There Is An Acolyte that Never Goes Out

At some point over the last decade a factory in the British midlands began churning out identikit four-piece indie bands with ironic hair. I’m telling Matt Cocksedge from “new Manchester” guitar ‘n’ beatz pop combo Delphic this theory. He laughs and says, “and we want to find that factory and burn it down”.

This is slightly disingenuous, Matt admits. A few years ago he and Rick Boardman from Delphic were in one such indie-pop disaster. But they saw sense before things got out of hand.
“Yes, we were in a band a bit like that and kind of writing middle-of-the road crap,” he sighs. “We realised one day that we actually didn’t like the music we were making. There was no overall concept or direction of where we wanted to go. Every song was written because we’d heard a really cool tune on the radio and wanted to copy it. There was no overall identity or vision to what we were doing. It was a painful realisation and once you realise that you kind of think, ‘what’s the point?’ We had no option but to end that band and write music that we wanted to hear.”
So Matt and Rick and a college friend James Cook decamped to the Lake District to dream it all up again.
“We were in this rundown little cottage without TV or the internet... the three of us chopping wood and writing some songs,” he laughs. “We needed to get out of Manchester and re-inspire ourselves.”
To write music you “want to hear” can be a counter intuitive and cerebral exercise, says Matt.
“Before we’d even written a song we were trying to think of concepts for the album and ways to make the songs all fit together and put them all under one umbrella. It was trying to combine the music we were into. We love people like Kraftwork, Orbital and Underworld and that dancier side of things. We also have a real affection for bands like Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Godspeed You Black Emperor and people like that. So, it was really a matter of consciously taking all our favourite bits of music and putting them all together and Delphic is what came out of that.”
And the Manchester influence that’s been picked out by eager scenesters and journalists is overplayed a little bit, he reckons.
“Being from Manchester has affected us in two ways really. It’s made us rebel against a certain type of Oasis-y laddish pub rock; hearing all that music made us want to be a different side to Manchester. Then of course there’s the Factory Records history and the New Order thing. That’s inescapable and being seen as part of all that or a continuation of that is great, but the truth is we were only 12 or 13 when the Hacienda was shut and the Manchester influences are among many bands in the pallet we’re drawing from. I reckon if we were a Sheffield band we’d be likened to the Human League instead of New Order, but people need to pigeonhole us I suppose.”
One city that definitely influenced them was Berlin, where they went to record with producer Ewan Pearson after their spell in the Lake District furnished them with an album’s worth of songs.
“Berlin definitely seeped into the record,” Matt nods. “Even though all of the songs were written by the time we took the album over there, we loved the city and that minimal techno scene and we definitely brought a bit of it to the record. Berlin’s a great place. It’s very similar to Manchester in many ways. They’re not affluent cities. Berlin has this decaying feel to it... I don’t want to imply it’s dying because it’s a really vibrant city. But it has this battered feeling to it which I think Manchester shares. This is definitely not a London vibe we’re dealing with here, and that’s very important to us.”
Now, weirdly enough, Matt says it feels like there is a Manchester scene. But one that eluded them in the past.
“We were kind of shut off from the city in many ways. We all lived together and cocooned ourselves away and wrote music, but it looks like a lot of Manchester bands were thinking along similar lines as us.... bands like Egyptian Hip Hop and Dutch Uncles. We’d initially responded to what we saw as a lack of cohesiveness in the Manchester scene by running our own little underground raves rather than playing the typical venues. Our drummer had his own generator and we’d set up and go. There’s a different scene for that kind of thing. There’s an edge to a night like that that’s great.”
And there’s something in the zeitgeist now, he says, a new wave of pop experimentation that really appeals to him.
“In the last few years bands have used the word ‘pop’ as a way of trying to be cool or relevant or hip and all it meant was that they made happy-sounding songs or maybe had a girl singer. Now there’s this twisted kinky pop music emerging. Pop music doesn’t have to be happy. It can be dark and emotionally complex. That’s one of the things that music does fantastically, maybe better than any other medium – it can explore and expose those jarring feelings between euphoria and sadness. And that dark deep euphoria is what Delphic is all about."