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Day: 15 February 2013

Interview: Django Django

“I don’t think anyone’s ever thought of us as a headlining band,” laughs drummer and producer David Maclean. We’re sitting on the Django Django tour bus outside the Academy, ahead of the NME Awards Tour’s traditional Friday night in Manchester, and the politely-paused Xbox game and tightly-clenched cup of tea hardly suggest that the Edinburgh outfit have chosen to embrace their newly-found bill-topping status in classic rock n’ roll, coke n’ strippers fashion. “You’ve got no choice but to step up and put on a proper show. It was a big boost to see the place packed out in Newcastle last night; with three other bands on, you can’t be sure everyone’s there to see you.”

Maclean seems incredibly self-effacing, but perhaps it’s a characteristic born of the band’s atypical origins as compared to the rest of tonight’s lineup. Miles Kane, Palma Violets and Peace have all started out at a pretty young age, but – while hardly dinosaurs – it took a little longer for Django Django to take shape. “We all met a while ago now, at art college in Edinburgh. It wasn’t until around 2005 or 2006 that we all ended up moving to London for different reasons. When we did meet up again and reconnected, we decided to finally do what we’d talked about as far back as 1998, and start a band. I guess we were a long time in the making.”

Not that they were the fully fleshed-out outfit that they are now right from the off; Maclean reveals that things originated as a straight collaboration between himself and singer-guitarist Vincent Neff. “In the beginning, it was just me producing Vinnie’s songs. Musically, the core of the band comes from he and I bonding over a lot of the same influences, really. We’ve both always been very much into 60s pop, and garage and psychedelia; it all comes down to the likes of The Beatles and The Beach Boys. We’ve both got our own influences too; personally, I’m into a lot of house and hip hop, and I think it was a combination of shared and individual influences that shaped the first songs we were recording.”

The disparity between the tightness of the Django Django live show – sonic sharpness married with crisp visuals and matching stage shirts – and their early releases couldn’t be more gaping, and translating bedroom recordings to a live environment was arguably the biggest challenge the band have faced to date. “It was really difficult,” says Maclean. “Everything was bare bones on those singles, because you’re in a tiny bedroom with no room to do anything; to make the songs viable live, you have to work backwards – it’s a very methodical process.  We’d like to have layers upon layers of sound onstage, but the only way to do that is to use laptops, which we definitely don’t want to resort to – things stop being live when you bring in computers. We just relied on stripping things back and making them as bombastic as possible – we’ve made the dancey bits really dancey and the rock n roll bits really frenzied, and it seems to work.”

Much has been made of the band’s admiration of spaghetti westerns – indeed, they named themselves after one such film, Django, which served as the inspiration for Tarantino’s latest effort – but Maclean divulges that the impact of the genre was accidental. “It just seemed to happen subconsciously. A lot of the songs we’d written acoustically just came out sounding like those tracks that Bob Dylan did, that were steeped in that spaghetti western sound. It was just coincidental that the music led us in a direction that myself and Vinnie were both really interested in.”

Initial underground success led to the opportunity to sign with a number of labels, with French imprint Because Music winning the race. “As a group, I think the thing that attracted us to Because was seeing our friends in Metronomy going there and doing well and enjoying a great relationship with them,” says Maclean, “but personally, I found it really exciting that they understood all the references I was making, especially in terms of dance music because they’ve worked with the likes of Daft Punk and Justice. They’re really laidback as well, so it was nice to know we could go into the studio with few constraints.”

2012 was unquestionably the band’s breakthrough year, with their self-titled debut meeting with rapturous acclaim critically, including a Mercury Prize nomination, and a surprising level of commercial success, especially for Maclean. “I was convinced this was going to be a totally underground record, maybe we’d make and sell two thousand copies. It was really weird, to be honest. When (lead single) ‘Default’ came out, things just seemed to go up a notch.” The support of the NME, the culmination of which is tonight’s headline slot, clearly played no small part, and my suggestion that they maybe just saw the endless opportunities for Django Unchained puns is heartily dismissed: “we can honestly say they’ve been there right from the start, they were talking about us right back when we were bringing out (debut single) ‘Storm/Love’s Dart’ in 2009. They’ve been great to us, so it wasn’t a surprise to us to be asked to be part of this tour; it was just a surprise to be asked to headline.”

The first act I ever saw play on an NME tour, to a very modest crowd at this same venue four years ago, now sells out arenas, headlines festivals and seems ubiquitous on the airwaves on both sides of the Atlantic. Florence and the Machine are just one of a slew of artists who had their big break on this national jaunt, and Maclean casts a comically gloomy outlook on his own band’s prospects. “I was looking back at some of the old lineups, and it seems like it’s always the openers who go onto big things,” – Coldplay and Franz Ferdinand have also filled that slot in the past. “The headliners are the ones that nobody remembers,” he laughs, apparently  himself forgetting about The Killers, The Cribs and Two Door Cinema Club. “We’d never met any of the other acts before last night, but those guys in Palma Violets and Peace – you know they’re gonna be huge. The very fact they’re here tonight tells you that.”

Whatever comes next for Django Django, we’re not likely to hear it for a while yet. “We’ve got bits and bobs down already, but ultimately we’re miles off another record at this stage,” says Maclean. “We never considered trying to introduce anything new on this tour. Most of the crowds just won’t know us well enough. It’s just gonna be a sort-of festival set – we’ll give it an hour of our best, and hope that’s enough to win people over,” he says, with a sheepish grin that’s certainly endearing, if hardly becoming of a headliner of such a famous institution. “I guess we’ll see what happens.”

Django Django headline the NME Awards Tour until February 23. ‘Django Django’ is available now via Because Music

Interview: Frightened Rabbit

“I think we had a bit of an identity crisis on the last record.” Scott Hutchison is referring to The Winter of Mixed Drinks, the third Frightened Rabbit album, which was a hit with the critics but seemed to fly under the radar commercially, failing to deliver on the promise of mainstream success that its predecessor, The Midnight Organ Fight, hinted at.

Plenty’s changed in the three years since; the Selkirk band have finally made the indie-to-major label crossover, making Atlantic Records their new home, and frontman Hutchison divulges that the switch allowed them to make a clean break as far as their approach to making music was concerned. “I don’t think we really knew what kind of album we wanted to make with Mixed Drinks, whereas with the new record we’ve achieved what we set out to do. There was a lot more collaboration in the writing process – we wanted to actually sound like a band this time round – and lyrically, I was keen to go back to the more personal stuff I was writing on the earlier records.”

This vision has brought the band their first top ten album with Pedestrian Verse, which charted at number nine in the week of release, and Hutchison is confident that the change in approach was key. “We’d actually never recorded live as a five-piece before; we’d usually start with the drums and sort of layer the songs upwards from there. It took longer and there’s obviously some overdubs, but the core of each song was recorded live and you can’t really get achieve that energy any other way.”

Pedestrian Verse also sees Hutchison return to the more personal lyrical style that served as his signature pre-Mixed Drinks. “I think I suddenly became aware of revealing too much; when you’re writing songs in your bedroom, you’re kind of in a vacuum because you’ve got no audience. Once you do find yourself with an audience, you’re thinking, “fuck, I’m not sure if I should be so revealing about myself, I don’t want to hurt certain people who might end up hearing this.”” That diversion, though, is something he felt ran contrary to what Frightened Rabbit represent: “I think you’re compromising yourself as a songwriter if you start censoring yourself in that way. It really watered down what the band is about. It might seem selfish, but lyrics are often the best way for me to make sense of what’s going on in my life.”

The passion and honesty that drive the band lyrically is reflected in the ardent response of their fanbase, with whom the songs clearly strike an emotional chord. “I don’t think I could ever be blasé about how into the songs the crowds seem to be,” says Hutchison. “Where a lot of the older songs are concerned, the original sentiment that inspired me to write them isn’t there anymore, and you realise that they’ve become more about the reaction from the vans; it’s like the band have become a vehicle for the crowd’s catharsis. In that respect, they’re not really my songs these days.”

Mixed Drinks seemed to meet with greater commercial success across the pond, certainly in terms of the live circuit, with a clear disparity between the sizes of the venues the band were selling out on either side of the Atlantic. “I think we’ve bridged that gap to some extent now, although I’m not entirely sure why things started moving quicker for us over there,” confesses Hutchison. “There’s definitely a great affection for Scottish music over there, especially on the east coast in places like Boston, where there’s a lot of Celtic heritage – I think that maybe allowed us a faster track than maybe an English band would have. A lot of my influences when I started writing songs were American, like Wilco and Ryan Adams, so maybe the audiences over there picked up on that, too.”

Even the nicest guys have breaking points, and for Hutchison, his came after a string of American journalists repeatedly compared Frightened Rabbit to Mumford and Sons. It’s an association so absurd that it borders on offensive – contrived, calculated and emotionally void, Mumford and Sons are an ‘indie-folk’ band as Simon Cowell would envisage one – and Hutchison, quoted by the NME as having said he ‘fucking hated’ the waistcoat-botherers, reveals he drew tired of discussing the link. “I’d been in a stream of interviews and in every single one, that band came up. I suppose I can hear it in places, but overall it’s not a very valid comparison. I’m trying not to talk about it now, in case I get in trouble,” he laughs. He also stood by his view that “it’s it’s a huge insult to someone who’s invested in the band to give them more of the same”, on the basis that “I think you owe it to an audience that’s followed you to at least make an effort to evolve on the next record.”

The evolution apparent on Pedestrian Verse is due in no small part to the band’s move to Atlantic. “People assume you have less creative freedom once you’re on a major, but if anything, moving to Atlantic has been liberating for us. Having a bit of money for once has allowed us to make a huge step forward creatively; we could afford to go away together for a few weeks and work on nothing but the record. Even things as simple as not having to worry about having a day job can be really freeing in that respect. A lot of things have changed since we signed, but none have been negative.”

A tour of obscure towns in the Scottish Highlands was used to sharpen the songs before Pedestrian Verse was recorded, with the trip documented in the form of Here: The Highlands Film. “A lot of bands I admired, like Idlewild and Biffy Clyro, had done that kind of tour, and spending so much time surrounded by beautiful scenery and playing to crowds that usually wouldn’t get to see us was obviously a positive experience all round,” recalls Hutchison. “I mean, I suppose we might not paint the most flattering picture of Scotland at times,” he laughs, “so it was nice to show people there’s another side to it, too.”

Pedestrian Verse is out now on Atlantic Records. Frightened Rabbit play Gorilla on February 22 – sold out.

Fuse: A Barbershop Project

Barbershop. What comes to mind when you hear that word? A quartet of older men in striped waistcoats and straw hats singing Goodbye My Coney Island Baby or Hello, My Baby? If you’ve ever been to a Disney resort and seen their resident quartet, The Dapper Dans, that may be why. But nowadays, that sort of image isn’t representative of barbershop, and it’s events like Fuse, which took place last weekend in Sheffield, which aim to bring in a new generation of barbershop singers.

The aim of the event was to give young people a chance to sing barbershop in a fun environment, whether they’d been singing for years or just wanted to give it a go. These are similar principles to the now defunct National Barbershop Youth Chorus (NBYC), which last year ceased its operations due to the fact that the model of asking members to travel to several different rehearsal venues across the country every year was not conducive to regular high attendances.

However, Zac Booles, a former NBYC member and member of the 2008 all-NBYC British Quartet Champions Monkey Magic (now known as The Great British Barbershop Boys), knew that British barbershop still needed an event for young singers, albeit in a different format.

Explaining the new approach, Zac said “Fuse is NBYC rising from the ashes, but with a few changes. Instead of having several rehearsals a year, we’re just going to have one full day a year and try and get as many people who have no, a little, or a lot of barbershop experience to come along and just have a good time”.

The main focus of the day, for which there were almost 30 young singers in attendance, was learning an Aaron Dale arrangement of the 1946 Mills Brothers song, Don’t Be a Baby, Baby. Under the direction of two-time British Quartet Champion Duncan Whinyates, progress was quickly made through the day to turn the song into a performable number. The day was divided up into section rehearsals, to sort out notes, and full chorus sessions, to create ensemble musicality and choreography, and there was plenty of time for a few fun and games as well.

One of these is tag singing. For those of you who don’t know much barbershop jargon, the tag is the bit after the end of the main song which brings the whole song to a close, similar to a coda in classical music. Traditionally, barbershoppers would only sing tags of well-known songs, but nowadays many tags are written completely independently of arranged songs, and tag teaching is a good, quick way for four singers who don’t know each other to sing something together. Among the tags that were taught and sung on the day were “Never Knew You”, whose melody comes from a song from Pocahontas, and “Help Me Say Goodbye”, which was written by Zac, who is well known in the barbershop community for his tags and arrangements.

By the end of the day, Don’t Be a Baby was at a fine performance standard, and Joe White, bass of last year’s quartet silver medallists Mach 4, said “I’ve never seen a piece of music come together so fast in my life”.

Plans are already in motion for next year. Bristol has been announced as the next venue, to take advantage of the already active youth barbershop scene at the University of Bristol. If you want to find out more about barbershop, or join the university’s chorus (there are separate choruses for both men and women), then go to the Manchester University Barbershop Chorus page for more information.

5 songs in the field of: Birth

Bright Eyes – First Day of My Life

The first day of anyone’s life isn’t pleasant; neither for mother or child. The mother has the terrible pain of child birth, and then the baby pops out to be greeted by a load of red tape and bureaucracy. No sooner have you took your first breath, the hospital mob are all over you.

Dianna Ross – I’m Coming Out

Recalling our time in the womb is often difficult, but that’s not to say impossible. Some people recall the experience as unbearable and mind numbingly boring, and consequently chose to exit their temporary accommodation earlier than anticipated, showing a real independence (for a fetus).

Morrissey – November Spawned a Monster

We’re all familiar with the phrase ‘a face only a mother could love’, but the beauty of being Morrissey is that you can comment on children objectively. Although It’s not universally acknowledged that births in November lead to a high percentage of monsters, it is however definitely something worth looking in to.

Salt n Pepper – Push It

The wards of hospitals all around the world echo with these infamous words.  Although I’m sure Salt n Pepper weren’t suggesting we call nearly born fetus’ ‘it’, I think musically they felt it had more of a ring to it as opposed to ‘push him/her’.

Muse – Super Massive Black Hole

Can you imagine the horror; your wife’s gone into labour, you rush her to the hospital, she’s having contractions – she is going to give birth! The midwife spreads her legs apart, and woosh! She’s gone. Consumed by a human black hole – what are the chances?