The Stool Pigeon

Not everyone immediately ‘gets’ Late of the Pier. Take BBC 6 Music presenter George Lamb. “He asked a load of questions that showed he didn’t really know anything about us,” sighs lead singer Samuel Eastgate, recalling a recent radio interview with the DJ. “Then he asked if the record was going to be any good and I just said, ‘No.’ I think he thought we were being cocks or something, but I wasn’t; he just kept asking a load of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions, most of which were based on misquotes, and I just got bored of being obvious.”

The mood in the studio became even more fraught when the band introduced their recent single ‘Focker’ live on air. Lamb, cloth-eared and ignorant, proceeded to take offence on behalf of his listeners.

The band were “mugs”, he said, “wazzocks”. The sometime-T4 presenter returned to the incident later in his show, swearing to use his friends in the industry to make sure the band “wouldn’t be around next year”.

“I think that’s why he’s there on 6 Music,” muses an unrepentant Andrew Faley (bass/synths). “Because he’s a cunt and everyone wants to listen to him because he’s a cunt.”

They started young: the Castle Donington quartet, completed by Sam Potter (sampler) and Ross Dawson (drums), are all aged between 20 and 22, and their genesis can be tracked back to GCSE science lessons; unsurprisingly perhaps, given the type of noises that began to grow and leak out from Eastgate’s attic bedroom, which doubled as a museum for the instruments his father played in bands like My Dog Has No Nose and Smokey and The Fall. Those noises - dissected, fused, mutant - only recently graduated from development and testing into debut album Fantasy Black Channel.

“The title’s linked to loads of things,” explains Eastgate, who’ll do most of the talking today. “Although it was quite an instant idea, the first thing it meant to do was engage the power of the imagination - if you take the words individually it’s like looking at a black screen and imagining what your fantasy would be. It’s like when people watch TV. I don’t think anyone watches it because they really like it, I think they watch it just because it’s there. One of the ideas was that if you actually wanted to watch something, anything, what would it be? I bet most people have a better idea of what that’d be than the TV people.”

“Some people have said it sounds a bit like some kind of black porn channel,” adds Potter, “and that backs up that it can be anything you want. If you want it to be a lot of big black dicks, that’s what it’ll be.”

It’s an idea apt for a record flung to the four corners of a blank, dark canvas, on which only brighter colour will show vivid. Donington metal, Parisian electro, suburban post punk, Muse and gamelan are all pulled from the shadows, released into a pen and forced to breed in a brazen romp through four decades of (mostly British) popular music that could only have been conceived by minds hardened, over time and together, into one mega-brained, lunatic mangle.

“The timing of the album and the way we recorded it was kind of essential to the way it came out,” says Eastgate of the record, produced with Erol Alkan at a studio in Shoreditch.

“It sounds, I think, just how we wanted it to sound and that’s only down to having the perspective we had at the start of the year. If we had done it last year we might have been less clued-up about what we actually wanted to do.”

Is the fugitive, thrill-seeking gaze of Fantasy Black Channel the sound of you getting bored of songs you’ve been playing for too long?

“Some of those songs had that fun element to them already and we just wanted to do them justice,” Eastgate continues, referring back to the relatively vast expanse between the band’s inception and their debut album.

“Sometimes we’d record a version of the song and realise the demo had more to it, so against a lot of people’s advice we took longer and were determined to get whatever it was on the demo that made the song what it was.”

Not everyone immediately ‘gets’ Late of the Pier. Critical lore has long had them pinned as the kind of band you’d get if Klaxons all had envious younger brothers, though that consensus seems to be shifting as the severed earworms of Fantasy Black Channel burrow their way into pleasantly surprised attentions.

“It was a bit irritating when the Klaxons thing came around because I think a lot of people thought we were copying them when we’d been doing that three years before them anyway,” says Faley.

There’s a concession from Eastgate, too, that holding off the album’s recording may have damaged them in this respect: “I think because we’ve taken a bit longer to produce what we’re doing people might assume we’ve come along afterwards.”

In truth, all that the two bands really share is a loyalty to similar clothing outlets and a willingness to dredge through pop’s past to rescue lost ideas of the future, hanging the eighties’ dreams of silver space suits up on pop hooks for all to gawp at.

“It’s definitely important to revisit threads that people started in the eighties but that haven’t really been finished off,” Eastgate confirms.

“The influences we borrowed we mixed in with a heap of other stuff. Obviously the track that everyone says is a Gary Numan thing is ‘Space And The Woods’ but actually that was much more influenced by Magazine. It was only when we produced the song that we found the best way to make it sound really huge was to borrow a few things from Gary Numan - the synth sounds or whatever.”

Raiding retrofuturist scrap-yards for recyclable flotsam has had an odd effect on the flow of the band’s album. Though some parts threaten to get cheesy, the constant segueing from one style to the next helps bat away the whiff and, instead, there’s the impression of something like a full-band version of Girl Talk, disappeared from conventional logic and moving perpetually, foraging for new scraps of sound to sustain its own skewed rationale.

“That kind of fractured thing - and I think fractured is a good word, because it’s the way we make music - we don’t want it to be this smooth flowing thing you can fall asleep to,” enthuses Eastgate. “We just kind of get the most out of everything, all the time. We just wanted to wake people up a little bit.”

“You can hear it in the demos,” expands Faley. “It’s just four kids messing about and getting really excited because they’re doing something for the first time.”
Still, there’s a rare confidence present...

“But it’s a weird confidence that’s not really based on any formulas or stuff like that,” says Eastgate before Faley chimes in, again.

“We’re not shouting about how good we are in the songs. We’re just shouting about how we’re having fun.”

Popularity: unranked [?]

More content of interest...

• Moshi Moshi Records Singles (Posted in LPs | Reviews)