TAS in Session: Delphic
The mantle of hype that descends on some British acts can either be right on target (the xx, Florence and the Machine, Adele) or an odd misfire (Little Boots). Since the winter of 2009, the UK music press has been salivating over Manchester dance rockers Delphic for good reason; the young band's first record Acolyte, which finally dropped in the States on Dangerbird in late June and in the UK in January, is one of the most accomplished, promising debuts of the year.
Delphic, whose first US mini-tour and Coachella appearance was waylaid by Icelandic volcanic ash back in April, have only played a handful of gigs in the States so far, but they'll be returning to North America this fall, opening for The Temper Trap. Delphic will play Terminal 5 in New York on October 1 and Montclair's Wellmount Theater on September 30.
Earlier this summer, three of Delphic's four members - guitarist Matt Cocksedge, singer/bassist James Cook and Rick Boardman on synths (drummer Dan Hadley was off playing New York tourist) - dropped by Studio A to play "acoustic" versions (meaning no electric guitar, but rented synths and laptops) of "Doubt," "Counterpoint" and "Halcyon:"
Kara Manning: You were supposed make your first visit to the States in April for Coachella, but a volcano with an unpronounceable name got in the way of that. Were you in the Manchester airport waiting to get out?
James Cook: We were, yeah. We’d been to the airport a few days before because we were to go to France and that’s when everything started. This woman was smoking outside the airport and said to us, “we can’t fly today because of the smoke and the ash.” And we’re like, “your cigarette smoke, do you mean?” So we were stopped from going to France and a week later the volcano was still erupting. No luck. So it was pretty crushing. We just stayed in Manchester and sobbed into our pillows.
Kara: There has been such a big buildup to Acolyte in the UK over the past year and a half in the press, since the release of your single "Counterpoint," and you were listed as #3 of the BBC's Sound of 2010.
Rick Boardman: It’s called unnecessary overhype.
Kara: Isn’t that [kind of attention] treacherous for a young band releasing its first album?
James: It’s just really strange. It’s really bizarre to be at home in Manchester and write some songs and a few months later be hailed as the “third best new band.” How on earth do you quantify this kind of thing? It’s silly. But I think there’s a general culture in the UK of hype. I think it started with The Strokes to be honest with you. When they came over, there was this huge hype and everything exploded and everything changed. I think with every new band since, the UK press really loves to build up bands and then let them go. If it it explodes, it explodes, if it doesn’t they don’t care. There’s another band to hype up around the corner. There’s a strange culture in the UK of hype and the aftermath of hype. We just try to cut through it by not paying any attention to it, just playing gigs and releasing our songs. Doing what bands are meant to do which is to make music rather than justifying our presence in national music lists.
Kara: You’ve toured with a lot of bands that have been through that kind of hype, like La Roux, Bloc Party, Doves, even one of your heroes, Orbital. Was there anything you learned from touring with them?
Rick: I think every band different things that they can offer us. It wasn’t a massive learning curve for us. With Orbital, we’d stand at the back of their synth set when they were playing and with our notepads, [writing down] what kind of synths they had and what they were doing. With Bloc Party, you’ve got Kele who is a really great frontman and showman so we learned that side of things. We La Roux ... we learned other things (laugh). Like how to have a massive quiff which James has got now. I guess different people offered us different things. It was really important for us to go through all of that before we released this record.
Kara: You also co-headlined with Two Door Cinema Club, your Kitsuné [French label] bandmates.
Rick: We really got on when we toured with them. I’d like to say we’re friends now. We don’t have many. We need more of them. We have such a weird lifestyle that all of our real friends have abandoned us. We just have each other now.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5v0NEvEVto&feature=player_embedded]
Kara: “Doubt” was the third single off of this album. It has a wonderful affinity with vowels.
Matt Cocksedge: That was kind of inspired by Aphex Twin. It’s an odd one. I don’t know if you’d be able to draw the link without the knowledge, but [there's a] bit of “Windowlicker.” We were listening to a lot of Aphex Twin at the time of writing this album and [there are] amazing vocals in “Windowlicker.” We kind of wanted to do something with vocals and “Doubt” came out. Make of that what you will. I don’t know how you get from “Windowlicker” to that.
Kara: You’re on an assortment of labels in the UK, the States and Europe - Dangerbird, Polydor, Kitsuné - but you also have your own label Chimeric. How did you manage that?
Rick: Sheer precociousness.
Matt: I think we managed to fool everyone into thinking we were really, really good.
Rick: We started to go to meetings with big A&R people and we were joking around and demanded our own label, a UK only deal and all of these things and everyone was laughing. We didn’t think we’d get it either. But somewhere along the line, someone fell for it and gave us what we wanted. We was actually great, joking aside.
Matt: Credit to good management as well. They did a great job.
Rick: I like people to believe that we’re responsible for everything. It adds more excitement and mystery (laughs).
Matt: The management just takes twenty percent, that’s all.
James: And we’re on Modular in Australia as well. We’re pretty much covered.
Kara: You also worked with a terrific producer, Ewan Pearson, who is also behind Tracey Thorn’s most recent album. Why was Ewan the man?
James: The recording process and finding the right producer for Delphic was actually a long, drawn-out, arduous process. We tried with Tom [Rowlands of Chemical Brothers] and we tried with Paul [Hartnoll of Orbital] and it wasn’t quite right. We even had the audacity to try it ourselves but we really didn’t know how to operate a studio as efficiently as someone who can do it better. One day we found, in our inboxes, this version of “Counterpoint” which Dan [Foat] of R&S [Records] had given to Ewan. He’d sneakily given him all the parts [of the song] to rearrange it and Ewan did just a beautiful production job on it. We listened to it and fell in love with it. So we knew we had to do the whole album with Ewan. He’s one of those guys who has a real ear for what’s right with a track; he doesn’t try to take too much away. As a producer, he doesn’t try to put a massive stamp of his own on your songs.
Matt: Ewan understands music as well as dance music. He’s not just a DJ who listens to techno tunes. He understand and likes songs. That’s what we ultimately wanted to get through, wrapped up in this dance sound. That’s what we aimed for and that’s what we got to in the end, I think.
James: And we really wanted to make an album which hadn’t really been heard in a while. With this kind of shift in culture to iTunes and Spotify and all that, it’s so easy just to have a little glimpse of a song or a band, make your mind up and move on. So we really wanted to make a record that people could listen to from start to finish and made sense as a - at the risk of sounding like a massive hippie - like a journey of a record with a start, a middle and an ending.
Kara: “Halcyon” is a critical track, sitting in the middle of the album and propelling you to the end.
Rick: It’s kind of the start of the second side of an LP. That’s how we thought of it! “Acolyte” would be the end of Side 1 and “Halcyon” the start of Side 2.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j6mmBPmSdY&feature=player_embedded]
Kara: You’re often compared to New Order since you’re from Manchester, you’ve got that rock/dance element. Every single review on earth about you seems to mention New Order.
Matt: It’s funny, isn’t it?
Rick: Matt doesn’t even like New Order.
Matt: I like the singles! But I never found New Order to be much of an album band.
Kara: But you told me that you guys even interviewed Bernard Sumner.
Matt: We did! And for that occasion, I loved New Order.
Kara: What did you talk about?
Rick: Well, we tried to talk about synths and how they recorded their albums and he just talked about getting drunk.
Matt: We were being really geeky.
Rick: We had pages of notes and were like, “what synths did you use for this?” and he’s like, “let’s forget all this, during The Hacienda years, we just got wasted.”
James: He’s just fantastic. He’s just a really well-trained with the media and lines of questioning. We’re asking him things about Ian Curtis and stuff and he completely flipped it around to when his new solo project was coming out. He’s brilliant.
Rick: It was a really interesting experience for us, though. New Order are one of a load of influences, we can’t deny that. They’re not the main influence as people like to point out.
Kara: Coming from Manchester, which is so known for its music, from The Smiths to Happy Mondays, the whole of Factory Records, Doves, Chemical Brothers, Future Sound of London ... you’re surrounded by it.
Matt: Oasis, [the] Northern Soul [movement].
Rick: The whole legacy of music is huge, but we’re younger. We weren’t around when acid house came to Manchester so the idea for us was to break free from it and make Manchester exciting for the future. Though we obviously have great respect for what’s been there, people like The Smiths.
Matt: I got into The Smiths and the whole Manchester music thing really quite late. I was into Radiohead, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Sigur Rós and all that. Only later on did I get into stuff like The Stone Roses and I never got into the Happy Mondays. But all of it came much later and it took me awhile to get past Morrissey’s voice as well (laughs). [I was] about 18, but it was a few years prior to that listening to Prodigy, the Chems, Radiohead and Sigur Rós and then Manchester at the end of this thing. It’s bizarre because we can’t really view ourselves as objectively as we’d like. We’d like to say we don’t sound particularly in a Manchester mold, but as an outsider looking in, I don’t know.
James: We rebel against it. We don’t want to be a part of any kind of scene. I don’t think there is a scene in Manchester. I do think there’s a lot of good bands in Manchester. But you can’t hide the fact that Manchester did bring us together. I lived in Wiltshire and I wouldn’t have been in Manchester had it not been for the music scenes of past that had been going on there. It was listening to The Smiths, apart from these guys, or Oasis or bands like that drew me up there. I had to be a part of that.
Rick: And had Manchester not been so important in the past, I would have moved out of Manchester to find somewhere else that could have offered me what I wanted musically.
Kara: You’re also all music teachers ... or you were?
James: This is the odd quirk of the band. Rick, who plays keyboads, was a drum tutor. I was a guitar tutor and Matt’s mum is a music teacher.
Matt: But I didn’t teach music. I just read existentialist novels.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmYuMU7lArg&feature=player_embedded]
Kara: All of your videos have been accompanied by a beautiful, enigmatic video, but I just recently discovered that you’re not in any of them. You don’t want to be?
Matt: We’re not the gorgeous Parisian people you thought we were.
James: We look to the videos as being important, they’ve become so undervalued over time and so many videos are generic, just adverts for songs. We wanted to make videos that were artistic and meant something and were valid bits of art in themselves, even if you took away the music. We wanted to make a big deal out of it which is why we do the blogs, which we do ourselves. We just see Delphic as a 360 thing, not just music. Artists that we admire like Björk and Bowie, people like that, have always had everything. From the front cover of the album, to the videos and obviously the music itself. They really care about the whole thing and that’s why put a lot of thought into all of the moves that we make. A lot of the videos are inspired by old European film and it’s a different aesthetic, creating our own world to fit with the music.
Kara: Your video for “This Momentary” was actually filmed in Chernobyl. Director Dave Ma risked life and limb for you. Was that his idea?
Matt: Well, we wanted to put him in a high risk situation. So we thought that it’s either base jumping from the Empire State Building, swimming with sharks or nuclear radiation poisoning. And he chose the nuclear poisoning. We really wanted a video that contrasted with the “Counterpoint” video, not actors, not a set-up kind of feel. We wanted something that was like the lyric in “This Momentary,” of “let’s do something real.” We wanted moments from real people and that was the concept we took to Dave. Ewan had introduced us and we’d seen Dave’s work with Foals and we really wanted to work with him. We took this concept to him and a week later he came back and said, “right, I’d like to go to Chernobyl, do you want to come?”
Rick: Did we want to come (laughs)? No thanks!
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkmZBuidJVY&feature=player_embedded]
Kara: The three of you live together.
Rick: We do, touchy subject.
Kara: Do you drive each other crazy?
James: No.
Matt: Sssshhh.
James: If I say yes, he’ll hate me.
Kara: What’s in the fridge?
Rick: We’re come to America, so we’ve cleared it out.
Matt: Oh no, I left some milk! We always leave milk in the fridge. What a nightmare. You open the door and there’s this stench.
Rick: But me and James really like cereal so we just persist with it. So even if it’s pretty bad, we’ll put it on the Shreddies, hold our noses and hope for the best.
Matt: That’s just wrong.
James: You might partake in that, but I don’t.
Rick: Don’t be embarrassed, James.
Delphic's North American Fall Tour
Sept 26 Philadelphia, PA - Trocadero
Sept 29 Boston, MA - House of Blues
Sept 30 Montclair, NJ - Wellmont Theater
Oct 1 New York, NY - Terminal 5
Oct 2 Montreal, QC - Le National
Oct 3 Ottawa, ON - Capital Music Hall
Oct 5 Toronto, ON - Phoenix Concert Theater
Oct 11 Detroit, MI - St Andrews Hall
Oct 12 Chicago, IL - Metro
Oct 13 Milwaukee, WI - Turner Hall
Oct 14 Minneapolis, MN - First Avenue
Oct 16 Mexico City - Capital Festival
Oct 22 Pomona, CA - The Fox Theater
Oct 23 Los Angeles, CA - Club Nokia
