THE HORRORS...ALBUM, Tour, AND Instore GIGS!

THE HORRORS ARE SET TO RELEASE THEIR DEBUT ALBUM STRANGE HOUSE ON LOOG RECORDS ON 5TH MARCH. CHECK THEM OUT ON TOUR!

Chay Woodman

Date published: 23rd Feb 2007

They might be the most exciting British band since the Sex Pistols, but there’s very little that could’ve prepared The Horrors for what’s happened to them since they played their first gig in September 2005.

A mess of sharp elbows, big hair, feedback and monochrome clothes, since that gig at The Spread Eagle in Shoreditch, the band (who all met at Southend’s super-fashionable Junk Club, run in the basement of a decaying Victorian hotel by keyboardist Rhys ‘Spider’ Webb) have played gigs everywhere from LA to Hull and Tokyo, been tipped by Jarvis Cocker as the future of British rock and appeared on the cover of NME after only two singles. They’ve scraped knuckles and cut knees. They’ve made a video starring acclaimed actress Samantha Morton with legendary director Chris Cunningham and then had the same video swiftly banned by MTV for excessive strobe use and general gruesomeness. They’ve been chased down the street by teenage girls trying to tear out locks of their hair in Rome. They’ve seen UFOs at 3am on the way back to London from a gig in the grounds of a stately home in Derbyshire. They’ve caused $10,000 of damage during a near-riot at a gig in New York after signing to Island Def Jam (home to Kanye West and Jay-Z) in America. And they’ve released a four dark-hearted singles that have annoyed as many people as they’ve enthralled – as well as the New York show, they had to cut short a gig at the last-ever Junk club because of an over enthusiastic crowd.

"It’s weird, because when we do gigs we just set out to play our songs and not annoy or wind up anyone - but we often cause loads of trouble in the process", explains keyboardist Rhys ‘Spider’ Webb evenly. "Still, we’re not interested in pleasing everybody. And we certainly don’t have a problem with pissing people off in the process. We don’t care what people think of us. If we upset people we’re not bothered in the slightest."

Likely to win over the floating voters more than annoy them, it’s little wonder that The Horrors’ debut album sounds so assured – this band have squeezed more into one 18 months than most groups do in a lifetime. It also helped that, all being fanatical collectors of vintage music from ‘50s rockabilly and ‘60s garage to ‘70s post-punk and ‘80s no-wave, the band had a very clear idea of what their first album should sound like. "When we started playing together it was because we thought we might be able to play some gigs and maybe save up enough money to put out a limited-release seven inch" says Webb. "The fact that we played our first gig after two rehearsals is important – we didn’t want to write an album’s worth of songs and take them out on the road and try to get a deal. We literally played our first gig three weeks after we’d formed. So, yes, everything’s happened quickly for us – but we were always built for it to be that way."

"With ‘Strange House’ we wanted to capture the energy and enthusiasm of a band that had quite little experience of either being in a band and playing" Webb continues. "So this album documents the journey from walking into a rehearsal room a year ago and playing covers of ‘Jack The Ripper’ by Screaming Lord Sutch and ‘The Witch’ by The Sonics up until touring the world."

Recorded variously with Bad Seeds Seeds/Cramps/Sonic Youth drummer Jim Sclavunos at The Chapel in rural Lincolnshire, Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner at Ray Davies’ Konk studios, Blur and Depeche Mode producer Ben Hillier at George Martin’s Air Studios and Depeche Mode/U2 Alan Moulder and Sons And Daughters producer Seb Lewsley at West Heath studios ‘Strange House’ is a dense mass of radio static, Faris Badwan’s complex, poetic lyrics and Joshua Von Grimm’s (a physics graduate with a love of DIY electronics who builds his own guitar pedals) startling guitar textures, all swept along on fractured garage riffs.

"The album was recorded over the course of a year," explains Webb of the large number of producers "just because we were playing gigs all the time. Recording was great, though: we were singing in toilets, drilling through guitars, playing the bass with drumsticks and creating electrical interference to all of the TVs in the studios."

"We also wanted to try and keep it as close to the live show as possible. A lot of ‘Strange House’ is recorded live. So we stripped everything down to the basics. It’s quite puritan, but we kept that live energy."

Their live shows are the key to understanding The Horrors’ ethos: far from being nihilistic troublemakers, the band are keen to spread awareness about their influences when they play, passing on their love of the more arcane corners of the last fifty years of rock’n’roll to their fans, pressing up lovingly-created fanzines that combine Badwan’s art (the singer is a Fine Art student at the prestigious Central St.Martin’s) with articles about obscure British freakbeat and how to make your own clothes. This is a band committed to community as much as chaos.

"We feel strongly that we should be playing to as many people as we can" says Webb. "And when we tour we’ll get some silkscreen posters made up or do our fanzine or each take a box of records out with us to DJ inbetween the bands – we don’t want to turn up in a town and hide in the dressing room until it’s time to go onstage. We like to make it an event when we play."

"The best thing about the last year has been the crowd reactions, even in places like LA" says Badwan. "In Japan the fans copy our style but do it better - if we’ve inspired people to take their lives in a direction inspired by us that can only be flattering. There aren’t many bands that have this opportunity to transmit their music to a wide audience so we think it’s a big responsibility to do it without sounding like anyone else."

Not only does ‘Strange House’ not sound like anyone else, but, much like the early Manics, it manages to take all of the band’s disparate influences and recast them into something that could only be The Horrors. It’s a landmark record. However manic the last twelve months have been, the future can only get stranger still.

‘Strange House’ track by track

1. ‘Jack The Ripper’

Spider Webb: "This was the first songs we played in our first rehearsal. We were attracted to it because it sums up so much of what we’re about – not just the menacing sound or the subject matter but the fact that so many bands we like have done a version of this song, from Screaming Lord Sutch’s version produced by Joe Meek to (‘80s Canadian garage revivalists) The Gruesomes."

2. ‘Count In Fives’

Spider Webb: "The album version is exactly the same as the one we released as our third single."

Faris Badwan: "The lyrics are about me counting things in fives when I was a child – I’d always step on paving slabs in groups of five."

Coffin Joe: "It also shares a riff with ‘My Brother The Man’ by (1960s Florida garage band) We The People. But it’s one of those timeless basic garage riffs, like ‘Louie Louie or something."

3. ‘Draw In Japan’

Faris Badwan: "We don’t like to record songs that we can’t play live. This is the exception, though."

4. ‘Gloves’

Faris Badwan: "This is about a collection I used to have. You always see abandoned gloves on the pavement and I used to collect them, label them with the location and time that I found them and put them in plastic bags. I’m sure that some of them had fleas. But I’d imagine stories of who they’d belonged to. In the end I threw them away because they started to freak me out."

5. ‘Excellent Choice’

Faris Badwan: "This was the first song we wrote together."

Spider: "We wanted to make an album that was an album, not a collection of radio-friendly songs or just all stuff that was immediate. We wanted to explore some different sides to the band, hence the spoken-word segment of the track."

Faris: "The thing that links all the tracks was the fact that they’re all built around a strong rhythm section that are all recorded live."

6. ‘Little Victories’

Spider Webb: "When we were recording we had access to an archive of really old synths, ones made before they even used keys. Even some of the drum sounds were processed through those, like on this track."

7. ‘She’s The New Thing’

Spider: "It’s an anti love song."

Fairs: "It’s about the frustration of getting bored with people too easily. It’s also the first time that The Horrors have experimented with harmonies. Like ‘Johnny Remember Me’ backing vocals."

Spider: "It’s supposed to be a pop song that’s not a pop song in the traditional sense but still catchy."

8. ‘Sheena Is A Parasite’

Faris: "That’s our underground smash hit."

Spider: "It sums up everything about us. It’s 90 seconds long, it’s dark but weirdly catchy."

Faris: "It’s the exact kind of music that we want to make. The garage riffs but with the breakbeat rhythm. It takes the past and changes them into something new that doesn’t sound like anything else."

Spider: "We’ll always quite happily wear our influences on our sleeve and talk about bands from the past that we like but we always wanted to take our influences something else and create something new. But this song captures the rawness and the live energy."

9. ‘Thunderclaps’

Faris: "This was inspired by being up in Lincolnshire. There was nothing form miles. We didn’t leave the house for a week. But there were huge thunderstorms for the week we were there. The power kept cutting." Spider Webb: "Working with Jim Sclavunos was amazing – he’s worked with so many people that we admire, like Sonic Youth and Teenage Jesus And The Jerks and The Bad Seeds and The Cramps."

10. ‘Gil Sleeping’

Spider Webb: "The title is a reference to (Miles Davis arranger) Gil Evans. It’s a departure from the intensity of the rest of the album. We wanted again to work within the space of an album and explore what we could do with that. This track was completely spontaneous and an exploration into projecting sound."

11. ‘A Train Roars’

Faris Badwan: "This was created from a robotic drummer that me and Josh built. We took a bass drum and a snare and taped some sticks to them, then sent a signal through an old guitar pedal and some speakers to make the sticks rattle across the drum skin and built a beat from it."

The Horrors are:

Faris Badwan – Vocals, Spider Webb – Keys, Coffin Joe – Drums, Joshua Third – Guitars and Tomethy Furse - Bass

The Horrors on tour....

MARCH

5 Mar Virgin Megastore London

6 Mar Virgin Megastore Manchester

7 Mar Virgin Megastore Glasgow

23 Mar Academy 2 Liverpool

24 Mar Club Academy Manchester

25 Mar Welly Hull

26 Mar Cockpit Leeds

27 Mar Barfly Birmingham