Watching the detectives

It’s backstage at Oxegen and I’m standing with 40% of The Pigeon Detectives, the Leeds quintet whose debut album, Wait For Me, entered the UK charts at number 3.

Like fellow Yorkshiremen Kaiser Chiefs, The Pigeon Detectives have been heralded as the next big British guitar band. Unlike Ricky Wilson’s mob, however, you get the distinct impression that the Detectives won’t blow their load on their debut album, however good it is: after all, these ‘next big things’ have been writing songs together for years.
“We’ve known each other since we were four years old,” notes bassist Dave Best. “As a band, we’ve been playing for about two-and-a-half years. We were just playing gigs in Leeds and stuff like that before we got recognised, but once we did, it hasn’t stopped.”
So while they’re hardly an overnight success, The Pigeon Detectives have already been tarnished with the dreaded h-word: hype. Did that bother them at all?
“We haven’t had that much hype, to be fair,” Dave opines. “We hadn’t been in the media that much, and then all of a sudden we’re playing festivals and starting to do tours and people are going mental for us: everyone going mad at every gig, getting on the stage. Like today, Matt, our singer, says: ‘Can I have some mud?’ and everyone was just chucking mud on stage. But when we went to do the album, we didn’t feel pressure or anything like that: we’re taking each thing as it comes.”
Ah yes, the album. Recorded with industry heavyweights like Will Jackson (Kaiser Chiefs, Embrace) and mixed by Cenzo Townshend (Snow Patrol) and Steve Harris (U2), Wait For Me was hardly a quiet introduction. Why the big names?
“We recorded the album with someone we’re comfortable recording with, which is Will in Leeds. We knew him well, we’d done things before,” Dave states. “And when it came to the mixing, we knew how important it was to get the balance right and we’d heard Cenzo’s stuff. He was our first choice and we just said, ‘We’ll see if he can do it.’ We sent him something and he really liked it. Then Steve Harris, who did The Automatic and Kaiser Chiefs, did the rest of the album, so it’s all worked out really well.”
Drummer Jimmy Naylor interjects, with a smile, to point out that the aforementioned Mr Harris also numbers the rather less hip Santana amongst his credits.
When the album debuted at number 3 in the charts, the band were in Germany on tour.
“Because we’re on an independent label, they were always kinda modest with their expectations,” Dave smiles. “They were saying, ‘Oh, we’re hoping top twenty at the most.’ Then it went in at number three, and we had a couple of minutes' silence between us all.”
The album’s success is testament to the amount of time the band have put in on the road. In the last eight months alone, The Pigeon Detectives have toured with Dirty Pretty Things and Kaiser Chiefs, as well as their own dates and now the festival circuit.
“We got thrown in at the deep end with the Dirty Pretty Things tour, because we hadn’t even really been signed then,” Dave recalls. Describing the trek as a “real eye opener”, he admits that it did wonders for their fledgling fan-base, as did their jaunt with Kaiser Chiefs a couple of months later.
Anyone unlucky enough to miss The Pigeon Detectives at Oxegen, fret not. They’re coming back in October for four dates, taking in Belfast, Galway, Cork and Dublin. They’re looking forward to it immensely, as Jimmy notes: “It’s good to get back in smaller venues again and get people up on stage with you, havin’ a laugh with them before security people start going crazy.”