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.
