Thursday 25 September 2008

LOTP for FACT



Quick chate with one of my favourite bands of the last few years, Late Of The Pier...


Late of the Pier’s space odyssey started in the verdant summer of 2004 under the gleaming spires and proud turrets of Castle Donnington. Since then, they’ve made the kids dance dance dance with their indescribably beautiful hair and chrome-plated squat-suited electro. The debut album, Fantasy Black Channel, is produced by Erol Alken and sounds like a ship made out of heroically gleaming metal piloted by android Knights of the Realm of Infinite Sublimity. We chatted with lead singer Samuel Eastgate in the departure lounge of Heathrow airport.

Hi Sam!

Oh hello.

So, the new album is out now…

Yeah. It was finished in March actually, and we wanted to release it right away. But that would have been a very silly thing to do, as word spreads quite slowly, and still very few people knew who we were, and those that did would have been really surprised to see it out.

That sounds almost cynical.

Yeah, I dunno. We definitely wanted it be like the first chapter of something special, like the first step of a beautiful journey. That meant people would have to buy it and realise it was out. I mean, some people and some magazines have behind us since the early days, but a lot have only recently gone Oh, hold on…

I heard that the album was recorded in one big old house?

Yeah! When we signed, we thought Let’s do this properly. It was a conscious decision, definitely. We just thought, if we want this to be good, we had better be doing this all time, so yeah, we rented this huge derelict mansion with shoddy foundations just outside Nottingham and recorded the album there. There’s something about the immediacy of living in such close quarters, being able to get up every day and just make. It was nice relying on gut instincts there. And thowing really good parties.

There’s something very “English eccentric” about that idea: retiring to the country to make this strange psychedelic work…

Yeah, I suppose there is! But we’ve never seen ourselves as a particularly English band: a lot of the music that we’re into is from all over the place, which I suppose is totally normal, isn’t it? The psychedelic thing is interesting though… A forming point for us was stuff like Revolver-era Beatles, and talking about drugs, though none of us had ever taken drugs. So I suppose what got us together was the idea of mind-alteration rather than mind-alteration. It was totally just us going into this world of our own and thinking our own way. What was really lovely a few years ago was coming to London and Way Out West, the Underage thing and all that… Seeing these kids that just got it.