Curve your enthusiasm

Bent have always been something of an oddity. Too chilled out for the deep house mafia, too electronic for the indie kids and too quirky for the marketing bods responsible for the deluge of chill out compilations in recent years, quintessential English eccentrics Simon Mills and Nail Tolliday occupy their own little universe.

The self-consciously daft name, their disparate backgrounds – Nail used to make deep house, Simon was in bands and their infectious paeans to everyday life always marked them out as outsiders in the world of electronic music.
True to Bent’s unpredictable nature, just as their fans and critics thought they’d pinned down their sound on their last album, The Everlasting Blink, they’ve bounced back with something completely different.
Having recently attained Dance Album of The Fortnight status in hotpress, Ariels sees Bent make the transition from anonymous dance producers to proper songwriters. It’s also the first time that the duo used ‘real’ instruments in the studio.
“Nail has been getting better and better playing the guitar and we also started to realise what the possibilities were using live instruments,” says Simon. “We were writing songs in a random fashion and then we’d get the musicians we were working with to play over the arrangements.
“Technology has allowed everyone to bang out music on a laptop,” he continues. “Nowadays, you can sit on the top of a hill and write a track, but just because you give a million people a pencil, it doesn’t mean they’ll all be able to draw.
“At the same time, I didn’t want to go totally acoustic and it was a question of bridging the gap. We worked with musicians we knew and the singer from Kosheen again – she’s a good friend. We also had a string arranger, but we kept it understated, we didn’t want to make another ‘Bittersweet Symphony’.” (Laughs).
Perversely, Simon explains that Ariels has so far been overlooked by certain sections of the media.
“The dance mags haven’t taken to it at all because it isn’t as electronic as the other albums,” he explains. “We normally try to put as many different sounds and ideas into our albums, but this time round, we recorded 40 different tracks, but ended up picking all the melancholy ones.
“I love artists like Aphex, Depeche Mode and Kate Bush who have one distinctive sound and anyway, melancholy music is great, you can listen to it with many different ears.”
Bent have good reason to be unhappy: the past few years saw Nail fall seriously ill – he’s fully recovered now – and the duo were also faced with a hefty tax bill, which was only paid off when the group licensed their music for use in TV ads for big name brands like Motorola and Carlsberg.
“We’re rubbish at managing our money and, much as I hate to admit it, if it wasn’t for TV ads, we would have been in trouble. We’re not well known enough to survive on the proceeds of our sales.”
Before recording Ariels, Bent also suffered a crisis of confidence about the direction their work was taking.
“After we did the first album, we became very complacent and lost our way a bit. At the same time, the label was putting us under pressure because they had just lost £5million with Fischerpsooner and, understandably enough, they were after a hit record.”
Although there are moments on Ariels where Bent outdo even Air and Brian Wilson in the blissed out pop stakes, Mills and Tolliday were adamant that they wouldn’t turn in an inferior product just to please their corporate paymasters.
“We always try and give our music a pop sensibility without being cheesy, but you can’t divine a hit - the greatest songs are written by accident. Ministry wanted us just to copy Air, but we refused to give into their demands and amazingly, the label stood by us. We’ve never had any hits or big radio exposure, but this corporation is still on our side. It’s quite rewarding.”