Consisting of husband and wife duo Holly Ross and David Blackwell (whose jet-black bob and Northern twang lend him the air of a certain seminal Scouse band), they're a fiercely independent, endearingly jocular duo with a baffling release schedule: "It is a bit confusing", confesses Holly. "We've got a single coming out at the end of this month, and it's called Panic Plants. Then we've got another single coming out in December, which Gruff Rhys has produced. That's coming out via the Too Pure Singles Club, and Too Pure just booked us in here." With Gruff trending on Twitter following a session with Lauren Laverne precisely as this interview is recorded (albeit in a rather less extravagant way than the direct metal mastering method with which Allergies is today committed to copper), added to a heavily anticipated show at the notorious Shepherd's Bush Empire a few miles down a few roads scheduled for the following evening, it's as good a time as any to have the estranged intellect of wired psych hop aboard. "We just thought we'd love Gruff Rhys to produce it for obvious reasons, and so we sent this email off to his people as he's not that proficient with the internet and the like. Literally the next day we get this email in our inbox from Gruff saying: "I'd absolutely love to do it, I'm coming up to Lancaster." And that was that." While achieving desired outcomes in the industry may often entail extensive traipses around endless mulberry bushes, The Lovely Eggs are a determined, and evidently direct pair, only too aware of what, or indeed who, they're after. "We enjoy working with people who we get good vibes from, people with whom it feels right to work with. If there's too much industry involvement, we won't go for it", David affirms with imperturbable confidence. However the musical appreciation they demonstrate towards Rhys' work is allegedly reciprocated: "having been in touch, we then found out retrospectively that he'd previously professed his enjoyment of our music, and people had told us that they'd seen him come on to one of our songs, Have You Ever Heard a Digital Accordion?, at several of his own shows. We couldn't believe he'd even heard of us!"
Have you Ever Heard a Digital Accordion by thelovelyeggs
And the coincidences run deeper still: "Allergies is loosely based on this guy called Bob Markley who was in this '60s West Coast band called The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. We're really big fans of that band, and Gruff also happens to be a massive fan so there's multiple weird connections. It seemed practically fated to work pretty well..." The once-seemingly fanciful hope was born when Holly and David penned "this psychedelic song, and because it's just the two of us recording, producing, engineering, mixing everything at Lancaster Music Hall [where David coincidentally works], sometimes it gets a bit overbearing. There aren't any other band members to chip in so we've really wanted to work with external, "other" people for a while now."
David admits that "obviously we didn't know how it was going to turn out until he actually came up to Lancaster to meet us, but having him there made it so much easier for us to record the track. Sometimes we get stuck on bits and pieces, and we do eventually get through the indecisions and what have you, but it was such a smooth process working with him." And Rhys' influence wasn't merely democratic: "sound-wise, he brought up loads of bits with him: toys and that sort of thing. At one point he said that he thought it'd sound better if there were a sitar on it, at which point David went and got one of his two sitars." Holly, clearly equally bemused by his need for not one but two sitars continues: "he's a massive collector of everything, all manner of shit, but especially musical shit. Gruff didn't quite seem to believe he had one, but that really worked on the track, and we'd never have thought of doing that had he not got involved with it. It was lovely to have fresh ears and ideas plugged into it."
They're both adamant however that their symbiotic status as both husband/wife and band members facilitates, rather than complicates matters: "while we obviously have two lives, it feels as though it's just the one really, which makes things really easy." Foreseeably however, naturally, there are disadvantages: "if we want to record something live together, we have to set the tape rolling and run down into the live room. So if we make a mistake it can be pretty devastating, having to start again and that. We're used to it, but it's hard to have the mentality of being the sound engineer and the musician at the same time, all the time."
The Lovely Eggs - Panic Plants by 9PR 3
Comprehensibly, that's the result of "subscribing to the whole punk ethos": Holly expects her audience "to turn up to a show, get fucking wasted, and have a fucking good time." Regarding their own motives and ambitions meanwhile: "we like to have no rules, and when we first started our band we wanted to keep hold of the freedom to be able to do exactly what we want, whenever we want. That's why some of our songs only last ten or fifteen seconds, while others are three or four minutes. Some sound really fully formed, like proper songs, while others just feature a drum and me singing haphazardly over the top. We don't really want to end up getting pigeonholed, nor to have people commenting on how we sound like this, or sound like that. Even if people seem intent these days on packing everyone in a specific box, the only box we've been put in is the one for bands that don't really fit into any others. So we'll always be different, and Panic Plants is, for instance, completely different to our previous single, Fuck It. We just want to write songs that we like, even if it sounds clichéd. For instance we decided to release Fuck It as a single, even though it inevitably couldn't be played on the radio. We also released it on a Bank Holiday so nobody could buy it as all the shops were shut." An intriguing release day ploy if ever there were one. "I think some other bands go wrong when they hone their songwriting so that it's then aligned with what other people want from them, so we've found it best to just plough our own furrow basically."
In their parting shot, they deliver a quite candid résumé of the way in which they interpret their current modus vivendi: "We get to go around the UK, for weeks at a time, meeting loads of new people, staying on their floors, and just getting pissed every night on free beer. We only started this band to have a party really... That's what drives us to keep on trucking and touring predominantly. Before we were The Lovely Eggs, we used to go to gigs all the time anyway. We really liked partying; really liked boozing; really liked music. Now we get to do that full-time, all the time. Depends what sort of person you are, you see..." And to have The Lovely Eggs any other way is all but unimaginable as they party on, up and down the country.
The Lovely Eggs.
