Interview: Factory Floor

You can always rely on the Dice Club, held every month at the Legion in Shoreditch, to bring a sober and severe antidote to what’s happening in London that particular day. Up the road, the annual granola cauldron that is the Stoke Newington festival, is taking place. Skin turned pasty by vegetarian dinners is burning, and conversation is turning to Banksy and granite kitchen surfaces. No such nonsense here, where boys in fully-buttoned shirts and girls with immaculately bobbed hair have, for the past year, been enjoying one of the most exciting scenes of new music in London, with gigs from the likes of Ulterior, These New Puritans, and ddd.

To an outside observer, it could seem like a closed and self-congratulatory gathering, offering little to anyone except art students with large collections of post punk vinyl. But it isn’t and Factory Floor, playing tonight, are certainly different. They work upon collectivist ideals – the three members (Gabe, drummer, bassist Dominic and guitarist Mark) contribute to vocals, lyrics and aesthetics – and they play with a rare intensity. Their music – influenced by Kurt Vonnegut and old photographs as much as the post punk canon – is progressing in leaps and bounds too, the aggression of their live set matched by the quiet, electronic complexity of their demos. It all changed, says Gabe, when Dominic joined the band about four months ago: “That’s when it all condensed. It’s got a lot more impetus – feels like a vehicle and it’s moving forward.”

Of his punching of the Factory Floor time sheet, Dominic says: “I had a year of being quite introverted, so I think we all had a lot of momentum when I joined. We all came together at the right time.”

This spark is keeping Factory Floor busy, with a new EP planned for July. “We’re always very mindful that you can’t keep plugging the same things, so we’re always trying to evolve and move things forward,” says Mark.

In actuality, Factory Floor are going into the studio the day after our meeting to record the EP in a straight session, working from rough sketches of songs. Gabe says that while their debut single (‘Bipolar’ / ‘You Were Always Wrong’) was made of tracks concocted in the very earliest incarnation of the band, the new will be a documentation of where they are now, and where they’re heading.

“I hate it when you go and see a band and the first song could be the second or the third,” says Dominic. “I like to keep things wide. We don’t want to narrow down our focus, or our sound. It’s a narrative in some way.”

Indeed, this narrative element is key to Factory Floor’s brilliance. I first fell in love with them via the dour track called ‘Aeromodelling Club’, with its thumping beat and squidges of unpleasant electronica. It made a tale about the joys of building a glider in Burley in the late 1940s sound deeply sinister. The source of the track exemplifies Factory Floor’s way of working. “It’s taken from a lot of my grandad’s experiences when he was younger, then when some of us were growing up,” says Gabe. “It’s real life experiences, given a twist. We like stories, but we like surrealism too. We take ideas from all of us, and move forward with them. The visual side of things is very important to us as Factory Floor too. Images often inspire songs. ‘Aeromodelling Club’ comes from when I was going through my Grandad’s old photographs.”

“It’s a strange place, Britain,” says Mark. “There’s a lot more going on beneath the veneer.”

It’s this that Factory Floor explore. Where so many groups, from Britpop bands to The View, sing about the veneer, rejoicing in the mundane, Factory Floor peel it off, and ignite it with a frightening intensity.

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