Slaughtering: Robbie Williams, Reality Killed The Video Star
Revolution or Mutiny on the Bounty: Biffy Clyro, Only Revolutions
Gone is the piercing jagged shell that once encased Ayrshire screamster darlings Biffy Clyro, storing them safe away from the sycophantic smoothness of the saccharine-sweet conker that is Radio 1, Goal of the Month backing tracks and the dear old NME; the mainstream. Just as Simon Neil’s estranged locks hit the kitchen tiles around the release of critically-acclaimed cross-over behemoth, Puzzle, a few years back, Biffy have fallen from the tree of post-hardcore insanity, smoothing over their once sharpened, glitchy edges and exposing the vulnerable pop sensibilities that perpetually threatened to seep out from day one, back in the days of Blackened Sky (see Justboy, 57 or Joy.Discovery.Invention for signs of live before Mountains recently erupted).
Only Revolutions, the trio’s fifth attempt, is a quizzical listen. Neil somewhat controversially backs conversing with God in equal measure to Satan in order to “hear both sides” on acoustic lullaby and Machines of the record if you will, God & Satan, which goes some way as to cranking open the wealth of hidden intricacies that lace Only Revolutions. There’s a sense of conflicting interests embedded within, the striving for success set against the experimental tendencies and barking lyrics etched all over Infinity Land; Born On A Horse sets squelching synths against pristine guitar sheens and ludicrous lyricisms (“I pronounce it aluminium cos there’s an I next to the U and M” wouldn’t quite scale the top ten summits of Mountains) whereas the climactically frantic string squeals of That Golden Rule shriek with a neck-jerking urgency entirely absent from the power pop pieces of Puzzle, bar its frenetic opener. Quite whether their arena-conquering glistening alt. rock is the divine or the devilish voice piping up at the back of Neil’s mind is far from conclusive; Cloud Of Stink layers the least harmonious of vocals committed to plastic since The Wave Pictures and falls as flat as a leaky post-op Winehouse, whereas the endearing glinting guitar rays of possible chart-pillager Whorses shine supreme. Bubbles floats majestically to the forefront of the record alongside the swashbuckling stomps of The Captain yet filled with contradictions, Only Revolutions is vastly vapid, as Booooom, Blast & Ruin, Know Your Quarry and Shock Shock make about as much impact as a Leon Jackson convention on a drizzly Monday morning in Scarborough.
Far from their ‘finest hour’ Only Revolutions blends the fruits of Biffy’s past labours into an equal-parts sweet and sour concoction, more puzzling than Puzzle, equally as blissful as the convoluted chaos of Vertigo of Bliss yet far brighter from the darkness of a Blackened Sky, there’s not a whole load of Revolution here. Yet nor is there any sense of resolution, leaving the good ship Biffy to sail deeper into unchartered territories yet over the coming years...
Interview: The Chapman Family
Wikipedia knows next to nothing of the Stockton-on-Tees noisenik quartet undulating the underground enough to crack Geordie pavements. Lead barker Kingsley Hall may well be the most articulate cult figurehead to shred the pages of NME with unequalled bravado and outspoken chivalry since Morrissey. Taking on the mainstream, one sycophant-smashing step at a time, The Chapman Family may well be the dark horses to back over the dingy, hurdled tracks of a recession-obsessed England. Brace yourselves- it's lenghty. But comedic genius shouldn't be abbreviated...
Dots: The majority of those aware of the cataclysmic punk that is The Chapman Family will presumably have come across it through the medium of NME, namely supporting that old quiffed electro Shirley Manson/ Annie Lennox copyist (or “electro goddess” on a good day) La Roux on last Easter’s Radar Tour. With the forthcoming Virgins being your second single proper, most bands would perhaps see toilet tours as something of a regression...
Kingsley: There’s no comparison between ourselves and La Roux but certainly we’d never have even dreamed of the scale of publicity we got off the back of that tour. Bearing in mind that even after playing the BBC Introducing stage at Glastonbury last year, we were still a band just playing in relatively pubs and clubs so bagging that tour was a proper coup for us. Having to do interviews every single night and playing to sold out crowds in far bigger venues that we were used to was amazing, although we were under no illusions as to why those shows were sold out. It certainly wasn’t anything to do with us, rather that Bulletproof was at number two in the charts and everyone wanted to have a big ginger quiff on their head so we had front rows of fourteen/ fifteen year old girls, sexually confused, looking up longingly at their petite ginger songstress.
Dashes: You’re almost speaking positively of her, being renowned for twisting the knife with a fair few mainstream chart chancers...
Kingsley: Possibly, yeah but I don’t see any reason to lay into La Roux; as much as I either like or despise some of her songs etc, she was always really quite nice. She had her sister doing the merch so I think in her case she’d never really done a tour of that scale either before that point so it was presumably an eye-opener for her too, having to gig with diverse bands, namely four sweaty oiks from the North East of England. And she was pretty good. I can gladly slate people as much as I like but sometimes when they’re just so darn nice... I don’t know though, she may be completely different now, she may be a complete corporate whore but I doubt it. She made Pop [Chapman, bassist] up to look like her one night in Bristol so he was a little Rouxette for the night. But that was quite early on in the tour, when we were all still friends.
Dots: Where La Roux’s been categorised within the fictional genre of the year “Female”, The Chapman Family don’t seem to slot neatly into any pigeonholes or scenes of late...
Kingsley: No, we’re in a funny sort of situation but we always have been as we’re not extreme and metal enough to be lumped in with the likes of Pulled Apart By Horses or even Dinosaur Pile-Up but then again, we’re not indie enough to be billed alongside insert-indie-band-of-moment. Even when we’re trying to get bookings, promoters are usually quite confused as to which bands to put us on with so throughout this tour a load of promoters have just said “Great, they’ve been in the NME, we haven’t even listened to them so we’ll just put on any old indie trite. We’ve played with bands desperate to sound like Oasis or The Libertines and that’s not really where we’re coming from whereas others have been quite savvy. There’s definitely a resurgence in younger bands who are probably equally as bored as we are of corporate indie and we’ve been quite lucky to play with a few of them.
Dashes: In terms of the musical void that you’re haphazardly filling at this present moment in time, where do the influences for the ramshackle show that is The Chapman Family come from? You’re of course vaguely renowned for being somewhat outspoken...
Kingsley: It’s never meant in a bad way, although I’m sure it sometimes comes across like that. You can read anything on the internet and if you haven’t got lol written behind it, you’ve got no idea whether anybody’s kidding or not. The reasons I started the band are quite well documented, meeting Paul in a call centre and going to local venues at weekends. I loved watching bands and still do, every band I’ve watched has at least one decent song but it was the back end of bands striving to be Pete Doherty, maybe not in London but certainly in the North, so we’d get bands from Scotland or Liverpool all wearing vests, chatting in mockney accents and using one mic for all vocals, bumping into each other and we’d had enough of all that so anything different really stood out. I remember watching Friendly Fires in the Ku Bar in Stockton a couple of years ago and I swear there were only about ten people watching it and out of those ten, maybe five enjoyed it whilst the others were just looking at them, thinking “what the hell’s this?” There weren’t two guitars, a bass and drums, nor were there vocals about going down Hammersmith Palais. We’d go watch this sort of crap, go home and then decided we could probably do better than that and gave it a go, writing as many songs as possible before managing to fluke ourselves a gig, basically because I was the best man for the husband of the bloke who owned the club’s girlfriend’s sister. It’s really difficult to get first gigs I think and so you’ve got to just blag your way in. I didn’t really know how to do anything with bands or even run a Myspace so we basically formulated our own way of doing everything. A few local bands gave us a leg-up, Das Wanderlust especially. They used to put us on predominantly because we had a female bass player at the time, because they like things like that. I think that factor got us a fair few gigs early on, which sounds terribly sexist...
Dots: And typical of indie music...
Kingsley: Exactly, especially if there’s a girl playing guitar: “Wow, that’s different!” but then she decided she didn’t really want to do it any more so we drafted in Pop, who’s just noisier than everyone else and a bit outlandish shall we say, so he was just a bit of a personality in his own right. That helped us, gave us a kick up the backside and changed the sound completely and gave us a bit more of an identity.
Dashes: When you look at the band aesthetically, the image is a varied one, perhaps something along the lines of four individuals meeting in a call centre, brought together by communal interests that don’t quite converge with the latest D-list celebrity scandal or new edition of Windows...
Kingsley: I’m not going to get all Northern on this again, because I think I do it a bit too much but I think that collectively, as the North, I think we need to get over that perpetual chip on our shoulder, that Southerners never make it to the North of England, “we’re never going to get anywhere because we’re from the North”...
Dots: Feeling Northern rather than Northern English...
Kingsley: Exactly but we need to get over that and were we to decide that it didn’t exist and just made good music and got it out there then you don’t have to go on bemoaning a Northern heritage.
Dashes: Contradictorily though, your tag line of ‘Not A Cult’ serves as something of an alienation from the mainstream...
Kingsley: Kind of but the origins of that were fairly simple; when I was constructing the band Myspace, I didn’t really know what I was doing so when I was asked for a headline, what do you put as a headline for a band? So I just thought of that line, didn’t think it sounded too bad and went with it. It went on a bit from there... I might embellish the story every now and again, claim we were meaning to be like David Koresh or The Brian Jonestown Massacre or something like that but it’s all nonsense really.
Dots: Ironically, you’re almost entirely a cult band these days...
Kingsley: I know, how ironic!
Dashes: During your shows, it tends to be the same faces staring back at you, particularly down South, in and around London. Have you had brushes with obsessives, stalkers or anything down that avenue?
Kingsley: The girl with the half white/ half black Mohican, a photographer who initially got into us because her surname’s Chapman and she now drags all her crowd down and they’re kind of obsessive, which is pretty humbling. Up until relatively recently, we were just playing these tiny shows in front of next to no one before driving home that night so to have these people ritualistically, regardless of the size of the venue or the size of the crowd, come down and go slightly mental at the front for half an hour was great.
Dots: Looking at London as something of a main hub of British music contemporarily, breaking into a sedated market through mic lead asphyxiation whilst head butting guitars probably isn’t the most sure-fire route to stardom. Whereas East London attempts to channel eccentricity at its most debauched, it all seems somewhat superficial... Take your pick from a fair few of the style-over-substance acts at September’s Offset festival...
Kingsley: It’s difficult, of course although I really like Offset Festival, almost like the Artrocker edition of Reading Festival and I’m into a load of the bands there but I kind of get what you’re on about in that London scenes tend to come and go so if you can get thirty mates to come down to a show at Nambucca or Hoxton Bar & Grill for instance, you’ve basically created a scene and it’ll presumably be in next week’s edition of NME, entitled ‘New Red-Faced Goth Scene’ or something along those lines so we try and remain as honest as we possibly can really.
Dashes: The X Factor seems to wield the most power within chart success these days. Being a Northern lass, do you feel an affinity with the lady of the hour, Cheryl Cole?
Kingsley: No. I think she’s a funny one. I mean, do you watch X Factor?
Dots: Do you?
Kingsley: Yeah, massively. Jedward are fucking awesome. But that Fight For This Love’s absolute rubbish. She beat us in the Sun singles section; we got three stars for Virgins and she got three and a half. You know that N-Dubz, Tinchy Stryder, VV Brown collaboration, that fucking abysmal Killers cover, that got four out of five but on the hallowed Teletext we beat Cheryl by one point with eight out of ten and that collaboration got one so justice was served. But it’s worrying that she’s gone from some Geordie slapper to the new fucking Princess Diana. You don’t listen to Radio 1, do you?
Dashes: Um no.
Kingsley: Oh God, it was a nightmare earlier. Robbie Williams was doing a live lounge set for Fearne Cotton.
Dots: Opinions on Miss. Cotton?
Kingsley: Is there a premeditated response to this one?
Dashes: No.
Kingsley: She looks bizarre and you’ve got to be a bit wary of her I think. The phenomenon that is Fearne Cotton’s just odd and she’s a worry. I never thought I’d rue the day Jo Whiley wasn’t on Radio 1 any more but now, I kind of miss her. But Cotton’s encounter with Robbie was just so sycophantic. There are photos on the site of them together, arm in arm and he’s just a fucking prick. He’s so shit. I’ve never seen such a smug fucker in my life and I can’t believe he’s proclaiming he’s back: “I’m back, Robbie’s back.” Basically what he means by back is that he’s not doing his experimental Rudebox shit any more, reverting back to classic Robbie and classic Robbie is just this smug cunt that everyone seems to fall for. But a photo of Fearne Cotton cuddling Robbie Williams portrays the two faces of the devil and it just makes you fucking vomit.
Dots: It sounds like you spend too much time tuned into Radio 1...
Kingsley: I think you have to. I wanted to be in a band because I thought other bands were rubbish and Radio 1 proves that. For the same reason I watch X Factor, and I love it. Jedward are brilliant, I can’t stress that enough.
Dashes: They need to win to kill off the whole fucking shebang.
Kingsley: Exactly but as Big Brother seems to have come to its logical conclusion now, even if you dress up in wacky clothes, you’re a bit camp and cover your face in make-up it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to win Big Brother any more as people have finally seen through that and thought hang on, he looks like a prick and I think exactly the same will happen with X Factor. You can’t be force-fed this crap any more. How can Danii Minogue come out and bombast the competition for not being about singing any more, claiming that it’s lost all credibility. When the fuck was there? When Leon Jackson won? When Steve Brookstein won? When Same Difference came third? What the fuck are they talking about? Absolute joke. At least Jedward have a bit of spark about them. There’s talk of them getting kids TV shows but I think that’s totally wrong. Just send them out on tour. They’re above that. We Will Rock You and Ghostbusters- you can’t fault them. Louis was dead right from the off. He’s easily my favourite judge.
Dashes: On a slightly different musical note, compared with the visceral demos scattered throughout the internet throughout the past year or two, Virgins is something of a step in a more commercial direction...
Kingsley: Definitely. It was intentional but basically, obviously we did Kids, our signature tune if you will, so we wanted to make it as noisy, bombastic and immediate as possible. Not everyone got it, opening with five or ten seconds of feedback, before a chorus, before a solo that’s played pretty abysmally. I hate Youtube but I saw a comment that said it sounded like someone’s got a guitar and they’re just hitting it with a hammer. It was meant as an insult but that’s the best description of our music I’ve ever heard. But for the next single, I want to go back in the direction of Kids, more avant-garde. Without sounding pretentious.
Dots: And the album’s going to be something of a halfway house...
Kingsley: We’ve got a few gigs lined up but apart from that, for the next few months I just want to write the best possible stuff for the debut record proper so whatever fits onto that will make its way on there. I want to rope in Future of the Left’s producer to make sense of everything but if we were to pool together all the tracks recorded over the past few years it wouldn’t work whatsoever, regardless of production values etc. I’ve always demoed with my little synth, not in the electro Little Boots/ La Roux vein though...
Dashes: With your sequins on...
Kingsley: With sequins on, exactly.
Dots: You probably don’t have a clue as to how to answer this but do you have a rough idea of how many guitars you’ve smashed to date?
Kingsley: Ah right well I’ve had to stop doing it.
Dashes: You’ve run out?
Kingsley: I can’t afford it! Pop has told me not to do it any more as he didn’t want people to come down to shows just to see me smash seven shades of shit out of a replica strat so over this tour I haven’t smashed any. We’ve broken stuff but completely accidentally. I swear though, there’s nothing better than smashing a piece of relatively expensive musical equipment in front of people. It’s really good fun but I’ve got to suppress the urge at the moment but hopefully we’ll get a really high-profile gig soon and I’ll just sneak a guitar in round the back
Dots: When you reach Wembley Stadium you could smash the Gibson...
Kingsley: Well no, that’s my dad’s. I’ve broken so many I have to use his now. Over the NME Tour I smashed seven over twenty-odd dates but I’d also manage to put it back together again. Reading Festival was rather difficult, but eventually smashed to smithereens. So I’d say maybe somewhere in the region of 15 to 20. I used to take all the frets off the guitars too and everyone would say I was just changing guitars to smash them but it wasn’t really like that; I took all the frets off so that it’d be easier to run the drum stick up and down the fret board so that was the point of it in the first place, before it developed into me just smashing the crap out of it. Again.
Tegan & Sara: Shepherds Bush Empire, 13th November '09
It’s half six in the evening on a fateful, drab Friday night as damp as Louis Walsh’s sinking optimism at a lonely hearts club and queues spew at every possible angle from the jarred mouth of the Empire. Jackie McKeown of inconsequential Scot lo-fi trowels 1990s once stated that it’s their cult status that keeps them alive and whilst they may have dropped off the radar into further obscurity, tonight sparks the starting gun of a whistle-stop UK tour for ‘queer’ siblings and darling queens of the LGBT musical corner, Tegan and Sara. As streams of fresh-faced bi-curious pilgrims stream past the condescendingly chauvinistic tendencies of the neighbouring Walkabout, backpacks in tow, itching to tack onto the end of the now-cobra like hoard snaking past the stage door, a bizarre, somewhat unnerving ambience settles in. Gazing out over the enamoured congregation in the belly of the venue, it’s at least 89% female. Heterosexual males, perhaps the predominant gig-goers (and prime detractors) are most certainly merely subordinate accessories to a veneration not seen since The Beatles. And Twilight.
Scuffling on to Mama Cass’ Dream a Little Dream Of Me, a saccharine-sweet calm erupts into a harrowing shower of shrieks bellowed as from above as below, before the duo launch into the vocal swoons of The Con and pandemonium ensues. And continues. Until the final chord’s struck. Dotted throughout in its entirety is latest record, Sainthood, lacing an absolutely vast setlist to varying effect; the glitchy 80s-tinged Someday blows holes in beating hearts whilst the frantic urgency of Northshore devastates to desperate effect in the rapturous wake of the obsessed. The wily wines of The Cure are splendiferous in the hallowed setting of the Empire and the futuristic funk of Alligator is far more enticing than the kangaroo curries rustled up next door. Elsewhere however, the emo hooks and bland thrills of Hell translate to little more than an off-cut of a One Tree Hill soundtrack and the static road to nowhere that is Red Belt bores. Tonight, Tegan is unquestionably the ringleader, grabbing the reins on sumptuous set-closer Call It Off in the most gut-wrenching moment of a part-sublime, part-monotonous Friday the 13th. However, feigning nerves and translating it into hideously awkward not-so-sweet nothings at every possible opportunity, any endearing allure evaporates as jokes reverting to the vague sexual innuendo that is Shepherds Bush fly, of course only permitted from the mouths of Sapphic lovers, before going on to discuss excremental patterns whilst on tour. And the saccharine sheen vanishes. Whilst their extensive back catalogue is well and truly ignited live, The Ocean washes wondrously over the front few rows and Living Room explodes into a kaleidoscopic creation composed of slippery sliding guitars and chimerical stomps, the numbers still don’t quite compute with Tegan and Sara, as much as 2,000 devoted, backpacking pilgrims may have hoped they might whilst sat in school waiting for the final bells to ring just hours ago.
Mew: Shepherds Bush Empire, 10th November ‘09
As icy autumn dew flickers off the patchy blades of malnourished grass on Shepherds Bush green, surrounded by the overbearing commercialism of Westfield shopping centre and colossal cinema complexes, a paralleled chillingly beautiful prospect awaits. In a frozen dressing room, guitarist extraordinaire of Danish cult overlords and perpetual outsiders Mew, Bo Madsen sprawls apprehensively over the sort of brown varnished sofa usually seen gracing the pavements of West London, as the heating finally surges through air vents overhead and distant sirens blare. Named allegedly after the noises gargled incomprehensibly by seagulls, as self-professed ‘extreme seagull enthusiasts’ they’re a far cry from the indie-by-numbers known to clog the arteries of the British mainstream contemporarily. Combine their solidarity and isolation (hailing from the suburbs of Copenhagen, Madsen categorically denies any affiliation ‘even in the slightest’ with a single other Danish act) with the androgynous vocal swathes of otherworldly extrovert and lead singer Jonas Bjerre and it becomes desperately apparent as to why their latest effort, the comfortingly discomforting No More Stories..., a self-confessed ‘extravagant and adventurous record’, peaked, predictably underwhelming, outside of the UK Top 100. Endearingly evading the internet so as not to ‘look at each other from the outside’, the mark of their underground following is a sold-out show at the Shepherds Bush Empire, a venue steeped in the faded glories of Eurovision and pre-war music hall balls, beautifully juxtaposing the decaying glamour of years gone by with the shimmering star upon which Mew have ascended over the past decade. Having pulsated through the motorway veins of Britain throughout the past week, the London climax provides the apt finale...Staring out over the seas of adoring, awaiting, nail-in-teeth obsessives fellow Danes Choir Of Young Believers (or Jannis Noya Makrigiannis backed up by organic trip-hop drum’n’bass and baroque cello washes) channel Fleet Foxes’ harmonious folk before injecting a serotonin kick into proceedings, with the lavishly uplifting Action/ Reaction. Makrigiannis’ beard threatens to swallow his entire face before their drastically diminished set vanishes into a hazy euphoria yet the desperately damning truth is that had Robin Pecknold’s Sub Pop darlings not rocked the music world when their self-titled LP crashed everything from Glastonbury to the Brits last year, this Choir may be converting a fair few more Believers, both young and old alike.
Where the stomps of Makrigiannis and his trusted cohorts garner smiles through minimal simplicity, Mew revert to grandiose spotlight strip lights, impeccably constructed stop-start animation backdrops and cataclysmic, sky-shattering Telecaster jabs. With the melancholic swoons of Reprise reverberating around the balconies of the Empire, Bjerre emerges amongst a swell of strobe, a gush of dry ice and the rapture of a gushing mass and once the calypso chimes of Hawaii strike, reminiscent of Bounty bars on golden beaches, the throng is rendered inanimate, entranced by the waves upon waves of majestic musical wizardry cast over an effervescent ninety minutes. Reindeer skeletons gallop behind fogged beacons beaming up to the lofty third tier before Madsen unleashes a fuzzed-up apocalyptic intro and Special rears its oracular head. As ethereal as ever, Special morphs magnificently into The Zookeeper’s Boy, which sounds as though the ceiling’s about to crack above the hurricane howls of Bjerre’s desperate demanding of ‘So are you my lady, are you?’ Following the most devastating duo drawn from 2005’s And The Glass Handed Kites, Frengers faves Am I Wry, No? and 156 follow, catapulting the great Danes into the realms of the stratospheric. With every last body and soul in the room on-side, the trio road test the hauntingly alluring Bamse, a duet between Bjerre and a baritone bear who emerges from a spark of glowing light in perhaps the most touching moment of an ultimately breath-taking spectacular, as hearts break and shatter on the beer-soaked floor below. The low-slung slump of Silas the Magic Car lulls us into a false state of security, before forthcoming single Repeater Beater is triggered traumatically, and the frenetic snare stabs of Snow Brigade steal every breath and every sigh from every pair of lips present. Disappearing temporarily, Bjerre, Madsen and drummer Silas Jørgensen reappear to conclude in typically emphatic fashion, as the vacuous opening twangs of Comforting Sounds reduce weary hearts and bleary eyes to gushing, aqueous pools of sorrowful triumph. On such electric form, there’s no desire whatsoever to escape from Bjerre’s Snow Brigade: forget contender for gig of the year, this may well be the night of the Noughties.
Stepping Into The Harsh Light Of Day.
Channelling a similar blackened doom-pop streak currently found plastered all over Brit fanzines and underpasses alike, Wesley Eisold’s Cold Cave are illusive, emotive and emotionally stunted all at once. Billed apprehensively optimistically as something of a catch-them-while-you-can band at Bristol's exquisitely emptied Louisiana, the trio cower cavernously behind keyboards, synthetically reproducing the schizophrenic regurgitated retro of their debut outing on the hallowed Matador label, Love Comes Close. And at times, twitching soles and awkward glances aside, a discomforting relationship flourishes, flittering frequently between adoration and disgust; the thundering post-Gameboy synths of Life Magazine formulate the eye of the storm that sees the seemingly crumbling legacy of Toronto noiseniks Crystal Castles restructured to pulverisingly grandiose effect, whilst the minimalist clicks and reverberated tricks of title-track Love Comes Close encapsulate the painfully pleasing sensations of entrapment within an air-conditioning unit in full swing. Yet like fast-forwarding through Leone tumbleweed scenes, skimming hastily and haphazardly over Morricone soundtracks, the leather-clad trio flash past in a hazy abyss of stylish substance and synth abuse. Add a dash of aggression, a touch more melody and a Fall Out Boy chorus or two (Eisold, there must be one or two still stored away up there) and these cavemen and women may venture out into the light of day.
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