Beauty in the Beasts: Hot Press meets Wild Beasts

In case you’ve read otherwise about Wild Beasts, Hayden Thorpe wants to clear a few things up. “I don’t want to come across as being overly patriotic,” the erudite co-frontman for the elegant Kendal band says. “I would hate the sense of our music being ‘British’. I’m not very proud of British music. I’m not even proud to be British.”

Patriotism. Oft felt as an inordinate swelling in the chest at the mention of the accomplishments of countrymen you probably don’t even know. No, Hayden Thorpe has little truck with that.

He does, however, like his artists to stay true to themselves. “Music relies on sincerity. It relies on an emotional believability. When you’re writing love songs or hate songs – personal songs – there’s a disconnect if that song is sung in a tongue that isn’t your own.

“I think there’s something beautiful in artifice,” continues Thorpe, who definitely sounds like he’s spent time mulling this over. “There’s some incredibly gifted and talented people doing things that I could never do. But do not try to engage me on an emotional level and think I’ll believe you when you’re obviously not from the Deep South of America! That’s all that point is about.”

That point? We can trace it back to a Pitchfork interview on January 9. A polite “I suppose” offered from Thorpe after a journalistic Arctic Monkeys reference and the next day we have an online Guardian story built entirely around it, with a subhead proclaiming how Wild Beasts’ new single ‘Wanderlust’, deals with “Americanised voices – such as the Arctic Monkeys.” Apropos of, well, very little.

“I certainly wasn’t pointing the finger at anyone in general. I definitely wasn’t pointing the finger at the Arctic Monkeys, who I have a great deal of respect for and I think do incredibly fantastic things. For a start, no matter where they go they’re always proper Yorkshire! That’s what’s great about them.”

It’s true that, as The Guardian pointed out, Tom Fleming – the deep velvet baritone to Thorpe’s high tenor, which if not aiming for the late Billy MacKenzie’s leap at least has eyes on the same tightrope – has placed Wild Beasts in opposition to the Arctics in the past. In 2011, he noted how their number was “very blunt, very macho and Northern”. Not a real swipe. It just meant that wasn’t the Wild Beasts way.

Over the course of our conversation today, ostensibly to natter about their fourth album, Present Tense, Thorpe will bring up the fact that his North of England bunch grew up in “quite a macho environment. And I don’t think we’re unusual in that sense. All societies have their version of machismo. It’s just fascinating to watch how redundant all those old ideas are and why we’re trying to keep them. There’s a sense of emotional coding that men have to keep up, which is really strange. And I think quite damaging”.

On Present Tense, recorded with Lexxx (Björk) and Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno) rather than usual producer Richard Formby and a record, Thorpe is proud to say, that has “quite a lot of space… silence”, the band make a slight move to a more mature outlook. Whilst retaining the barbs and peculiarities that make them special, family life enters the scene. As for the male characters of the piece… well, they’re still occasionally brutish, occasionally pitiable beings.

“It’s an album of clarity,” he reflects. “An album of small realisations and revelations. For us, age brings balls and composure. You become more convinced of your beliefs but you also get better at the craft of putting them across. A lot of these ideas, we spent a lot of time boiling them right down to their bare essentials. Thought: ‘What’s decoration? What’s just fancy?’ And what’s genuinely important to me is a moving and functional piece of music.”

Returning to masculinity, it seems to be Wild Beasts’ particular area of expertise.

“Haha... yes!” decides Thorpe, giggling at the notion. Are we a slightly preposterous gender?

“Well, we only have licence to talk about men. We are men. I don’t have any in-depth knowledge of being a woman. Not yet anyway – I’m not ruling anything out. And not that I don’t sound like that sometimes! I don’t think the crises of masculinity are often dignified or at least portrayed in a sincere way. So much is shrouded in what’s expected of us, being in a band. We’ve all, me included, been sucked into the responsibility of being ‘that guy’ in the band. Of being that character, having to impress in every way. Being an all-conquering, womanising, rope-swinging man. And you realise what an exhausting endeavour it is to uphold that.”

Has he had to pull himself from the brink of becoming a caricature at any point?

Third album Smother, with its ‘be careful what you wish for’ sentiment, was about that: “If you want to be this polygamist, womanising, all-seeing, all-doing Tarzan, than that’s what you’re going to get!”

Pop music is a perfect vehicle to explore such issues and Wild Beasts are very handy at the wheel. But what of the other side of pop, where its chief aim seems to be the sexualisation of young women? Does Thorpe have a take on the whole Miley Cyrus palaver?

“I think ‘Wrecking Ball’ is an incredible song for a start! I think it’s a beautifully executed piece of work. Do I blame her? No. Do I worry for her? Yes. At the same time, she’s in charge of her, she can do what she wants and there’s something quite liberating about that. But it’s hard to make that judgement call – where does her exploiting her assets begin and where does her being exploited end? It works both ways. Is she just using what she’s got or is she just upholding a quite grubby little business? Having said all that, do I think ‘Wrecking Ball’ would be a hit if she had more clothes on? Yes I do, I think it’s a wonderful pop song.”

Of course, none of this is black-and-white. Wild Beasts – a serpentine, witty quartet who can coax aching beauty from ugly things and wrap themes up in a joke or character – have become adept at wriggling out of critics’ grasps. All we seem to agree on is that they’re bloody good. For Hayden Thorpe, who sees the band’s black humour as “membership; ‘do you get the joke, are you an insider, are you one of us?’”, there is pride to be taken in their oracular approach.

“We pride ourselves on being brave enough to not try and pander too much to that middle-ground. We’re not trying to sell to the cheap seats here. Growing up, all my heroes made, in some ways, quite coded music. It took a bit of understanding and unravelling. I’m talking about my real heroes here like Morrissey and Leonard Cohen. Those kind of writers who, taken at face value, could seem incredibly dour and dry. I’m proud that we rely on that level of believability.”

He has yet to read Morrissey’s Autobiography, though he might one day.

“I didn’t feel I would get any creative benefit from it. It felt a little like watching a snuff movie. I have a great love for the legacy of The Smiths and what they represented but I’m quite happy for it to just hover in that place without it having to be brought into the ‘now’.”

A nice sentiment. For now we have Present Tense to contend with anyway. And all the contradictory Wild Beastian magic that brings.

Present Tense gets a live airing on March 29 in the Dublin Olympia.