INTERVIEW: Wild Beasts (March 2010)
I think it’s fair to say that no single band in memory has caused me to perform such a violent about-turn as Kendal’s weird and wonderful Wild Beasts. Upon first listen, they met with such flat-out abhorrence that I immediately deemed them one of the most humourless, ugly-sounding, pompous and downright appalling bands I’d ever heard. Central to their unrepentant Marmite status is Hayden Thorpe’s whooping, swooping falsetto – a wildly unrestrained display of vocal embellishment so strident that it threatens to scupper any chance of unsuspecting newcomers delving past their immediate surface.
Genuinely baffled by the heaps of critical praise being lavished upon their sophomore album Two Dancers, I forced myself to keep going to back to them in an attempt to fathom just what it was that seemed to be getting reviewers so hot under the collar. Sure enough, as time wore on, I found myself being gradually seduced by their liquid, percussive instrumentation, intricate arrangements and melting vocals, eventually conceding that Two Dancers was, in fact, a serious contender for best album of 2009.
It was only then that I was able to see just how wrong I’d been: the band’s inspired transformations of musical whimsy into delirious flights of fancy are alternately hilarious, sombre, outlandish, subtle, introverted and flamboyant - sometimes all at once. To quote part of their debut album’s title, in many respects they’re pure panto – yet, beneath all the hooting and howling there exists real depth, soul and art, most fully revealed in tracks like the magnificent Two Dancers (i) and All the King’s Men, two of the finest pieces of songwriting to emerge in recent years.
I chatted with Hayden and Benny from the band when they played at Warwick Students’ Union in March 2010, just prior to Two Dancers being nominated for (and, in any other year, robbed of) last year’s Mercury Music Prize. Suffice to say, I think an apology and an explanation is in order…
Well, first of all, congratulations on being the only band to have ever done a 360-degree turnaround on me…
HAYDEN: [Laughs] Thank you!
So my first question is probably one you’ve been asked dozens of times before – how did you arrive at the overall sound of the band, particularly with regard to your vocals?
HAYDEN: I think the vocals are pretty much representative of our whole philosophy in a sense, in that we try to be as uninhibited and expressive as we can be, you know, and the vocals are one of the more immediately obvious features of that. I think in general we try and be as loose, in a sense… without doing ourselves down, we’re most excited when we’re unhinged, in a way. And in that sense, we don’t quite know what constitutes our sound – we don’t really quite want to know ourselves, and therein lies the magic.
Did you ever say to yourself, “This is how I want to sing”, or was that just the way it ended up emerging against the rest of the band?
HAYDEN: Well, I was talking in an interview earlier about Kendal, where we grew up and me and Benny started the band, and I think maybe Kendal has a very suppressive atmosphere – I think at that age, everyone feels oppressed, and I think the band, certainly for us when we first started, was a way of sort of ‘freeing’ ourselves and being as crazy as we could be. You know, not crazy in a stupid way, but in a sort of expressive way, in a very life-affirming way – and I think the vocals maybe stem from that. The words and our collective songwriting developed at the same time as the singing.
So everything was kind of ‘built around’ that fixed point.
BENNY: Yeah, absolutely. The first record kind of slowly built, and we’re still slowly building, you know? We’ve taken the long way round and taken that professional route – we’ve learned and learned and learned.
What’s your musical background, Hayden – have you had any vocal training?
HAYDEN: No – it’s quite split in a sense, in that Tom and Chris both have had musical upbringings, professionally, as in both their parents are music teachers, and for me and Benny it’s a sort of different matter, we’re more… instinctive in a sense. I don’t know how much to say about it, but there is that element of ‘the learned versus the instinctive’. I don’t know, maybe as a balance that works for us.
The last record [Limbo, Panto] seemed to be just a straightforward collection of songs, whereas this one seems to be more ‘built from the ground up’ – the percussion in particular is not so much part of the arrangement but more the structural basis of the track.
BENNY: Yeah, it’s the central point, almost.
Was the writing process quite different for this album?
HAYDEN: Yeah - I think, in inverted commas, ‘a groove’ was a discovery for us. It was like, it’s almost like a dirty thing for a band when you discover you can groove - you know, in a weird way, it’s almost like a bit wrong! But we discovered that if you can sort of win the body, you can win the mind; I think before that we’d always been winning the mind and then the body.
BENNY: It’s kind of moving away from the shame that’s attached to that.
I definitely got that feel from this record, that it is very instinctive – it just kind of slides around…
HAYDEN: Well, Chris as a drummer, we allowed him more space – when he first came to the band we allowed him a floor tom as a bass, and a snare, and he had to work with that. Now he’s got bongos and he’s got woodblocks, cowbells… all sorts of shit!
BENNY: When you see his drum kit you think, “Oh…” – a lot of drummers think he’s going to be terrible, and then what he does is that!
I was watching him in soundcheck earlier, and I was genuinely intrigued as to how it was going to be performed live – whether he’d be using synthesised drum patterns or not. But he was doing it all!
HAYDEN: Yeah! Well, we call him the octopus drummer – you don’t know where the arms are coming from to hit the things…
The record itself has a much greater ‘album’ feel than its predecessor, and features recurring motifs all the way through. Did that come out of the recording process, or was it written as one complete body of work?
HAYDEN: Our idea initially was to have a complete running album that didn’t stop – but that was too much of an undertaking in the end, too restrictive. But we definitely wanted recurring themes; we wanted it to run more like a novel where things come and go, and you can reference things. I think to achieve that we needed a locatable start and end, whereas the first record, we don’t know where we started it – we know where we ended it, but we sort of started it before we ‘knew’ it, you know. So we needed to start with an agenda. But also, the more we learned, the more we realised we don’t have to use our knowledge, in a sense – we allowed chance and accidental things to guide us. And that was a big leap of faith when you realise actually, okay, we’re comfortable enough now to not be in control, and we sort of liked that.
On the first album – particularly on a track like The Club of Fathomless Love – it’s all very ‘upfront’, but on Two Dancers (i) there’s a lot more audible space, almost creating a subconscious, dreamy feel. Was that something you designed, or did the producer guide you that way in the studio?
HAYDEN: Well, I think the first record, particularly songs like Club, we were actually making pop – and that’s the crazy thing looking back now, even ourselves, we think “That’s not pop – that’s avant-garde pop”, you know?!
BENNY: The thing is with the first album that we played the songs over and over when we were rehearsing them, and even when we were recording them we were playing them, like, fifty times, and it was more about getting the right take. Whereas the second album it was more like – yeah, like Hayden said, left to chance and more spontaneous; we let things come out in the studio a bit more rather than being so restricted and formulaic.
To that end, has it been difficult to translate those arrangements into your live set?
HAYDEN: Um, no, because the foundations for all the songs on Two Dancers were done live – you know, that was a big thing for us, because with the first record… We talk about the first record a lot when we talk about the second record, because the first record taught us everything we knew, and that translates to the second record. It’s like when a carpenter makes a chair – all the jagged mistakes that he made on the first chair are sort of eradicated on the second chair, and it’s more smooth, and the wood’s less splintery – and that’s the way I see it on the second record. You know, we were less… angry, we were more composed. Like a lot of bands, your first record, you expect to be this all-conquering manifesto that explains you in half an hour, but I think we found too much to say to quite get it out. And the second record is the sound of us being a lot more able to ‘speak’.
In many of the reviews I’ve read, there seems to be quite an element of surprise – this is not what people expected to emerge from the band based on the sound of your first album. In that respect, you seem to have taken the opposite route and just now made an album that says, “This is the direction we really want to go in”.
HAYDEN: Well, the second record is what it was at the time, and the third record will be – I think all the best art, all my favourite albums and all our favourite albums in general, are a snapshot of that time. That’s the only thing you can do; you can’t... It’s like, a great picture captures that moment, and that’s what the album is for us - I think we were in a good place when we made the album, mentally… Well! [Laughs] You could argue that was a bad place, but maybe that’s what makes good art, I don’t know…!
I wanted to ask you about your sense of humour – my first mistake when I heard the band was to think it was all very serious, but actually there’s far more to it than that. This album in particular is very wry, whereas with the first album the clue is in the title – it’s panto. Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants always gives me the impression of a pantomime dame wobbling about going, “Oooof!”
BOTH: [Laughs]
It seems very literary-influenced, is that fair to say?
HAYDEN: Yes.
What sort of stuff feeds into your work?
HAYDEN: I think humour and the English language are amazing tools, you know – they’re something that you should empower you, rather than… you shouldn’t dumb it down. And I think humour is also essential in that it works as speed-dating in a sense – if you find someone funny, you’re far more likely to get along with them, you know? And you know, it’s a healthy thing we maybe turn to more because of our characters.
Are you happy with the split reaction from people? Everyone I play the band to seems to go one of two ways – half of them say, “This is genius” and the other half immediately goes: “Hell, no!”
BENNY: [Laughs]
HAYDEN: Which is fine! There’s this fear factor that, like, art or music in general isn’t supposed to confront people – it’s supposed to always be very user-friendly, very ‘easy’ and automatic. But we don’t want to be automatic – like, for you, it wasn’t automatic at all, really, it was like: “Wow”… And, you know, if people come to meet you and come to you, then you can give them so much more than if you’re just desperately trying to go to them, you know?
I think it’s fair to say you’re not really a band that Fearne Cotton is ever going to ‘get’…
HAYDEN: Actually, Fearne Cotton played our single on Radio 1 and read out that it was “gorgeous”, which was very nice of her…!
BENNY: [Laughs]
HAYDEN: But you know, I think we were idealists and we thought our music was going to take over Radio 1… [Laughs] But I think as we get older we realise that the beauty of our music is that it never will. We learn to draw strength from our greatest weakness, in a way.
Your label, Domino, had a terrific year in 2009 with bands like yourselves, Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors – how far do they influence the direction you’re allowed to take? Presumably they just ‘sign the artist’ and allow you to get on with things?
BENNY: Yeah, they’re in it for the long haul, you know.
Do you think that sort of relationship is key to where you want to go as a band?
BENNY: Sure, you know… they let us get on with it, they don’t call the shots. They’re not like other labels, with the micro-management that goes on.
Were you ever linked to a major at any point?
HAYDEN: I mean, it’s all bravado, isn’t it? We could say yes, we could say no! [Laughs] I dunno, like… the label didn’t matter to us when we signed to Domino. We got lucky; we could’ve signed to anyone – we really could have. For us, it was like when you buy a chocolate bar – you don’t look at the wrapper so much, you rip it open and you eat it; that’s how we sort of regarded albums. But we’ve never, ever been told what to do, never been told to tone anything down, always been egged on; so the fact that Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors had these proud, leftfield, strong American records last year helped endlessly when we went over to the States last month. Suddenly, it wasn’t this Anglophile underground thing in the States, it was this proud American contingent.
How did they take you over there?
BENNY: We were really shocked – the shows were all full, like most places in the UK.
Do you think they saw you more as a novelty, or an art band?
HAYDEN: Mmm… just an art band, I suppose.
I mean, presumably there’s no-one out there really doing what you’re doing…
HAYDEN: That was definitely a strength, that we’re not another English export – we’re not another ‘English band doing an American band’ sent back over to America. That was a strength. But like Benny said, the shows were full; actions speak louder than words. There were places very close to home - we’d go to places like Detroit and Minneapolis… It’s been really helpful going over there: I think it was slowly forging over here, and I think we’re out of the Dark Ages here more than personally I think we were a couple of years back. But out there, the more leftfield and the more outrageous we got, the more people wanted it, and that was something new to us! We’ve always had to figure out a strategy to tone it down and to be more user-friendly…
Finally then, where do you go from here? Have you written anything since this album came out, or started exploring where you want to go next?
HAYDEN: To be honest, no – I think for us, the writing process is our special thing, you know… it’s something we have to protect and look after and cherish, and I think for that reason we’ve kept it away from this ugly side of things. Because touring is brutal, on the mind and the body. And you have to be careful with writing - we have to keep it special and keep it protected, as opposed to… we’ve actually ring-fenced some time now which we’re working towards.
Sound-wise, is it shaping up to be Kid A? Is it going in that direction…?!
HAYDEN: Well, we haven’t made OK Computer yet!
Genuinely baffled by the heaps of critical praise being lavished upon their sophomore album Two Dancers, I forced myself to keep going to back to them in an attempt to fathom just what it was that seemed to be getting reviewers so hot under the collar. Sure enough, as time wore on, I found myself being gradually seduced by their liquid, percussive instrumentation, intricate arrangements and melting vocals, eventually conceding that Two Dancers was, in fact, a serious contender for best album of 2009.
It was only then that I was able to see just how wrong I’d been: the band’s inspired transformations of musical whimsy into delirious flights of fancy are alternately hilarious, sombre, outlandish, subtle, introverted and flamboyant - sometimes all at once. To quote part of their debut album’s title, in many respects they’re pure panto – yet, beneath all the hooting and howling there exists real depth, soul and art, most fully revealed in tracks like the magnificent Two Dancers (i) and All the King’s Men, two of the finest pieces of songwriting to emerge in recent years.
I chatted with Hayden and Benny from the band when they played at Warwick Students’ Union in March 2010, just prior to Two Dancers being nominated for (and, in any other year, robbed of) last year’s Mercury Music Prize. Suffice to say, I think an apology and an explanation is in order…
Well, first of all, congratulations on being the only band to have ever done a 360-degree turnaround on me…
HAYDEN: [Laughs] Thank you!
So my first question is probably one you’ve been asked dozens of times before – how did you arrive at the overall sound of the band, particularly with regard to your vocals?
HAYDEN: I think the vocals are pretty much representative of our whole philosophy in a sense, in that we try to be as uninhibited and expressive as we can be, you know, and the vocals are one of the more immediately obvious features of that. I think in general we try and be as loose, in a sense… without doing ourselves down, we’re most excited when we’re unhinged, in a way. And in that sense, we don’t quite know what constitutes our sound – we don’t really quite want to know ourselves, and therein lies the magic.
Did you ever say to yourself, “This is how I want to sing”, or was that just the way it ended up emerging against the rest of the band?
HAYDEN: Well, I was talking in an interview earlier about Kendal, where we grew up and me and Benny started the band, and I think maybe Kendal has a very suppressive atmosphere – I think at that age, everyone feels oppressed, and I think the band, certainly for us when we first started, was a way of sort of ‘freeing’ ourselves and being as crazy as we could be. You know, not crazy in a stupid way, but in a sort of expressive way, in a very life-affirming way – and I think the vocals maybe stem from that. The words and our collective songwriting developed at the same time as the singing.
So everything was kind of ‘built around’ that fixed point.
BENNY: Yeah, absolutely. The first record kind of slowly built, and we’re still slowly building, you know? We’ve taken the long way round and taken that professional route – we’ve learned and learned and learned.
What’s your musical background, Hayden – have you had any vocal training?
HAYDEN: No – it’s quite split in a sense, in that Tom and Chris both have had musical upbringings, professionally, as in both their parents are music teachers, and for me and Benny it’s a sort of different matter, we’re more… instinctive in a sense. I don’t know how much to say about it, but there is that element of ‘the learned versus the instinctive’. I don’t know, maybe as a balance that works for us.
The last record [Limbo, Panto] seemed to be just a straightforward collection of songs, whereas this one seems to be more ‘built from the ground up’ – the percussion in particular is not so much part of the arrangement but more the structural basis of the track.
BENNY: Yeah, it’s the central point, almost.
Was the writing process quite different for this album?
HAYDEN: Yeah - I think, in inverted commas, ‘a groove’ was a discovery for us. It was like, it’s almost like a dirty thing for a band when you discover you can groove - you know, in a weird way, it’s almost like a bit wrong! But we discovered that if you can sort of win the body, you can win the mind; I think before that we’d always been winning the mind and then the body.
BENNY: It’s kind of moving away from the shame that’s attached to that.
I definitely got that feel from this record, that it is very instinctive – it just kind of slides around…
HAYDEN: Well, Chris as a drummer, we allowed him more space – when he first came to the band we allowed him a floor tom as a bass, and a snare, and he had to work with that. Now he’s got bongos and he’s got woodblocks, cowbells… all sorts of shit!
BENNY: When you see his drum kit you think, “Oh…” – a lot of drummers think he’s going to be terrible, and then what he does is that!
I was watching him in soundcheck earlier, and I was genuinely intrigued as to how it was going to be performed live – whether he’d be using synthesised drum patterns or not. But he was doing it all!
HAYDEN: Yeah! Well, we call him the octopus drummer – you don’t know where the arms are coming from to hit the things…
The record itself has a much greater ‘album’ feel than its predecessor, and features recurring motifs all the way through. Did that come out of the recording process, or was it written as one complete body of work?
HAYDEN: Our idea initially was to have a complete running album that didn’t stop – but that was too much of an undertaking in the end, too restrictive. But we definitely wanted recurring themes; we wanted it to run more like a novel where things come and go, and you can reference things. I think to achieve that we needed a locatable start and end, whereas the first record, we don’t know where we started it – we know where we ended it, but we sort of started it before we ‘knew’ it, you know. So we needed to start with an agenda. But also, the more we learned, the more we realised we don’t have to use our knowledge, in a sense – we allowed chance and accidental things to guide us. And that was a big leap of faith when you realise actually, okay, we’re comfortable enough now to not be in control, and we sort of liked that.
On the first album – particularly on a track like The Club of Fathomless Love – it’s all very ‘upfront’, but on Two Dancers (i) there’s a lot more audible space, almost creating a subconscious, dreamy feel. Was that something you designed, or did the producer guide you that way in the studio?
HAYDEN: Well, I think the first record, particularly songs like Club, we were actually making pop – and that’s the crazy thing looking back now, even ourselves, we think “That’s not pop – that’s avant-garde pop”, you know?!
BENNY: The thing is with the first album that we played the songs over and over when we were rehearsing them, and even when we were recording them we were playing them, like, fifty times, and it was more about getting the right take. Whereas the second album it was more like – yeah, like Hayden said, left to chance and more spontaneous; we let things come out in the studio a bit more rather than being so restricted and formulaic.
To that end, has it been difficult to translate those arrangements into your live set?
HAYDEN: Um, no, because the foundations for all the songs on Two Dancers were done live – you know, that was a big thing for us, because with the first record… We talk about the first record a lot when we talk about the second record, because the first record taught us everything we knew, and that translates to the second record. It’s like when a carpenter makes a chair – all the jagged mistakes that he made on the first chair are sort of eradicated on the second chair, and it’s more smooth, and the wood’s less splintery – and that’s the way I see it on the second record. You know, we were less… angry, we were more composed. Like a lot of bands, your first record, you expect to be this all-conquering manifesto that explains you in half an hour, but I think we found too much to say to quite get it out. And the second record is the sound of us being a lot more able to ‘speak’.
In many of the reviews I’ve read, there seems to be quite an element of surprise – this is not what people expected to emerge from the band based on the sound of your first album. In that respect, you seem to have taken the opposite route and just now made an album that says, “This is the direction we really want to go in”.
HAYDEN: Well, the second record is what it was at the time, and the third record will be – I think all the best art, all my favourite albums and all our favourite albums in general, are a snapshot of that time. That’s the only thing you can do; you can’t... It’s like, a great picture captures that moment, and that’s what the album is for us - I think we were in a good place when we made the album, mentally… Well! [Laughs] You could argue that was a bad place, but maybe that’s what makes good art, I don’t know…!
I wanted to ask you about your sense of humour – my first mistake when I heard the band was to think it was all very serious, but actually there’s far more to it than that. This album in particular is very wry, whereas with the first album the clue is in the title – it’s panto. Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants always gives me the impression of a pantomime dame wobbling about going, “Oooof!”
BOTH: [Laughs]
It seems very literary-influenced, is that fair to say?
HAYDEN: Yes.
What sort of stuff feeds into your work?
HAYDEN: I think humour and the English language are amazing tools, you know – they’re something that you should empower you, rather than… you shouldn’t dumb it down. And I think humour is also essential in that it works as speed-dating in a sense – if you find someone funny, you’re far more likely to get along with them, you know? And you know, it’s a healthy thing we maybe turn to more because of our characters.
Are you happy with the split reaction from people? Everyone I play the band to seems to go one of two ways – half of them say, “This is genius” and the other half immediately goes: “Hell, no!”
BENNY: [Laughs]
HAYDEN: Which is fine! There’s this fear factor that, like, art or music in general isn’t supposed to confront people – it’s supposed to always be very user-friendly, very ‘easy’ and automatic. But we don’t want to be automatic – like, for you, it wasn’t automatic at all, really, it was like: “Wow”… And, you know, if people come to meet you and come to you, then you can give them so much more than if you’re just desperately trying to go to them, you know?
I think it’s fair to say you’re not really a band that Fearne Cotton is ever going to ‘get’…
HAYDEN: Actually, Fearne Cotton played our single on Radio 1 and read out that it was “gorgeous”, which was very nice of her…!
BENNY: [Laughs]
HAYDEN: But you know, I think we were idealists and we thought our music was going to take over Radio 1… [Laughs] But I think as we get older we realise that the beauty of our music is that it never will. We learn to draw strength from our greatest weakness, in a way.
Your label, Domino, had a terrific year in 2009 with bands like yourselves, Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors – how far do they influence the direction you’re allowed to take? Presumably they just ‘sign the artist’ and allow you to get on with things?
BENNY: Yeah, they’re in it for the long haul, you know.
Do you think that sort of relationship is key to where you want to go as a band?
BENNY: Sure, you know… they let us get on with it, they don’t call the shots. They’re not like other labels, with the micro-management that goes on.
Were you ever linked to a major at any point?
HAYDEN: I mean, it’s all bravado, isn’t it? We could say yes, we could say no! [Laughs] I dunno, like… the label didn’t matter to us when we signed to Domino. We got lucky; we could’ve signed to anyone – we really could have. For us, it was like when you buy a chocolate bar – you don’t look at the wrapper so much, you rip it open and you eat it; that’s how we sort of regarded albums. But we’ve never, ever been told what to do, never been told to tone anything down, always been egged on; so the fact that Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors had these proud, leftfield, strong American records last year helped endlessly when we went over to the States last month. Suddenly, it wasn’t this Anglophile underground thing in the States, it was this proud American contingent.
How did they take you over there?
BENNY: We were really shocked – the shows were all full, like most places in the UK.
Do you think they saw you more as a novelty, or an art band?
HAYDEN: Mmm… just an art band, I suppose.
I mean, presumably there’s no-one out there really doing what you’re doing…
HAYDEN: That was definitely a strength, that we’re not another English export – we’re not another ‘English band doing an American band’ sent back over to America. That was a strength. But like Benny said, the shows were full; actions speak louder than words. There were places very close to home - we’d go to places like Detroit and Minneapolis… It’s been really helpful going over there: I think it was slowly forging over here, and I think we’re out of the Dark Ages here more than personally I think we were a couple of years back. But out there, the more leftfield and the more outrageous we got, the more people wanted it, and that was something new to us! We’ve always had to figure out a strategy to tone it down and to be more user-friendly…
Finally then, where do you go from here? Have you written anything since this album came out, or started exploring where you want to go next?
HAYDEN: To be honest, no – I think for us, the writing process is our special thing, you know… it’s something we have to protect and look after and cherish, and I think for that reason we’ve kept it away from this ugly side of things. Because touring is brutal, on the mind and the body. And you have to be careful with writing - we have to keep it special and keep it protected, as opposed to… we’ve actually ring-fenced some time now which we’re working towards.
Sound-wise, is it shaping up to be Kid A? Is it going in that direction…?!
HAYDEN: Well, we haven’t made OK Computer yet!
BOTH: [Laughs]
HAYDEN: But no, I think we’re really excited. We know what we’re here for, and that’s a good thing.
Two Dancers is available now on Domino.
posted by Chris Carter at 7:57 AM
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