Faith No More have reformed, but it’s for his extensive solo work that this man deserves a Patton the back.

Words by Jeremy Allen

Mike Patton recently swung back into the consciousness of a whole bunch of people who still yearn for the collective teachings of The Face and Sky Magazine, lust for the unconsummated sexual frisson of Mulder and Scully and get wistful at the heady whiff of CK One and hot knives. The reformation of Faith No More for touring purposes following more than a decade’s hiatus prompted a predictable surge for tickets as Tarquin and Miranda dreamily recalled pogoing around the student union to ‘Epic’ in paratrooper boots and Alice In Chains t-shirts. For others, he never went away. His apparatchiks are numerous and they hang on every word projected pleasingly from his roomy and majestic diaphragm.

Patton clearly doesn’t believe in reincarnation, given his relentless pursuit to create in this life. Having accomplished rock icon status, he could have chosen to milk it for all it was worth and become some alternative Jon Bon Jovi. But all they share in common is an early penchant for disastrous hair as tenderfoot rock fledgelings and the fact that Patton will undoubtedly sleep when he’s dead. Indeed, to say the 21st century has been a productive period for Mike Patton is tantamount to saying Jeremy Kyle is a bit of a prick.

The Faith No More frontman’s musical projects are too abundant to list in full, but Fantômas, Tomahawk and Peeping Tom instantly trip off the tongue. He’s collaborated with Björk, Rahzel, Kool Keith, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Melt-Banana and Sepultura, and that’s just scratching the surface. He has his own record label, Ipecac, whose roster has included The Melvins, The Locust, Dälek, Kid606 and Ennio Morricone, to name but a few. He made an independent movie, Firecracker, where he played not one lead role but two. He’s in great demand as a voiceover artist, having added his talented larynx to various computer games, the film I Am Legend and the Adult Swim cartoon Metalocalypse. And in December 2008, he curated All Tomorrow’s Parties with the help of The Melvins, assembling one of the most leftfield and hip-hop-heavy line-ups the festival has ever enjoyed.

In among all this frenzied activity Patton found time to move to Italy, get married and become fluent in the language. While no longer enjoying conjugal felicity, he can still speak — and, more pertinently, sing — in Italian. Which brings us to his new release, Mondo Cane, a wildly ambitious collection that incorporates a 40-piece orchestra and that voice re-imagining some of his best loved songs in the Italian language, including the mighty and aforementioned Ennio Morricone and his classic ‘Deep Down’, as well as Gina Paoli’s ‘Senza Fine’ (famously covered by Connie Francis). He has uncharacteristically stamped his own name on this project (he usually deals in pseudonyms), and you get the sense this was a very personal and cathartic mission that perhaps brings closure to a chapter in his life. Amateur psychology aside, it is a joyous and life-affirming experience belying the title, which roughly translates as ‘life has gone to the dogs’ and, like Peeping Tom, it comes from a classic film — one that would be immediately recognisable to many an Italian.

Patton, we are informed, is keen not to talk about Faith No More today. In fact, the subject is off the record, which, given his propensity for spikiness, is observed. One can understand why he doesn’t want to be asked for the 3,000th time about when Faith No More might step back into the studio. As the Pixies have proved, reforming for nostalgia is very lucrative, and who should really care whether or not Faith No More ever record again when the filthy lucre earned from touring can afford a man as creative and unhinged as Mike Patton a 40-piece orchestra? Mondo Cane will never sell a fraction of what Angel Dust managed, and nor have any of his other records, from the funky scratch pop masterpiece General Patton vs the X-Ecutioners, to the bizarre sound effect laden Fantômas offering Delìrium Còrdia, which sounds like an early Doctor Who sound-effects montage without the guiding hand of Delia Derbyshire. But does Patton care about shifting units? Clearly the man don’t give a fuck.

SP: Hi Mike Patton, how are you?

MP: I’m alright. I’m at home in-between tours, recharging and writing some new music.

SP:You’re always writing new music.

MP: Well, that’s what I do.

SP: That’s your job.

MP: That’s my job!

SP: It’s a good job, too.

MP: It’s not bad. Ah, you know, some days I feel really lucky; other days I feel cursed.

SP: Like when you have to talk to journalists...

MP: Well, I don’t have to do that, and that’s something that I’m learning to get a little bit better at.

SP: It probably helps to sell records.

MP: Since I own a label it doesn’t hurt, you know. I’m not gonna be stupid about it. I put a record out, and I’m proud of it, but there are only a few things you can say about a record. You do so many interviews and then all of a sudden you feel a little bit, ah... a little bit stupid. I still do my best.

SP: Because you get asked the same questions all the time...

MP: Well, yeah, usually. I try to vary the answers and then I reach a point and then I give up! Basically you want to try and paint the best picture you can of the record — in words, which is really a losing battle.

SP: The old ‘dancing to architecture’ thing. I can’t remember who said it first. Maybe it was Elvis Costello...

MP: [Firmly] Frank Zappa. [The quote has famously been attributed to both.]

SP: So why the hell are we here?

MP: You do it for a living! I gotta put myself in your hands, you know...

SP: Speaking of doing things for a living, how do you cope in modern times when you own an independent label? Are you surviving?

MP: It’s still funky. When the rest of the industry was whining and complaining and wanting to slit their wrists, we were doing okay. But gradually it sort of made its way down the ladder to labels like us and we’ve become much more careful about what we do — not necessarily musical-content-wise, because we’re not putting out top 40 records, nor were we EVER — but what we have to be careful about is how many records we do a year. We’ve had to cut back our release schedule quite a bit to ensure we’re not going to lose money. It’s unfortunate and horrible to say, but sometimes just the manufacturing costs of doing something are more than you get back in return, and you have to look at each situation in a different way.

SP: Not like the days when major labels were all hubris and cocaine and insanity.

MP: It was ridiculous. Even if you’re resourceful, it doesn’t mean you’re going to survive! It’s really gotten to that point. Everyone has to be smart. If you don’t have your head screwed on tight, things are gonna happen. There’ve been situations where we’ve been approached by artists who we’ve worked with in the past and that’s really difficult. You can’t just say, ‘No, we can’t put out your record, sorry. We already put one out! Obviously we love you to death and wanna support you...’ But you really just have to pick and choose. The thing that SUCKS is it has nothing to do with the musical quality — it has more to do with the AMOUNT of releases we do. ‘Maybe we can pass on that until next year.’ It’s the worst thing you can tell an artist and that’s a horrible position to be in, and not one that I envisioned myself in when starting a label.

SP: So, Mondo Cane. Unfortunately I’ve only had the chance to listen to it twice...

MP: That’s enough!

SP: I might play it some more times. Or maybe quite a few more. When Delìrium Còrdia came out it was great, but I probably only listened to it twice.

MP: That’s twice more than I listened to it.

SP: You put records out under various guises, but not with Mike Patton stamped on them...

MP: It’s a personal record. And I thought I could easily call it Mondo Cane and nobody would know what the hell it was. I felt like it was a significant enough part of me that I could put my name on it. It’s something I conceived and executed pretty much from the beginning to the end. It is MY record and I don’t feel any shame in it.

SP: I didn’t mean it negatively. Peeping Tom, for instance, is a collaborative record with artists like Kool Keith and Kid Koala and other people with the letter K alliterated in their name...

MP: The Peeping Tom record was as much mine as the Monde Cane record is mine. I just CHOSE to use a moniker instead of my name. The difference with this record is that it’s personal to me, and it’s something I felt I had to do to sort of take a snapshot of a certain point in my life and move on.

SP: Your Italian sounds fabio to a man who doesn’t speak Italian. You’re a bit of a multi-linguist, right?

MP: I speak Spanish, but not as great as I used to. Spanish, Italian and English. That’s it.

SP: I tried learning French because I wanted to know all the dirty things Serge Gainsbourg was saying...

MP: Ha ha, exactly.

SP: But it’s difficult learning a new language.

MP: Look, certain people are attracted to that kind of thing. I think you have to have ears, to be honest with you. And the fact that I’m a musician gives me an unfair advantage. I don’t have to sit down with a bunch of workbooks or DVDs. I’m not being cocky here, but to me the best way to learn a language is to go somewhere, stay there for a long time and listen. You know, LISTEN!

SP: I have ears. But people can’t afford to just up and leave and go somewhere...

MP: I can’t afford it either. What I’m saying is, if you’re interested in something, you just go there. And you tell all of your friends, ‘Don’t speak to me in English.’ And you sink or swim, you know what I’m saying? The reason I learned Italian is not because I’M A RICH ROCK STAR and was staying on some YACHT somewhere. No, it was because I decided to live there a while and I lived in an apartment — you know, shitty, hot apartment with no A/C — and loved every minute of it. When you dive into something like that head first, it’s always exciting and exhilarating in some weird way, but you have to take something away from it, and what I took away was the language and also maybe this record.

SP: Italian is beautiful, but nobody else really speaks it, do they?

MP: Well, there’s a few colonies in Africa that might beg to differ...

SP: I don’t want to dismiss huge swathes of the world, but you know, apart from them...

MP: Ha ha ha. Other than that, no. It’s basically only spoken in Italy.

SP: So you took the album title from a film title. I’ve not seen Mondo Cane or subsequent movies. Was the film a direct influence on the record or did you just like the name?

MP: The name is great. It’s an old saying. And the film was taken from that saying. But also, I’m not gonna lie, I really love the connotation or the provocation of the film title as well because it’s very well known. I thought it gave a nice edge to this music. I wanted an Italian title — to me, that seemed like a very good fit. At least one that would make people’s eyebrows go up.

SP: Ennio Morricone is on there. And Connie Francis, too.

MP: Ha ha. You see I don’t even know [the Connie Francis] version. I mean, I know it a little bit. Even though I’m an American kid and I should have known that version, I knew the Italian version first. There are weird anomalies like that that make you wonder, ‘Where did I grow up in my past life? Or what did I do?’ Yeah, that Connie Francis thing — I’ve heard it, like, twice. Didn’t make an impression on me AT ALL. When I listened in Italy and I heard the original, I FLIPPED OUT! Absolutely, completely spun my head around. So there you go — it’s really hard to define what started where or who made what famous. It’s really more about ‘What’s the soul of this music and how can I execute it the best way I can?’

SP: On the new record, you have a 40-piece orchestra according to the press release...

MP: That’s true. Does it sound like it? I mean, you’ve heard it...

SP: Yes. It sounds big.

MP: Then why are you asking me?

SP: Because I don’t trust press releases.

MP: Then why do you read them?

SP: Er, I don’t usually.

MP: Yeah, yeah, I’ll lay off now.

SP: What I’m wondering is, is playing with an orchestra the greatest fun in the whole world ever?

MP: It is fun. It’s trying, though. It’s weird. It’s different. From someone that’s come up playing in four-piece rock bands, it’s very exotic. But, at the end of the day, the personal dynamics are not much different. [Puts on ‘Land of Sunshine’ voice] ‘Everybody needs to be happy / Everybody needs their space’. In a sense, it feels more like a film production, as opposed to a concert, and it can be pretty stressful. ‘Hey, that first violinist is a pain in the ass. What can we do to make him happy? What can we do to make him play better?’ You end up thinking a little more like a politician. Or, I dunno, a masseuse. Ha ha. You wanna make sure everyone’s happy and playing at their best.

SP: And you’re going to take everyone with you when you tour?

MP: No. I HAVE to scale it down and the way I’m doing that is to scale the band back a little bit and the orchestra is basically cut down to half. With my arranger, I’m re-writing all the arrangements for the smaller ensemble. It was an absolute must if I wanted to tour this thing. It’s a crazy endeavour.

SP: Half an orchestra is still quite a lot.

MP: Oh, it’ll be great. It’ll still have the effect, it’s just certain tunes and certain moments will be different than how they are on the record. It’s actually kind of exciting — one more version of this music.

SP: You tend to conduct with bands you’re in. Will you be waving the proverbial baton at these shows?

MP: A little bit. Even if I’m not the conductor, I sort of end up doing it because it’s a natural instinct. The instinct turns itself into a bodily movement. When I’m on stage, I know what has to happen at a certain point, and I want to make sure everyone knows. I’m in a fortunate position in that I’m in front and everyone can see me. More than being close to the crowd, it’s more important for me to be a signpost for the band.

SP: The first time I saw you do it, you looked like you might kill someone if they got something wrong, in a similar way to how Don Van Vliet of Captain Beefheart used to hold a crossbow to his musicians’ heads when they were practising.

MP: Ha ha. That was probably Fantômas. In Fantômas, I’m really, you know, the conductor.

SP: Was curating All Tomorrow’s Parties fun?

MP: It was amazing, yeah — one of the better festival experiences I’ve had in my life — not just because they gave me some creative control, but because of the way it was organised and the way they dealt with the artists. It was pure pleasure. But Butlins was a drag.

SP: As an American, do you get Butlins?

MP: Oh no, it’s weird for us. I mean, I understand it now because it’s been explained to me 1,000 times. There are these vacation homes, where we go... Yeah, yeah, it’s bizarre, we don’t have that.

SP: It is weird, I’ll give you that.

MP: It’s an English thing and that’s fine, you know. I mean, I GET IT, but I don’t get it. Ha ha ha.

SP: It’s what makes us British, like sodomy and bad teeth.

MP: The concept is just a little bizarre to me, like people should all go to vacation in the same place.

SP: We don’t understand why you all go to a mall.

MP: See? There you go. It’s a social concern, what we’re talking about here. Different social behaviours. And it usually involves the congregation of many people in one spot. Yeah, for us it’s malls. They scare the crap out of me as well.

SP: We’re getting more of them. It’s the dissemination of American culture. It’s unstoppable.

MP: Really? I would have thought you guys would have put up a better fight.

SP: It’s not my fault.

MP: No, no, I just thought Britain in general would resist that type of culture. I dunno...

SP: I’m always a bit disappointed we’re not more European, really.

MP: It’s funny, living in Europe. If I had a flight or something, or a gig, I’d be like ‘I’m getting an inter-European flight,’ people would be like, ‘Oh, where are you going?’ ‘London.’ And they’re like, ‘THAT AIN’T FUCKEN’ EUROPE!’ Everyone in Italy would say, ‘Waddaya talkin’ about?’ I guess I see what you mean.

SP: That said, I think London is fine. It’s best not to go anywhere else in the UK if you can help it, though…

MP: I would, ahhh, I guess I’d agree with you. I mean, there’s some cool places, but you’ve gotta have time and you’ve gotta have the patience. I’ve never really been able to put those two things together. London or nothing, ha ha ha.

SP: You voiced a character in Metalocalypse. Was that a one-off or are you in it?

MP: No, no, I just did a voiceover for one, maybe two or three episodes. But that’s it. I’m not a part of it.

SP: And you’ve been doing other voiceover work here and there. I guess that must be fun, right?

MP: It is fun! It’s challenging and weird and it’s kind of more akin to improv, as opposed to showing up with a script and being like a union musician with his coffee break every 15 minutes. That’s what I thought it would be more like. It’s more like an improv gig. They’ll say, ‘Hey, we’ve got this idea, whaddya think? Here’s the script but if you wanna go off it, fine,’ and it always ends up being a little bit edgy and a little bit unpredictable and you don’t know what’s going to happen from one moment to the next. For instance, I did voices on that movie I Am Legend and basically we talked about it and we talked about it, I got this, I got that, but the way it really ended up working was they put a giant film screen in the studio and just played me the movie. I was just sitting there with a microphone trying to imitate what the monsters were doing. As crazy as that sounds, that was the most effective way we could get it to work.

SP: You’ve got a great job.

MP: It’s alright, man! I’m not feeling bad about it. Not today.

After 26 years of solid work the sludge rock survivors have finally smashed the Billboard Top 200. At number 200.

Words by Cian Traynor

Not getting due recognition can destroy a band. Still going after 26 years and 20 albums, The Melvins remain one of the most misunderstood groups in rock history, known to most only for being Kurt Cobain’s favourite band. Yet from post punk to surrealist rock, their versatile career arc has proved so unpredictable that both Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover, the band’s mainstays, can’t resist reading whatever is written about them online.

“It’s like watching a bad car wreck,” says an exasperated-sounding Dale. “I always think people are wrong anyway… but I can’t help it.” Buzz even remembers their very first review. “It was by [Sub Pop founder] Bruce Pavitt. He hated it. Thought it was absolute crap. I remember thinking, ‘Man, when you’re wrong, you’re wrong.’” Ever since, the snarky frontman has consistently blasted popular consensus, insisting that if you get it, no explanation is necessary. If you don’t, no explanation will do.

“We’ve managed to completely piss people off to the point where, without trying, it makes you wonder what the hell is going on.” He sounds agitated, his voice steadily rising. “People tend to say, ‘This is the worst song I’ve ever heard.’ I mean… wow! I’m not doing this to be perverse. I’ve worked VERY HARD to get to the point where I can do whatever I want and make records the way I wish other bands would. My fans understand that. If they don’t, then they’re not going to remain fans for very long. So be it. But I’ve thought about this A LOT. The reason why we’ve lasted so long is solely based on the attention to detail. I think if people started at the beginning of our catalogue and went through it, it’d be an amazing journey. All kinds of music! If we were a shitty live band or made terrible records, it would have been over a long time ago. The one thing that’s been completely constant and predictable is that we’re going to do things that are good. Sales don’t mean shit. I apologise for none of it. I’ve never been wrong about anything. I can’t think of the last thing I was surprised about.”

No insecurities there, then. But perhaps any lingering frustration with the industry is understandable given the band’s backstory. Luck has never quite gone The Melvins’ way. They recorded their first album, Gluey Porch Treatments, in 1986 when burgeoning San Francisco label, Alchemy Records, gave them enough gas money to drive down from Aberdeen, Washington. “The record came out to a resounding thud,” recalls Buzz. “We did a tour in ’86 and vowed never to do it again because it was such a disaster. We got a lot of trouble at shows. There was a heavy skinhead influence everywhere we went and they certainly weren’t interested in our long-haired antics. We lost money we didn’t have. You come home $900 in the hole individually and it might as well be nine million.”

When Alchemy founder Victor Hayden disappeared with whatever little money the label had, the band spent years searching for another record label. “We didn’t put out another album till ’89 because no one cared,” says Buzz. “Then when we moved to San Francisco, the guy from Boner saw us play at the request of some girl who OD’d not too long after. He put Ozma out and for some reason, things changed. I don’t know exactly why. It was almost like the musical environment caught up to what we were doing. There was enough interest in that record that a booking agent said we could do a tour where we wouldn’t lose money. Quickly after that we decided to do it full time and haven’t had jobs since.”

After Nirvana’s breakthrough success, The Melvins were quick to benefit from the ripple that grunge sent through the record industry. Cobain had once auditioned to join the band, but was apparently too nervous to remember the parts. As a committed fan, he’d often volunteer to be their roadie and later even recruited Dale to play drums on Bleach. Atlantic were curious enough to take a punt on the band, signing them to a three-album deal. Yet even the Cobain-produced Houdini (1993) failed to endear them to a wider fan base. Opening for Nirvana’s final show was their last glimpse of mainstream audiences, but by then such experiences had soured any ambition to make it big.

“Nirvana did everything that you’d think they would be against,” says Dale. “They ran their band no different than how Bon Jovi would: having a big-time manager, big productions, tour buses — all that stuff. Which is too bad. We always thought that if we were in a position where we had money and became successful, we wouldn’t go down that route. It’s certainly about ego. What else could it be?”

The Melvins remain content with their cult following — a dedicated throng who understand that the only consistency to be expected from album to album is a fresh twist, even if it means losing as many followers as the last outing would have gained. “If you look at the grand scheme of everything we’ve done,” says Buzz, “the hard part comes in figuring out what to do next — if you want to do something that’s at all challenging. But you pay the price for that. People get upset. I’ve never understood why anyone should expect me to be predicable. Me of all people! I’m an eccentric weirdo — probably a lot weirder than you would imagine.” He cackles madly. “There’s no way around that. I’m not the easiest person in the world to get along with.”

Yet for once, The Melvins appear to have found stability. Having gone through a multitude of bass players over the years, they’ve expanded into a powerhouse quartet by adding Big Business’s Jared Warren and Coady Willis on bass and additional drums. There’s no pressure or expectation from their label, Ipecac, as it’s run by friend and collaborator Mike Patton. In fact, their accessible but still abstract new album, The Bride Screamed Murder, has earned The Melvins a spot on the Billboard Top 200 — at number 200 — for the first time in their career, by selling just 2,809 copies in its first week. Even if the stability should prove short-lived, and the band suspect it will, what continues to keep the them together is an unwavering self-belief — one that Buzz believes is questioned at every turn.

“I ran into Slim [Moon] from [indie label] Kill Rock Stars years ago and he said, ‘Don’t you ever get tired of playing loud rock music? Don’t you wanna do something else?’ I just stared at him. ‘Like what? What are you talking about?’ This is it for me! I don’t have anything else. I have to make this work. If I make stuff nobody believes in, I’m out of business. That is it! The difference between me and people like him is that the light is gone out of his eye. It’s gone. I haven’t lost that magic.”

‘Knobbly and weird’ 34-legged megagroup would love to cue up a collaboration with snooker ace Steve Davis.

Words: Ash Dosanjh. Photos: Erika Wall

Catch London’s Southbank on a good (sunny) day and it’s like fighting your way through an army of ants congregating around pure liquid sugar. But just for a moment today, those ants have stopped dead in their tracks as a group of 17 people resembling prophets of doom visiting from a hostile future pose in front of the River Thames for our photographer. “It’s as good a hobby as any,” one tourist says with a smirk. Other onlookers are simply baffled into gaping silence as the group strut their stuff in front of the camera without any hint of amusement or ironic intent.

Our tourist friend’s comment may be barbed, but there is a smidgen of truth to it. Essentially the pastime of London-based brothers Milo and Leo Smee, Chrome Hoof started 10 years ago as a bastardised bedroom project intended to fuse doom metal — courtesy of Leo, also Cathedral’s bassist — with the synth experiments of producer and remixer ‘Kruton’, aka Milo. However, it has since evolved into the sprawling pool of collaborators being ogled by Southbank amblers today. From the convergence of musically diverse tribes comes a sound as refreshing as it is unique — even if it has been imitated shamelessly (more of which later).

In the run-up to the release of new album, Crush Depth, the unorthodox collective has decided to play a night at the more orthodox Queen Elizabeth Hall. It’s a venue long favoured by classical musicians thanks to acoustics that can cope with an orchestra in full swing. Fortunately, it proves equally well suited to a group that includes a funk-soul diva (Lola Olafisoye), a trumpeter who doubles as a doomy screecher (Emma Sullivan), a bassoonist (Chloe Herington), two keyboard and synth operatives (Emmett Elvin and Milo), a percussionist also at home on violin and viola (Sarah Anderson), a bassist (Leo), two guitarists (Andy Gustard and Kavus Torabi) and a choir of singers — or make that groaners.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You wonder how, given that the ranks contain such a smorgasbord of musicians, Chrome Hoof avoid sounding like sonic diarrhoea.

“That’s actually a very good question,” says Leo. “The messier, the badder, the better. I think subconsciously me and Milo had our own vision of how we wanted things to turn out, but after 12 other musicians add their bits, you can’t really envision that. You’ve just got to make it work and not have everyone play at the same time.”
“You have to be quite strict for it to not sound messy,” adds Milo. “You have to have people drop out for a certain amount of time, especially live when you have sound bouncing around and it’s all mashed up. If we had 10 people playing all the time I would hate it. It would just be a boring listen.”

“You do have to be quite ruthless,” continues Leo, “because obviously everyone wants to play all the time. But if you can get that balance and strip the semi-ego away from everyone, you end up with…”

Milo: “…a unique marine corps.”

Are there a lot of egos in this band?

“Well, everyone’s got an ego and everyone loves to play their instruments,” says Leo.
Who throws their toys out the pram?

“Just Milo.”

The subtle, playful sibling rivalry between the two isn’t just apparent in their banter. Their differing musical tastes can be heard jostling for space throughout their new record. Milo, the raver, gains the upper hand on the synth-driven likes of ‘Crystalline’, which buzzes with schizoid, frenetic energy, and ‘Sea Hornet’, a sci-fi movie soundtrack in waiting. Leo takes charge during ‘Third Sun Descendant’, with its metal nuances, and ‘Mental Peptides’, a surge of disco doom. Yet the sound of Chrome Hoof remains a distinctive one — so distinctive, in fact, that their imitators are easy to spot.

How do the pair feel about being copied recently, to lesser effect, by bands like, say, Invasion?

“I’ve heard this a few times but I don’t really get it,” says Milo.

“I think they’re influenced by what we’re into, but I can’t really comment — I know them,” adds Leo, with such steely caution that it almost becomes uncomfortable to look him in the eye. “If they said they were influenced by Chrome Hoof, I would take it as a compliment.”

“They’re a good band,” adds Milo.

“And Chan[tal Brown] is a great singer. She’s sung with Chrome Hoof.”

“There’s a track on the vinyl that isn’t on the CD where Chan is the lead vocalist.
She’s helped us out a lot.”

But what about the robes that they wear? That’s just like you.

“Oh yeah, I forgot about that,” admits Milo.

Still, there remain some striking differences between the two bands. One lies in their respective personnel numbers. Where Invasion is a mere trio, The Hoof are as ever-expanding as the universe. If you want in, the criterion is simple: you must be “someone who likes to hang out and not get any money at all”.

They’re also a band unafraid of taking risks. From bringing strippers on stage at their early gigs (“just to see the reaction on people’s faces”) to somewhat inappropriate support slots with every trendy wanker’s favourite band, Klaxons, Chrome Hoof are intent on breaking the rules, albeit sometimes with a touch of humour — this is, after all, a band that once said that they would like to collaborate with Mr Crocodile Shoes himself, Jimmy Nail.

“He’s the master,” protests Milo. “On a serious note, we’d love to get Steve Davis [yes: the snooker player] on a record, too. Some sort of spoken word thing. He has so much weight behind his words.”

On the surface this would seem an obvious wind-up, but when you discover Davis is a massive fan of Magma (a progressive rock band from France who Chrome Hoof once supported) and even funded that band to play a trio of shows at London’s Bloomsbury Theatre in the late eighties, it suddenly seems a less far-fetched idea.

In the meantime, Chrome Hoof can continue to feed off the aforementioned sibling rivalry.

“That’s the beauty of music,” says Leo. “I come out with what I do and Milo comes out with what he does… and it sorta seems to just about work.”

There’s time for one more question. How would Milo describe Chrome Hoof’s music to a deaf person?

“Knobbly and weird.”

It’s as good a hobby as any.

Canadian electro punks HOLY FUCK are devoted to the free spirit of uncompromised music, and they curse bands who need to be liked

Words by Cian Traynor     Photograph by Richie Hopson

Lights out. Total darkness. A packed Berlin club gasps as the music keeps pounding: roaring and squealing, glitching and backfiring. This is not electronic music. There are no samples. This is not instrumental post rock. There are no crescendo-building templates. This is endorphin plundering, blood-vessel bursting electro punk that has the band pouring with sweat, struggling to pump their energy into instruments that were there only seconds ago. Gradually the audience begins to laugh, bemused by the band’s unwavering composure. But this is exactly what they want: a chance to be robbed of control and to stumble blindly into inspiration.

“It was fun!” recalls the band’s Brian Borcherdt, the next day. “Things like that are a metaphor for how it is. We’re going up on tightropes every night without safety nets, trying to do this thrilling, daring, weird music. It was hard to play but we get through it by embracing those moments. Like when you unpack your suitcases after flying, you know things are going to be broken or battery acid will have spilled everywhere; something will be ruined or isn’t going to work right. So while there’s obviously something serious driving us, you still have to go up there and do it with a smile.”

Holy Fuck are not a high-tech band. There are vocoders, guns, 35mm film synchronizers and various implements bought in a pawn shop for a dollar, but none of it is programmed. Since forming in 2004, the Canadians come up with songs by improvising and then record them live the same day. Much to the chagrin of every engineer they’ve worked with, they look for as little control over their mess of sounds as possible: no building tracks in pieces, stacking in layers or adding in after-effects.

“The concept was to do something different with compromised equipment, so we didn’t have too many options,” says Brian. “Therefore we surrender our desire to will it in certain ways. Just let it be what it is, make no apologies about it and hope it’s something unique. Sure enough, I don’t think a lot of people like it. These days there’s a desire to make everyone like what you do because of this blogosphere where everyone’s trapped in a horrible battle of the bands. It’s really annoying. I think it’s okay to let it be murky and weird; a bit distorted. It’s nice to be free of that and not give a fuck whether people like it or not.”

They are only interested in what the moment can uncover, submitting to the energy even if it requires crashing out for 10 hours afterwards — as it does today while the band’s tour bus winds through the Austrian mountains. Though Borcherdt and fellow keyboard-and-effects geek Graham Walsh comprise the group’s core, their third album, Latin, is mainly driven by drums and bass, making its live reproduction a physically demanding process for the other two members. Drummer Matt Schulz won’t even eat for two hours before going on stage so as not to risk soiling himself. “Luckily he’s a very fit, buff and handsome man,” says Borcherdt. “Personally I find the adrenalin and the frenetic pace of the songs snaps me out of whatever I’m feeling. You have to be very alert to hit all the buttons at the right time and execute all these little things. I’d find it harder to sing and play guitar when you’re not feeling up for it, like when you’ve just eaten a big kebab and you gotta sing sad songs into a microphone while burping up onions. I guess that’s what’s fun about it: not having to be this overly romantic figure, like, ‘Oh I’m trying to capture the essence of my retreat to Berlin’ or something.”

Meaning, then, doesn’t necessarily factor into the equation. It’s not songwriting in any storytelling sense, but an emotive spirit that pulsates with ambiguity. You can commit random acts of violence to it, but you cannot sleep with it on. You can assemble a child’s playhouse to it but you cannot perform surgery to it. Yet whereas many musicians act offended at the idea of people doing “other things” while listening to their music, Holy Fuck are perfectly happy to soundtrack everyday activities.

“I’d be a little disheartened if people were only putting our music on at parties because then you’re not really listening to it,” says Borcherdt. “Personally I like music the most when it’s in my headphones, when I can do something and feel moody. People tell me they were jogging or working around the house with our music on and they felt like it was driving them. That’s cool because it really means you’re listening. We’re an ADD generation and probably getting worse all the time, so there’s nothing better than knowing people are paying attention to it.”

Though glad that their throttling rhythms, patterned textures and cyclonic beats can penetrate the world of routine tasks and chores, the band would prefer to be considered more of a challenging listen than mere background noise. Sometimes when you look back at your favourite records, you realise they’re the ones you weren’t sure what to think of at first. Yet the minor details that stuck out as odd or even jarring at the time are often what keep them sounding fresh or intriguing years later. This is precisely where Holy Fuck sees themselves.

“That was a big, inspiring force behind deciding to start a band like this,” says Borcherdt. “If we had an endless sample bank to choose from or a digital plug-in on a computer, how would we know when a song is done? In the end it’s probably not going to be as sweet or as melodic or as perfect as it could have been in another’s hands or with other instruments… but maybe that’s the inspiration. It’s not really about what we’re playing; I don’t think Casios make us special. It’s more about the end result. So far the spark has been there when we need it.”

Things on your mind come out through your mouth. That’s just the way it is. At times it seems an overly basic relationship  — ignorant, perhaps, of all the barriers, both physical (cords and cricoid cartilage) and invisible (conscience), that thoughts must pass through before they’re turned into words. You imagine men grown tired of this process are the ones to thrust gun barrels into their own throats, triggers pulled to decorate walls with thoughts forced out too soon, and in the wrong direction. A red, raw, unready mess of mind splashed on magnolia paint.

Is that too crass?

Yes. It’s pretty objectionable. There’s a purity of expression there, though, surely?

Yannis Philippakis has a lot on his mind, if the words pouring through his mouth are to be believed. Yannis is a chain-smoker, but cigarettes can’t stop them. Yannis is a prodigious drinker, but shot glasses can’t stop them. Thoughts arrive so thick and fast it’s hard to know which avenues to explore and which to leave alone. Some talk, though, moves in circles. Yannis is unable to tear from his mind the image of a rotting whale carcass. He uses it as a metaphor for both his band’s new album, Total Life Forever, and the plight of Mike Tyson.

“Making the record, there was a preoccupation with the tragedy of descent — the idea that you have someone above normal human achievement, and then he’s just refuse. Actual refuse. What’s fascinating with Tyson is his awareness of it — he’s self-aware, articulate; he’s living in the fucking… whale carcass of his own achievement. His mind’s just shrunk inside all those huge things he used to inhabit. What does he think about now? You watch those old fights, and there’s something so incredible about being able to exist in the pressure of those moments.”

Foals’ debut album, Antidotes — a poised, strange workout in math rock and afrobeat — entered the charts at number three upon its release in 2008. Does that preoccupation with Tyson’s fall from grace betray any anxiety on your part about the pressure of living up to a record that was, for an album of its kind, pretty successful?

“Not as a band. Personally, it’s strange how something that was once quite small has become all-consuming. It’s the same with anything that’s ever been really good in my life. You’re thinking, ‘Is this gonna be the best it gets? Is everything after this gonna be a grey march in the shadow of some previous golden age?’ Any human aware of their own predicament would be the same, I think. Especially with something that’s affected me so physically. Touring’s withered my lungs. And I can just feel the encroaching… in Britain we’re aware of our own health in a way I don’t think we have been before.”

“It’s an extension of vanity,” he continues. “It gets you assessing yourself to these external standards — are you in your prime, physically, mentally, emotionally?”

He throws another whisky down his neck; lights up.

If Antidotes was characterised by its guitars and its rhythm — the former glimmering and interlocked like woven gold; the latter propulsive; both incessant — then Total Life Forever seems to be characterised by the decay of those fine, polyrhythmic lines. Total Life Forever remembers Antidotes in fragments of guitar chatter, but its aesthetic seems to be that of an old aesthetic slipping away. Tracks like ‘Spanish Sahara’ and ‘Blue Blood’ arrive less guarded, and as such there’s more space for Yannis’ vocal — sung now, rather than yelped — to stretch out: soul growing in the gaps.

“Those trebly, staccato guitars sound strange now,” admits Yannis. “They seem to be odd fragments of bone in the carcass of an old Foals.

“It’s good, though — you’re getting to the foundation that way: to something with more weight and gravity. It feels more real. The first record was quite self-aware, so we’ve tried to regress to a more naïve state where the songs are primarily about expression.”

If the guitar phalanxes of Foals’ debut can be read as an attempt to demarcate their own sonic territory, Total Life Forever’s relaxation of arms perhaps indicates the arrival of home ground in physical form. Earlier, Yannis, drummer Jack Bevan and keyboard player Edwin Congreave had shown me around their shared house in Oxford’s Jericho district. Total Life Forever was made here, and Foals have become physically embedded in the ‘The House Of Supreme Mathematics’, particularly its basement — an old shower cubicle turned vocal booth, walls scrawled with lyrics and song-plans.

“It’s a proper, old school HQ,” explains Yannis. “I’ve always wanted a central, physical space with its own army of people. You can’t be messed with — either artistically or physically. That place is full of weapons: swords, baseball bats, mallets… The record itself is an act of violence, almost: something carved out in the basement’s stale, sunless air. It’s a violent thing, building a record.”

Like building a pyramid.

“Hopefully not something we’ll entomb ourselves in,” says Congreave.

Frequent references to other places blot the new album. In ‘Miami’ Foals fear the betrayal of a lover in a “highly-sexed, tropical, affluent environment” where you can “smell the endless scope for getting a better mate”. In ‘Alabaster’, a girl from Villa Luz burns down the neighbourhood and kills her parents. When Foals went to Sweden to record the album, Yannis “almost got murdered on the first night”.

“I went back to this tattooed Viking guy’s flat to buy weed. There were three or four even bigger Aryan guys with Alsatians, and a stern-looking woman who looked like she’d happily eat my spleen. In the kitchen, there was a plastic sheet covered in blood and 30 or 40 dead animals in this guy’s bedroom. Cheetahs, armadillos… He had loads of guns, and suddenly it became clear we didn’t share the same bloodline [Yannis’ father is Greek, his mother a South African Jew]. I bought the weed and left. I never felt more small and Mediterranean and Semitic in my life. They may as well have been drinking from skulls. It was good weed, though.”

Carried in the space of this album is the time of it — the band are all approaching their mid-twenties, which in itself is like making a second album. There’s a filtration of memory. Things and friends start slipping away from you. The traces of Antidotes in Total Life Forever feel representative of that — quietening echoes of the past that more subtly influence the construction of adult identity.

Time for musing over, it’s off to another bar, and, eventually, the home of a peddler of late night antidotes. There’s an empty glass tank on the table by his television.

What’s that for?

“A snake,” he says.

Where is it now?

“I don’t know. It escaped.”

So where is it?

“I don’t know.”

Peering into it, I make out shedded skin and my brain laughs silently. No need for the mouth to join in, really, because it’s just so unbelievably fucking apt.

Like most habitual dope smokers, the only party I can recall from the last 20 years is the one at which I puffed my first ever joint. Even then the details are hazy: I remember the host, Jim Walsh, arm-wrestling his pretty blonde girlfriend over a surfboard. I recall a green-faced Rick Adams gulping down a pint of vodka thinking it was water and then spewing all over the garage door. And I remember the record on repeat that night, Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday, sounding better than pretty much anything I’d heard in my life.

Jim built his first bong soon after. Rick entered the school public speaking competition on the subject ‘Why Marijuana Should Be Legalised’, an argument he recited word for word from the Black Sunday sleeve notes without once looking up at the audience (he lost). As for me, I began the protracted descent into cannabis-induced psychosis that would smother my teens and twenties, years spent confined to couches and the safety of computer games and in which contact with the outside world was kept to a minimum. No such fate awaited Cypress Hill, who, for a bunch of guys regularly exposed to gangs, guns and double-crossing drug dealers, remain surprisingly paranoia free.

“We still smoke every day,” says Sen Dog in his laidback Latin drawl. “It’s a constant source of inspiration. From the very beginning, we wanted to be part of the legalisation movement. We were party heads and huge Cheech and Chong fans, but we also had friends whose parents were hippies, and we’d go round their houses and they’d break shit down and teach us about what we were smoking. Not long after we met some Rastafarians who prayed for maybe 30 minutes before getting high. We were like, ‘Dude, there’s so much here we need to talk about.’ We didn’t want to just get on stage and be like, ‘Awesome, we’re stoned!’ We wanted to know our facts, and I’m glad we did, because it helped break down doors and move that old school mentality out of the picture.”

But if middle class British kids believed Cypress Hill had suddenly exploded into being amid a cloud of bong smoke and a fanfare of blunted beats, they were mistaken. Sen Dog and B-Real first joined forces back in 1988 and from day one they were working on a formula that would help them stand out from the crowd. The bad cop/bad cop blend of B-Real’s nasal delivery and Sen’s grunting baritone played a big part, as did their comic book rendering of the California badlands they called home.

“We did everything in direct opposition to what was going on at the time in the rap game,” says Sen. “In those days everybody had their faces plastered all over their album sleeves, trying to look all gangster with gold chains and shit, and we didn’t want any of that. It was also fashionable to rap about your culture and ethnicity and we weren’t interested in that either. We figured it was pretty obvious just from looking at us that we were Spanish, so we decided to rap about who we were and what our lives were like — just ordinary days hanging out and partying with our friends.”

Not that Cypress Hill’s parties were much like Jim Walsh’s. They were more small arms skirmishes than arm-wrestling matches, more baseball bats than surfboards, and when Columbia finally released the group’s eponymous debut LP in 1991, they were clearly unsure how best to market so volatile a cultural commodity. As a result, ‘How I Could Just Kill A Man’ — the heaviest track on the album and the one with the most antisocial refrain (‘Here is something you can’t understand / How I could just kill a man’) — was slipped out surreptitiously on their lead single as a b-side to the decidedly more innocuous ‘The Phuncky Feel One’. When the flip became a huge crossover hit with everyone from ’hood rats to Harvard college kids, Columbia saw the potential, bit the bullet and pushed for the release of the equally ghetto ‘Hand On The Pump’ as the second single, complete with a murderous video featuring street beatdowns, shotgun assassinations and B-Real, Sen Dog and (producer) Muggs stalking around a decayed industrial estate. Almost overnight, Cypress Hill became America’s most wanted both in the hip hop charts and the shit lists of concerned parents across the nation.

“It was a strange time,” says Sen. “For every nine out of 10 people that loved what we were doing, there was one call into every radio show that was like, ‘You people are wrong, children are listening to you,’ and we had had a couple of shows that were picketed by Christian organisations and women’s groups. But we loved it. That sort of attention was exactly what we wanted and from that point on we just laughed off every naysayer and finger-pointer that crossed our path. We knew we were onto something that would keep people talking, and it was the best publicity we could have hoped for.”

But Cypress Hill’s defining moment was still to come. In 1993 they released Black Sunday, an album as genetically modified to the smoker’s high as a skunk plant. It was the culmination of a style both musical and visual: the vaguely derivative ghetto funk of their debut had been replaced by Muggs’ eerie atmospherics and tape-saturated beats, while the album’s lyricism and imagery established the group as dark prophets of the apocalypse — a role bolstered by the video for the Black Sabbath-sampling ‘I Ain’t Goin Out Like That’, which depicted them as grave diggers bearing torches and pursued by slavering devil dogs. Cypress Hill hadn’t tapped a nerve so much as mainlined a vein: the album entered the Billboard charts at number one before going on to sell 3.25 million copies worldwide.

Few rap groups had enjoyed comparable crossover success. Lead single ‘Insane In The Brain’ became a stage-diving spectacle that smashed rock as well as rap clubs and later that year Cypress Hill found themselves collaborating with both Sonic Youth and Pearl Jam on the soundtrack to forgettable action flick Judgement Night. For many it was the first inkling of the direction the group was about to take in its fusion of hip hop and hard rock, but for Sen Dog it was the culmination of a process that had begun long before the first album.

“We were fans of rock and heavy metal way before we were into hip hop. I remember when we were coming up with our first logo — the skull and spikes thing — we looked for inspiration to the posters we’d had on our walls growing up: The Doors, the Stones, Kiss and Aerosmith. By the time we were recording the second album, we were looking at those bands and figuring out how we could present ourselves in the same way. We wanted to have the mystique of a Jimmy Page, the rowdiness of a Keith Moon, the destructiveness of a Jimi Hendrix... We wanted to get the turntables on stage and set fire to that shit.”

A college tour with Rage Against The Machine and slots at the ’94 and ’95 Lollapalooza festivals gave Cypress Hill the chance to do exactly that, and when they were banned from Saturday Night Live for trashing their instruments and sparking a joint on stage, they cemented their reputation as a rap group capable of rocking as hard as any metal band.

Not that they were quite ready to give up their ghetto roots. In 1995, they released Cypress Hill III: Temples Of Boom, widely regarded as their best record thanks to Muggs’ sparsely paranoid production and the album’s sinister, psychedelic imagery. It also served as a sparring ring for one of the most famous beefs in rap history: when Cypress refused or were contractually unable to let former friend Ice Cube use ‘Throw Your Set In The Air’ for the soundtrack to his ’hood comedy Friday, Cube went ahead and recorded his own version. The ensuing spat led to a series of increasingly hostile diss tracks from both corners, with Cube laying a lyrical beatdown on the Westside Connection tune ‘King Of The Hill’, and Cypress replying in kind on the awesome ‘No Rest For The Wicked’.

Yet, by the end of the decade, the band had put battle rapping behind them and stepped onto a wider stage. Their 2000 LP Skull & Bones was a two-disc affair with one CD (‘Skull’) comprised of hip hop tracks and the other (‘Bones’) heavily metal-influenced, and featuring cameos from members of Fear Factory, Deftones and Rage Against The Machine. Tellingly, the lead single was either ‘Rap Superstar’ or ‘Rock Superstar’ depending whether you heard it on urban or mainstream radio. Hardcore hip hop fans plugged their ears and pretended the whole thing wasn’t happening, but Sen Dog couldn’t have cared less.

“We loved hip hop, we loved heavy metal, and we knew that the bands who have the most success are the ones who aren’t afraid to walk that edge and risk everything for the bigger reward. Sure, there were people in the hip hop community that wanted to talk shit about it at the time, but the alternative audiences took to it right away and before long we’d look out into the crowd and the ethnic diversity was just staggering — we were playing to pretty much every race on the planet. I think rock’n’roll definitely helped us grow stronger as artists and it served as an example to kids growing up not to be penned in by pigeon-holes in music.”

It’s an attitude the group has carried with them to the present day, which sees the release of their eighth studio album, Rise Up — five years in the making and featuring appearances from Rage and Audioslave’s Tom Morello, salsa singer Marc Anthony and Daron Malakian of System Of A Down, as well as production from Pete Rock, DJ Khalil and Linkin Park’s jack-of-all-trades Mike Shinoda. The latter was called in to produce the poignant ‘Carry Me Away’, which finds Cypress in reflective mode, meditating on fallen friends, mistakes made and the dark side to the ghetto lifestyle they spent 20 years bragging about without pausing for breath.

“There’s some great songs on the album, but ‘Carry Me Away’ was the track I wanted on it most. It means a lot to have a chance to tell our fans that we’re not without regret; that we made mistakes and lost a lot of good buddies on the way up. When people rap about that crazy gang life, it’s always the rowdiness and bravado that comes across, not how much they cried when their best friend got shot. That’s what makes that song so fucking special.”

And while it’s a million miles away from the pump handling, hammer cocking, kill-a-man machismo of the band’s early nineties incarnation, it’s still an excuse to see them storm stages the world over and, like any great supergroup in their third decade of touring, play the tracks the audience came to hear.

“Those songs — ‘How I Could Just Kill A Man’, ‘Insane In The Brain’ — I swear those tracks get a better reaction now than they did 18 fucking years ago. And it’s weird, because I think they might have more meaning to the audience than they do to us. We were so young when we wrote them — just knuckleheads on the street doing dumb shit. But the message they conveyed was one of craziness and being down for whatever, and that continues to speak to kids today in ways we never imagined possible.”

Words by Kev Kharas

Photograph by Dave Ma

The problem with guitars is the urge to play them. That idiot rockist mantra - ‘turn up, plug in, rock out’ - is recited as if all you need do is hang the thing from your neck and lash at it, until you chance upon some formula of notes so profound it forces trapdoors to swing open in the sky. Despite what computer games, hair gel, Kate Moss and punk revisionists will tell you, music has no need for any more everymen. Punk may have been a great antidote once, but the word’s become a blight - an excuse for people too lazy, dull and cowardly to pursue ideas of their own. ‘Punk’ now is rarely anything other than a corruption turned into perverse etiquette, one tied up in another of those idiot chants.

‘Three chords and the truth!’

Who wants the truth? The truth’s boring: it already exists.

These New Puritans’ new album, Hidden, with its arcane, peculiar, preposterous, brave and strived-for something sound, knows all of this. It seems to recognise, too, the difference between nextness and newness - faced with that familiar, obedient queue for the trend cycle (...English heroes then American ones, women after men, synths follow guitars...), Hidden prefers to simply blow that cycle’s wheels out from under it. It’s not an album that makes a great deal of sense. It’s a surprise. It pisses on your betting slip.

That’s not to say the Southend quartet have been impatient - their leader, Jack Barnett, had to learn how to read and write sheet music from scratch before he was even able to imagine the tides of woodwind and brass that weave their way through the record. After “incredible hours” spent tinkering with manuscripts and writing deaf (in the company of New York arranger Ryan Lott), Jack travelled to Prague to hear the noises in his head played aloud for the first time. They were “blasted out by 13 Czech wind musicians” and recorded in the same day, before Barnett returned home to Essex to work on Hidden for several more months.

Sat now with twin brother and drummer George by a fire in a west London pub [band mates Sophie Sleigh-Johnson and Thomas Hein are absent today], Jack’s keen to impress his admiration for “renegade classical music”, like that composed and conducted by fellow Thames Estuary native Benjamin Britten in the 20th century.

“We were listening to Classic FM on the way to a gig once,” he explains, “and I thought, ‘When I say in interviews I like Benjamin Britten, do people think I mean stuff like Mozart?’ I can’t stand that kind of classical. Britten made some of the most brutal, melancholic music you’ll hear.”

While, in rock music, wind and brass are usually the preserve of exhausted brains fumbling for an easy anthem, Hidden’s classical is odd and morose. Jack’s spoken before about his desire to use that instrumentation to make his music “even more uneven and distressed”. Brilliantly, it’s at this moment that ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ chooses to creep from the pub’s speakers.

This one of yours, is it?

“It’s just something that people reel out, isn’t it?” he laughs, “‘Play the riff with strings!’ And then you see ’em doing it live and they’re all going, ‘YEAH!’ with washed hair and scrubbed faces... It’s horrible.”

The other big influences on Hidden are probably more at ease on an album plotted like a military offensive. ‘Three Thousand’ has the predatory rhythmic slink and serious-sex hexes found in much US hip hop of the decade just gone, while dancehall’s totemic stomp and eerie synths tattoo themselves across both lead single ‘We Want War’ and ‘Attack Music’, the latter a name the band previously had in mind for the album.

“The original idea was to make something like ‘Blackout’ by Britney Spears, but give it the depth, musical brutality and melancholy of someone like Britten,” Jack explains.

Much of the record echoes that, successfully. In less inquisitive, industrious hands those disparate influences might easily have jarred, but Hidden reconciles them to each other: adding a hung-in-time gravity to chart R&B and dancehall’s “crappy presets”, and giving posho classical its teeth back.

How much concession do you make to the audience when you’re meshing things together?

“None, really,” says Jack. “That’s what I like about classical music; that the composer’s supposed to be this demonic force who’s not like the audience at all. It’s always about what’s most fun for us to make.”

Something else These New Puritans had a lot of fun with while recording Hidden were Foley Techniques, traditionally used by engineers to produce sound effects for films. Hear drawing blades, and melons covered in cream crackers then hit with mallets to sound like bursting heads.

Is it important for you to seek out inspiration in places others aren’t likely to?

“I’m not a music geek who listens to deliberately obscure things,” Jack insists. “I just thought it’d be good if a song had the kind of sounds you get in films. I wanna do a song that’s purely swordfight sounds. Not sampling, because I think that’s really old-fashioned, but a proper high-fidelity recording of people having a choreographed sword fight, with a generic American R&B singer over the top. I’d still like to do that.”

Would you still do it if someone else already had?

“I dunno,” he says, then pauses. “No, probably not. It’s more interesting for us to make something that’s completely ours. Again, it comes down to what’s most fun, and the most fun stuff’s when you don’t know what it’s gonna sound like. When it’s a risk.”

“This whole album was a big risk,” admits George.

Obviously risks are important. Without risks, all you have is dull truth, waiting for someone with guts to come along and meddle with it. There were six months in 2008 when east London seemed besieged by shit versions of These New Puritans. They’d all wear pointy shoes and grow their hair down over their eyes and bark at you over a loose approximation of George’s drumming, the difference being that those bands never seemed too enamoured with risk music. As it goes, I think they’re all in lo-fi bands now.

“S.C.U.M. and people like that? I think all those bands are god-awful - actually don’t say that,” says George. “I’m sure they’re lovely. Maybe they’re good. Maybe they’re really, really good.”

No, they were fucking dire. How did you react to them at the time?

“I don’t know, we weren’t around much,” he continues. “I don’t think they’d be able to replicate what we do now anyway, so good luck to them.”

Another crowd they’ve managed to outmanoeuvre is the one that gathered at The Royal Hotel on Southend’s seafront around five years ago for Junk Club. Junk was pretty great for a while, but even an early Puritans - reliant on guitars aside from the occasional throbbing synth - never seemed the snuggest fit for something built from kohl, winkle pickers and nascent garage rock (Junk also helped introduce The Horrors, XX Teens and Ipso Facto to the world).

I saw Jack stood stock still on Junk’s dancefloor once, arms at his side and expressionless, as a Thames Estuary version of The Loft partied around him to disco and acid house. So how were you entangled in Junk’s addled, seed-soiled world?

“Oh, I dunno, probably Thom was doing drugs with [Junk founder] Oliver Abbot and we did that gig because it was somewhere to play. There was no other venue apart from Chinnery’s, which was like a youth club.”

Wouldn’t playing a youth club be the more attractive option to you now, what with the children’s choir that haunts the new album [‘Attack Music’, ‘Orion’]?

“Oh, we played it,” Jack laughs. “We played several youth clubs. It was really weird - they introduced us like, ‘Ladies and gentleman, put your hands together for.. Tee! En! Peeeeeeees... We closed with a reggae cover.”

Do you still feel any affinity with those people from Junk?

“Not at all,” says George, shaking his head. “I don’t think that was a defining moment for These New Puritans at all. It was... nothing, really. No, it was something: a start, but it had no impact on us, especially not a lasting one. I think the thing we did for Dior had more of an impact on us - having to produce something that was much more real.”

The “thing we did for Dior” was the out-on-a-sore-limb, auto-manhunt hypnotism ‘Navigate, Navigate’; a 15-minute track produced at Hedi Slimane’s request for one of Dior’s catwalk shows. Three years on, it remains one of this young century’s best pieces of music, and saw These New Puritans’ announce their public split from guitars by knotting them all together by their necks.

“The guitar world is really conservative,” notes Jack. “The people in it - those that get labelled ‘experimental’ - think they’re doing something amazing and new, but the most interesting things are the textures happening away from that, in dancehall, R&B, American pop... We feel more affinity with that than lots of other guitar stuff, really. There’s loads of people doing things with guitars - it’s probably the easiest way of doing things - but I don’t feel like I have anything to add to it.”

“I hate those bands that pretend they’re really complex by having an arpeggiated synth, then playing rock’n’roll over the top and turning their amps up slightly,” adds George. It’s the coward’s way out. Sixties rubbish!”

Are you often confronted by those good-time, cocaine rock’n’roll people?

“Yeah,” says George. “I don’t like those sort of people.”

How do you deal with them?

“I’m generally not that nice to them. I don’t have time for people like that, really.”

“Going back to ‘experimental’ guitar music, I’ve also realised I don’t like improvisation at all,” rejoins Jack. “‘Jamming’. I like compositions basically; pre-written music.”

So how much of the present you’re currently occupying was devised years ago?

“Quite a lot,” replies Jack, in a half-smirk. “We like to control what people see and hear. We don’t always want the truth to be shown.”

As you’d imagine, the band already have various futures plotted. One involves finding a young, eastern European girl to front a These New Puritans take on Disney pop, the aim being to sneak something interesting into the charts without the ‘experimental music’ tag blowing their cover (they cite ‘Joe le Taxi’ by Vanessa Paradis as an example).

Jack may also be writing songs for each of Essex’s 20 islands to aid his home county’s bid to be the next European Capital of Culture. He’s still waiting on confirmation from the council, but apparently Tony Robinson and Paul Morley are also involved somehow.

How do you react when people call you pretentious?

“We’re not as pretentious as the bands playing jangly guitars trying to look all cool and appeal to everyone,” laughs Jack. “‘Oh, you’ve got to have the rock look!’ That’s the world of pretension and compromise to me.”

“Our music’s free of that, hopefully,” says George. “Again, it’s important for people to understand that Jack doesn’t get off to Mozart.

“You’re more council estate than they think,” he says, turning to his twin. “They think you’re some really intelligent kid that’s been to university and got eight degrees. And that’s not true. If we tried to ingratiate ourselves, like most bands, we’d probably get a lot further.”

I’m not sure that’s true. I like that they’re the only band who’d dare to describe global warming as the ultimate artistic event, or look to forge a new kind of empathy between the island musics of Essex and the Caribbean. I like how Jack knows that no women or children lived on Canvey Island until the 1800s because it was a smuggler’s colony, and that in 1953 there was “one really bad flood, and loads of people died”.

Essex is more prone to flooding than any other county in Britain. With 350 miles of coast to protect and sea levels rising, it’s likely that it’ll be one of the first to offer its towns forever to the thirsty tide. Maybe it’s this knowledge of what’s to come for their native flats and sands that excites These New Puritans from complacency. Maybe it’s the absence of etiquette.

“It’s really good working with your twin brother,” says George. “There’s no need to be polite - we can say whatever we like because there’s blood there.”

Blood’s thicker than water, I’ll bet. Maybe that estuary’s safe for now.

Eye to body, eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, arm to shoulder, arm to waist, mouth to mouth, hand to head, hand to body, mouth to breast, hand to genitals, and finally - finally - sexual intercourse.

These are the 12 stages, as mapped out by behavioural psychologist Desmond Morris, that our relationships must all one day stroll through if we’re to laze in the precious and tender glow of real intimacy. Halt there, though, gladsack; eyes back in pockets. Something seems off. There are flaws here. That final stage could just as easily have been replaced by the words ‘the police arrived’ or ‘the man did not move any more’. At least then there’d be the implication of hazard, something Morris seems to omit altogether from his flat pack instruction manual to undying love. It’s not Ikea. It’s fucking, Desmond.

Except it’s not that either, at least not always and not with The xx. Their intimacy is curiously sexless; but like fucking, and all other intimacies, at their best they are emotionally ambiguous, awkward, treacherous, done in the dark. As such, they are impossible to reduce to 12 easy steps.

The xx are a band that happen in the dark. Their debut album xx was written and recorded over the course of four teenage years and still seems to exist nocturnally, in silence broken by night’s edge, reverb and mysterious bass loom. Camouflaged from head to toe in various shades of black garb, you always get the sense with them that things are being figured out away from the distractions of an awake world. That sense is piqued by the emotional honesty in the throats of Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, whose love-bitten confessionals are so candid they may as well be heart murmurs.

Oliver and Romy aren’t always easy to listen to. Their young voices stand naked against the austere musical backdrop beckoned into being by his bass, her guitar, Jamie Smith’s Akai MPC drum machine and - formerly, now - the additional guitar and synth work of Baria Qureshi. Such minimalism is unforgiving - every moment of doubt or unease, every affectation suddenly becomes as desperate for attention as Fred Astaire. You hear the tips of their fingers sneak back across guitar strings. You hear the tongues moving in their mouths, and you end up stranded somewhere between confidant and voyeur. Teenage girls from America might roll their eyes and declare the experience ‘Awkward,’ or, ‘Cringe’, but discomfort is a cheap price to pay for a record with such a rare ability to draw you into its empty, silent spaces - for a record that seems to tender real intimacy.

“The big thing for me, lyrically, is that I’ve always written with the thought in mind that no-one else will really hear it,” admits Oliver, peering out from backstage at the crowd gathering ahead of tonight’s show in Brighton. No one apart from Romy, anyway. So it’s gonna be weird writing again, with the thought in the back of my mind that people might hear this at some point.”

Might?

“Maybe I won’t put it all out there next time.”

Oliver is six-foot-plus, slick hair, stud-earring, south London. It’s hard to figure out whether or not he needs to be timid about letting his emotions show.

“The lyrics come first,” Romy explains from behind her swept fringe. “It’s a case of me and Oliver working alone, getting the confidence up and building a skeleton of words. Then we add our bass and guitar to that skeleton and Jamie and Baria will help flesh it out.”

This interview, it should be noted, happened on the day before Baria left the band.

“A lot of that minimalism [on the record] comes from the fact that I have an MPC,” says Jamie, whose fingers hammer and poke at the MPC’s drum pad to provide The xx with a reticent but reliable, juddering heartbeat. Jamie also produced the debut album.

“We spent about a month before recording in the studio just taking stuff out of the songs,” he explains, before Romy delves further into the band’s past: “When we first started, Oliver had only had a couple of bass lessons and I was teaching myself guitar. A song like ‘VCR’... I listen now and think, ‘That’s such a simple guitar line,’ but at the time it was all I could play. So it sounded right, I think. I like that because it’s having limitations, but not consciously.”

I read somewhere that, in your own words, “It started out as a joke” - that The xx were originally just like every other teenage gang of four you find hanging around the school music-block at lunch time; blaring out loud, distorted punk covers. So when and why did you decide to pare things down?

“I think that actually, underneath the jokey thing, I was already writing in a way that was more personal,” Romy explains. “But on my own. I was writing poems, things like that. When we first met it seemed scary and it took a while to get more serious words out. The first step was the singing part and so we had to do that as a joke, but as we got more confident we found we could sing more personally in front of each other.”

“Me and Romy aren’t necessarily singing to one another,” Oliver explains. “She’s my oldest friend.”

The phrasing here is vital. When Romy and Oliver sing, ‘voice to voice’, it is very much in front of one another, rather than to each other. There are only ever four people involved in the stories The xx tell - one is whoever’s singing, be it Romy or Oliver, while the other just listens. That’s two. The third is the person they’re singing about - the ‘you’ who crops up in every song to provide both the affection and the subsequent, inevitable angst. The fourth is the listener. As such, all the lovelorn vows to “cross oceans” and “give it all on the first date” are directed outwards, and suddenly there’s tension within The xx’s intimacy, because even though that’s where the songs exist, it’s not what they’re necessarily about. They couldn’t be, because Romy and Oliver aren’t singing to each other - they subvert that traditional, lovebird duet-dynamic in the most dazzlingly logical and extreme way possible.

A friend of mine interviewed you recently and she said she asked about your sexuality and you didn’t want to go into it...

“I don’t think you liked that interview,” says Oliver to Romy. “I just don’t think it’s particularly relevant,” he says to me. “It’s relevant to us as people, but maybe not musically.”

“It’s not like we’re in the music personally,” counters Romy. “We just wanted to be people doing it separately. We never wanted to be that band with a face before the music. We’re putting ourselves out of it and the music is what it is.”

You can see why it does intrigue people - because the music draws you in, but there’s that certain step that has to stay hidden...

“Oh definitely, I can definitely see why it’s interesting.”

Romy flicks her fringe, smiles awkwardly.

“It’s just er, I dunno...”

Something you wanna keep back?

“Yeah, it’s just something we’d rather not project. The songs are anyone’s, you know?”

She shrugs and holds out the faces of her palms, referring once again to that desire to draw people in. People get confused when they don’t know where the sex is, though. Have you ever had boyfriends or girlfriends who’ve been threatened by the closeness of your relationship?

“No, I think it’s very much a friendship,” says Romy.

“I’ve got an older sister,” Oliver explains, “it’s very much the same kind of relationship.”

So how long have you two known each other?

“Since nursery,” says Oliver. “Since we were about three, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, 17 years.”

“17 years.” Oliver again. “Wow. Our parents were friends. You know when your parents are friends and they try to push their kids together? Good choice mum made. We went to primary school, secondary school, sixth form and now this. We’ve been side-by-side most of our lives.”

Haven’t there been times when you’ve drifted apart, belonged to different peer groups? Have you always been best friends?

“Yeah,” says Oliver.

“Yeah,”says Romy.

“Always,” says Oliver.

That’s pretty amazing.

“Yeah,” says Oliver, then laughs.

“It’s nice to have somebody that you’ve been through so much together with,” says Romy.

So a track like ‘VCR’ (lyrics: “You, you still have all the answers / And you, you still have them too / And we, we live half in the day time / And we, we live half at night / Watch things on VCRs, with me and talk about big love / I think we’re superstars, you say you think we are the best thing / But you, you just know, you just do”) - that’s not about the two of you?

They look at each other.

“Well ‘VCR’, you instigated that song,” says Oliver.

“Yeah, well, ‘VCR’ is, y’know, I wrote it when I was 16 and it means something to me now that it maybe didn’t mean then.”

Romy continues: “They come from so far back, those lyrics. I can connect with them a bit more now. Things that have happened to me... I want people to listen to it and be able to adapt it to their own lives, ’cause that’s what I’ve always done with music I’ve loved. And I kind of don’t want to know everything about the songs I love. I prefer to keep it that way, keep it a bit of a mystery so people can have it as their song.”

But there’s never a ‘them’ in the lyrics, Romy - there’s never anyone there apart from the two of you and whomever you’re singing to, usually lost and slightly beleaguered on this harsh, minimal landscape your music conjures up. It does seem very direct. That thing you do, maybe, when you’re in love and everyone else is unimportant, so mentally you cut them out of the world...

“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” she says. “I mean, yeah, it is like everyone else is shut out. I like that our voices and our lyrics cross over and don’t exactly meet.”

The xx have said in the past that they got their name just fucking about on Microsoft Word, but I’m going to ignore that and point out how the axes of each ‘x’ work in a similar way to those narratives spun by the singing pair, crossing over at points, resting and reliant, but each, ultimately, holding another at bay. There are times when The xx sound quite like other people - like The Kills, The Cure, Chromatics and Young Marble Giants; Chris Isaak, Everything But The Girl, Rihanna and Mario Winans. But there’s never a single moment when the intimacy sounds anything other than their own, because the contradiction at the heart of that intimacy - the “dazzlingly logical and extreme” thing that ultimately limits it and prevents Romy and Oliver from going beyond ‘arm to shoulder’ - is so unique.

The source of all The xx’s empathy and tension is the relationship between their singers. Each is an x holding the other at bay, repelling ends of twin magnets, keeping a lid on it all, protective of that awkward, simmering and unsaid thing like small talk at a dinner party, or pubic hair.

The four of them are out on Brighton Pier, trying to keep stony-faces fixed for posed photos. The weather is pretty terrible. A wind’s got up and is toying with Romy’s fringe, and squawking arcade machines don’t help the quest for seriousness. Smiles lurk just beneath the surface and they emerge when a gaggle of kids - slightly awkward, early teens - approach, asking, “Are you The xx?” They get their photo taken with the band and briefly everyone seems happy about it, before the goofy teens lollop off with their disposable camera and Romy, Oliver, Jamie and Baria troop back to the venue.

It’s the last time Baria will play with her bandmates. The next day she bails on a show at the Village Underground back in London citing exhaustion, Oliver explaining from the stage that it’d been “a really tough few days for us” and that “this is the first time we’ve played as a three piece. It’s devastating not having Baria here with us but you all being here has made us feel better. Thank you very much.”

She’s quiet the night before in Brighton, not once approaching the dictaphone as Oliver talks about how the touring has “gone steep onto another level - more and more and more and more, further and further away from home”. He talks, too, about the 12 shows they played - around three a day - earlier in the week at New York’s industry marathon CMJ, describing them as “good” but “really intense”.

You can’t help but feel the last four months on tour contrast starkly with the four years previous spent writing and recording xx in their bedrooms, and at their label XL’s in-house studio. Did they invite too many people in, too quickly?

Backstage, again, in Brighton: if you were to go back to those quiet days you had before, would that be OK? Or would you miss what’s happening now?

“All I want now is to go back to that,” says Romy. “I crave that. I crave it so badly. [gesturing at Jamie] But we discussed this - you came home and said you sat down for five minutes on the sofa and were bored. So I think if I had a week of it and went back to touring that’d be ideal for me. Just to pause and reflect on things. I think we’re all quite slow people, and things have got faster around us.”

Baria Qureshi by Mattia Zoppellaro

A few days of rest later, I call Oliver to ask about Baria’s departure. He seems more upbeat.

“We’re a three-piece now. We’ve been in a band with Baria since we were 16 and known her since we were 12,” he says, (the four of them first met at Elliot comprehensive school in Putney, which also counts Burial, Four Tet and Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor among its alumni).

“It’s just been a case of, I suppose, growing apart? It’s a big jump from 13-years-old to 20. I think we’ve just grown into different people and I don’t believe touring was for her, really.

“It’s been ridiculously sad, but I’m quite looking forward to seeing what spawns from here. For the first time in a long time we sat and worked, jamming in a rehearsal space trying to build up the live set again and have moved a bit further away from the album, after a stage of just reciting it.

“I feel like we’re going somewhere else now - being a bit more creative, trying to put on a bit more of a show.”

Putting on a show doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would come naturally to The xx, but then how would I know what’s happening inside their skulls? Perhaps the biggest mistake was thinking that they might know themselves, that they might understand what it is they’re awkwardly feeling their way towards, because for all their intimacy, The xx ultimately seem a band as unknowable as the algebra of their name.

Back to the drawing board, Desmond.

We live in dark times, but there’s hope for us yet according to the wise words of RICHARD HAWLEY

Words by HAZEL SHEFFIELD Photo by Richie Hopson

There’s a lyric on Richard Hawley’s new album Truelove’s Gutter, that ends: “...blundered into the abyss.” Is that where we are, the abyss? Two-and-a-half million unemployed; our little island lagging behind all the bigger fishes and fatter cats in the semi-recovering global economy; clinging onto other people’s politicians and our own half-remembered glory days. If that’s where we are, then blunder we did.

Only he wasn’t talking about the economy, or politics, or society. He was talking about falling in love. And that’s the thing about Hawley: big things have gone to shit - Britain has forgotten what it is, where it’s going - but there are still voices of reason out there. Hawley’s one of them. His sixth solo LP doesn’t directly reference the recession, but dashed hopes, damaged dreams and half-forgotten ambitions penetrate every weird sound and subtle lyric of its 51 minutes. His songs aren’t about boom and bust but, he says, “The fall-out of that, I suppose, and the way that people get caught up in it. My family was deeply affected by the last major recession with the closure of the steel works. It cost my parents their marriage.”

That’s what it comes down to. Not statistics and politics, but the people you love and the streets you tread, and that’s something that Hawley has never forgotten. “My family has lived [in Sheffield] for 150 years, you know,” he says. “We live in a very transient, migratory age, but I really, really am rooted in Sheffield, and that’s important to me. Not in a stick-in-the-mud kind of way, but because I know why I’m here.”

Hawley’s never made a secret of his love for his hometown. His Mercury-nominated fourth album, Cole’s Corner, told the story of one of the city’s famous meeting places, while Truelove’s Gutter is the ancient name of Sheffield’s Castle Street, so-called after Thomas Truelove, an inn-keeper there. “The juxtaposition of the two names seems to sum the record up perfectly,” he offers by explanation. He also produced Tony Christie’s Made In Sheffield album from last year.

Hawley’s father was a steel worker, his stepfather a miner, so he’s well placed to remind people of a time when community still existed and work was anchored to identity. “It’s the people I love more than anything,” he says of the city. “When the steel works were open people lived really hard lives, but they had a right good sense of humour - very self-deprecating, not taking yourself too seriously. And people would definitely stick together, you know?”

The people Hawley writes about on Truelove’s Gutter came unstuck. They lost themselves in the mire of modernity, and forgot where they came from. In ‘Don’t Get Hung Up In Your Soul’, Hawley recounts the story of a friend who spent a lot of time in institutions for mental problems because she found it safer there than being out in the world. “You have to know something before you can really sing about it,” he explains. “It’s not about holding onto things for the sake of it, it’s about holding onto things because they mean something. And I think that’s the point. Because once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”

He speaks of how he takes his children to see the old steel works where their grandfather, the late Dave Hawley, worked, and about the museum in Sheffield dedicated to the industry. “In 20 years’ time or even 10 years’ time I can’t imagine there being a call centre museum, can you?” And then, laughing: “‘This is where I plug my modem in, this is where I charge my mobile...’ Do you know what I mean?”

Coming from anyone else, it might seem worthy: a successful musician championing the working class. But Hawley’s done his time. His career started when he was still at school, in a band called Treebound Story. When they broke up, he found success with nineties Britpop act The Longpigs, and then, seven years later, with fellow Sheffield natives, Pulp. “The ideas for a lot of the solo stuff had kind of been fermenting in my mind for a long time,” he says. “I wasn’t frustrated or anything, I was more than happy sat at the back watching someone else singing. But it just got to the point where I was 32-years-old... and now I’ve been making solo albums for a decade. That’s longer than I was ever with any of my bands. I was completely shocked where I ended up and it completely threw me - I never expected that at all. But the music’s mine to be made. I’m sick of music being made for commercial purposes. I think that music can serve a different purpose.”

For Hawley, music is his trade, just as much as steel was for his ancestors.

“Music is a craft,” he explains. “If you pick up an instrument to become famous and rich, more than likely you will be very sorely disappointed. But if you pick it up because you love it... I’m very clear about what I set out to do and I’ve never lost that.”

He goes on: “At a time like this it’s not great commercial sense to make an album full of 10-minute strung-out pieces of music. But I don’t think it’s the time either for creative characters just to play it safe and play the game. That’s another thing that’s important for me as well: to make a record where I stretch myself as a writer, musician and producer.”

Truelove’s Gutter still features that same molten vocal that earned Hawley a reputation as ‘the Elvis of the north’, but this time it’s soundtracked by a whole host of instruments so unusual they could almost be made up: the glass harmonica, musical saw, megabass waterphone and crystal baschet. What should sound, from this description, like some kind of hellish modernist racket, actually rumbles and glides with similar classical precision as his previous work. It’s testament to the man’s propensity for integrating innovation and tradition.

Hawley’s a man who’ll remind you just where you came from, and why things went awry. But he’ll also tell you that now, more than ever, is the time to push on with the future. “At the time I decided that I wanted to make music as a way of making a living, things were a bit like they are now. You’re not going to say, ‘Don’t do that, get a job,’ because where are the fucking jobs!? You might as well do something that you believe in.”

Click here for details of Richard Hawley's UK tour this Autumn.