Photo by Klaus Thymann
WILD BEASTS, Berlin, Domino Records office, tea, biscuits, slick dudes: Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming being honest and as beautiful as men can be. The band’s highly anticipated fourth longplayer Present Tense is about to get released these days. Perfect scenario for NOTHING BUT HOPE AND PASSION to start with a few ‘Either/Or’-questions as a warm-up before digging a bit deeper with these lovely gentlemen.
Tragedy or Comedy?
Tragedy.
Hip Hop or Techno?
Hip Hop.
Beer or Wine?
Wine.
Confetti or Sequins?
Confetti.
Playing Live or Studio?
Live Studio.
80s or 90s?
90s..80s..Ohh..
Talk Talk or Lady Gaga?
Talk Talk, I think!?
Jeff Koons or Francis Bacon?
Francis Bacon.
Lady Gaga or Miley Cyrus?
Lady Gaga.
Dancing or Talking?
Talking.
Climatic or monotone structure?
Monotone structure.
Marihuana or Cocaine?
Marihuana.
Hypnotic or surprising?
Surprising.
Henry James or James Joyce?
James Joyce.
Guitars or Keyboards?
Keyboards.
Keyboards, well: So tell me about your new record then.
Have you heard it?
I had a long drive last weekend..
I always think it’s a good test of a record. For me it’s on the train. If it keeps you going on the train and kind of romanticises the train journey. I remember listening to the album from London to the Lake District where we live. So it’s kind of the soundtrack of this passage through Britain, from the kind of decadence of the South, you know, getting the train out of London: All these incredibly expensive and lavish buildings and then slowly creeping up to the kind of industrial broken north. That’s a good cross section of what the record is. The backdrop to the record really is the landscape of the industrial north, where we’re from, which is a very grey area.
Was that an approach to the record? A concept? Transposing kind of a trip into music?
No, not really. Its more how we listen to music. It’s supposed to transform your landscape in some way. Will that be literally passing by the window or actually the way you’re going about your day. It’s supposed to have some kind of effect. Some kind of juxtaposition I guess, with what things are actually like versus how we tell you they are. I think all the best bands – say KRAFTWERK, they take the landscape and they romanticise it into this kind of mythic..
..Autobahn..
...exactly. Like the M6 or M1, or, you know, like Wigan, which is a shitty industrial town. These things are no less worthy than the Autobahn or Bruce Springsteen’s New Jersey Port. They are just as valid or worthy. We think it’s important to beautify those things.
How are they transcribed into your music? What’s the expression of a landscape?
I think there is kind of a romanticism to our music. There is a sense of the space. Certainly this record is more of a city album than we ever made. I think it’s much harder sounding and much more synthetic. But I think there’s always a kind of human touch and a human mess to it as well. I’m often put off by music which is too perfected and presents itself in too slick an exterior.
..too static..
Yeah. I think it is in the sonics, this kind of landscape. I don’t wanna over-theorize it, but our sonic layers are a mixture of very crude, broken, accidental parts with some very lavish and highly orchestrated production on top a s well. It creates this kind of very unique structure, hopefully. And i think the british landscape is that mixture of the broken and abandoned and the taken away. London is a good example of that. You can walk one minute and you are on a street where you’d have to be a millionaire to live on, to walk round the corner where the government is paying for you to live there. And this is literally next street. And we kind of think, naturally, the album was kind of written in those in-between spaces. We all live in London. But no one wants a band as a neighbour. So we were moving from place to place, finding enough spaces to make our noise.
Photo by Klaus Thymann
Where was the album produced?
For the most part we rented a summer studio out in rural england, the west country. And recorded the rest of it back in London.
Who did it?
A guy called Lexx who mixed the last couple of records but produced this one and a guy called Leo Abrahams who is a record producer and also a session guitar player. Both are excellent musicians and offer different things.
I want to know about your worst live experience. My first contact to your band was is London. I was walking by a venue, just went inside for no real reason and stumbled into this JACK PENATE show.
And we were there as well?
You were opening.
So you were at the Astoria show? Where all the posh kids were hacklin’ us.
They were throwing cans of beer on stage.
Yeah. I remember that very well.
It made me think: ‘Fuck JACK PENATE; that’s the band’. You were causing this roar at this idiotic crowd. I thought when they are hating this band, I’m gonna like them.
That was kind of our attitude as well: we don’t wanna please you. But that’s not near our worst live experience.
What was it then?
Well, it’s better to be hated than not to be noticed. Basically when you turn up and there is nobody is there. We’d be in Baltimore and there is like 15 people. There’s also things like the equipment breaking. We played in Mexico and the P.A was still playing music for half of our set. Although people can deny it, things going wrong live is deeply effecting. It’s humiliating in front of a lot of people. You have to kind of grow a backbone. But I think I’d rather provoke an angry emotion than no emotion when people see us play.
But you’re not an angry band. I wouldn’t say, from listening to your record, that your band would cause angry emotions in any kind of way.
But I hope it’s confrontational. I think people can find it very confrontational.
Especially your style of singing.
True. Of course to us it feels bizarre. Because it’s just how we do it. Though I can kind of understand it. But it’s surprising how conservative some people can be. On the other hand it’s surprising how open some other people are. So it balances.
Your approach to records, or even how songs are written, has changed quite a bit within four albums, right?
Well, it has to change, for a start, I think. On Limbo, Pantho I was a person angry with everything and now i’m just angry with more specific things. And I think it’s more open this record. I think the only idealism of making a record at 21 is you have to prove everything wrong. You have to dispel everything, and reinventing the wheel. And once you realize that’s not gonna happen, you’re a lot freer.
So you grew more calm?
I think so. You get older and you think about things differently. Also we wanted to make better work. Before, the cause was more important than the consequence. It was like: We are gonna make this very rebellious sound and fuck what happens with it. So when you realize, that you can’t work that way around, you wanna make good work, regardless how you’re feeling.
Photo by Klaus Thymann
Especially when you are having some kind of success. You’ll have to change your approach. Think differently about yourself and your music. Being against everything might be easier than being able to go on with what you wanna do.
I think we’ve been lucky that we never ever been told what to do. Domino, as a label, would never tell us what to do. We have harder time to tell each other what to do. They might hint that they’d like a couple more singles. But they always just release what we give them. I think we’re in an age where your first album is expected your defining piece of work. And when that didn’t happen for us, and it wasn’t world domination immediately, honestly, it felt like a great failure: Oh my god, can we even be a band anymore, is there any point? But I think that was crucial in the making of us. Kind of like: This is the worst that can happen? Let’s just keep going. What it gave us is a huge amount of room to grow from. I hear a lot of music that i don’t think is made with the same humanistic realizations. I think you probably can still hear that hurt in our music, which I think is a good thing. I don’t want to disown our older records. We do still have this slight element of us against the world in our mentality, but we are also aware that we sound very different. I think you also develop more cutting and detailed ways of expressing yourself.
How did that change? Were you a band standing in your rehearsal space and just jamming and now you’re using different techniques?
Definitely. Just through learning. When we started out we had no idea of how to use recording software or anything like that. You just genuinely develop it. There is a gap between wanting to attain a level and being able to attain that level. And its that gap which makes you go forward. Nowadays, there is a big push to be satisfied immediately: I want this now – I can have it now. A lot of what our culture is built on is being immediately associated. But I think good things come out of maybe a bit slow burning kind of growth.
That seems rather controlled and self aware. Is it like: Push a button and you’ll get the sound you had in mind now?
Well, it’s not quite as graceful as that.
Or is it still more stumbling upon..?
There is a lot of stumbling. There should be an element of coping around in the dark. Otherwise why do it? I do think that music, or any art-form, is work. It’s something you do rather than something you are. But there surely is something you can’t explain as well. That is the way it is because that’s how it is. It’s hard to explain, cause it’s as small as it can possibly be.
How is the next record gonna sound?
I think we’ll invert. I expect it to be very invertive from what it is now. Cause this was an invertion from smother definitely.
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