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Author: Mark Corcoran-Lettice
Mark Corcoran-Lettice plunges into the psyches of The Indelicates, a band with an opinion on just about everything.
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Let’s get the obvious out of the way then: you’re releasing this on Corporate Records as a pay-what-you-want release, with a physical release to follow. Have traditional ways of selling alternative music failed?
No, they were very successful for ages and made a lot of cunts a lot of money - but the underlying economic reality has been changed by the internet and I really do think that the whole industry as we know it is on the way out. It's simple. Record companies used to have a monopoly on music sales because the key resources they controlled (recording, manufacturing, distribution and promotion) were scarce and expensive – the internet has made them abundant and pretty close to free. Consequently, a radical shift in the business model is just necessary. I think it's good - everyone always knew that the music industry were card stacking parasites - now we actually have alternatives.
You’ve campaigned against the passing of the Digital Economy Bill – what do you think the consequences of its passing will be? Can it be realistically challenged now?
Well, it has to go through a lengthy process of clarification and interpretation and I live in hope that the more poisonous of its provisions will find themselves contained - but it's still a shockingly stupid and ill-thought-through law made by people who don't understand the internet for the benefit of music pricks who don't want to. At the very least, sites that link to copyrighted material will be blocked and a site-blocking precedent will be set; innocent family members will be
harassed and threatened with disconnection for the actions of teenagers and an undergound internet of VPNs etc will be created to get round ISP tracking. The law as written allows for far worse, though - especially the
new clause 8 on web-blocking which could be interpreted without much fuss to include Youtube, Corporate Records or Google. I doubt Google will ever be blocked in the UK - but laws shouldn't be passed that are so imprecise
that their lack of insanity in practice depends on the good sense of the sitting government. It's a very bad Act and it annoys me that so few musicians were willing to speak against it. It was, after all, passed in our name.
Onto the music, at last: to me, there seems to be a more dramatic sound to the album – I’m thinking of tracks like ‘Europe’ and ‘Be Afraid Of Your Parents’ here. Was there a deliberate shift in your sound while you were writing this album?
Deliberate to the extent that we didn't especially want to make another album that sounded like the first and didn't try to. We had a lot more studio time on this one and we didn't turn up with everything pre-arranged so a lot of what's going on was made up on the spot. We recorded it in a studio occupying a tiny corner of the enormous old DDR radio building in Berlin and spent a lot of time poncing about recording doors slamming from the other ends of corridors and using the stairs as an echo chamber – if you listen on Roses you can hear an old communist news broadcast that we recorded from some magnetic tape we found tangled up in a corner inside a
derelict propaganda office block - I don't want to be so wanky as to claim that you can hear the location in the recording, but hanging out somewhere like that for a month and a half can put you in a dramatic mood...
One of the standouts for me is ‘Flesh’ – I’m especially interested in the line “Hey girls, ain't you heard we're more concerned about the hegemony, than the women”. Do you think feminism has perhaps become overlooked? Discuss…
Well yes. We'll get into trouble for this, but I think there's a sense in which fashionable postmodern theories about cultural relativism have trickled down into the mainstream to the point where normal, left-leaning,
well-meaning people are quite happy to forgive egregious oppression of women by regimes and religions that are seen as opposing the hegemonic power of 'america' - while continuing to claim the title of feminist. I don't like that, I think if you're for Women's rights you have to be for them everywhere - but hey, if you post this online I expect that a charming trotskyist masturbator calling himself 'Resistor' will be along pretty soon to call me a pretentious neo-con for saying so, so what do I know? The song as a whole is more about the general dilution of feminism and also has Julia saying snatch, which people are oddly uncomfortable about.
The idea of savages appears throughout the album, obviously on the track of that name and also on ‘We Love You, Tania’. What counts as savage in the world of The Indelicates, and would the band be savages themselves?
In 'savages' it's a specific reference to the savage in Brave New World (for which the album cover can be treated as a spoiler). It's the idea that someone is driven, self-destructively to rail against a society that,
in fact, works quite well and that results, on the whole, in human happiness - any rebellious action, if successful, will make the situation worse not better and yet rebellion is a compulsion because it just will
not do to submit. Greeks in the age of Rome, Satan in paradise... I feel like this sort of a savage, complaining about music I hate when, on the whole, people don't care if the latest kooky girl on the radio is a
product of deceptive, sexist marketing they just think it sounds nice and, rightly, don't care that much. In a world like this you have to hang yourself just to stop yourself spoiling things for everyone else.
The reference in Tania is more to a bloke I vaguely know who used to think he was the sex because he sold some guns to some tribes on an island somewhere. twat. Its basically a coincidence that the word shows up twice,
but I like how it helps to tie things together.
Speaking of ‘Savages’, the synth outro on it is especially lovely. Has the synth-pop revival struck The Indicates too?
Revival? I been doing electronic shit since the 80s yeah? er... actually there's hardly any synth on savages - there's one arpeggiated sinewave that comes in at the end and the main snare and half the kick are electric but everything else is a live track looped - including an aerosol spray and an egg shaker doing the hi-hat bits at the end. Still, Julia only used to listen to trance when I met her and dance music can really be awesome - but it's no more dancey than the bit in America with the synth bass and the clapping. I never know what's being revived at what time - though I was in a shop the other day that was selling linen summer blazers with sleeves designed to be rolled up like James Spader has in Pretty in Pink. I've been waiting for that look to come back for so long - I was delighted.
You’ve announced plans to release music videos for all the tracks on the album – the video for ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ is out now, but any hints of what we may expect from the others?
Julia as Travis Bickle. That's all I'm saying.
On both records, there’s been a lyrical fixation on the wealthy and the aristocratic – ‘Unity Mitford’ on the first album, ‘Money’ on this one, and others. Is there a particular interest in the lives of the rich for the band?
Not just any rich people, you have to be a hot chick and you have to get involved with extremist politics like Unity Mitford or Patty Hearst (We Love You, Tania is about her). There's something interesting and dangerous
about angry young rich people who think they're special. Your Money is less about the rich than it is about the things you find yourself doing when your activity is at the mercy of someone else's chequebook - I mean, we had to have one cliched 'second album complaining about the music biz' song didn't we?
Although you’re sometimes compared with other bands like Art Brut, your sound and lyrical content has always been rather distinct from most other, euphemistically dubbed ‘indie’ bands in the UK. Have you sought such an artistic independence?
I don't know - you just write what you can stand to. I don't really like dancing, I haven't been in the early stages of a relationship for years, I've got an MA in Renaissance Studies and most of the time I listen to
popular science audiobooks instead of music - If I tried to write about a girl being lovely I'd just be a big fat liar. Art Brut are lyrically amazing though. Listen to Post Soothing Out on their second album again -
it's the best song written this century about being a man.
As the blog on the Corporate Records website made clear, The Noughties Were Shit. Any hope for this decade being any better (or at least jobs on the next round of I Love The Whatever’s)?
I'll take any money for old rope media job going. Want me to pretend to remember a children's TV show? I'm your man, I'll be so convincing even Peter Kay will be impressed at how nostalgic he feels. It's hard to know.
I you all elect a Tory government things will be worse, I expect – though it will have the corollary benefit of putting me back in step with the left while encouraging people to listen to angry, brilliant bands like the
Dirty North. There will probably be a bit of an online war between generations. The record companies will start lashing out more aggressively...
Still, if every piece of technology presented in Back To The Future Part II has not been invented by 2015 we will have failed as a species and yes, the 2010s will have been shit.
Oh yes, and finally – any dates in Newcastle soon? Please?
We're on our own, booking wise, and as the big booking companies have a bit of a stranglehold on venues and support tours, it's tricky to get gig everywhere we'd like to - if you can get a venue and pay travel, we'll
come - or you can buy the super special edition of the album where we come round your house, play and record it for you and then transfer ownership of the master tapes to you. It's expensive (price tbc) but you can club
together...
The second we can get booked to play, we'll come.
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