An Airforce To Be Reckoned With

Paul Wilkinson is playing coy. This is a hugely disconcerting sight. Something like a smile tugs at the corner of a mouth that, surely, was never designed for such extravagant levity. His eyes glitter. He even tilts his head at a strange angle, as though afraid it will suddenly spin off and land in your lap.

“What bands did I work with? Oh, I can’t remember really,” Wilkinson says of his stint as a studio technician in Eastbourne. “Nobody that honestly sticks in the memory.” His twinkling manner feels deeply perturbing. Short of turning up in a string vest and bling-bling jewelry, deadpan insouciance is the last thing you expect of Wilkinson.
As one half of Coleraine’s The Amazing Pilots, he is a purveyor of earnest, elegant anguish. On record, Wilkinson seems to wear a perennial slouch; delivered in an appalled whisper, his songs are unrelentingly crestfallen.
“The Amazing Pilots aren’t depressing,” he says, sounding suddenly deflated, as if perma-misery were a condition to be aspired to. “But I suppose there’s a lot of sadness in our music. It isn’t something we consciously produce – it just comes out that way.”
What prevents the Pilots, who were formed by Wilkinson and his brother Phil, from sinking into a self-pitying morass is their ear for a compelling hook. Over the course of their debut album, Hello My Captor, the siblings push the miserablism envelope yet never forget that they are supposed to be writing pop songs.
“I’ve always loved melody,” explains Paul who, at 29, cuts a disgracefully youthful dash. “For me, it’s one of the most important elements in a song. It’s the first thing I start with.”
A surreal tinge colours Hello My Captor. The record, mixed by Frames/Gemma Hayes collaborator David Odlum, doesn’t so much feel timeless as placeless, a document from somewhere strange and uncharted. But then, the story of The Amazing Pilots does boast its share of lapses into the unlikely.
To begin with their inaugural brush with mainstream exposure came courtesy of a tribute album for an artist they never really listened to previously.
“We had an opportunity to contribute to a Lee Hazlewood tribute record, Total Lee. Obviously we jumped at it because there were so many great musicians involved [Evan Dando, Lambchop, Jarvis Cocker etc]. To be honest we didn’t know a huge amount about Hazlewood’s music. But the song [‘Soul’s Island’] got a huge reaction – when we were in Austin for South By South West recently, people kept talking about the track. Obviously we’d touched on something.”
Not long after recording the Hazlewood number, The Amazing Pilots plunged into full-wattage weirdness when they pitched up in Elk City, an Illinois hick-town that by all accounts would have made an ideal setting for an episode of the Twilight Zone.
“It was a pretty weird place. There was a proper whiff of Twin Peaks there. You were getting a sense of the real America. The place is a hotbed for Americana – I think there are more recording studios there per head than anywhere in the world. We went there to sharpen our skills in the studio, which we certainly did. However, it’s fair to say the experience influenced us in other ways too.”
Theirs isn’t merely a tale of charming eccentricity however. Along the way, there have been a few body-blows. Three years ago the brothers inked a publishing contract with Chrysalis music only for the company to sink shortly afterwards; their first record label, Easy!Tiger, went under two weeks before their debut single was due for release.
Now signed to Decor (home to alt.country cult hero Richmond Fontaine) and based in London, the Wilkinsons feel grateful and astonished to have come this far.
“It’s been tough, but we appreciate how lucky we’ve been,” says Wilkinson. “With the album under our belts, we’re finally going to have an opportunity to do some proper gigging. We really want to make something of the live thing. I’m a big fan of The Flaming Lips – I just love the way they turn a concert into an experience. They really push it in terms of lighting and presentation. Hopefully we can do something similar.”