'Flash and glamour don't come cheap' - Hot Press meets London buzz band HMLTD

Unless Sigue Sigue Sputnik popped in for a swift half during the ‘80s, I doubt if Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street has ever been frequented by such extravagantly coiffed and attired young gentleman as HMLTD.

Beloved of UK style bibles, the South London-based outfit are a heady mix of New York Dolls gutter punk, Blitz Kids glamour, goth, psychobilly, Ennio Morricone spaghetti western soundtracks and David Bowie’s best bits. In other words, they’re the anti-Ed Sheeran.

“Blandness is great because it gives you something to kick against,” proffers frontman Henry Spychalski from beneath his trademark military cap. “If no one’s making music or other forms of art that excite you, you have to create it yourself. I’ve nothing in particular against Ed Sheeran but most music nowadays is so… unambitious.”

“I don’t understand this thing of liking somebody because they’re ‘normal, just like you and me,’” jumps in surname-less guitarist James. “If I pay to go to a gig, I want to be rescued from the mundane, not reminded of it by bands who look like they’ve just walked in off a building site.”

“It’s a fucking insult to your audience to stand there staring at your shoes for 45-minutes,” Henry agrees.

There are collective sniggers when I mention that as an antidote to having to review the new Liam Gallagher album I’ve been chain listening to HMLTD’s epic new creation, ‘Satan, Luella & I’.

“Yeah, well, that’s my point,” James nods.

Unlike most bands, HMLTD didn’t get together through a shared love of any particular artist or genre.

“Attitude-wise we’ve things in common, but the six of us have never sat down and listened to music together,” James resumes. “It’s a bit of a convoluted story but Henry and I knew each other before and were living together in London. Henry met Duke, who’d moved over from Paris because he found it so horribly conservative, in a bar. Nico and Zac also arrived as musical refugees from France. We found the last piece of the puzzle, Achilleas, on Gumtree.”

Originally trading as Happy Meal Ltd. – it wasn’t a massive surprise when the McLawyers objected – the sextet quickly found themselves embraced by fellow cool creatives like Charles Jeffrey, Alessandro Michelle and Jenkin Van Zyl, the visual artist responsible for the band’s everything including the kitchen-sink videos.

“What we’re good at – aside from making music – is knowing who to collaborate with,” Achilleas picks up. “A lot of bands are defiantly DIY, which is fine, but we like to spark off other people like Jenkin who graduated a year ago from the Slade School of Fine Art.

“I saw this weird, abstract, non-linear video installation, Escape From Fort Bravo, of his about cowboys and thought, ‘This is exactly what we need in terms of visuals.’ Jenkin’s brave and bold enough to back up what we do sonically.”

As you may already have gleaned, HMLTD are not a band that just dash things out.

“It took us six months to come up with the title for ‘Satan, Luella & I’,” Harry sighs. “The decision-making process isn’t helped by the fact that there are six of us, and when we have a democratic vote it’s invariably split down the middle. We either need to add a member or sack somebody to speed things up. Or I could become dictator.”

Bankrolled by those nice Sony Music people – “Flash and glamour doesn’t come cheap, which is why we need a major label,” Harry notes – HMLTD have started venturing overseas with the Electric Picnic and Moscow among their favourite stop-offs so far.

“We had loads of technical problems at the Picnic, which probably made it a better gig because we just turned everything up and went for it!” James concludes. “Moscow was surreal. It was a free, underground show attended by 200 or 300 people who, because there’s such oppression there, were really into it. A girl was telling me about how in Chechnya they’ve been sticking queers into concentration camps. They’ll literally drive up and bundle somebody they don’t like the look of into a car. In the circles we were in people were very accepting, but you can tell that the authorities really don’t like anything they consider to be non-conformist… fuck ‘em!”