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Music interview: The Brute Chorus
COULD This Be Love?, the new single from The Brute Chorus, comes with quite a story.
"We were at a party in south London a couple of summers ago," explains the band's drummer Matt Day. "I ended up having an argument with some guys outside and getting my face bashed in.
"My wife had to run back to the party and say I was beaten up. We ended up with the entire party, about 20 of us, going from this house at three in the morning to Lewisham A&E department. I believe James (Steel, the band's singer and main songwriter] wrote it then."
Matt suffered a broken nose and cheekbone in the altercation, as well as having his four front teeth displaced. "We were just about to go on our first tour. We had to cancel the first couple of dates.
"It was not ideal," he says wryly, "but a single has come out of it."
The track, to be released digitally and on limited-edition 7in on April 19, is the first fruit of The Brute Chorus' new deal with east London indie label Tape.
An album, How The Caged Bird Sings, will accompany it at the end of May.
It's the follow-up to the four-piece's eponymous debut, which came out last spring. Unusually, the band decided to record that live. "We had been in various studios doing demos of our early material but we were never quite happy with the sound we were getting," Matt recalls. "We never felt it was capturing what we were getting live at all our shows.
"As a bit of an experiment we thought we might as well record a live album as our debut. It was pretty testing to do it in one take in front of a live audience but we managed to pull it off in the end."
Decamped
This time the band decamped from London to Cumbria where Matt and Nick Foots, The Brute Chorus' bass player, grew up. "Last summer we went up to Cumbria to play a gig for Nick's mother's 60th birthday," says Matt. "It was in an old village hall. When we got there we set up and we could not get over how loud it was.
"There were a lot of old people coming so we ended up doing a stripped-back acoustic set.
"We decided for this album that we wanted to have a much bigger sound and it would be closely miked. We looked into studios in London and the South but we did not feel the sound we could get would be as loud as we could get in Cumbria.
"After a bit of persuasion with the label we dedided to go up there. It sounded a really good idea to go up there in the first week of January but with the big freeze there was no heating in the hall."
With temperatures in the main hall, where Matt was drumming, hovering below five degrees, it was "pretty grim".
"It turned out to our advantage, though," says Matt cheerfully. "It made me nail my takes – I wanted to get out pretty quick!"
As we speak, Matt's in the midst of packing for a tour of France and Germany with reformed 80s indie heroes The Woodentops. "We are big fans of theirs," admits Matt.
Even better, the headliners will be driving their equipment around while The Brute Chorus intend to use InterRail. "If you've ever travelled in a van with 10 blokes it's a bit more sane to catch the train," Matt chuckles.
They then return home for a British tour. At Leeds they will support The Joy Formidable. Says Matt: "Outside of London, Leeds is probably our favourite town. We've always had good links there. We've played nearly everything from tiny house parties to sold-out shows at the Cockpit. We really enjoy the buzz of the town. The two guys that drive us on tour are from Leeds too."
The Brute Chorus play at the Cockpit on March 17. Doors 7pm. Tickets, priced 7, are available in advance from Jumbo and Crash Records or from.lunatickets.co.uk
www.myspace.com/thebrutechorus
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Friday 25 May 2012
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