Norwich’s Le Tetsuo shouting like canaries in London
Words Kev Kharas
Le Tetsuo don’t make drone music, they can’t really dance and they haven’t yet proclaimed fraternity with Brooklyn’s neo-tribal noise scene or afrobeat. What they do is get to the point.
“We like shouting and the Pixies,” says Jack Underwood, guitarist/vocalist with the Norfolk-bred, London-based trio. “So we fell into the alternative bracket and played those nights on the Norwich scene with bands like KaitO and Bearsuit.”
Judging by their debut EP, ‘Your Elbow’, another name you might toss forth is that of seventies punks X, whose girl-boy vocals squabbled like Underwood and co-throat Charlotte Morris’s do, though they’re more used to “wearing plastic grapes round their necks and drinking lager through straws” at art school in Norwich than shooting dope in LA dive bars.
Not to talk trash on the city that sired them, you understand, but something must have driven Le Tetsuo towards London’s lights.
“The Norwich scene has an unusually friendly, oddball intimacy about it,” explains Underwood, “but it can feel like you’re shouting from the bottom of a well if you want to get heard elsewhere. We were right to come to London.”
London was where I met Le Tetsuo for the first time, outside a pub on Kingly Street. Without warning, Morris tried to kiss me and Jack ridiculed my trousers, but they still won me over. The racket they make with drummer Sam Riviere is just as blatant; brattish guitar tolerated because it collides with bigger hooks and lyrics like, “I used to imagine what you looked like when you were fucking.”
“Charlotte is a very respectable young woman,” Underwood protests. “We don’t give ourselves time to contrive too much, so what you hear is directly from us, which hopefully makes it exciting, or at least a bit urgent.”
