them pops his collar and shrugs it off? All those artists come across as so lovely, so the thought of them having some kind of ruckus in the street only to have it broken up by the neutral Arcade Fire amuses me.

But I’m digressing – I’m here to talk about Together, the latest record from the New Pornographers, one of the two Canadian supergroups of the last decade (the other being, if you hadn’t worked it out by now, the Kevin Drew-led Broken Social Scene), and a record that I can almost label a return to form (if such a label is legitimate for a band who never really lost their form, who merely went from being excellent to very good for a while). AC Newman is the ‘leader’, as much as he can be called such, and his comrades in arms are Neko Case, Dan Bejar (of Destroyer), Todd Fancey, John Collins, Kathryn Calder, and Kurt Dahle – all artists who have made names for themselves as very good solo artists, as well as frequent collaborators with each other in various capacities. The Broken Social Scene lot are equally prolific, but their style has always been a kind of sloppy shoegaze/Pavement hybrid; the New Pornographers are a straight power pop band, a genre that can infuriate as much as charm. It’s not extremely different to what constituted ‘pop music’ back in the 60s and 70s, but I suppose giving it its own name can help make it sound a little more sincere than just normal pop music.

For Together, the group have also enlisted the aid of St. Vincent’s Annie Clark, Beirut’s Zach Condon (with a trumpet tracK), backing vocals by Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, and singing from the nu-soul group the Dap-Kings. There’s very little silence, with every gap between chorus and verse filled with whistling or (more so than in past records) cello – instruments are piled on top of each other into some kind of approximation of a wall of sound, but it’s not the slab of noise that characterises all those old pop songs but instead just sheer weight of numbers that makes these songs so noisy – yet thanks to fantastic production, it’s all as clear as a bell.

Hook after hook after hook come firing out of the speakers. So one doesn’t stick? Here’s three more! After the slight dip in joyousness that marked 2007′s disappointing Challengers, this, their fifth record, sees them, above all, being happy again. ‘Valkyrie and the Roller Disco’ is the closest to a slow song, but it’s still got something of a beating heart. Throughout Together, the drumming clomps and the guitars hum alongside Newman & Co’s harmonies – there’s the 70s hard rock lick that underpins ‘Your Hands (Together)’, then the dreaming pop ballad of ‘If You Can’t See My Mirrors’, and the gorgeous string-soaked finale of ‘We End Up Together’, building up to its chorus of, “ma, ma, ma, ma,” over and over.

The thing about ‘super’ groups is that they always come with such damned high expectations. For a group like the New Pornographers, the slightest dip in quality is pounced upon as being indicative of the beginning of the end; even more cruelly, they have to reach higher to achieve the deliver the same kind of satisfaction as their peers simply because there’s so much talent in one place. They can toss out compositions easily (and, in the past, it has occasionally felt like that), but here they’ve clearly tried hard to put together something that’s as great a sum of its parts as they are – it’s quite possibly their best album since 2005′s masterful Twin Romantic. Here’s hoping they can keep this going for another decade.

Written by Ian Steadman on Wednesday May 19th, 2010 5:03 pm

Categories ,AC Newman, ,Arcade Fire, ,beirut, ,broken social scene, ,canada, ,ian steadman, ,Indie, ,Okkervil River, ,Power Pop, ,St Vincent, ,The Dap Kings, ,The New Pornographers, ,Together

Amelia’s Magazine | Caribou – Swim – Album Review

ian steadman
Has lived the glamorous life – born in San Francisco, buy moved to Wolverhampton, then Solihull, then Slough. Lost his West Coast accent, hashed together something that sounds like a lazy BBC presenter, and gained an ability to string words together. Decided it would be a good thing to try to do for a living. Realises that the more he tries to keep up with the new things in the world the more he fails. Reads voraciously – will stop strangers in the street and plead with them to read Roberto Bolaño. Has an unfailing loyalty to Bob Dylan.

Writes music journalism mostly, but actively trying to get into the serious stuff – famines, wars, plagues, depressions, recessions, shortages of tzatziki down the corner shop due to volcanism, that sort of thing. Thinks there aren’t enough Ryszard Kapu?ci?skis in the world. Has a twitter that is updated infrequently; has a blog updated even less frequently.

http://butmostlywind.tumblr.com/
http://twitter.com/iansteadman
Has lived the glamorous life – born in San Francisco, viagra moved to Wolverhampton, try then Solihull, then Slough. Lost his West Coast accent, hashed together something that sounds like a lazy BBC presenter, and gained an ability to string words together. Decided it would be a good thing to try to do for a living. Realises that the more he tries to keep up with the new things in the world the more he fails. Reads voraciously – will stop strangers in the street and plead with them to read Roberto Bolaño. Has an unfailing loyalty to Bob Dylan.

http://butmostlywind.tumblr.com/
http://twitter.com/iansteadman
Has lived the glamorous life – born in San Francisco, drug moved to Wolverhampton, rx then Solihull, check then Slough. Lost his West Coast accent, hashed together something that sounds like a lazy BBC presenter, and gained an ability to string words together. Decided it would be a good thing to try to do for a living. Realises that the more he tries to keep up with the new things in the world the more he fails. Reads voraciously – will stop strangers in the street and plead with them to read Roberto Bolaño. Has an unfailing loyalty to Bob Dylan.

http://butmostlywind.tumblr.com/
http://twitter.com/iansteadman

When it comes to talking about music constructed of non-organic noises (sampled, treat synthesised) then I have to admit that I am at something of a loss. Badum. Kaching. Ting ting bading. Crash. Words are not music; I can talk about the words that are sung alongside the music just fine, but this is a dance record of sorts, and my knowledge of where this thing is coming from is patchy at best. I shall have to be throwing together some kind of thesis constructed out of childhood memories, ones consisting of adverts for Euphoria compilations on Channel 4 and a general understanding that there were parties happening on islands in the Mediterranean and that I was far too young to understand why everyone was so happy to be all covered in foam and wearing whistles. Oh, idle youth.

What I do know, and can talk about authoritatively, is that Caribou is the long-time project of Dan Snaith. He’s something of an intellectual (with a doctorate in mathematics), his music has always been steeped in IDM and psychedelia, and this is his (and his band’s) third album of the past ten years. At first listen it’s a radical departure from the psych-electronica-rock of 2007’s Andorra, but it can also be seen as an evolution of Snaith’s play with musical texture. This is a veritable smorgasbord of sound; pay attention to anything that feels like a gap or pause and, like some kind of aural Mandelbrot set, there are yet more treats hidden within.

Listen to first track ‘Odessa’ and feel the confusion as it dawns on you that every typical reference point is useless. As a reviewer, this is particularly challenging – hence discussion of ka-wooshing and ba-thumping. That guitar line is straight 70s funk, the percussion is halfway to dub, and half the melody is some kind of distorted animal yelp while the other half a constipated squeak from an instrument that I have yet to determine the nature of. Lyrics are mixed low, and often unintelligible – though that which does break through tends to be strangely melancholic (example: “As they watch themselves grow old/as he helps her into bed/just a hint of it survives/just a spark inside his head,” on ‘Kaili’). It is enthralling, it is fantastic.

‘Sun’, next, is a mesmerising tune that sounds how laughing gas feels – Snaith chants “Sun/sun/sun/sun/sun/sun…” over and over again, the sound fading and surging, swooshing from one side to the other, over a beat that brings to mind the electronic hip-hop of Flying Lotus. Personal favourite ‘Bowls’ has a thumping bassline augmented with dozens of overlapping chimes that are presumably bowls being tapped with metallic spoons or something of that ilk. Then there’s the pacy ‘Leave House’, sounding uncannily like the greatest track Hot Chip haven’t made.

I suppose I can draw upon a metaphor here for Swim as organic music, an ecosystem in a record. All these strange confluences, these peculiar balancing acts – they all combine to create something that is unquestionably organic and real-sounding. The noises are mostly real, created by hand, but put together like an architect using a design program, erected into something vastly complex and, importantly, homely. Again and again I struggle to find a better descriptor for this album than ‘warmth’ – this brings me towards talking about what appears to be the clearest of all the myriad reference points on offer.

Take away the wobble in the synth on ‘Sun’ and you could be listening to ‘You’re Not Alone’, pre-Tinchy; or notice that ‘Bowls’ relies on a pulsing, pointed melody absolutely typical of Faithless’ biggest single; or consider the familiarity in the saxophone refrain on ‘Kaili’. Or, perhaps, the biggest hint – 3:50 into ‘Leave House’, and 1997 threatens to break through the surface. A pounding euphoria beat rises, like some majestic fatty aquatic mammal trained to jump through a hoop, but then… vanishes again, beneath the waves. It’s only there very briefly, but it’s perhaps the only moment on the album where Snaith’s vibe is displayed on his sleeve for all to see. If I were searching for a pithy genre label here I could settle on ‘math-rave’ or ‘math-house’, but that could be tempting fate, as from Tokyo to Chicago the blogging hordes jump onto some kind of hideous bandwagon – or is that a compliment to how natural Swim feels, how it feels like something we should all already be doing? We are (weirdly, as many anthropologists have pointed out) hairless apes, the simians that love to swim, that are actually born with the ability to swim. Swim, the name being so apt, is an album that is entirely instinctual in its construction.

As befits music critics, they’ve begun cobbling together some kind of proto-hypothesis as to the fundamental characteristic of alternative American popular music. It contends that, in the US, bands still worship, that they are still in awe of, all those horribly sincere and gentle psychedelic lads from the 60s – your Grateful Deads, your Jefferson Airplanes, Allen Ginsberg setting William Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience to his own immature compositions. When Patti Smith came to London for the first time in the mid-70s to play her first LP, Horses, she and her band were seen as being at the front of this brave new ‘punk’ idea they had over in that New York City of theirs. Lydon and his Sex Pistols played the same night, and he opened their set with this sentient credos: “Horses? Horses? Horseshit!” That’s the kind of evidence that can, if a review demands, be taken and applied over a whole society – we are the country that had punk as mainstream movement, as political ideology, as nihilistic creed. We came out of the 70s with the tombstone of Ian Curtis and synthesisers set to ‘dread’; Americans ended up with ‘Shiny Happy People’. In short, the British are, in the main, over it when it comes to hippie idealism in music; the Americans have never really recovered by comparison, and prefer to get lost in the niceties of older eras where sincerity had yet to give way to irony.

You could, apparently, see this in effect just last year, when we saw Animal Collective release their Fall Be Kind EP with the first commercially-licensed sample of a Grateful Dead track. Perhaps Snaith is another adherent to the same trend – taking hold of stuff a lot of other musicians might consider gauche and reassembling it as exciting, bold, new. He’s a Canadian based in London, so maybe that explains why he’s been looking towards the Balearic islands for a warm and friendly drug scene to take cues from instead of San Fransciscan flower children.

What this all boils down to, regardless of whether it follows some general cultural phenomenon or not (and it can certainly be taken as one possible analysis of why this album has arrived in the form that is has), is this: Swim takes something that, to the vast swathes hogging the blogosphere, is fundamentally uncool, and completely refurnishes it. Snaith has tapped into the warmth of those synths, and that period, the sense of belonging and the sense of nostalgia, to create a work of electronica that has few faults. A masterpiece, dare I say it.

Regardless of myself or anyone else giving this some needless new label, we’re likely going to be seeing a lot of kids in bedrooms starting to raid yet another era of dance music, the rehabilitation of previously verboten dance forms, perhaps even a reappraisal of Kevin & Perry (though that will probably be the high water mark). The irony of this all is that it has taken a man with a doctorate in mathematics, a man who is clearly a perfectionist and a delicate composer (rumour has it Swim is a synthesis of over 600 original compositions) to reinvigorate genres of music entirely associated with the emotional mindlessness of ecstasy. This album has a heartbeat, a kind of Frankenstein’s monster brought to life by a scientist who believes in poetry and beauty.

Written by Ian Steadman on Monday April 19th, 2010 6:35 pm

Categories ,2010, ,Allen Ginsberg, ,andorra, ,caribou, ,Dan Snaith, ,dance, ,electronica, ,Faithless, ,Flying Lotus, ,Grateful Dead, ,Hot Chip, ,House, ,ian steadman, ,Ibiza, ,Jefferson Airplane, ,Manitoba, ,patti smith, ,Polaris Prize, ,Pyschadelia, ,review, ,rock, ,sex pistols, ,Swim, ,Techno

Amelia’s Magazine | Festival Preview: Latitude

Alternative Fashion Week Day 5 2010 Viveka Goyanes

All photography by Amelia Gregory.

Kim Seoghee may not be Flemish (I’m gonna bet he isn’t) but his work sure as hell feels the touch of Belgium. With a team of skinny stoney faced pretty boy models and ethereal girls, visit web Kim showed us a classic example of the sulky European genre. Eyes emphasised with kohl, visit this the models lined up to show Another 7th Day, prescription a pick ‘n’ mix collection in black, grey and cream. Amongst the upbeat surroundings of Alternative Fashion Week their cool collective attitude stood right out, but they’d fit right in at Paris or London fashion weeks proper.

Alternative Fashion Week Day 5 2010 Kim Seoghee

Kim Seoghee with his models.

Laura Panter showed a clever collection – ‘This collection cries adolescent’ – God knows what being a teenager had to do with it though. The clothes were a curve enhancing mix of pastel chiffon and wool with bondage inspired straps and belt features.

Alternative Fashion Week Day 5 2010 Laura Panter

Laura Panter.

She was followed swiftly by the work of another Laura. Laura Fox had put together a cute series of outfits inspired by ‘British Heritage, Harris Tweed and Oilskin’ – with the aim of promoting manufacturing in the UK. Her love for classic British designers such as Christopher Bailey for Burberry were clear in what I thought was a sweet and mature collection, and that was before I discovered that Laura is wheelchair bound. She has a good web presence with a Carbonmade website and a twitter feed so she clearly hasn’t let a little thing like a disability stop her from keeping busy. And my friends over at Creative Boom have also blogged on her here. Dead impressed.

Alternative Fashion Week Day 5 2010 Laura Fox

Laura Fox had business cards to hand: the way it should be done!

Sarina Hosking showed a couple of pieces titled Beauty and the Beast. I have to say I’m not surprised by the title – during a week when titles often bore abstract relevance to the collections they were attached to (at best), this did exactly what it said on the tin. The girl that really got all the photographers salivating was a sexy grown-up version of Little Red Riding Hood, complete with red lacy veil. An elegant gent in wolf mask looked on. They were a distraction from the rest of the collection but heck, why not mix and match your fairytale references? According to her myspace Sarina is principally a theatrical designer, so it all begins to make sense.

Transform by Elizabeth Wilcox was described as ‘Sportswear creating capsule wardrobe’. It was certainly sporty but I am not sure I was feeling the marl grey highlighted with neon sculptural thing.

Viveka Goyanes put together cutesy cream printed shirts with carefully styled black and white tailoring to present a mature collection called Brummella the Dandella. I particularly loved all the little touches, like the ripped and accessorised socks. It always pays to look down!

The first festival I ever had the fortune to attend was Latitude 2007. Still a fresher at university, page still fresh-faced and just a little naïve; a small hatchback, viagra order four friends, and every nook and cranny jammed with our camping equipment. We were green, and we didn’t know that you wouldn’t need six sets of clothes, nor a full foldable mattress, nor (as one of our group, bizarrely, thought) a full set of crockery. It was only due to our general keenness that left us arriving early and managing to snag a camping spot both close to the site entrance and (crucially) within 600 yards of the car park. That was, I discovered, exactly the limit of my stamina for being able to carry my own weight in paperbacks and camping stoves (three!) and several pairs of shoes. Oh, idle youth! These days I can take five nights of living in muddy squalor like a medieval serf in my stride, but that’s only down to training myself; I had to ween myself off such modern luxuries as soap, razors, and fresh underwear.

But I digress – this is meant to be a preview of Latitude 2010. The background: Latitude occurs every year in July in Southwold in Suffolk, and operates under the banner of Festival Republic (formerly Mean Fiddler), that gargantuan promotions company with fingers in many pies and still perhaps best know for the carnival of the damned that is the Reading and Leeds Weekender. Latitude is something of a pet project for Festival Republic, who felt that British festivals had lost track of what made them so culturally important in the first place – not just the bands but the atmosphere, the vibe, the performers on stilts and the chance meetings in the dark under the boughs of some off-to-the-side willow. Glastonbury has become something of a behemoth, but it used to be a small and intimate affair; Latitude’s raison d’être is to mimic what Glastonbury is suppose to once have been. My verdict, taking my experiences of 2007 into account, is that they have succeeded admirably, though it would be churlish to say that it’s exactly as the same. Many of those ideals that the hippies celebrated at the solstice three decades ago – appreciation of the earth, appreciation of humanity – have arguably seeped into the larger (regular) festival-going public, but these days we’re much, much better at recycling.

Capacity is relatively small, as far as festivals go these days, capped at 25000 since 2008, and the wondrous thing about Latitude is that you can go the whole weekend without seeing a single band. There’s a strong lineup of comedy acts, theatre performances, literature talks and other cultural oddities that mark it out as unique in the British festival scene. I’ll run through some of the things to look forward to this year, for those that are going, and if you’re not then be quick, because it’ll sell out soon.

There are several music stages scattered about the site. The largest is the main Obelisk Arena, this year headlined by Florence & the Machine, Belle & Sebastian, and Vampire Weekend. Other artists worth seeing include folkster Laura Marling, indie legends Spoon, insanely talented Mexican acoustic duo Rodrigo y Gabriela, gorgeous melody act Dirty Projectors, and even a recently-reformed James. They’ll probably sing that song about sitting.

Move across to the second stage and you’ll find the Word Arena, headlined by the National, the xx, and Grizzly Bear. The first is one of the best bands in the world, without question, and if you go you’ll probably find me there too, undergoing some kind of trembling transcendental spasm attack. I love that band. Oh god how I do. The xx are an interesting choice of headliner as their music, so heavy with meaning and yet so utterly minimal, might struggle to hold a headlining slot on a festival stage. I’ve seen them live before and they were bloody fantastic, so I’m sure they’ll be fine; I won’t be seeing them at Latitude, though. My reasons involve a broken heart, a worn mixtape, and shattered promises – I won’t burden you any further than that, but know that it was horrid. Grizzly Bear are sick, and will absolutely suit the beautiful site that Latitude is situated within. Also playing the Word Arena are Wild Beasts, Richard Hawley, the Horrors, and Yeasayer, etc. etc..

Then you’ve got your Lake Stage, which is (no surprises here) situated next to a lake, as well as the Sunrise Arena deep in the woods on the edge of the site. Exactly who shall be playing where on these stages hasn’t been announced yet, but what is know is that artists and bands such as the Big Pink, Black Mountain, Girls, These New Puritans, Tokyo Police Club, and a bunch of others. I’ve been looking back through past years and Latitude 2010 looks like being potentially the best ever with regards to the music acts (though 2009 was also pretty sick – Nick Cave!). But it’s not all about the music, of course, otherwise it wouldn’t be quite as sweetly unique as it is.

In the Comedy tent there are sets from Richard Herring, Emo Philips, Rich Hall, Phill Jupitus, Mark Watson, but also many smaller acts such as Mark Oliver and Doc Brown. In previous years this tent has had a propensity towards overcrowding when the bigger names have appeared, but hopefully they’ll have ironed out the creases there. We’ve already covered the Literature tent on Amelia’s Magazine, somewhat, but I’ll add that Jon McGregor is also giving a talk. He’s the author of If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things, a novel that is in itself extraordinarily remarkable and one of the finest examples of prose-poetry I’ve read in the past decade. Also of note here is that Dan Kitson, who probably blushes when he gets described as, “perhaps the finest standup comic of his generation,” all time, will be telling a story for an hour every night at midnight on the Waterfront Stage. His work is rarely available on video as he doesn’t like the idea of his shows being pirated, so please take this opportunity to see him in the flesh.

John Cooper Clarke is in the Poetry tent – one of the towering figures of modern performance poetry in this country should be reason enough to raise some curiosity there, but there are also appearances from important figures on the British poetry scene like Luke Wright and John Stammers. Eddie Argos, of Art Brut fame, will also be doing a set – if you’re familiar with the man then you’ll know that’s an intriguing prospect.

I’ve barely scratched the surface here – there’s a Cabaret tent that parties on into the early hours of the morning, there’s the Film & Music Arena showcasing some unique new audiovisual shows (as well as more irreverent stuff from the likes of Adam Buxton and the Modern Toss crew), and there’s also a chance to wander into the woods to find both the opera performances and the In The Woods area, a woodland clearing set up for late night raving. There are numerous plays put on at the Theatre Arena, including performances from the Royal Shakespeare Company and Everyman Playhouse. There’s a huge childrens’ area that’s almost like a playground.

Hell, the whole thing is like some gaudy carnival from the middle ages transported through time for our enjoyment. There’s a parade at some point, there’s giant painting projects, you can row boats in the lake, you can watch a jazz band play all day on a floating stage on the lake, and so on, and so on. The beauty of the site just completes the package, and thankfully the Latitude team are very good at maintaining it. They’ve got a well-developed set of environmentally-friendly policies that have managed to recycle most of the waste from past festivals, including designated recycling bins, bags handed out to campers for sorting their recycling, and everything you can buy on site is sourced so that it won’t damage the environment both getting there and if it’s thrown away. Sorted.

So that’s Latitude 2010. Three days almost doesn’t seem enough, does it?

Written by Ian Steadman on Wednesday April 28th, 2010 5:45 pm

Categories ,2010, ,Adam Buxton, ,Art Brut, ,Arts, ,Belle & Sebastian, ,Black Mountain, ,Cabaret, ,comedy, ,Dan Kitson, ,dirty projectors, ,Doc Brown, ,Eddie Argos, ,Emo Philips, ,environment, ,Everyman Playhouse, ,festival, ,film, ,Florence & the Machine, ,girls, ,glastonbury, ,grizzly bear, ,ian steadman, ,James, ,John Cooper Clarke, ,John Stammers, ,Jon McGregor, ,latitude, ,Latitude Festival, ,Laura Marling, ,leeds, ,Luke Wright, ,Mark Oliver, ,Mark Watson, ,Modern Toss, ,music, ,Nick Cave, ,opera, ,Phill Jupitus, ,rave, ,Reading, ,Rich Hall, ,richard hawley, ,Richard Herring, ,rodrigo y gabriela, ,Royal Shakespeare Company, ,Spoon, ,Standup, ,the big pink, ,the horrors, ,The National, ,The XX, ,These New Puritans, ,Tokyo Police Club, ,Vampire Weekend, ,Wild Beasts, ,Yeasayer

Amelia’s Magazine | The Pipettes – Interview

I thought that we’d start with just clarifying something that I’m not entirely sure about, which is the songwriting – who writes what?

There’s a lot less playground-romance in the new songs.

Ani: [whistfully] I think we should be honest that our school days are well and truly gone…

Time to put the photos away in the album?

Ani: Heh, yeah. Although I never liked school much. We were 100% losers.
Gwenno: But now you’re a winner!
Ani: Yeah! Um. A winner all the way.

So there’s the sci-fi influence on the new album, but what else was coming into your heads when you were making it?

Gwenno: Well, everyone had different takes on it, really.
Ani: When I first came into the band…

Sorry, how long have you been in the band now?

Something different?

Lyrically?

Gwenno: Yeah. And I like old Kylie songs and things like that, and I think that you can hear that more.

So are you saying that you weren’t as keen on the Phil Spector-influenced stuff from the first album?

And with your new songs you don’t feel tied down to a single aesthetic?

I was watching your video for the first single off the album, ‘Stop The Music’ – you’ve got your dance moves in that, and lots of costumes…

So you’re more sure of yourself? The album does sound very cohesive despite the change in direction, I think.

You don’t worry at all that the change of direction will alienate some of your fans?

But you’re picking up new ones, too?

A labour of love?

You said that the first album was a bit gimmicky – but surely that’s the point of pop music? To criticise pop for being throwaway and fun is a bit like criticising water for being wet.

But that’s still someone’s words that they’re singing, someone’s emotions.

Straightforwardly manufactured acts who are designed deliberately to make sales?

Lots of bands wear silly things, mind. You guys seen Of Montreal?

Gwenno: Hah, yes!

Like having an old record where it always skips in a certain place, and when you hear it on the radio and it doesn’t have that little clip in it, it feels less real?

He’s been around for a while – almost old to enough to have worked on some of the original doo-wop records.

So who’s he worked with?

Gwenno: Well, I think his biggest thing was Dare by The Human League. Buzzcocks, Stranglers, Shirley Bassey, Altered Image… I think he turned Madonna down.

Really?

Rehearsals for your tour are going well?

Does this mean that you’re not looking to find a third member of the band, to get it back to how it was before?

Kind of like a session musician?

Scary?

(All images courtesy of the band, taken from the shoot for their latest album)

Written by Ian Steadman on Friday April 9th, 2010 3:02 pm

Amelia’s Magazine | Team Ghost – You Never Did Anything Wrong To Me – Album Review

team ghost review
Alternative Fashion Week Spitalfields 2010

Alternative Fashion Week is a funny old beast, viagra order one that I’ve been getting to know rather well over the past week. And really getting to become rather fond of. Every day I rock up at 1.15pm with no idea of what the day’s catwalk show would bring. Generally I come skidding to a halt on my bike just as the stout lady with the microphone finishes giving her daily spiel to the audience, order which is a funny old mixture of family, stuff friends, industry pundits (apparently, though I didn’t seen anybody I know) and interested city boys and labourers.

Alternative Fashion Week Spitalfields 2010

On Tuesday I was still a novice, so I asked the lady at the back with a clipboard if I could sit down – being as I was press and that’s what it said on my ticket. “No.” She told me bluntly. “Not if you haven’t reserved a seat.” Oh alright then.

Alternative Fashion Week Spitalfields 2010
Don’t hassle this lady. She’s very busy. She ensures that everyone gets out on the catwalk on time.

One major issue with this event is the lack of surrounding information – Alternative Fashion Week doesn’t have much of an online presence and the bumpf that I got sent in the post was basic to say the least. It certainly didn’t warn me that I needed to RSVP or go fuck myself. I always find it amusing how, because of the way I dress and the fact that I carry a big professional camera with me (photographers generally being the scum of the earth and all that), I am treated in a certain way. Oh world of fashion, you do make me larf. Still, I like to travel incognito, so it suits me.

Alternative Fashion Week Spitalfields 2010
Some of the audience really aren’t going to help you get ahead in fashion – bemused city workers look on.

Alternative Fashion Week Spitalfields 2010
The band. They’re quite naff.

Now I actually think that the lack of a seat was a blessing in disguise – I spent about ten minutes on day one attempting to watch the catwalk shows front stage before realising that there was far more fun to be had hanging around the back, where a big old melange of models, designers, city workers, pervy middle aged male photographers and screaming organisers raced about like mad things – it made for far more interesting photos, and I got to boss the girls around when they come off stage. (Something none of the other photographers seemed to do. It must be something to do with my background as a fashion photographer because I have no qualms with telling a model how to pose. Though of course the rest of the cameras descended in front of me like locusts once I’d arranged a shot.) So whilst I can report generally on the outfits, I have no idea what any of the catwalk presentations were like. Not that I think that matters – it’s the clothes that are important, right?

Alternative Fashion Week Spitalfields 2010
“Hello young lady, can I take a photo of you because you don’t appear to have a bra on.” Believe me, there was only a pair of nipple tassles under that jacket.

The standard at Alternative Fashion Week is massively variable but amongst the huge quantity of stuff there are some really interesting designers to be found – ones that I would wager money on becoming successful. So it’s important to give into the undeniable exuberance of the occasion: everyone is quite simply having a ball. Some of the “models” may be slightly ropey, some of the designs outstandingly bad, but the fact that such an event exists to promote up and coming talent is a good thing. It’s just a shame they don’t have more resources to make sure that each designer gets as much promotion as possible: I had real trouble trying to figure out which was which. And that I at least had the choice of a seat if I had wanted.

Alternative Fashion Week Spitalfields 2010
Model or mum? You decide. Perhaps both. There are all comers here.

Alternative Fashion Week Spitalfields 2010 Alex Seroge
Alex Seroge showed a very strong collection.

Alternative Fashion Week Spitalfields 2010
Great styling from Hayley Trezise.

Over the week I have got better at making a note of who all the designers are, no mean feat when juggling camera, iphone and twitter updates. So if you see your work on my website and it hasn’t been properly credited do drop me a note and let me know. I’ve also learnt a lot about what you should and shouldn’t do at Alternative Fashion Week if you want to make an impression – and that shall be the subject of another post.

Alternative Fashion Week Spitalfields 2010
Alternative Fashion Week Day Spitalfields 2010

Kimberley Startup.

Alternative Fashion Week Day Spitalfields 2010
Havering College get ready to go on stage.

Alternative Fashion Week Day Spitalfields 2010
Adel Andic.

Alternative Fashion Week Day Spitalfields 2010
Maartje de Man.

Alternative Fashion Week Day Spitalfields 2010
It’s tough when your bum is hanging out in the street.

Alternative Fashion Week Day Spitalfields 2010
Checking through the running order backstage.

Alternative Fashion Week Day Spitalfields 2010

For those of you unfamiliar with the loud, sales scattershot-shoegazing electronic noise group M83, approved then perhaps it might make sense to take a quick break here and catch up. Anything will do, though it seems to be generally accepted that their 2003 record Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is their high point; shortly after its release Nicolas Fromageau left the band to pursue his own projects, and I (like many others) had assumed that by now he had simply dropped away into the ether. Not the case at all, as it turns it – he’s back with Team Ghost, a new project with multi-instrumentalist Christophe Guerin, and with it taking the M83 project in a new direction, towards the realms of krautrock and synth-pop. The album cover (although technically this is an EP) should make it clear that this is cut from a decidedly darker and ruder cloth than the work of M83 – Team Ghost aren’t afraid to flash a bit of tit.

‘Lonely, Lonely, Lonely’ is the longest track. Fromageau’s choice, opening his own group’s first record effort with a song that’s surprisingly close to M83 in spirit, seems a strange one at first. It’s tempting to write this off immediately as merely a pastiche of his last band, and already as the music builds up I’m thinking of ways to describe this record as merely one man’s way to satisfy his own ego… and then it ends. I’m going to go out on a limb here and call this predictable instrumental track tongue-in-cheek. Just a hunch.

‘A Glorious Time’, though, kicks in with a huge wall of guitar feedback, sounding like some poppier indie band discovering a distortion pedal. Fromageau sings, “leave it all behind you… leave it all behind you,” over and over the guitar’s swirl. It’s a straight-up shoegaze track, and whilst not hugely original it’s already a sign of a more diverse lineup to come. It’s followed by ‘Sur Nous Les Étincelles Du Soleil’, a dreamy, twinkling song with some sultry French chanteuse breathing sweet nothings down in the mix. It’s halfway through before it’s clear that this is more post-rock than shoegaze, but of a very nocturnal sort.

Raising us from our slumbers comes ‘Echoes’, followed by ‘Only You Can Break My Heart’, which both fight it out for the distinction of being labelled the best track on here. The former is a pulsing tribute to Neu! and early-80s new wave – it’s surprisingly groovy for an artist like Fromageau, but not unexpected considering the influences being chucked about here. It’s the kind of thing that makes me excited to see what Team Ghost might do next; so too can this be applied to ‘Only You Can Break My Heart’, a pounding track that sounds not unlike No Age trying to beat the bloody hell out of a synthesiser. Totally instrumental, but completely bracing.

‘Colours In Time’ sounds eerily like an Air track remixed by Crystal Catles; Fromageau’s French lilt, crooning over a song that sounds not dissimilar to what you’d have found pumping out of an arcade game’s speaker system circa 1994. Then there’s ‘Deaf’, another bout of semi-shoegaze but this time more in the style of the recent Horrors album – it’s a shimmering track, and a satisfying closer to the album.

It may have taken him nigh-on seven years to finally find his feet, but Fromageau has clearly found a music partner with a clearly similar outlook and vibe. Where this EP really comes into its own is where it departs from the M83 formula, strikes out on its own with its own new influences. If they can maintain, hell, even improve upon the kind of collages they have here in songs like ‘Echoes’ then it will be fascinating to see where Team Ghost go to next.

Written by Ian Steadman on Friday April 23rd, 2010 4:56 pm

Categories ,80s, ,Air, ,Crystal Castles, ,Dead Cities Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, ,feedback, ,ian steadman, ,M83, ,neu!, ,new wave, ,No Age, ,post-rock, ,shoegaze, ,Synth-Pop, ,Team Ghost, ,You Never Did Anything To Break My Heart

Amelia’s Magazine | The Futureheads – Interview

Style: “lu flux hats 2″

Illustration by Jenny Robins

Lu Flux is one of the most interesting new British ethical fashion labels and one of the highlights in this year’s Estethica exhibition at London Fashion Week. Katia Bololia meets her in her studio at the industrial end of East London to talk about her latest collection, page ‘Dame and Knight’, ethical fashion and taking life less seriously.

Firstly, tell us a bit about yourself and your journey in the fashion world so far.
I graduated from the Edinburgh School of Art at 2006 and did my first collection for Glasgow Fashion Week, then went on to work with German fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm in Paris. I made the decision to move to London and at first I was doing commissions for other people, I hadn’t fully committed myself to fashion at the time until a friend of mine opened a gallery at Brick Lane and I put myself down for a show, so that put me into gear to make a collection for October 2008. That body of work I created eventually led me to the Vauxhaul Fashion Scout Show, which kicked off my career.

From then it escalated, leading to London Fashion Week’s Estethica Exhibition. Tell us about that experience.
It was really good, I hadn’t been to Estethica before and at first I didn’t know what to expect. There were all of the designers I’ve met before and it was nice because it felt like we were this strange ethical family, I’ve also met lots of people that I’ve heard about and wanted to meet personally. It was really lovely to be part of it and it was very exciting for me to be part of the LFW, I’ve never been in such a place before where I could meet people from all around the world.

What are the things that interest you in general?
Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of time for myself but when I don’t do fashion I am very interested in art, galleries and culture mainly; music, films and everything. I like getting away to the countryside as well, escaping from it all.

When it comes to your label, do you have a fashion manifesto and if so what is it?
I read Vivienne’s Westwood manifesto recently and I suppose mine is very similar to hers, in the idea of buying something for longevity. I am also against disposable fashion. I think we should buy something because we love it and because it reflects our personality. I feel that all of my things transcend this message, to be loved for a long time.

There is a very interesting story when it comes to your fabrics, can you tell us where you source your fabrics from?
I used to source everything from charity and vintage shops, car boot sales and markets myself. Although I loved it, it is quite a difficult process as it takes up a lot of time and effort. I can’t commit myself to doing that anymore so I started working with a recycling company that is actually around the corner from my studio. These are fabrics coming from clothing banks from all around London, I may get fabric pieces, sheets or even clothes that I will take apart. The amount of waste that gets thrown every day is phenomenal and I am happy that I can make new, exciting pieces of it.

During that process, do you have difficulties sometimes finding the right thing for you? Or the opposite – finding a “small treasure” ?
Definitely, one piece of fabric can spark off a completely different design angle. I try not to have a specific design idea in my head, I prefer to see what I can get first and develop my designs from that; it helps the design process. If I can’t find something that I have in my mind, something else will come along and take its place. I also work with organic fabrics – the variety that’s out there is getting so much bigger these days and more accessible.

Speaking of organic, and its growth nowadays, I sometimes wonder if when companies take the eco route (whether it be fashion or food or whatever) they do so just because it has become fashionable. Although it all contributes to the greater good, do you feel that in some way ethical fashion has become commercial?
Green is definitely a buzz-word at the moment and everybody, be it in the fashion industry or not, tries to become as ethical as possible. I am not necessarily coming from that angle, even though I obviously care a lot about what I do and how it affects the environment, there is just too much waste and that affects everyone. But for me it’s more about the final garment than the ethical process; the fact that these pieces are unique, they’re more like art pieces.

In your collections we see an almost fairy-tale world. Where do you draw your inspiration from?
I have a personal collection of vintage photographs that I like to I look at. I love this time when photography was just starting and you get these moments frozen in time. Right now everyone uses photography all the time, capturing every moment, but back then you only see a fraction of their life and you have to imagine for yourself what their world might have been like. Obviously, I am also influenced by fairy-tales and their magical feeling; the escape from reality. Fashion is so intense, serious and glamorous and I want to take another spin on it, to keep it quite child-like and fun.

By seeing your collections past and present, one gets into a playful mood. Do you think that fashion is a protest these days, like it used to be in the past?
I think everyone’s got their point that they’re trying to make. My point is that you can have fun while making your point, it doesn’t all have to be serious. I want people to realize that they can have fun in whatever they’re doing and that humour can be injected in everything. Everything is so serious nowadays, fast-forward and busy.

For your last collection you’ve collaborated with London-based artist Alex Chinneck and traditional cordwainers Green Shoes. Tell us a little about that collaboration.
It was easy collaborating with Alex – he’s not only a wonderful sculptor but also my boyfriend! He had this paper cut-out of an explosion called Ka-boom and we both came up with the idea of translating it into a piece of clothing. It is a wonderful pictorial piece and it was also a real test for my patch-working abilities – it was really technical and much more complicated than I thought it would be, so it was really rewarding when it was finished. Then with Green Shoes, it all started when I bought a pair for Alex’s birthday and I decided to customise them for him, so it all unfolded with what I did and we decided to have them in the collection and a bag as well. They are all made of vegetarian leather and tanned with vegetable dye, so they’re as ethical as a shoe can be. Also, the cut-outs I used are off-cuts from the leftovers from Green Shoes to reduce waste once again.

Illustration by Jenny Robins

Finally, an urban fashion legend says that Tom Ford offered Stella McCartney the role of design director at Gucci. When McCartney said no fur or leather, and Ford couldn’t oblige, she turned down the role. What would you do in a similar dilemma, in a fantastic scenario where you are offered a dream job but you have to compromise your principles in ethical fashion?
Actually, I’m doing my dream job already! I don’t want to buy fabric off the roll, I have to think within these parameters and I like the barriers that I have put to myself, otherwise it is not ethical. This way I push myself to do something a little bit extra, it’s not as easy because all these fabrics are not given to me on a plate. When you are more resourceful and you push yourself creatively then the final result is much more rewarding. I don’t want to preach to people, but I want to plant an idea. If people like it they might be inspired and follow my example. Fingers crossed!

Lu Flux photographed by Holly Falconer

Illustration by Jenny Robins

Lu Flux is one of the most interesting new British ethical fashion labels and one of the highlights in this year’s Estethica exhibition at London Fashion Week. Katia Bololia meets her in her studio at the industrial end of East London to talk about her latest collection, viagra ‘Dame and Knight’, ed ethical fashion and taking life less seriously.

Firstly, find tell us a bit about yourself and your journey in the fashion world so far.
I graduated from the Edinburgh School of Art at 2006 and did my first collection for Glasgow Fashion Week, then went on to work with German fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm in Paris. I made the decision to move to London and at first I was doing commissions for other people, I hadn’t fully committed myself to fashion at the time until a friend of mine opened a gallery at Brick Lane and I put myself down for a show, so that put me into gear to make a collection for October 2008. That body of work I created eventually led me to the Vauxhaul Fashion Scout Show, which kicked off my career.

Illustration by Jenny Robins

Lu Flux photographed by Holly Falconer

Illustration by Jenny Robins

Lu Flux is one of the most interesting new British ethical fashion labels and one of the highlights in this year’s Estethica exhibition at London Fashion Week. Katia Bololia meets her in her studio at the industrial end of East London to talk about her latest collection, ed ‘Dame and Knight’, sildenafil ethical fashion and taking life less seriously.

Illustration by Jenny Robins

Lu Flux photographed by Holly Falconer

On the eve of the release of their fourth album, no rx The Chaos, I sat down with lead singer Barry and guitarist Ross from the Futureheads to talk about their creative process, how it really felt to get dropped from their label, and their political leanings.

What were you thinking, recording this album? What was it you were trying to do?

Barry: It was very much a song at a time, and giving our full attention to each song without really thinking too much about the album as a whole until we’d given each of the songs enough time to know that they worked.

How long did you spend recording them all?

Barry: It was quite a fractured process, really, because we did it in three different sessions. The first session was in Sunderland with a mate of ours, Dave Brewis from Field Music, the second was with Dave Glover who produced the entirety of our second album – that’s This Is Not The World – and then we did a final session that we produced ourselves up in Newcastle in a tiny little studio called First Avenue. It was very much three different environments, three different atmospheres. It’s quite a well-rounded album I think.

It still sounds very cohesive, despite the different sessions.

Barry: We weren’t that worried about it not working as a record because we’d put so much effort into the songs that it could only add to the quality of the album, but when it came to actually mixing the album together we kind of realised that this is actually a preferable way to record. If you’ve got your guitar amp in the same room on every song, and it’s the same amp in every song, then that’s the level – guitars are guitars, they’re not going to sound that much different, but moving around gave it an extra level of personality and character.
Ross: And I think it truly only became the album, The Chaos, about 2/3 of the way through, when you start thinking about the artwork and the order of the tracklisting, what songs are going to make, what songs best sum up where we’re at. In the early stages you’re just going through it one song at a time, and that process really influences the rest of the songs that come after it, you know? When you’ve worked up four or five songs and recorded them, if you do it over a long period of time you’re going to end up influenced by that batch of songs, because even though we didn’t it all at the same studio or whatever, our head space was the same all the way through.

The title then – I noticed it’s a fast album. It goes quick, it’s not that it’s short but…

Barry: It’s pacy.

Yeah, it’s pacy, there’s so much happening and then it’s over. Is that where the name comes from, in a way? The Chaos?

Barry: Well, the song, ‘The Chaos’, is a song that does kind of represent the overall cohesion of the album. It captured so much for us, I think, the nature in which it was recorded, the times that we’re living in, the actual state of our culture is pure chaos, it’s the natural state of the universe, pure chaos. I was watching this amazing documentary on the BBC that was called The Secret Life of Chaos which was about chaos theory, and we’re trying to write songs about how we’re all fully capable of dealing with this chaos because we’ve all got to this point just fine. So no matter what you think might happen in the world, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, or whatever, we’re here to deal with it, to deal with the experience. Not to shut it off, but to take it as it comes, to be a part of it. The main thing that the album is for is individuality and building confidence in yourself. I don’t want to sound like some self-help guy but, you know, music has this amazing ability to uplift people, without philosophy or whatever, and it’s all about the experience just coming through the airwaves into your brain and stimulates you. That’s what we’ve always done to ourselves, that’s what we’re all about as a band.
Ross: That element has always been really important with the Futureheads, and probably none more so than on this record, is to engage with people, on record, especially live, we want to engage with the crowd and each other. On this record the message is perhaps more direct than it’s ever been, and it’s about getting people to engage, to spark some kind of debate, some kind of positivity and not have such a passive experience, not to just settle for the dull things.

To what extent does that all come into play with the album cover? Where does that come from?

Barry: Well, that’s basically the chaos symbol, which was invented by a sci-fi writer in the 1950s. It’s a circle with eight arrows coming out of it. A very interesting symbol, because the arrows draw you in to that central point but the arrows create a dynamic to spit you out, and we’ve basically bastardised that symbol and made it into our own.
Ross: It sort of evokes the Nul Records logo too.
Barry: Aye, and with the artwork we all kind of chipped in little ideas.
Ross: Aye, it was great, we all put down our little designs and blueprints, like a school project. Interactive as it goes, like, because a lot of the time a lot of bands will have the management get a graphic designer in, they’ll choose from a range of designs and that’s it, that’s the cover, end of story. But I think that the way that we’re doing everything, to carry on, especially considering the problems we’ve had in the past and all, you really have to find a love for everything. It’s not just like writing a song and performing it, that’s it in its pure form but there’s a lot more involved. I think we get a thrill out of being closely involved with that stuff, and that we’re doing it on our own label entitles us to that now.

How is it running your own label? Has it been liberating?

Barry: Absolutely. Righteous. Righteous liberation.
Ross: That’s the thing, at the start of every new album it’s a very standard thing for a band to do is to get new press shots done or whatever, and in the past when we were with a major label there would always be this one guy who’d come along with these big books of portfolios…
Barry: Oh god.
Ross: …bearing in mind that all of us are very interested in the creative world, and we all are aware of photographers and artists in our own right, and he’d bring these things along and say, “how about such and such,” and it would be such a corporate process.

Very patronising?

Ross: Aye, it is very patronising. You’re not really part of the decision-making process, you’re only there as a gesture almost, having this sit-down. So this time, in keeping with the record being made in the north-east, close to home, we got a good friend of ours, Ian West, to do the photographs. We’ve tried to keep it as close to us as we can, really, and that level of control and those sorts of decisions are, relatively speaking, minutiae, but on the big picture are really massive. For a band to be able to exert that kind of authority is really rare, and I think that’s just one of the things that we enjoy doing, the fact that it’s a lot more free. How quickly we can go from having a decision or an idea to getting it done, there was just so much beaureaucracy at the major label.

Who were you with?

Barry: Warners, technically it was a subsidiary called 679 Recordings, but really, still a major. Nice people, don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticising the individuals, it’s just not smart enough for us, it’s a bit stupid.

I was reading that you guys were having some troubles back after you got dropped, that you were considering breaking up…

Barry: I don’t think that’s true, really.

I’m just going off Wikipedia here…

Barry: Wikipedia! I’m going to re-write that, because we’re not a ‘revival band’, fucking ‘revival band’! That’s bollocks, as if we’ve been a covers band for a decade. Piss off!
Ross: Oh man, now he’s raging.
Barry: I’m going to re-write the full Wikipedia for everybody.
Ross: Gonna have to be quick there, on the old computer like. It can be done.
Barry: This is the truth, right – the day that we got dropped, our manager called me and said, “I’ve got some good news – you’ve been dropped.” Yes! Cries of ecstasy. The best thing that could have happened. They were perfectly legally entitled to keep us on their shelf and say, “you get back to the studio,” and get songwriters in… There would’ve been blood, it would’ve been dangerous, to stay on Warners.
Ross: And another great thing about it was that they didn’t take another 18 months, two years, whatever – the second album had come out in May and by October, November they’d dropped us. And in a way it’s good on them to not mess us about.
Barry: They let us free, they let us out of the cage. They liberated us.
Ross: It happens to a lot of bands, I think, but for some reason we decided to talk about it a lot more. Like, for example, I was listening to Zane Lowe, he was interviewing a big lad from Outkast, and he’d just been dropped, signed again with Def Jam. They were talking about it but the way that it was dealt with, there weren’t many negative connotations. I think that maybe, the way that people now perceive that relationship is very different to when it happened to us, or the fact that we were so open about it almost attracted some kind of sympathy or drop in status.

Yeah, well what I’ve read about it almost seemed to suggest that you guys were really not happy about it, that you wouldn’t come back from it.

Barry: No, we never gave off the impression, intentionally… I think it’s fair enough to assume that if someone is rejected in that way that they’ll be, in some way, heartbroken, and we were of course all disillusioned with the music business but never with ourselves, never with our band. And now we have our own music industry, our own music business, that only we experience. It’s called Nul Records, and us and our managers are in complete control of that world. We control where we go in the world, what we spend on videos, and budgets and everything else, it’s empowering. We made the video for ‘Heartbeat Song’…

What’s that like?

Barry: Check it out, it’s funny, it’s like three different game shows in one. It’s all based on 70s game shows, it’s a really smart video.
Ross: There’s a standup, Ray Green, who’s the host and he’s very funny. He takes the focus off the video from the band, we’re kind of contestants.

So with your own record label, have you got yourself your own studio? It sounds like you’ve almost got your own kind of factory set up where you can work on your own terms.

Barry: We haven’t got our own studio, no.
Ross: But back in the north-east we’ve got 8music which is a creative space that we kind of share with Field Music, where we did record some of the album there.
Barry: Yeah, which was kind of revelation for us. We set up the 8music collective about seven or eight years ago now, and we contributed rent to a community building, and our fantasy was always to set up a studio there and release records from there, in a collective form, making ridiculous amounts of music. And then the Futureheads took off and we kind of disappeared from Sunderland for over year, really, just touring and stuff. Meanwhile, the brothers from Field Music kind of did actually set it up as a studio for them and when we came back they’d already started making music there, and it was very fortuitous for us to ask if they’d like to do a session together and they’d say absolutely, of course.
Ross: In a way, we probably could’ve made the entire album in that room, in that environment, if Dave hadn’t got so busy trying to record the latest Field Music album [called Field Music (Measure)].
Barry: Which is a double!
Ross: Yeah, imagine trying to fit in between sessions for a double album. And we’ve almost taken that space for granted but I think it’s really quite a special thing, that we can get the records out there from relatively small premises.

It sounds very punk, very DIY.

Barry: Absolutely.
Ross: It feels like we’re in charge of our destiny to a massive extent, way more than most bands in many ways because we haven’t got those corporate pressures or anyone interfering with the music or the creative decision making. It’s an intimate thing but it seems to be working for us.

So you’ve got this system worked out where you seem to be very comfortable, but I have to ask – how much chaos is there in that system?

Barry: Hah, just right. Balanced chaos. That’s the thing with chaos because there’s chaos in chaos. It’s just chaos how we perceive it, because there’s something else far more powerful controlling it and we experience, as an observer, as a crazy random world.

A last thing now, because everyone’s going on about it – did you watch the first TV debate?

Barry: No, we were… what were we doing last night?
Ross: We played a gig at King’s College. We tried to keep up with it online but, by all accounts, Nick Clegg came out of it well.

Are you guys politically engaged at all?

Barry: I think we all are, in our own little ways. We’ll all be voting this year, it’s turning into a very interesting time, but I read too many conspiracy theories… the Illuminati and Freemasons…

Shape-shifting lizards?

Barry: Heh, I don’t subscribe to that particular fucking crazy theory, but there’s definitely a cabal of highly powerful billionaires who are calling a lot of the shots, and there is that element of slightly sinister shit going on, but it’s a distraction from the real reality of it which is that we’ve got a big election coming up. What’s that saying… “Shat on by Labour, shoved up by Tories”? As Uncle Monty in Withnail & I would say. How about you?

I’ve got no idea yet. The thing is, I live in one of the safest Tory seats in the country, it’s been Conservative for the past two centuries.

Ross: Ah, well, conversely a lot of the districts that we live in, in the north-east, are very much Labour, and what with us wanting people to engage, this album, the timing might not be great with it coming out after the election but it would be that thing of wanting people to mobilise themselves and have their say. It’s like they say, you can only moan if you vote.
Barry: Hah! [puts on RP accent] Mind you, you can only moan if you vote. I voted and I can moan as much as I like!

Heh, well, don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos. So the album’s coming out on the 26th of April, and the next single is going to be…

Barry: A mystery. Not sure yet.

And touring plans?

Barry: Yeah, got a big tour coming up to promote the album starting on the day the album is released, up in Norwich. Then we have a little break and we’re off to America, which will be good as we haven’t done a tour there in three or four years. The album comes out over there on the 1st of June, the first day of the tour, so it’s pretty well organised. And we’re doing a few festivals, Leeds and Reading main stage which will be amazing, a few years since we’ve done that. Wicker Man Festival, Kendal Calling, there’s a lot of really good smaller indie rock festivals establishing themselves, you know, 5000 max kind of things.

Like Truck Festival?

Barry: That’s really good, it’s got a lovely atmosphere, like a tiny Glastonbury. Festivals are great things, you know, they’ve been happening a very long time and they’re usually celebrating something, like the summer solstice. Glastonbury’s always been on the solstice, so there’s this element of getting together as a community and passing the time in a very positive and proactive way. And that kind of joy that people are experiencing is just great, and you’re essentially like a hoover, you know [makes sucking noise], trying to suck all the joy up and fire it back at them, and that’s the beauty of festival. I love them.

Are they your favourite gigs, then?

Barry: Oh, I love them. Absolutely love them. So exciting. No preparation. You’re in front of your largest crowds with your smallest amount of equipment, shortest time to prepare. You’ve got to get them, otherwise they’ll just float away, or else they’ll just go watch someone DJ, or go on the rides, you’ve got to hold them, it’s a really interesting experience.

Written by Ian Steadman on Tuesday April 20th, 2010 4:09 pm

Categories ,8Music, ,BBC, ,field music, ,First Avenue, ,Heartbeat Song, ,ian steadman, ,Ian West, ,Newcastle, ,North East, ,Nul Records, ,Ray Green, ,Sunderland, ,The Chaos, ,the futureheads, ,The Secret Life of Chaos, ,This Is Not The World

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