Hot Press meets Palma Violets

Reports of rock’s death are greatly exaggerated. Give a few matinee idol-types a guitar or two and mayhem will ensue. This year’s model? Palma Violets, a four-piece that thankfully have enough musical ‘otherness’ to ensure they should stay far from the scrap heap. Still in their infancy, there’s already a mighty mythology building around the newest bunch of bright young things from London. Just back from wowing Japan (naturally), Will Doyle is giving me a giddy tour around the centre of much of it, their HQ and the place that lends its name to their album title and cover. The Libertines had The Albion Rooms, Palma Violets found Studio 180.

Fantasically-named bassist Chilli Jesson reckons he saw the whole thing in a dream – he’s prone to flights of fancy – but Doyle brings it down to earth.
“I dunno what was coming to him in dreams!” he laughs. “He just called me up one day and was like, ‘I’ve got this place’. So... it’s just a black door, this looks like a normal house from the outside. It’s pretty much falling apart, a really small Georgian building. We used to play gigs down in the basement and the roof would start to fall in because we were so loud. Upstairs, every door has a different colour. Behind them are rooms where people create, they’ve got their own space. So it’s this amalgamation of different people’s creative output. But we’ve always just been down the basement.”
Superlatives from the music press and the guttural, throwaway brilliance of first single ‘Best Of Friends’ later and it was Palma Violets’ time to come up for air.
Hailing from Lambeth, Doyle had grown up with keyboardist Pete Mayhew and guitarist Sam Fryer. The missing ingredient was Chilli, who heard Sam strumming an acoustic in a Reading Festival campsite and demanded he become his manager.
Chilli ultimately opted for bass and found manager proper Milo at, of all places, a QPR match (“possibly the best thing that could come out of the QPR grounds at the moment,” Doyle deadpans).
Songs were written, shows played and their lack of an online presence only fueled the interest. Courted by plenty of majors, the band opted for Rough Trade, mainly because head honcho Geoff Travis was only interested in the music.
“We used to cover The Rivieras’ ‘California Sun’. Geoff came in and went, ‘Oh you’ve done a cover of The Rivieras!’ and Sam goes, ‘You’re the only person to get that!’ When [the record companies] came down, everyone had bought beer, wine, cigarettes, as a welcoming gift. Rough Trade just came down with themselves. Geoff even told me to pay for him! They told us straight up that they wanted to work with us. It was just literally like, ‘Ok, write out the
contract and we’re done’.”
The first thing Doyle did was jack in the day job.
“I spoke to our manager and asked how long he reckoned it would be before we got paid. I had about 300 quid in my account, I needed to make that last until we were!”
He’d been working as a lifeguard and was fed up not being able to swim. Meanwhile, Sam Fryer managed a week working in the Royal Albert
Hall before getting sacked. Now they’re playing the place.
“My mum went online the other day to get tickets and she got the worst seats in the world.
So hopefully I’m going to try and get her some good ones.”
They genuinely seem nonplussed by the hype. Mercifully, they’re taking themselves far less seriously than everyone else. They admit they’re still finding their feet and are just enjoying the ride. Every ‘rock star’ story of Doyle’s concludes with “...and I just burst out laughing”. Like the time they appeared on Jools Holland, the highlight for him
so far.
“It was all these acts like The Weekend, Lana Del Rey, Soul II Soul... I was just like, ‘What on earth are we doing here?! This is ridiculous, the whole thing’. It hit me again at the end of the night as well, when we were sitting in the pub having a drink. We got an autograph from Lana. We tore a picture of her out from the NME and Pete went straight up with it. We were hanging around outside her room for ages. Her stylist came out and Pete goes, ‘Can you just get her to sign this please!’ He disappeared, came out, and gave it back to us. But Pete did get a hug and a kiss from her later, so that was pretty good.”
They sound more like fanboys than Great White Hopes. As for the fangirls? Will says Sam gets the most attention, while “Pete gets the select few who plays the keyboards. They tend to be the weirder ones, but he’s just as kooky as them.”
Much has been made of the chemistry between co-frontmen Sam and Chilli. Onstage they clatter into each other, offstage they exchange kisses. It’s made the band the perfect replacement for those Libs lovers missing the Pete Doherty and Carl Barat bromance. As the guy who sits behind them, what does Will make of the fuss?
“That was bound to happen just because The Libertines was the last big ‘thing’ on Rough Trade. But I’m behind a drum-kit and Pete’s behind a keyboard... where would Chilli go?! Is he going to jump into Pete and probably knock his keyboards over?! But I did wonder, when Pete and Carl were jumping around, who were they compared to?”
I seem to remember it was, bizarrely, cockney skiffle duo Chas And Dave.
“Haha, Chas and Dave?! Brilliant.”
And there’s no danger of one of them going the
Doherty route?
“No, not at all. We’ve been fine so far. Plus, we have youth on our side, I think we’ll be alright!”
The debut LP, produced by Pulp’s Steve Mackey, is in the bag but it was a torturous process for the band. “We hated being in the studio. We found quickly that playing the songs over and over again to try and get them at their best just doesn’t work. It takes all the soul out of it. So we brought in a ‘three take’ rule.”
So Palma Violets, who really draw more on the likes of The Gun Club and other raw, psych-punk West Coast
acts than British bands, are simply trying to bottle their live lightning.
“We didn’t want a polished studio album, we wanted to keep it raw and energetic,” Doyle concludes. “I think we’ve done that.”

180 is out now on Rough Trade.