The Sound Of The Suburbs

“RIGHT NOW you’ve got all these horrible boy groups, like Boyzone and Five, who are so tailored to be in the charts to such a degree that it’s sickening – I can’t believe those guys are making the money they are. That’s why a band like us represents a breath of fresh air, because we don’t look for acceptance. I really believe that.”

Even in his current state of semi-dishevelment, having just emerged from an afternoon snooze, Lo-Fidelity Allstars frontman Wrekked Train Dave (not his real name) can still summon up a decent-sized salvo of fighting talk at short notice in an interview situation. Always a good sign for a rock star just starting out on his career path.

“You’ll have to excuse the state of me,” he yawns, shortly after we begin the interview. “I’m fucking wrecked. I didn’t think touring was going to mess up my sleeping patterns and my general health to this extent . . . sorry, what were we talking about again?”

We were discussing the current status of The Lo-Fidelity Allstars as one of the most talked-about new bands in Britain this year.

“Yeah . . . we’ve certainly been in a lot of magazines since about April,” he resumes. “If we hadn’t made a great album that we’re really proud of, then we’d be worried about the level of hype and everything. But we know that the album is strong enough in its own right. We’d be happy to sell just enough records to make one more. It would be ideal to just lock ourselves away and do the same thing again. We’re doing exactly what we want to do, we’ve got complete control, and not too many bands can say that.”

Dave’s pride and joy, the Lo-Fi Allstars’ debut album How To Operate With A Blown Mind, was released in May to an exceedingly warm reception. A scattergun explosion of samples, scratches, found-sounds, drawled vocals and one-eyed rock riffs, as well as the odd chilled-out interlude (‘I Used To Fall In Love’), it dovetails neatly with the current vogue in alternative UK music for all things loud, lurid and messy. To this writer, though the album had its moments, it sounded a little bit too ramshackle, a bit excessively chaotic, too many parts and not enough whole.

Dave unsurprisingly, disagrees. “I know what you mean when you say that, but I think it works. We don’t just throw in everything willy-nilly, we’re not that slapdash. We seek out samples and noise that we feel is appropriate for the track in question. It’s not as random as some people think; it’s done with a bit of care. ‘Punk Paste’ is our ethic. It’s a phrase I came up with, it’s a reaction to the music. Plus it sounds good. Whenever people ask us what music we play, we just say ‘Punk Paste’. But you’re gonna get categorised whatever you do. In our case I think it was because people were confused by our music.”

Dave is the visual fulcrum of six Allstars who glory in stage-names every bit as, eh, imaginative as their frontman’s. The line-up includes such names to conjure with as The Slammer, Albino Priest Phil, The Many Tentacles, Sheriff Jon Stone and A One Man Crowd Called Gentile Andy (I bet that last one looks great on the work visas).

“I met Matt and Phil when they were working in Tower Records,” explains Dave. “The band was basically born out of the frustration of reading reviews of records, and then buying them and finding out they weren’t any good. So I’d sit in this flat in Highgate with my mates, drinking beer and messing around with a hand-held tape machine. I couldn’t perform in front of anyone else but them for a long time. I’d get the tape machine and an echo unit, and do stuff over the top, freestyling. They loved it and the whole thing escalated from there.”

With six people in the band, all fighting for attention, are rifts a commonplace feature of existence as a Lo-Fi Allstar?

“Nah. With some bands you do get a definite leader who emerges, but with the six of us it’s very democratic all round. We don’t say things to each other like ‘Oh, your idea’s not as good as mine’ or anything.”

As Dave is at pains to point out, the main thread that unifies the band is their fervent love of music, with their tastes encompassing all points from Spiritualized to Marvin Gaye.

“We don’t sit around all day endlessly compiling our top tens, or anything – it doesn’t get quite that anally retentive – but we do talk about it a lot. I’ve always thought that was one of the essential requirements of being in a band, the love of music. A good day for me is just going into a record shop and dawdling all day. searching for good stuff. It’s always important to us to keep up with new releases, but then again, as I said earlier, a lot of new stuff turns out to be absolute shite when you listen to it.

“Y’know the way at festivals you have umpteen different tents with different styles of music in them? Well, we’re like the ultimate festival band. With us, you get the lot – funk, soul, rock, techno, hip-hop.”

One of the more memorable features of How To Operate With A Blown Mind has nothing whatsoever to do with the music contained on the CD. Opening the inlay card, the reader is treated to a lengthy and occasionally bizarre list of the band’s influences: musical (Isaac Hayes, Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder), cinematic (The Deer Hunter), and, eh, other (Alex Higgins, Billy Bremner and Monster Munch crisps). All well and good, Dave, but isn’t there something faintly ridiculous about a futuristic techno-rock band claiming to be influenced by a Vietnam movie and a rabid Leeds United midfielder whose main claim to fame was ripping off his shirt after being sent off in the Charity Shield?

“Well, I’ve always been a big fan of Christopher Walken, for example,” he replies, “and when people say to me, ‘What are your influences?’ I reckon it’s limiting to just reel off a list of bands or records. It should be a list of things you’ve lived and things you’re genuinely into, and that should show in the music as well. Claudio Gentile gets a mention too: that was the bass player Andy’s idea. Gentile was this really psychopathic fucker who played football for Italy. He did a killer man-marking job on Maradona at the 1982 World Cup. What that says about Andy, I don’t know.”

Influences aside, one musical entity The Lo-Fidelity Allstars have no wish to be linked to is the nascent genre of Big Beat. With its roots in the early work of the Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim, Big Beat made something of an impression on the music weeklies a year or so ago. The “scene”, as such, was centred around Brighton, with umpteen losers queueing up to hook their clumsy splodge-and-splatter percussion tracks onto a handy James Brown sample. It is an overbearingly crude style of music, and is easily the whitest genre ever spawned by the UK dance music fraternity (you will look long and hard before you find a Big Beat track recorded by a black person). It is also perhaps the most self-serving, self-perpetuating, inbred tripe nurtured by the British music press since their Camdencentric farrago back in 1995.

“It’s just fucking appallingly lazy journalism on the part of the UK press,” snorts Dave. “Some bands will transcend that label, whereas there are other ones who sound as if they’ve just read the manual that came with the Big Beat starter kit. They’ll fall by the wayside. You can just visualise some guy in a suit, in a boardroom, ordering people to make a record the way Fatboy Slim does it.

“I mean, I hate that whole corporate realm. I despise MTV culture, for instance. It’s complete shit . . . it’s just this horrible world of grinning Europeans. Anyway, I don’t have the facilities or the time to watch it at the moment, thank God. After recording, rehearsing, touring and what have you, the last thing you wanna do is sit in a room and watch MTV. I hope the band never gets into a situation where we’re depending on MTV to sell records.”

So, ultimately, why is he in The Lo-Fidelity Allstars? What makes him keep getting up out of bed to come down and do interviews with rock hacks in hotel lobbies? What drives him?

“I just want to be creative in lots of different senses. A lot of bands say that if they weren’t making music they don’t know what they’d be doing, but in my case that really is true. Actually, that’s a load of crap. I know what I’d be doing: I’d be painting. I do a lot of that in my spare time (Dave painted the sleeve of the album – J. O’B). But I don’t get as much from that as I do from making music.”

How To Operate With A Blown Mind is out now on Skint.

Dave’s Fave Raves

The Undisputed Truth – ‘Friendship Train’

“This is a 7-inch I picked up in Amsterdam. Classic soul. I fucking love it.”

Marvin Gaye – Trouble Man LP

“The greatest album ever made. The title track is beautiful.”

Stevie Wonder – The Anthology LP

“Another Amsterdam purchase. Sheer bliss from beginning to end. I hate the stuff he’s doing now but this is top-drawer.”

The Lo-Fidelity Allstars – How To Operate With A Blown Mind

“That’s self-belief for you.” (laughs).