Interview: Still Corners

Still Corners make dark, dreamy pop music; synth-drenched songs that are haunted, rather than led, by the tremulous vocals of Tessa Murray. Although the band is the brainchild of a man from sun-bleached Austin, Texas, its sound has a slightly darker hue than that of your average found-footage pillaging haze-mongers. Perhaps it was the long stretches of rainy days in London — where the aforementioned man, Greg Hughes, has lived for these past eight years — that did it. Still Corners’ debut album, Creatures Of An Hour, is perfect gloomy-day listening. It’s like the soundtrack to the film you sometimes imagine you’re in (admit it) when you sit, staring out of the smudged glass of the bus home from work.

In fact, much has been made of cinema — specifically sixties art-house and David Lynch films — being the chief inspiration behind Still Corners’ songs and their accompanying Lucy Dyson-directed videos (not to mention the projections that wash over their live shows). But when The Stool Pigeon meets with them (well, one of them) to talk about the new record, we find it’s not only these kind of painfully right-on references that make the connections between the band and film appropriate.

On arriving for our interview in the near-empty cafe above Foyles on a weekday evening, we are met by Greg, and only Greg, who immediately apologises for being late. He was waylaid, he explains, by an eccentric man in the bookshop downstairs. He wouldn’t let him go. He kept trying to tell him about “all kinds of stuff”. “Did you learn anything interesting?” I ask. “Um, no.”

When it’s Hughes’ turn to talk, he starts out by explaining how the band met — a scenario that seems lifted straight out of Brief Encounter. “I was going to London Bridge sometime in January,” says Greg. “It was dark and cold and for some reason the train passed through London Bridge and went straight through to another station, a few minutes out. I got off and this other person got off… and she said she was missing choir because of it. And I was like, ‘Oh, we’re looking for a singer’, so I got her number. We started working on demos together — but it wasn’t until about a year later that I thought “oh, maybe, she’d be great in the band.”’

There’s a barely perceptible something about the way Hughes delivers the story, which suggests that it’s been retold, refined many times over. Life crafted into art. Greg protests: “It sounds stupid — like it’s not real — but it’s really true. Actually, she [Tessa] just told me a few weeks ago that she was going to sit down on this bench but changed her mind because it was wet. So the whole band came about because a bench was wet, and she came to talk to me because I was the only person there.” Do you believe in fate, then? “I don’t really. I just believe in… luck.”

The absent Tessa is, in a sense, the face of the band. In the video for the single, ‘Cuckoo’ (released earlier this summer), she emerges out of a holographic miasma, the camera lingering as a pair of anonymous male hands reach out to stroke her neck. The other band members blur and flicker further out of focus. We ask Hughes if he’s happy with this set-up. “Yeah. For sure, yeah.” Has it been modelled on that of any other bands? “No, I’m just a little bit nervous, and so I thought, y’know, you’re a girl, you’re pretty, you stay there, you get photographed, so, umm, I’m happy being in the background.” If she were around to listen, it’s hard to imagine Tessa not feeling a bit aggrieved by all this. Does she share in the songwriting process? “It’s just myself, but Tessa sings… so therein lies the collaboration.”

Still Corners’ Tessa Murray, Greg Hughes not pictured doing his genius thing in the background

Creatures Of An Hour, then, arrives as a mix of songs both old and new, united by a romantic thread that runs throughout (the album’s title comes from a Keats poem). “I was going through this really horrible breakup,” says Greg. “And… I haven’t actually told anyone this, but you look very nice, so I’m going to tell you — you have that very, kind of, understanding vibe.” Please. We’re blushing. “There’s a lot of, like… this sounds really cheesy, but there’s a lot of pain on the record. Like in ‘Demons’, that’s all about wrestling with that kind of stuff. But the chorus is about hope as the seasons change… Yeah, so it’s all about love and pain, I guess.’”

Indeed, it was an ill-fated love affair that brought Hughes to London in the first place. “In 2002 I moved here to be with a girl, but it didn’t work out,” he says, before cutting himself off: “God! I sound like all I do is date girls… But I ended up staying here, so…” But do you like it here in London? “I do, it’s cool. But I definitely don’t like it all the time…” At this point, we start to confess our habit of London bus-dreaming, and how conducive Greg’s music is to this (in)activity, before realising that this may sound derogatory. “No, that’s the best compliment I’ve ever had… Because the idea of somebody commuting and listening to the record… Yes, that’s it. Completely. That’s perfect.”

Despite Greg’s professed reservations about the term, Still Corners remain at core a ‘dream pop’ band at a time when discussions about nostalgia in the postmodern context and the filmic oeuvre of David Lynch are very much the order of the day in music. Refreshingly, Greg prefers to wander off-script: ‘I actually really love Woody Allen. He’s my favourite. But he doesn’t match the whole Still Corners thing, I suppose. I’m supposed to say David Lynch, but I just love Woody! He’s hilarious. You should watch Manhattan Murder Mysteries. It’s so funny, you’ll pee yourself…” Even less Still Corners-ish is Hughes’ penchant for internet cat videos, which his dad emails him on a regular basis. Seeing that the band’s projections — made by guitarist Leon Dufficy — often include “a combination of bits of film and bits of movies”, could the source material for the next one, then, be in the proverbial bag?

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