The Stool Pigeon

Words Gareth Dobson

Given the rather authoritarian state of French radio and their strict quotas of French-language-only music, to be a band singing in English and complementing it with a sweet, West Coast-style sound is to cast yourself as somewhat of an outsider.

Possibly it’s a tag that Coming Soon relish. The band, who hail from the very un-French-sounding Kidderminster, are an eight-headed beast that’s more a bucolic collective of songwriters and muses than a last-gang style rock’n’roll troupe.

“For us, it’s a little more easy,” muses Howard Hughes, one of the main contributors to Coming Soon. “There are couple of bands in France who already sing in English, like Moriarty, and we did the collabs together. It was very natural. [English] goes along with the style of rock’n’roll and folk. It goes with the rhythms and the beautiful rhymes of Bob Dylan.”

“The record we made should be in English,” he continues. “We want people to read our booklets and enjoy the lyrics. If it’s understandable, that’s even better for us. It’s like Dracula when he came to England. He had a plan.”

New Grids, Coming Soon’s debut album is a fine thing. A sweet sounding record that takes in Americana, folk, anti-folk and good old rock’n’roll, it’s also tinged, like all the best records, with something a little darker. “It is, yes,” agrees Hughes, “it’s joyful and sad at the same time - tainted by melancholy.”

Recorded in a week in a run-down old house in the countryside, it inadvertently brought out the anti-naturists in them: “We all had the worst allergies and everyone was sick,” says Hughes. “If you listen to the record, you can even hear the flies flying in the air.” But still, like all first records should be, it was all about “the joy of the labour of a first album - we did everything by ourselves”.

And indeed, Coming Soon are all about the strength of the collective. Always excited by the prospect of others, they themselves were formed by “melting” other existing bands together. Current faves are The Wave Pictures, with whom they plan to play with in Paris sometime this autumn; something they’ve already done here in the UK. “It was a beautiful experience,” says Hughes, “but it was like solving a murder mystery too fast. After that, we were so happy we didn’t know what to do with ourselves.”

In terms of dream collaborations, Hughes picks Nick Cave. “We really need to write better songs first, though,” he declares. That’s another thing about Coming Soon; they’re very modest guys too.

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