Noisettes Making noise
London's Noisettes are scratching their name into the fabric of this world.
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Few bands are chucking as many flavours into their musical stew as London-based three-piece Noisettes. Somewhere in there you can hear West Coast psych rock, eighties US punk, crackling jazz, classic English guitar pop, and driving old-school R&B. Fewer bands still are managing to take such a wide range of influences and transform them into something so individual, ferocious and brilliant. Yet on the eve of the release of their debut album, What's The Time Mr Wolf?, the band revealed not only a few last-minute jitters about the record, but also how hard they're finding it to win a reliable audience, despite being one of the most explosive live bands in the UK with a bona fide star of a frontlady, Shingai Shoniwa.
The Noisettes - Shingai, Dan (guitar) and Jamie (drums) - are refreshingly honest people. Their toil to be heard mirrors that of scores of bands who make music as it should be made yet, somehow, remain slighted by radio and the mainstream. For the moment, at least. This band have got 100 per cent belief in themselves and they're prepared to do whatever it takes to get their music out there. The punters will just have to catch up.
HUCK: Your debut album is not yet out but you're already recording new material. Is that right?
Jamie: We are - just demos. Six songs are roughly ready. We really wanted to get onto the new stuff because the way we recorded the album was good but, in the end, it wasn't the best way. We did it in different places and only when we could find time and, for that reason, it wasn't necessarily the best we could do. If all goes to plan, we'll record the second album in May.
So you're not happy with the debut album?
Dan: I'm happy with it.
Jamie: It's alright, but I'm not sure I would call it a classic album - it's more a collection of songs.
Shingai: That's just your opinion.
Jamie: Sonically, it changes too often and we seem to be coming from different places the whole time. I'd say a classic album is a moment in time.
Do you think people who buy the album will notice that it wasn't recorded in one place at one time?
Jamie: I can tell, but I'm not sure if anyone else will be able to.
Dan: A lot of the songs we recorded in California we ended up scrapping because they didn't really reflect what we wanted to do as a debut album. They were a bit dark. So we recorded more stuff here in Croydon [in England] and those songs worked better. I think the album's cohesive, even if we know ourselves it was pieced together a bit.
The Noisettes sound is really varied and distinct. Is it taking people time to latch onto it?
Jamie: No one wanted to touch us when we started out because we didn't sound like The Libertines or Bloc Party - everything about us was completely different. Labels thought it would require kids to use too much brain power to understand us, and that just wasn't fair on us or them, although they had a point: I'm constantly shocked by how much people who are supposedly into music just follow the pack and like what NME tells them to like. It's easier to do that but it's bullshit. Eventually we saw things happening, though - you see people come again. We're just about to go on tour and it will be a good test, because the last time we toured England it wasn't a huge success.
You've just been on a massive stadium tour supporting Muse. How did you get on with their fans?
Jamie: Really well, even though we took a bit of grief on our MySpace page. Some people said some pretty hardcore things. Some even didn't like that we don't have a guy singer. I couldn't understand it. But that's the only time we've been given a hard time.
Do people think of you as an eccentric band?
Jamie: Probably because we're not like Babyshambles. But we're not because there are bands like Lightning Bolt and Acoustic Ladyland out there too, and we don't think of them as being eccentric.
Shingai: A lot of people just haven't heard a band that seems to embrace a lot of styles of music. We don't ever try and force what we're writing through a hole and try and make it sound generic. We encourage the fact that we all bring different things to the songs and we think that now is a good time to do that. Other bands are all beginning to sound the same. It's about time they started bringing in different elements and trying new ideas. Plenty of bands doing the angular, post punk thing don't seem to realise that they've become ordinary; that they're the bland pop music that gets played to death on the radio and people end up hating.
So do you think of Bloc Party or Franz Ferdinand fans as your potential audience?
Shingai: It's not like that. No one's fighting for the same people.
Jamie: I don't care who they are as long as they come to the fucking gigs, and if they like it, bring two mates along next time. It's funny, because so many bands are looking backwards but few are doing what great bands of the past did and that was bring lots of styles to their music. Think of The Clash: they started rock'n'roll and punk, but then brought in ska and all sorts of other things. I just don't understand how it's got to this point where a band like us are considered outsiders when all we're doing is just making music like the good groups in the past always have. Everyone complains about this, but getting radio play and all that really ought to be about what's good and nothing else.
Shingai: It seems like so many bands do what they're expected to do. Someone says, 'I want a Saturday night record', or 'I want a Sunday night record', and they do it. It's not surprising that underground radio stations like Resonance keep going because they maintain that sacred place that musicians and artists always had. Now it's like we're being prescribed records by doctors and that's not right.
Jamie: But so many people don't seem to know that there's an option and something like Resonance FM is providing it, and every year it gets worse. There are kids now who think that 50 Cent created hip-hop. In America, things are a bit better. The most requested radio song is a Led Zeppelin song - 'Stairway To Heaven'. Here it's probably fucking James Blunt.
Americans have always been good to the Noisettes, haven't they?
Shingai: It's so much better over there than it is here.
Jamie: They've really embraced us. When we've played in America, or Europe, or just about anywhere that isn't the UK, it's been really incredible. Americans are better at giving something a chance if they don't get it at first. They won't just close their ears and go away. That may not be true but it seems like that.
In what ways can having this new record deal help you?
Jamie: It certainly helps to pay for the recordings and tours.
Shingai: But it still feels like we're a circus or performing troupe traipsing around trying to make a living. The truth is that we're never going to get much radio play and we're going to have to fight for privileges that other bands are handed. We don't expect to turn up in Liverpool or somewhere and have a ready-made audience. But we will go there and put on a show.
The Noisettes' debut album, What's The Time Mr Wolf?
This story originally appeared in Huck #004.
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Noisettes (text) by Phil Hebblethwaite is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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