Dudley intent

“It’s really brave to express yourself, to put yourself in a position of vulnerability,” says Pip Moore, staggeringly fleet-fingered bassist of The Dudley Corporation. We’re talking about the naked emotional honesty of northern soul lyrics, but we could just as easily be talking about his own band. “You’re leaving yourself completely open. And you could say it’s either someone being very tough, or being very masochistic. But the archness, that raised-eyebrow cleverness you find in some other kinds of pop music – that’s an easy way out.”

Too true. Similarly, once you’re through being bowled over by the irresistible force that is The Dudley Corporation, the perfect, four-minute top-speed yowled pop detonations, the 200-mile-per-hour kamikaze basslines, the drumming slightly more rapid and loud and deadly than machine-gun fire and the voice swooping from doleful whisper to shrieking height of wiggly falsetto – once you’ve stopped vibrating from the resulting adrenaline rush, you notice how candid, and gentle, and hopelessly, unashamedly romantic the lyrics are.

“Are you calling us soft?” threatens Dudley Colley (songwriter, live-wire frontman, attention-deficit-disorder guitarist), not entirely convincingly. Eh? No, surely.

“In the past I did write knowing, arch lyrics,” considers Dudley. “And a lot of the music that exists in the world – where the music itself tries to be a bit different – has words that are terribly ironic. And it lets itself down in that way. I think it’s important for us, when we write lyrics, to not be ironic – to actually have proper sentiment and expression in it.”

The Corpo’s debut of last year, The Lonely World Of The Dudley Corporation, definitely excels, to say the least, at being “a bit different”, hold the irony. It displays the Corpo’s ability to constantly do the unexpected thing without making it seem forced or over-clever. It is a John Cusack of a rock album: the songs full of a robust, boyish energy, an I-can’t-stop-myself hyperactivity, a tremendous intelligence and a tendency to go off without any notice on fantastic, mind-boggling tangents. And there’s ample evidence of several really good record collections. In any case, it serves as a reminder, in the face of Dublin’s current vogue for wordless, studied variants on the post-rock ideal, of the power of the brainy, honestly-observed, explosively rendered four-minute pop song.

It’s astounding to imagine that even a collection as short-sharp-shock as this was recorded and mixed in four days. Four days, mind you, stretched out of recognition into sleep-deprived 19-hour marathons, assisted by the tireless Songs:Ohia’s Andy Miller, and executed with a military-style precision any band would do well to heed.

“It was really informed by the fact that Joan of Arse [of which drummer Joss Moorkens is also a member] totally screwed up the recording of their album, had tried to do too much, had no plans going over to America to record,” says Joss somewhat surprisingly, as the hangdog loveliness of Distant Hearts, A Little Closer doesn’t precisely suggest the phrase ‘totally screwed up’, but how and ever. “So when [the Dudleys] started talking about it, we were like, Right. We need to have everything written out, know exactly what we’re going to do. That’s the only way this is going to work.”

“We’d even rehearse the songs in the sequence we thought the album was going to be,” says Dudley. “To try and get the mood right before we even recorded it.”

That said, the Dudleys possess the most scarifyingly tight rhythm section in the country, able to keep all four wheels on the ground while careening through the narrowest and most unexpected of pop-song scrapes. So they know something about timing. And about organisation: as well as playing in the Corpo and Joan of Arse, Joss runs the Scientific Laboratories label and occasionally brings bands over from abroad; and the Corpo themselves have lined up an American release (on Chicagoan imprint Flameshovel), a double-handful of upcoming split-singles and an exhausting-sounding series of live dates in Britain and on the continent. (“It’s not actually a tour, it’s just loads of gigs over the next months that are quite close together,” explains Joss, somewhat perplexingly.)

We, here at home, can meanwhile delight in new single ‘The Dudley Corporation Play Songs For Young Lovers’, featuring two slow smoulderers, both whispery-tender and ear-wincingly loud in all the right places.

“It’s really warm-sounding,” grins Dudley.

“It’s probably two of the best songs we’ve ever done,” ventures Joss, not incorrectly. “I’m really proud of it. I think,” he smilingly asserts, “that it should be an enormous hit.”

Indeed: the Corporation’s world, we think, is about to get a lot less lonely.