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Interview: Eighties Matchbox are hear to destroy "awful music"

Written by: admin

January 1, 1970 · Filed Under Blather · Comment

“Intention. Commitment. And belief.”
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p> </o:p>
That’s what Guy McKnight, frontman of the peerless Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, stoically states as the reason why both his band and their fans haven’t been put off despite numerous setbacks in the last two years. Guy is not the kind of man to waste words. Throughout our interview, the vocalist often pauses to make sure he gets exactly the message he means across.
<o:p> </o:p>
“I think can speak for us all when I say that this is really what we all want to do; this is our passion, not just a hobby. For me personally, I fell like singing these songs and performing feels like one of the most natural things for me to do. I feel really in my element when I’m onstage. It’s been a real pleasure, really natural to get back into it. It’s been far too long.”
<o:p> </o:p>
In 2005, Island Records decided that their relationship with Eighties Matchbox had come to an end. But that wasn’t the only obstacle facing the macabre five-piece. Since then, what have <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on">Brighton</st1:place>’s darkest sons been up to?
<o:p> </o:p>
“Writing mainly. I’d say that 2005 was probably the worst year of my life – there we were, with a shared breakdown…but I think 2006 was probably the best year of my life.” Guy reflects. As well as being dropped by their label, 2005 was the year that founder member and guitarist, Andy Huxley, quit the band for his own project, Vile Imbeciles. “[His] leaving the band has been a real catalyst for a new energy. I’ll always be grateful for him leaving, because actually he put me in a corner where I have to write songs, instead of relying on him and whoever else to write music, and then myself just to add vocal melodies and lyrics. Now me and Sym [Gharial, bass], are writing all the time, and I love it. 
<o:p> </o:p>
“Being out of the limelight, and not having a deal has given us ample opportunity to forge a sound. We’ve been writing so much, we’ve discarded so many tunes, but we’ve got about 40 now that we’re pleased with. We’ve got a few albums worth. The EP we’ve just released is getting back to our original intentions, energy-wise.”
<o:p> </o:p>
Ah yes – the new EP. ‘In The Garden’ picks up from where ‘The Royal Society’ left off – booming rhythms, guitars gone so feral they feast on human flesh, and Guy’s vocals swinging from the rafters like an undead prophet. The opener and title track is Eighties Matchbox’s own warped re-telling of the story of Adam and Eve.
<o:p> </o:p>
“Tom [Diamantopoulo], our drummer, actually wrote that song,” Guy remarks. “He was raised in a Catholic family, it’s really about his first-hand experiences in terms of….the guilt….I suppose I’m trying to put this as sensitively as possible…that’s been pressed upon him.”
<o:p> </o:p>
Guilt, suspicion paranoia, madness and just the plain old Dark Side are the phrases thrown about when people talk about Eighties Matchbox songs. The EP continues in this vein with ‘You Say You’re A Doctor But You’re Really A Mister’, a song “about the Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde aspect of Friday night drinking. The insane potential of alcoholism.”
<o:p> </o:p>
Perhaps that’s why people go so mad for Eighties Matchbox when they play live. Fey indie kids, the kind that hang at the back of gigs and nod appreciatively to bands most of the time, can been seen slamming against each other in a frothing frenzy down at the front. This is the effect that those parents who got so het up about the hips of Elvis thought was happening to teenagers way back when.
<o:p> </o:p>
“With our music, and our performance, our desire is to encourage people to really let go, to let go of their inhibitions. The only way you can do that is if you really open up yourself. If you’re giving 100% and opening up, then that can inspire others to do the same.”
<o:p> </o:p>
We move on to the influences for the newer material, where the band have previously listed “high diving horses from the 1930's, the wrath of god, Klaus Kinski, man's desire for freedom ultimately resulting in his own destruction, really dangerous circus entertainment, Werner Herzog” amongst their current mental fuel. “He was definitely someone who I find fascinating because despite being pigeonholed as being mad, he had an ability to really open up, and share or display raw emotion. I don’t think it’s simply a case of people wanting to see this freaky guy. People want to go and see someone like him because he is doing and saying what they wish they were doing and saying.” Kinski was famed as much for his acting as for his somewhat deraged life off-camera. “You could say he’s got a screw loose, but I think he’s just laying it on the line, and saying it how it is. I certainly don’t agree with all of his opinions, and his perspective on life, but I have a great respect for his freedom of expression.”
<o:p> </o:p>
With another tour set to follow the physical release of the EP (with will be coupled with an album of live and rare tracks), there’s no pause on the horizon for Eighties Matchbox. “From now on, it’s just going to be relentless. I really feel like this is our mission at this point in time, to really share this with everybody. Young people in particular deserve good music and deserve to have a good time.”
<o:p> </o:p>
What <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Music</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Towers</st1:PlaceType></st1:place> is desperate to know, after so many long months of being drip-fed new material via MySpace, and gorging ourselves on every Eighties Matchbox live show we can get to, is why after so long we’re only getting four new tracks?
<o:p> </o:p>
“We’ve been away for so long, we just wanted to release something to let people know that we’re still working, we’re still performing, we’re still doing it. The album, technically, wasn’t ready yet. This is just a taster. Also, there’s so much awful music it would be an offence not to release it.”
<o:p> </o:p>
Oh ho ho – he can’t expect to throw us a bone like that and not press him for some further dirt. Was there anyone is particular he’s targeting with barbed comments like that?
<o:p> </o:p>
“I just think that rock’n’roll appeared with the birth of the teenager in the 20th Century. It’s probably the most significant, largest, most influential music genre of the last hundred years. When you take away the haircuts and the clothes and the drugs, music is so much more profound than people realise or people are led to believe. 
<o:p> </o:p>
“With record companies and so forth, it’s just all about the package, shifting units. Without being pretentious, it’s just a fact that since time immemorial, people have been linking music and celebration and ceremony. It’s the most immediate, accessible art form. Things like theatre, art, painting, have unfortunately become quite exclusive. Anyone can hum or whistle along to a tune. 
<o:p> </o:p>
“From a scientific point of view, everything is energy existing on a certain vibration, a certain frequency – I don’t think it’s any coincidence or accident that the first sense that you develop in the womb is your hearing, and the last sense to go, apparently, when you die, again, is your hearing. The ears are the gateway to the spirit. With sound, with words, with vibration, with music, you can really touch people’s hearts, you can really communicate with people."
<o:p> </o:p>
By now, Guy is on a roll, and <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Music</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Towers</st1:PlaceType></st1:place> thinks it best to just let him run with it.
<o:p> </o:p>
“Because of this slanderous media-driven society that we live in, I think we’re led to believe it’s not really that important, or that music is just something that you can throw away, when actually I think it has unbelievable potential to help people, certainly to communicate with each other. I think it’s exactly the same with the power of words,” he says, pausing briefly for breath. “Because of headlines and tabloids and magazines, people have forgotten how powerful language is, and how you can change someone’s life with just one word. I’d say that terms of there being a lot of rubbish out there, or whatever it was that I said, anything that is insincere is just a complete waste of everybody’s time.”
<o:p> </o:p>
So he wasn’t referring to anyone in particular then? Not to The Eighties Matchbox unofficial tribute act, The Horrors, at any rate:
<o:p> </o:p>
“I’ve heard one of their songs – I thought it was quite good. I don’t think anyone can be truly original, and if they have been inspired by us then that’s a great thing and that’s flattering,” he diplomatically puts it. But there’s a smirk in Guy’s closing words:
<o:p> </o:p>
“But I don’t think there’s a band on the planet who can do what we can do.”
<o:p> </o:p>
The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster are currently on tour across the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">UK</st1:country-region></st1:place> – <A href="http://www.myspace.com/eightiesmatchboxblinedisaster">click here</A> for details. The ‘In The Garden’ EP is out now as a download, and will be available as a physical release in the first week of September.<o:p></o:p>

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Music Towers goes gonzo: An Evening With The Rakes

Written by: admin

January 1, 1970 · Filed Under Blather · Comment

Gigs and clubs have an uneasy alliance that’s never really suited either. On the one hand there’s that gig-urge, to stand at the back and drink over-priced under-strength lager while you wait for the support acts you don’t, won’t, and couldn’t ever really give a shit about, ply their trade. But if the whole caboodle is upped-sticks into a club, then there’s all sorts of additional demands put on the gig go’er; the clubbing aesthetic demands punters get up and move about and get involved and pretend like we’re having it large, and other such embarrassing club clichés that were probably out of date a decade ago. Which is why <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Music</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Towers</st1:PlaceType> feels a stab of trepidation in the pit of our stomach as we roll up to the SEOne club in <st1:place w:st="on">South London</st1:place> for what’s billed as ‘An Evening With The Rakes’.
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p> </o:p>
SEOne is a giant cavern of a club, hidden amongst the arches of the old brickwork of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">London</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Bridge</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>. It was where The Insomniac’s Ball starburst as the all-too-brief pinnacle of the indie-electro club revolution, before being swallowed up by the vacuous gravity well created by the lack of heart that the scene had right at its centre. The Rakes, who always surfed on the edges of the Shoreditch set, are hoping to be the new standard bearers to their own carned out niche of the <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:City> indiescape, by headlining a brace of acts interspaced with some DJ action from some of the leading lights of the indie club world.
<o:p> </o:p>
But the world has moved on – the collapse of the Insomniac’s is merely part of that story. It’s not been the easiest of years for <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:City>’s stick-thin urban storytellers, The Rakes. Their new record, ‘Ten New Messages’, failed to set most of the critics alight, and they weren’t able to produce anything near the scatterbrained genius of the singles from their first album. And to top it off, their label, V2 Records, was bought out by Universal, only to be torn to pieces in the cogs of the majors, with the fate of most of their bands – The Rakes included – still unknown.
<o:p> </o:p>
It’s apt that their frontman, Alan Donohoe sings during fan-favourite ‘Work, Work, Work (Pub, Club, Sleep)’ that “I’ve got the same shirt on for two days in a row, with a soy sauce stain so everyone knows, a shower and a scrub, still smell like the smoking bit in a Wetherspoons’ pub’ as the smoking ban now means that era can only exist in our memories. In this smokeless age, the smokers in SEOne are herded out back to the street, where they are caged from escape by giant temporary steel meshes. From the outside looking in it must seem like a makeshift <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Guantanamo</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Bay</st1:PlaceType></st1:place> for nicotine addicts. Like the terrorist suspects, here the smokers are branded with green wristbands, bearing the legend “No joke, I still smoke”, as if to ghetto-ise and increase the social stigma even further. The fact that these brands of addiction need to be bought from the bar, so the venue can profit while parading and stigmatising the nicotine fiends, just goes to show that under all this pretence of putting on an evening of entertainment for us all, we’re all just the greasy money spigots that keep this machine running. 
<o:p> </o:p>
But instead of the white noise and systematic torture of Gitmo, the smokers penned in here have to contend with people from Chiswick with questionable dentistry, and a ginger Scots wanker, drunkenly haranguing a fellow Scot for reading comics. Apparently that makes him a “stinking poof”. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Music</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Towers</st1:PlaceType></st1:place> pauses to give the homophobe illiterate an ear-bashing he probably doesn’t understand, in part due to his drunkenness, in part because he’s clearly more cretinous than a crab, before storming back inside for some more gig.
<o:p> </o:p>
The aloof strut of We Start Fires bores Music Towers almost as soon as we’ve pushed ourselves through to a decent spot in the restless crowd. As we beat a retreat from the stage, some guy in a baseball cap offers to sell us some pills under a variety of slang names we’ve never heard, nor ever expected to hear outside of a Brass Eye parody. Later on, judging by the number of scowling punters stalking the venue in the hunt for the opportunistic pill pusher, they apparently weren’t up to the levels of high quality to which they had been billed. Exactly the same as We Start Fires in that respect. And they weren’t any better under the effect of the weakest cut of MDMA on the south side of the river.
<o:p> </o:p>
Thankfully, The Ghost Frequency are here to give us as close to a headrush as we’re likely to get following the prevalence of shoddy pill pushers around these parts. The Ghost Frequency are one of those bands whose artwork does them no favours. Even in this age where you can listen to a band on MyBook or FaceSpace within seconds of hearing their name, there must be dozens of bands whose eye-breakingly garish web presence has predisposed me to write lots of angry, sweary, violent words about their spam-fingered attempts to make music before I’ve even got halfway through listening to their first taster track.
<o:p> </o:p>
But tonight they are the only band other than the headliners who deserve even a micron of further attention. Frontman Doran has the coal-black devil locks of a that weird kid who lived down the road from you when you were at school, but the infectious hyperactivity of half of the live !!! line-up put together. The jittery, more-infectious-than-Ebola rhythms of ‘Nightmare’ could probably get Stephen Hawking on his feet and dancing like Beyoncé being possessed by Baron Samedi.
<o:p> </o:p>
Afterwards, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Music</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Towers</st1:PlaceType></st1:place> pops briefly out to Smoketanamo, and when we return the venue seems strangely empty. Wandering through the empty rooms, there are lone dancers drunkenly lolling about on the dancefloors, like solitary moths orbiting around the flame of the DJ booth. We enter the end room and it all becomes clear – The Rakes have come on stage, sucking in the punters like a vacuum. The gig-meets-club premise has collapsed faster than a proposal at the Republican convention to just, y’know, try that Communism idea for an afternoon, just to see how it fits.
<o:p> </o:p>
But now The Rakes are onstage, we’ve reached that stage where we’ve drunk too much, sweated too much, smoked too much and talked too much with random girls we met in the smoking paddock to be able to pay attention to what’s going on up on the stage. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Music</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Towers</st1:PlaceType></st1:place> even fails to catch the name of the new song they slot in amongst the even mix of tracks from ‘Capture Release’ and ‘Ten New Messages’.
We're too busy jumping up and down to the jerky post-punk slices of musical euphoria by The Rakes, and all we can think of is "who needs clubs and drugs when you've got rock'n'roll?" 
 
(The fact our hands are in the air at this point has nothing to do with any clichéd gestures used by clichéd old clubbers to show their appreciation for a top tune).
<o:p> </o:p>
‘Ten New Messages’ by The Rakes is out now on V2 Records.<o:p></o:p>

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