Their Neigh Will Come

Seated in the corner of a gritty East London rehearsal space, Tahita Bulmer grinds her teeth in irritation.
“Topshop band!” moans the New Young Pony Club vocalist. “That’s a ridiculous label to pin on us. It’s utterly pejorative. To me a Topshop band would be someone like Girls Aloud – a group that young girls might aspire to be. To describe us as that is incredibly ignorant.”

It’s late October and NYPC are putting the final touches to their (as yet untitled) second album. Recorded while the band came to terms with various personal upheavals – as well as the professional setback of parting ways with Island Records – it is, says Bulmer, a far grittier affair than their Mercury-nominated nu-ravey debut, Fantastic Playground.
“It’s a reaction,“ she explains. “Obviously we had some modicum of success with the first record and that was great. At the same time, there were a lot bands who came after us who had even more success. So now that sound is mainstream – it’s on [Britain’s] Radio One. So we had to ask ourselves, do we want to do something in that vein? Or do we want to change it around slightly?”
Reading between the lines, are we to take it that NYPC are aghast that La Roux, Little Boots etc have taken their retro electronic sound and brought it to an even bigger audience?
“Well, our sound specifically is Stock, Aiken and Waterman meets Bronksi Beat. So we’ve always been slightly different. But we’ve been making music for some years now and it’s quite old hat to keep going on in the same vein. It was, we felt, time for a change.”
Personally, Bulmer’s been through the emotional grinder, following a break-up with her long-term partner. Did the success of the first record and her ascent into quasi-celebrityhood put pressure on the relationship?
“Not really. Obviously those things were going to have some influence. Specifically being female and having a male partner – men in general can feel quite threatened by a woman who’s successful.”
As can male music journalists, she suggests.
“The old guard in the music press have a tendency to see a woman in a very pejorative way,” she proffers. “The idea that you can play an instrument or sing – it’s almost as if you’re a singing dog basically. They feel shocked. They feel you’re just in it to wear pretty dresses. Certainly some elements of the old guard did respond to us in that way. Well, more fool them for not realising women can be as equally driven and passionate about music as men.”
Bagging a Mercury nomination was widely seen as being the making of NYPC. The reality was rather different.
“It did absolutely nothing for us,” she rues. “For people like Bat For Lashes, it made a big difference in terms of the way they were viewed. We were such a black horse entry, the old guard in the media was looking at us going, ‘You’re a fashion band – we’re not going to take you seriously.’”
Speaking to Bulmer, it’s clear she believes very deeply that New Young Pony Club have the chops for a long-term career. It’s probably just as well that she’s so self-confident – NYPC’s self-belief was pushed to the limit recently when they opened for Manic Street Preachers, a group whose fan-base is not known for its openness toward female-fronted pop acts.
“Obviously it’s intimidating with a band like the Manics, who have a rabid following. I remember being very young and walking past the Kentish Town Forum and seeing lots of older kids wearing eye-liner and feather boas and leopardskin. That would have been in the Richie phase of the Manics. Those kids are now in their mid to late 30s and they’re still at Manics gigs in their feather boas. They’re really passionate about the whole thing and, you know, there’s a kind of gritty authenticity to the Manics, despite the fact that they’re basically a stadium band now. For a little dance band like us, it’s quite a testing environment to go into. But hopefully we won a few people over.”
Despite the Mercury nomination, Fantastic Playground didn’t sell in astronomical quantities and last year NYPC were informed that Island couldn’t afford to bankroll their next record.
“They told us they couldn’t pay us the advance they’d promised. So we decided to go and do the new record ourselves. We’re not some big corporate act. We haven’t been engineered out of East London. There’s no big apparatus behind us. We are an independent band trying to deal with this brave new world and attempting to ensure we can keep making music.”