Our Club’s Cooler Than Your Club

New Young Pony Club guitarist/producer Andy Spence hardly has time to chill at home with friends, write movie scores or listen to music anymore, but he’s not complaining.

One would hardly pick New Young Pony Club – ice-cool English dance-poppers with impeccable dress sense – to be social misfits. But this sense of exclusion was partly the impetus for the group’s inception. Guitarist Andy Spence explains on the phone from home that the band’s name is about “saying to all those people that wouldn’t let us into their clubs: ‘fuck you, we’ve got our own club now and our club’s much cooler’.”

The amiable writer/producer is downplayed and modest on the phone, but on stage with band mates Tahita Bulmer [vocals], Sarah Jones [drums], Igor Volk [bass] and Lou Hayter [keyboards], they light an electro-pop fire! He says that’s the essence of NYPC: to dance the dance electric. “That’s what we’re about, you know, being a bit more energetic and exciting and dynamic… I think it’s a waste to create great music and not try and present it well. I enjoy seeing bands that make an effort and I think that’s the way it should be. You’re in a position there, you’re a focus if you’re making music, and if people like it… you should make an effort.”

They’ve certainly been making an effort, and it’s paying off. NYPC have been propelled into the all too familiar tour mill because of this. “That’s what we’ve done all summer and that’s what we’re doing for the next six months!” he says. It should see them in New Zealand around the New Year, perhaps even ready to showcase new material that he and Bulmer have “already started writing”.
“I mean I’ve only just come out [of tour], so you know, it hurts a little bit, I’m getting a little bit sick of it now,” he croaks. “Pony Club is kind of taking over at the moment, I hardly have time to even hang out at home or listen to music anymore, it’s crazy.”

Despite the demands of pony life, Spence keeps an ear to the ground. You can hear the smile in his voice as he recounts the Club’s inspirations. “The more recent kind of guitar bands that kind of push things forward a little bit”, was his unexpected response. And Franz Ferdinand: “They were really different to everyone else, I think that was an influence on our music.” Spence also credits “the DFA movement – the Rapture, LCD…” as influential for NYPC’s modern new wave.

The band is enjoying their whirlwind ride of success, but are wary of the trappings of fame. Spence cites pushy PR reps as detracting from the magic of musical discovery. “It’s great to see how things are taking off… but record labels get very excited, they try and push these bands on people. I think we always wanted people to discover us. It’d be nice if we had a bit more help from the radio over in UK here, but I think people eventually are finding us, and each time we do a live tour we do much bigger venues, so the numbers are swelling. And that’s fine you know, and it carries on like that, and I’m happy! But I’d rather let those fans find us organically and by their own means than having it shoved down their throat.”

Manufactured pop with no prefabricated jargon, NYPC is the real deal. They just happen to be of the extremely photogenic, unfazed-cool and stylish ilk of the Outsiders. Spence maintains they are not elitist though. “The thing about our club is that the rule of entry is that you have to be unique to be in the club. Most clubs are about conforming and being the same, but we want people to just be themselves and enjoy and dance and hangout, you know, sing, have fun. That’s the difference between our club and other people’s clubs.”

Harry Potter pwns Sailor Moon; Teacups pwn Jenny Lewis.

Two thirds of Teacups talk to a familiar faux-twin of their friend about their dainty music, crafts and fake facts.

Normally, nice girls shouldn’t go into dingy Queen St bars. But when said girls have a biting wit, astute class and endearing friendliness, they can withstand the stale beer smell and uncomfortable couples mingling bar-side, because places like these are often where they end up on a Friday night. Teacups are Auckland’s freshest new folk band to take quasi-residence in our often-lesser known, dingy establishments, but coming from the streets, these girls take everything with a grain of salt.

“We used to busk every Friday, that was pretty much all we did until we got that one gig!” laughs singer Chelsea Jade Metcalf, referring to the trio’s groundbreaking gig at Spiegletent, for the AK07 Craftwerk extravaganza.

Chelsea and Elizabeth Stokes [guitarist/singer] are school friends who would play outside the café where now third member Talita Setyady [double-bass/xylophone/singer] worked. “She’d make us soy hot chocolates!” grins Chelsea. The duo would busk in Botany, “up until the point where’d they’d set up a henna tattoo stall,” at which point they’d be “competing”. Talita says, laughing, “I gave them wasabi, I didn’t have any coins!” Chelsea: “She collects sauce packets! Wherever we go…” Talita: “Do not write that!!”

It’s easy to slip into lazy diatribe when writing from a roughly hour-long interview, which at times felt more like tea with friends than a discussion with an up-and-coming band. Not to blow the whistle too early, but Teacups are magnificently talented, nonchalantly covering Jenny Lewis’ entire Rabbit Fur Coat album so that they could swap their friend’s copy with their own cover version, much to the friend’s oblivion.

These craft-lovers are experimental in their approach to cutesy folklore, road tripping to buy an accordian, staging thematic shows and learning traditional Japanese chanting. “We’ve got a new song called Two Month Sleepover At Craig’s House,” Chelsea says. “And it just consists of Taiko drums, Liz on guitar, and a Japanese shout, cause Liz and I did a Taiko course – it’s a Japanese war drum, it’s awwwesome. Liz was so good she got asked to join the troupe!” They’re playing Craftwerk again on September 13, and they’re involved in various other creative activities as well. Talita plays in prog-jazz band Pink Fluffy Islands, and Chelsea won the wearable arts awards with her quilt-dress. “That day the theme was Indians!” Chelsea says.

Evidently the supermodel-esque band’s first interview, they are modest and endearing, softly spoken with self-professed faux-American accents, but uproariously funny and very giggly. The giggling is “derived from awkwardness,” Chelsea says. Commenting on the Watergate-ness of my taping our conversation, she says, “We should’ve brought a tape recorder too! We could’ve put it on our EP, it’d be the coolest!”

After Chelsea and Talita’s band-that-shall-not-be-named made it as far as the Rockquest national finals, they quit and began having their own band practice/nap clubs. But Chelsea says they got pretty lazy post-Spiegletent. “Our band practices were so bad, they were like ‘oh, do you wanna come over?’ and then we’d spend the whole night watching Youtube videos. One time we had band practice on a Sunday and fell asleep on my floor! [laughing] We slept there for like six hours; nap club.” Initially sticking to covers, they did Feist’s ‘Mushaboom’, The Bluebirds, and of course Jenny Lewis. “We played a medley,” Chelsea says, and hastily wrote an original, ‘Birds’, the night before the Spiegletent gig. Now they have many originals.

When asked about their song writing process they are increasingly modest. “There’s not a main songwriter, most of the time we write them together or someone will come up with the bare bones…sorry, I’m very bad at holding eye contact…” Chelsea stutters, looking away. The über Bear Cat/Harry Potter fans are driven by one thing –fun. “We’re just hanging out and laughing all the time,” Chelsea says. “I love it, sooo funny.” They’re three friends with a shared love. “Jenny Lewis. Why else do you think we sing in an accent?” Chelsea says. Adds Talita, “Yeah, the accent’s pretty intense; ‘we arrre country folk!’”

“Writing about music is like dancing to describe architecture.”

Bewildered Battles fan Sarah Gooding spoke to a bemused and delightful Ian Williams about the futility of music journalism, textures of sounds and a 12-girl screeching choir.

Some people just have it. Baffling intensity, easy humour and intelligent insight. Ian Williams, messianist multi-instrumentalist from the up and coming, fast-approaching New York band Battles, was the most enjoyable musician I’ve ever spoken to. Suitably modest but overachieving, Williams is amused by people’s attempts to describe his unique, experimental band. ‘Futuristic’ is one of the less cringe-worthy terms bandied about that he reluctantly accepts. “Why not? [But] I do think that it’s sort’ve a hokey word, like what are you, the fucking Jetsons or something?” he laughs. “Writing about music is like dancing to describe architecture, It’s sorta like how do you equate one to the other, you know? One thing can’t fit the other thing.” But one must persevere, because to share a band like Battles is to bestow the kind of greatness one only stumbles across a few times in their life. Like Oreo-shakes or a really great pair of togs.

And speaking of swimwear, Williams likens the band’s motives to wearing a tired old two-piece. “I think each record will be a response to whatever we’ve been through, so each record is sort of a process of where you’ve been and basically what’s the fresh new thing that you need in your life to make you happy, to get away from whatever’s been driving you crazy for the past year. So if through the past year I’ve been wearing a bikini on stage every night, probably at the end of the year I woulda been like, ‘I don’t wanna go anymore’! That’s one thing I’m gonna do, you know? So the answer to where we go is really simple.” Tan lines or bust.

Williams is a founding member of the experimental scene from which he springs. Charmingly excited about his current band, he says he saw vocalist Tyondai Braxton “beat boxing or something like that at a solo show and I was like ‘that’s crazy!’ cos he just does it through a guitar amp and it’s all kinda raw and weird, and I thought ‘oh that’d be great! I wanna play with him!’”
After gathering bassist/guitarist Dave Konopka and drummer John Stanier, the band then attempted to secure a 12-girl screeching choir, but feminist freak-outs caused the plan to go awry. But with their burgeoning popularity they just might revisit the idea. “Maybe now that more people know us we can get lots of good applicants and it’ll sizzle, it’ll be great… Girls who wanna do it should contact us, so we’ll have a 12-girl, New Zealand girl choir,” he laughs. Since this interviewer spoke to him, 11 places remain.

Williams’ verbose explanation of Battles’ vocal sound is almost an antithesis to their methodological recording process. “Putting the noises on the vocals kinda just helps blend it with the music more, so they don’t call as much attention to themselves. It sort of imbeds it a little more within the music so it’s just like another cog in that wheel… all the little parts add up to the larger whole.”

Their unique rhythmic constructions can also be credited to the guitar-tapping technique Williams developed during his early days. “In my old band Don Caballero I used to finger tap on the fret board a bunch… All of a sudden it opened up a whole new avenue of sounds, cos you could get like blending textures and harmonies and multiple sounds on the keyboard. So suddenly there’s a whole new world, it sorta connects you to the visceral element of like, a loud electric guitar, combined or blended with the colder aesthetic… I found it’s a new direction; it’s an impetus.”

But don’t dismiss their fragmented array of Echoplex loops and rhythms as mindless indulgence. “We don’t think of what we do as jamming, it’s all very twisted and tight… I don’t think we’re the kind of band that just sort of turns on a red light, smokes some pot and jams for two hours and just sees where it takes us, I wouldn’t say that’s us at all.”

That’s not to say they have no free reign on their songs live, either. “There are a few designated areas [for jamming]. It’s sorta like, you have a back yard, there’s the house and that’s sorta where you understand ‘okay, back there I’ll have a barbeque and that’s okay’. Otherwise it’s sorta like you have to have a barbeque in your living room, so we understand that, you know, there are little areas where it’s okay to do the jam.” There is a method to the madness.

Their “magic manipulation” on any of their recordings is baffling, Williams explains the very concept of recording as a “lie”. “The Beatles invented the four track recording process, and we’re not going back on that. There are a lot of tracks, a lot. With the magic of computers you can change all you want. We have a 16 track 2 inch tape machine, synched up with Protools, and there are tracks running on both, so. We have a lot of tracks,” he says. And they’re all incredible. Set sail with togs in tow, for Battles are on the horizon!