Hot Press meets Delphic

David Guetta, you’d better watch out. Four Manchester musicians are gunning for you.
“I think it would be remiss of us not to be on a mission to destroy David Guetta!” grins Matt Cocksedge, one-quartet of the returning Delphic. “I think that should be every band’s mission. That sound has become so dominant, he just chucks these songs out. There is craft in David Guetta, you’ve got to respect him for appealing to so many people. But to our ears, it’s just bland. It actually hurts our ears. We’re saying to people, ‘There’s more out there, you don’t have to be force fed DJ pop!”

It’s fighting talk from a band that have been laying low for roughly two years, bar slipping out ‘Good Life’ as part of the 2012 Olympics. A group that have felt more than a little unsure of where they should be heading after making critics froth at their keyboards upon the 2010 release of dance-rock debut Acolyte. There has been an abandoned ‘orchestral techno’ album that seemed “fun at the time”. Eventually, they headed to “a cold barn in Chesire to write for a long, long time.”
Now they’re back, armed with late-period Outkast records, a new penchant for samples and a desire to ditch the old media reference points. I catch the affable Matt as he ponders a slightly surreal silence. It’s the week of Collections’ release and all is calm.
“It’s been a strange week really,” he confides. “The record that we’ve been doing for years is out and there’s no fanfare. There’s no party poppers going off! You imagine this big ‘event’ for so long and then... nothing changes. We can’t even walk past HMV and say, ‘There’s our record’, we were about two weeks too late!”
In reality, Collections has got people talking. Scratching their heads. They’ve toned down the dance, swotted up on their J Dilla production techniques and entertained the idea of jostling for position with Guetta on the chart rundown. That the departure has come as such a surprise to fans has... well, surprised the band.
“It has definitely come as a bit of a shock to us. We’ve said from the start that we want to keep moving forward. Our favourite artists are people like Bowie, Björk, Radiohead. The music industry being as it is, I don’t know how many albums we’ll get to make. So do we want to make the same record twice? We’re like sharks, y’know? We have to keep moving or we’ll die!”
On top of that, they were keen to swim clear of all the New Order comparisons that greeted them around the time they placed third on the BBC Sound Of 2010.
“We couldn’t get that. Listening back to Acolytes now, we kinda hear it a bit more. In many cases it was lazy journalism. But yeah, that was a real priority. Now I think we’ve gone too far the other way. People don’t know what to call us. We’re not the ‘new’ anything. We’re the new nothing!”
The creative burn-out they experienced following 18 months spent touring Acolytes was compounded by their desire not to go into anything half-cocked. They’re a band that like to start off with a plan.
“Absolutely, we never even jam!” he exclaims. “I don’t know if that makes us ‘not a real band’ or something, but we don’t. We spend a lot of time ‘finding’ sounds, hunting for new and interesting things that tickle our ears. So it was a challenge.”
Collections was finalised late last summer. More recent challenges have included getting the eclectic, diverse LP to work in a live setting.
“Oh god!” the guitarist groans. “It’s been a nightmare mate. We’ve had to completely redesign our whole set. We’ve got MPCs going up and everything’s linked into something else. So Rick [keyboardist Richard Boardman] will be triggering some samples and I’m affecting them on the other side of the stage. I’m sending them back to him and he’s putting reverb on it or whatever. But we’re really happy with how the live set’s turned out because we’ve brought the old songs slightly more up-to-date and changed some of the new songs to fit in with the old. Overall, the live set still works as one thing.”
It should be pointed out that Delphic are a band famed for not pausing from one song to the next. You can only hope they’re taking minor breathers this time around?
“There are one or two occasions where we have a couple of seconds break,” Matt assures us. “Our drummer would actually die if we didn’t!”
And then suddenly New Order comparisons are being replaced by Spinal Tap ones...
“Hahaha! Well obviously he could still spontaneously explode at the drum stool. You never know. You just never know.”

Collections is out now on Polydor.