News Of The Weird

It’s an overcast Wednesday in Southend, a moderately decrepit English seaside town, and These New Puritans’ Jack Barnett is preparing to share a guilty secret.

“I have this song about Michael Barrymore, that I wrote years ago, yeah?” he confesses. “We were mixing it last summer for the album – and the day we went into the studio to do it, was the very day he was arrested for murder [Barrymore was detained in relation to the 2001 death of a partygoer in his swimming pool but released without charge]. It was weird, like we’d called this ungodly force into existence.”
Ungodly forces, it turns out, are a subject close to Barnett’s heart. On his band’s clattering, claustrophobic debut Beat Pyramid, he makes like a Britrock Rasputin, dropping bizarro references to numerology, an undead Elvis and the Tudor Elizabethan mystic Dr John Dee.
“Most songwriters, they take love, a very big thing, and make it into a small thing,” says the singer of his penchant for obscure lyrics. “We take someone like John Dee, who means nothing to anyone, and make him into someone... someone who means something.”
Should the hyperbole-spewing hype machine that is the British music press be believed, These New Puritans, together with kindred avant-gardists Foals and Klaxons, stand in the vanguard of a thrilling new genre: new eccentric. Such chatter seems of only passing interest to Barnett, not wholly comfortable, you sense, with the notion of fronting a rock group to begin with.
“We’re not a guitar band, we’re a band with guitars,” he intones. “We’re not a four-piece. There just happen to be four of us. I don’t pay much attention to boundaries. Like, recently, I wrote a piece for six accordionists. I’ve also written lots of choral things. I’ve done marching band music. I’d like to put together this huge marching band under the These New Puritans umbrella. Christ knows how we’d pay them all.”
Formed by Barnett and his brother George (perma-pouting rhythm guitarist Sophie Sleigh-Johnson and bassist Thomas Hein complete the line-up) These New Puritans caught their first break early last year, when Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane tapped them to score a soundtrack for his summer catwalk show.
Elaborates Barnett: “We’d just been signed by Domino but nobody knew about it. George met Hedi in a pub. They just got talking. He didn’t even know George was in a band. He invited us to go to Paris and record, to basically collaborate with him I guess. We went to Paris and recorded, mixed and mastered everything in seven days. We were in these amazing French studios. It was mindblowing. I think Hedi likes to work with bands – he always commissions new music for his shows.”
Adding to These New Puritans’ poseur rep was GQ magazine, which included them in its yearly ‘best dressed’ poll. Barnett bristles at the suggestion they’re beneficiaries of a fashionasta conspiracy, however.
“We’re really not that serious about our image,” he insists. “Actually I’ve started wearing armour on stage. I’ve got this rumour armour – it’s a 1940s stage costume. It’s like real metal. So that’s our new thing. It’s heavy but it’s all right to play in. The hard thing is that the guitar strap gets all caught.”
As to those Twilight Zone-meets-HP Lovecraft lyrics, Barnett is at a loss to explain from whence they originate. He doesn’t dabble in the occult – in fact he’s never had much of an interest in the subject.
“Actually, I had a thought the other day about the Michael Barrymore song,” he adds. “I saw him once, making a programme at Colchester Zoo. He had a camera crew with him and they were trying to interview kids. I don’t know whether there was a new animal at the zoo or something. Anyway, they tried to interview me. I just kind of made myself scarce. I’d forgotten all about it. It’s only just come back to me. Maybe that’s where the fascination started.”

Beat Pyramid is out now on Domino