Eastern Promise: Interview with East India Youth

His debut record maps the contours of youth in isolation, often seeming as cut-off and ‘other’ as Bowie in Berlin, but William Doyle can admit, like Snoop before him, that he’d quite fancy an entourage. The first hint was in giving his starkly solo vehicle a collective name. We meet that East India Youth chap – title pinched from the Docklands area of London – talking about touring life without the comradery of a band.

“I do miss it,” Doyle says of his time with twee indies Doyle & The Fourfathers. “Especially when you’re flying to festivals in Europe, it can get really lonely. There’s other bands there but they’ve all got their own entourage! A lot of the time it was just me. You’d talk to them for a bit and then they’d have to go in their dressing-room. ‘Oh, what am I going to do now?’!”

He’ll bolster that team-of-one for future tours, but the shows themselves have been sustaining him to date. Never has a soundscaper of glacial ambience attacked their audiences with such abandon. Doyle, the kind of guy you’d expect to see in a Topman advert slowly being choked to death by his own shirt, is a bit of a headbanger. He wants a reaction. “It’s stupid to think you’d make art not to get reactions from people. Surely that’s the number one rule?” He gets a reaction.

Thankfully, he’s not always aware of it. One particular night, he failed to cop the familiar face of one of his production heroes in the crowd. Of course, you imagine Brian Eno is a low-key presence at the back whenever he decides to go out and take in a show.

“Good job I didn’t actually recognise him when I was on stage,” notes Doyle. “It would have gone badly for me I’d imagine. He really enjoyed it as well, apparently. So to have it praised by him is crazy. He’s probably my biggest influence by a long way. Not necessarily just in terms of his music, which I do find influential, but it’s the spirit in which he makes things. His methods.”

Would he enjoy observing them first-hand? He could try some of his famous Oblique Strategies. Try faking it, William, etc...

“Maybe he’ll let me play something on the next Coldplay album… the royalties would be excellent!” For the moment, Doyle is happy with the hum of his computer for creative company; little else is required.

“I quite like to keep East India Youth as my baby really, keep it all to myself! It’s a bit selfish but I took so long coming to that realisation that I want to keep it that way for now. I’m in it for the long haul. It’s not a quick rise to the top that was my intention. It’s a career.”

One that’s off to a good start. Those who are seriously taken with Doyle (“I’m half Irish but I don’t actually know my roots at all, which I’m slightly ashamed of,” he says of his surname) are those who take their music seriously.

John Doran of music website The Quietus was sufficiently enamoured by East India Youth to establish the Quietus Phonographic Corporation in order to release his music.

Of that, Total Strife Forever is his debut long-player. Cribbing its title from Foals, but replacing “life” for “strife”, fittingly (“I’m one for a pun!” he says with a smile), it is a startling work that looks to combine modern electronica with a classical aesthetic. Comparisons have inevitably been made to James Blake. Doyle points to Sufjan Stevens’ Age Of Adz.

“He’s just an unbelievable sort of genius and that comes across. I liked what he was doing with that, it was a heavily electronic album but really orchestral and the two things collided with each other. That was an inspiring sound.” In truth, however, he doesn’t come from an electronic background.

“It’s funny, my frame of reference has come in a very ‘backwards’ way, by being compared to this and that. I started making electronic music because that’s all the tools I had available to me. On my computer, when I was 12 or 13 and started recording at home. But now I’m starting to get more into dance music, getting more involved in the scene and the history of it.”

Doyle has been vocal about his problems with the genre. Spoken about artists hiding behind masks, the anonymity of it all.

“I suppose it started with Kraftwerk or something, the idea that electronic music was cold and emotionless. The anonymity of the genre seemed quite appealing at first, after being a frontman in a band for ages. But my natural instinct in terms of performing is to be more physical and show myself. I just wasn’t seeing many people doing that really. It was all people looking off into the distance in their photographs and being covered in suggestion when they were playing live. It’s such a personal album for me that I needed to get that across.”

Take the video for ‘Looking For Someone’– Doyle looking, unwaveringly, out at you. “Changing the faceless way of electronic music is having me look right down the barrel of the lens into camera. Being confrontational with it. I quite like that idea.”

Total Strife Forever is out now.