Ghoul's Out

“If you want a new colour to pin to your mast, if you want to be the first person in your school talking about a band, then we can be that,” declares Fred MacPherson, briefly escaping his default humble setting. “That never really lasts, so you’ve only got the next six months to enjoy us while we’re fresh. After that, we’re just going to be last year’s tips, yesterday’s newspapers, today’s fish and chip wrappers!”
 
MacPherson, who’s been knocking around in various London bands for years (though he’s still only 23), should know that better than most and seems keen not to take the current media clamour around Spector too seriously. They might be this year’s Vaccines. But he doesn’t suggest they’re an upgrade.
“Maybe kids should buy The Vaccines first and then if they have some money left, buy our single,” he grins. “I don’t think we’re better than any other band around but we are slightly different.”
Not what you’d expect from a man recently tagged as “the new Johnny Borrell, just in a better suit”, a description he gently rebuffs.
“I think I’m the new Johnny Borrell in a worse suit! If I can write a song as good as ‘Golden Touch’ and date Kirsten Dunst for a while maybe that would be worth being hated by the British public. And I might get to wear some white jeans as well, so fuck it!”
What does he hate about music right now?
“It’s unexciting,” he sighs. “Guitar bands aren’t exciting. The reason people are talking about Spector is that there’s only about three guitar bands in the whole of the UK.”
Fred’s playful modesty belies a confidence that is clear to see when he performs, and a genuine skewed wit and ‘otherness’ that could yet mark him out as a great British pop star. He’s careful not to pinch his moves from the legends however.
“I’ve taken from very minor indie bands that have come and gone,” he admits. “The things I’ve stolen are from people that aren’t going to be around to get angry with me!”
One obvious nod to a musical great lies, of course, in that name. While MacPherson claims he wasn’t necessarily thinking of the screwball US production genius, the band enjoyed the thought of musos getting their knickers in a twist.
“I liked the idea that we wouldn’t be allowed use this name, because it’s this big monolith of popular culture. Maybe that might be quite an obnoxious thing to do. I just thought, ‘Well, Queen are called Queen’. Not that I’m comparing Phil Spector to Her Majesty but… I guess he was a bit of a queen! And he can’t do anything about it because he’s in prison! It was getting to the stage where we were doing ouija boards to find a name. We thought something might come from the spirit realm. It could have been that woman he shot trying to warn us about him!”
When questioned on his style, MacPherson has stated that one Dr. Crippen, a Victorian murderer, wore similar circular glasses. Coupled with name-checking Phil, one could assume he has quite macabre interests. So, Fred MacPherson, could you ever kill a man?
“I don’t think I necessarily could,” he ponders. “I can imagine killing one of the members of Spector but I’d be careful if I did it. I read somewhere that if you inject potassium nitrate into someone’s tongue, they die silently and it leaves no mark. So that’s something good for your readers to know.”
Spector’s bassist, Thomas Shickle, was almost the first to fall.
“I remember him wearing a hat at our first rehearsal,” says Fred, a man for whom attire is a matter of life and death. “You know when you think something really hard and try and project the thought with this burning force? I was doing that all through the rehearsal – ‘stop wearing that hat’. It was like one of those hats you’d wear if you were a big Pete Doherty fan. He’s never worn one since. And he seemed to know more chords than we did.”
These issues can arise when you form a band via the internet.
“It was a bit like an army recruitment type thing but we accepted the people that probably wouldn’t get into the army. People who shouldn’t even have got into Spector to be honest. I’d just look at their pictures on Facebook and see if they were Spector material. If I liked the look of them, I’d ask them if they had a problem wearing smart clothes. And if they didn’t, then we’d hear them play some music. That was the third bit of the CV.”
A thousand old New Romantics would surely approve.

Spector support Florence + The Machine in the Dublin O2 on March 2