Interview: Wild Beasts

It was just over a year ago that The Stool Pigeon visited Wild Beasts for the first time. At that point the handsome foursome had come bounding out of Kendal (via Leeds University) wide-eyed and eager before a world surely too smart to let them pass by unheralded. They had released the indecently extraordinary single ‘Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants’, were still basking in the afterglow of being signed to Domino and were looking smilingly towards the release of their debut album. It all looked rosy for this most original of bands… but this journalist groaned with resignation back then when he was offered to cover what was ostensibly a student band from Leeds. What a fool.

And here we are, with the album still unreleased. It is finished, though, and tentatively pencilled in for a June release. It is, we can report, one of the warmest, most refreshing debuts from a British band for years – eccentric, youthful, and uncompromisingly uncategorisable. And it should be – it’s taken them long enough.

“I think Domino wanted to give us a gestation period, some time to breathe,” says bassist Tom Fleming as the five of us squeeze into the poky dressing room at the Amersham Arms in London’s New Cross. “It’s taken this time to realise what we were trying to get at, and it shows – the quality of it shows.”

A year ago, Wild Beasts had released a couple of singles on the Bad Sneakers label and had under their hat and ready to go the songs that have ended up on the album. Tonight, dressed up in their fashionably unfashionable garb, the four of them agree that any album they might have made then would have been vastly inferior, but that’s not to say it wasn’t a bitch to have to sit on the songs for so long.

“It’s always frustrating,” says Hayden Thorpe, he of the voice that is a bit Tim Buckley, a bit Scooby Doo. “If it’s not frustrating and you don’t want to be making more music and getting more out there, then I don’t know why you’re doing it. But with a label like Domino and a band like us, we weren’t trying to get on the back of a quick-hype scene, like a smash-and-grab record. We feel there’s no real rush and it’ll land when it lands.”

Not a lot of music comes out of Kendal in the Lake District. In fact not a lot of anything comes from Kendal, apart from cakes and the odd farmer or joiner. Wild Beasts grew up in the town before university took them to Leeds. Degrees in sociology and other innocuous humanities subjects have been wisely put on the backburner.
But Kendal is perhaps part of the reason they sound like they do. Limbo, Panto is full of that tragic-comic spirit that permeates much of the middle-classes in British small towns. They’re a bit like a saucy George Eliot in that they have a loving affection for those characters they portray, yet aren’t above the gentle mocking of them and their ‘quirky little lives’. Kendal seems a pretty good place to gather material.

“The first thing we always say is that it was a good place to grow up,” says Thorpe.

“In some ways, it was a little bubble,” adds Fleming. “You feel outside the mainstream and not plugged into the main culture board, so you have to work hard at what you’re doing. And if you do want to make music, in some ways it’s a good place because you’re forced to think harder.”

“Yes, saying you want to be a musician in Kendal is eccentric,” offers Thorpe. “There’s a lot of people in Kendal who couldn’t survive anywhere other than Kendal.”

Nevertheless, apparently there is a Kendal contingency that finds its way to every Wild Beasts show. Even though, Fleming claims, “Ninety-nine per cent of the people there don’t know who we are.”

Then there’s Hayden’s voice. Its finest moment remains ‘Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants’, as he lurches between falsetto chirruping and what is a slightly alarming growl. His vocals are so integral to Wild Beasts, he’s going to have to get used to answering regular questions about them as their star rises. He says he’s not annoyed by it… yet.

The philosophy behind his singing style is best summed up by guitarist Ben Little, who says, “You can push the voice without putting on a Bruce Springsteen accent.”

Thorpe himself doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. It’s what comes naturally, of course. “When I hear it back I just think that’s the way it should sound and that’s the way I want it to sound,” he says. “When I listen to other people’s voices I think, ‘Oh my God, how boring – how put on – you sound like every generic Western male in the past 30 to 40 years. The voice can do multiple things. We like to have fun and experiment.”

On second thoughts, it would be unfair to suggest Thorpe’s vocal chords are the key ingredient to Limbo, Panto. Fleming’s deeper tenor offers a counterpoint to Thorpe, while the writing is a four-way thing, despite the dominant talkers at this meeting clearly being Thorpe and Fleming.

But you’d be hard pressed to find a band with such a palpable sense of friendship with one another. Fleming touches Thorpe’s knee to reassure him after a joke is made at his expense, and despite conversational duties naturally falling to those two, there is never any sense of a dominant personality. Their music is a testament to the camaraderie between them as well as their shared experience.

Wild Beasts are likely to face a sharp upturn in fortunes in 2008. Already, life has changed significantly since signing to Domino last year, even if that doesn’t mean much to most Kendal natives.

“To be honest, I didn’t know the significance of Domino,” says Thorpe. “We weren’t making music to be on a label, we just got extremely lucky. People at Domino are very human and the way it all happened was very human. We were never under the impression we were being run by big-shots.”

The Wild Beasts story has been pretty much the ideal blueprint for any credible, ambitious young band. Form with schoolmates, sound like no one has before, sign to a big label but remain loyal to your old management and friends. Apart from the slog to get the record out, surely there’s nothing they would have done differently?

“A few haircuts, a few fashion things,” says Little.

“Yeah, maybe the vests,” says Thorpe, referring to some early photo shoots with him adorned in the undergarment.

Too right, thank God those fucking vests have gone.

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