Pick of the best #2

LATE OF THE PIER, July 2008

Shepherds don’t often achieve chart success, but then Late of the Pier aren’t exactly a straight-forward sort of a band. As keyboardist Potter dons his wax jacket and begins to herd us around mid-interview, thick Yorkshire accent and all, the rest of the band act like they’ve seen it all before. To be fair, they probably have. It’s little things like this that sum up the band; while their trademark brand of synth-wielding other-worldiness and cod-metal buffoonery has been received with raised eyebrows, A&R stampedes and everything in between, none of it’s out of the ordinary for Donington’s psych-funk reactionaries. The band’s progress hasn’t completely bypassed them though, as bassist Faley admits: “Our first demo was basically just a compilation of MP3s we put on the internet, and I looked the other day and it’s had thousands of downloads. Which sort of explains how the people at our [Red Square] gig in Russia knew all the words to the songs!” Now with a chart-topping album under the belts, it’s unlikely they’ll have to worry about lyric-lacking fans in the future. October sees the band begin their first UK tour since the release of their debut Fantasy Black Channel, with six dates in the first two weeks of the month. The novelty? None of them are in run-of-the-mill venues.

“We’d gradually got more and more sick of playing to the same sorts of crowds in the same sorts of places., so we decided to change it up a bit”, Faley explains. And what a change, with one of their sets at Manchester’s annual Warehouse Project and two taking place at Wax:On, the two-city Northern equivalent of London’s Fabric nightclub. This time they decided to organise it themselves, after their last efforts to book a tour went slightly awry: “We basically booked a tour that didn’t exist. We found out our booking agent hadn’t booked the right venues, or even on the right dates, and we had about two weeks to sort it out.”

The process of recording Fantasy Black Channel began back in secondary school, when the four (then) teenagers used to bunk off school to put down makeshift demos in lead singer Sam’s attic, and it’s a period that’s still affecting their output today, with the majority of the album merely being remastered versions of the original attic tracks. The remaining few, some of which almost ended up in the bin, were recorded under the guidance of Trash mastermind and producer Erol Alkan at the Turk’s Miloko Studios in London. “Erol was an absolute diamond”, the band agree. “Sometimes, he’d have more enthusiasm for it than us. Like with (album centerpiece) The Enemy Are The Future, we’d practically given up with it until Erol convinced us to try it again. We’re glad he did though.” Resisting the urge to up sticks to the capital, the band are now holed up together in suburban Nottingham, living in separate corners of a massive family house. “It’s nice to go to London now and then and it’s an inspiring place, but we’re village kids at heart, so we don’t tend to stay too long.” Plus, as Faley later mentions, he can always drop into Stealth and play some records in return for free drinks, should he find himself without any evening plans. From the look of things, it’s unlikely he’ll have a huge amount of free time for a while now.

www.myspace.com/lateofthepier