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Music Interview: Dog Is Dead
ROB Milton vividly remembers the strangest gig his band have yet played.
“It was in Milan, it was Vogue fashion week,” explains the 20-year-old singer with Dog Is Dead. “We were playing for Burberry. We were getting kitted out in expensive clothes in the Burberry store and playing to these beautiful Italians, who looked immaculate, and there were we, these not-that-great-looking Nottingham lads.
“Everyone in that room felt awkward for each other.”
Fashion faux pas aside, things have been going pretty well for the Nottingham five-piece in the last 12 months. Having clinched a deal with Atlantic Records, they’ve toured with Bombay Bicycle Club and Viva Brother, performed at several major festivals and had airplay on BBC Radio 1 and 6Music.
The core of the band met at West Bridgford School in Nottingham. “We’ve known each other for eight to 10 years or so,” says Milton. “We were into rock music and wanted to play guitars. We made various little bands with us and our mates. This one somehow stuck.”
Soon they were shunning cover versions in favour of writing their own songs. Though Milton admits many of them “would sound rubbish”, there were “flavours of decent music”.
“We were keen to experiment quite early on, especially with the harmony thing. We were not great players, but we thought if we use the voice as an extra instrument we would make cool sounds. When we were 15 or 16 you get the hang of these things – that’s how a sound starts forming.”
Interestingly, the bright, poppy tunes they come up with were in direct contrast with their own grungy tastes for Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and the Pixies. Milton puts it down to a happy accident. “We had the kind of upbringings where we were exposed to all kids of music,” he says. Somehow it all fed in. “Which was quite clever of us – accidentally.”
The band’s name derives from a private joke (not, as some might suspect, from the title of a song by 90s Britpop band The Longpigs). “The words meant something,” says Milton, but none of his bandmates can quite remember what. “When we had our first gig we needed to call ourselves something. Dog Is Dead was floating about. ‘Let’s call ourselves that.’ We could not be bothered to think of a new name for the next gig.”
Deal
It wasn’t deemed an obstacle to them landing a management deal with the owners of Nottingham venue Rock City and releasing a couple of singles on a small independent label. An appearance, miming their track Glockenspiel Song, in the Channel 4 youth drama Skins earned them wider recognition. Though not a series “that related to us as people”, the band were persuaded by the programme’s director – “He said he loved the song and wanted us to do it”.
“South America went crazy for us after that,” says Milton, with slight disbelief. “I don’t know what they get from that show, but it was an unexpected addition to what we are doing.”
This February the band embark on a headline UK tour. It corresponds with the release of their new single. “Two Devils is a darker kind of side to what Dog Is Dead is doing,” says their singer. “We only wrote it a couple of months ago. It’s a twisted romantic tale of a guy and a girl. The girl is falling really ill.
“When we wrote it it seemed like the kind of thing that we wanted to exist on the internet and the radio, to have it out as a single.”
An album will follow in late August or September. “It’s 70 per cent recorded,” reveals Milton. “We’ll be finishing that off after the tour.” The disc will be a mixture of old and new material. “It has to be a debut record – that’s the point,” he says. “I don’t think there’s anything [in our repertoire] that has grown too tiresome. It’s making sure that we are not getting ahead of ourseleves. it should be raw and exciting.”
Given the current climate in which many guitar bands are struggling, it’ll be fascinating to see how it fares. Milton sees signs for encouragement. “No-one cared about us in the industry about a year ago. People were not signing guitar bands or putting out their records. It allowed us to develop our own sound even more. As much as being a guitar band is very difficult, the weird thing is those bands that had not fully blown up until their third album have been able to build, like The Maccabees, Bombay Bicycle Club, Noah and the Whale.
“Our big mission is we don’t need to get to No.1. We need to do enough to keep people interested. We need to put out an album that can be relatively timeless even if it does not sell millions, then we can be around for album No.5.”
Feb 26, The Cockpit, Swinegate, Leeds, 7pm, £6. Tel: 0113 2443446. www.lunatickets.co.uk
DUNCAN SEAMAN
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