Words originally for Vapour Trail Blog
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| Clockwise from top left: Mike Halls, Evelyn Halls, Ross Higginson, Saul Godman |
Clean Cut Kid are a happy-go-lucky, indie
pop quartet from Liverpool. They’ve had airplay from the BBC, supported Shura
and Circa Waves on tour and are gearing up to release their hotly anticipated
debut album later this year. As it happens, they’re also industry savvy, self-aware
musicians, and a totally lovely bunch too. We chatted to frontman Mike Halls, his
wife and the band’s keyboardist Evelyn Halls, bassist Saul Godman and drummer
Ross Higginson about the biz on a dark February night in Colchester.
How are things going on the road with
Fickle Friends?
MH: It’s amazing. The crowd are
similar to when we supported Shura in that they’re muso-y, so they listen and they
appreciate. And the band couldn’t be lovelier. We didn’t know them before this
tour but recently they signed to the same label as us. Being label buddies makes
a lot of things easier as well because it’s easier to coordinate a tour, like
when we sort merch and stuff like that.
How does this compare to supporting
Circa Waves last year?
MH: With Circa Waves the crowd
expected a different thing from the show – their priority was energy and not
specifically the music that was being delivered. Which is great, but we quickly
found that we could play the best song in our set perfectly and it would get
very little reaction other than just jumping up and down. With this kind of
crowd you can take things right down to a whisper and people will still be
really locked in and engaged. As the songwriter, I personally prefer it.
What are the origins of Clean Cut
Kid?
MH: I got set up on a date with
Evelyn whilst she was working as a solo artist, and I was playing as a session
guitarist. I’d met Saul earlier and one morning he was in town busking so
that’s how we got him. Then we all started working at a music school where we
met Ross. He had the same music taste as us so I stalked around a few of his
gigs and got him on board. From there we spent months buried away practicing
because we thought the live act needed to be perfect. When the date was ready
we found a manager who I’d been working with and got signed at our second gig.
How did being a session musician
compare to fronting your own project?
MH: This is a million times better. I’m
playing songs that I wrote, I’m doing everything with my wife, and we’re all
best mates. With the session thing, it’s a lot of pressure because you get
loads of material to learn in one night. I did a Gary Barlow gig in Battersea
once to 3000 people and when I stood on stage, half of the set I’d never even
played once on guitar.
SG: He had times when he had to learn
maybe sixteen songs on the National Express with no guitar. That’s fucking
impossible, it’s other-level stuff.
Love is a theme that runs through
your music consistently, but it’s an edgier kind to the one a lot of pop songs
are about. What inspires that?
MH: I can’t write a song that doesn’t
register on an emotional level. I wrote Runaway
literally on the day that my student loan dried up. I was sat there with a
guitar thinking about how my whole adult life had been spent pursuing music, and
wondering how I’d feed myself now I had no money. At that time, Ev was going
through a bit of a rough patch because she’d just moved from London and didn’t
know where she was really at, so the day before we went in to record Runaway I wrote Vitamin C as a little pick-me-up for her.
How have your lives changed since you’ve begun to find success?
EH: Every single thing has changed. On
the one hand, we’ve gone over the huge hurdle of getting our music on national
radio and getting signed etc. But then on the other hand, with every day that passes,
the expectation and the pressure from the label gets so much bigger. That’s
something that we’re all having to adapt to, and trying not getting too caught
up in the numbers as well.
MH: For a band like us, you can’t
build an entire fan base out of an overnight fad. We could get played sixty
times a day on Radio 1, but it wouldn’t be a 3D enough experience for people to
buy into us and fall in love with the band. Every single day you realise what a
long road it is.
Is it important to you to maintain a
genuine, hard working ethic in the way you work?
MH: It’s absolutely everything to us.
I don’t know how I could perform if I couldn’t make my guitar consume the whole
crowd – the moment you pull the controls away from me I don’t know what to do. I
certainly don’t think we’ll ever play with a backing track. The snare in Pick Me Up is a baking tray so when we
sit down to tech the record, we’ll have to work out how to mount and mic a
baking tray onto a drum kit, as opposed to just using a sample of it. It’s not
the same thing to me.
SG: And if you play all your music
from a computer, what do you do if it breaks on the night of a gig? We’re not
going to have that problem.
What about image, is that something
you put thought into?
EH: When we signed there were a couple
of weeks when we thought we needed to get an image sorted, but that was such a
nightmare we decided to just look how we look and wear what we wear. Obviously
there’s thought behind it but we’ve not sat down and gone “we should wear this
kind of thing”. Some people say that it doesn’t match the music but we don’t
really care.
MH: A lot of the time people say to
me “you don’t sound anything like you look”. We just always thought to
ourselves, when people get it they’ll think it’s dead cool. When we went and
did the Live Lounge, it felt like all the guys there totally got it, especially
Clara [Amfo].
EH: Sometimes people look at us and
think we’re a metal band. There have been various stylists brought in for photo-shoots
and videos but it’s never quite looked right. The most we’ve gone with is for
the Pick Me Up video because we had a
bit of a Napoleon Dynamite/Wes Anderson theme that we wanted to go with. As rag
tag as we usually are, we decided to put a 70s California skater thing on so it
was a bit more stylistic.
SG: Plus, it still wasn’t us being
told what to wear. They give you twenty t-shirts, coats, pairs of shoes, and
they ask you which ones you like, so
everyone still gets to pick their own fashion.
Pick Me Up is ridiculously catchy. What’s it about?
MH: It’s kind of like Vitamin C 2.0. Almost like how Vitamin C says, “I’ll be here for you”, Pick Me Up says, “Thanks for being there
for me”. I’ve got nothing else to write about! If I want to do a positive song
about love then it’s got to be autobiographical.
Does it concern you that you might be typecast as being a positive pop band? Or that it might alienate your fans if you try a different direction?
MH: Our whole idea has always been
that the more seriously you take the subject, the more uplifting you take the
arrangement. We’re not into emotion-for-emotion’s-sake; I still think you can
deliver the exact thing you want to say in a song without it being arranged in
a miserable way. Also, the two B-sides that are out so far are the ones that
virtually everyone has been screaming out for us to play at gigs. So there must
be an audience for our less lively material somewhere.
EH: I think if we were typecast as an
uplifting band, it wouldn’t be the worst thing. We get completely turned off by
bands who are miserable in what they put out on social media, and just moody in
general. We would never want to be like that because we’re naturally quite a
chatty bunch.
Saul chirps in.
SG: Can we give you a Babe Magnet
tattoo? This is our label. It’s only a transfer; you thought it was real for a
second! We’ve all got the same tattoo. Polydor made these transfers so we can
stick it on to anyone who comes to the gig.
What does the magnet represent?
MH: We’ve always wanted to have a home-grown
kind of vibe about us, and at the very start the label told us that because we
were doing everything ourselves, it should come from a home-grown place. So we’ve
got our own label that everything goes through – it’s like our own indie label
within Polydor. It’s just an extra bit of branding on our products. I’ve got
the original tattoo and everyone in the band has got it as well.
SG: And of course we’re all babe
magnets. As you’ve seen from the lines of girls waiting outside.
Are there any bands who you hope to one
day be as big as?
MH: Arcade Fire are one. My parents
might not know who they are, but they can go around the world playing
ten-thousand capacity venues and they’ll probably be able to until they’re the
Rolling Stones’ age. The Shins are another one – they may not be a household
name but they can sell out world tours in a day.
EH: Bon Iver. They make pieces of
art. Even though each album sounds different in production, it’s still them and
you can tell every time. I want people to say, “Oh, that sounds like Clean Cut
Kid”, even if they’re listening to another band. It would be nice to be a name
that people drop when they’re trying to describe a sound, like you can with Bon
Iver.
RH: Beck has that sound too. He does
loads of different things on loads of different albums but it’s always so
recognisable. I love Tame Impala and their new album. When I listened to that
for the first time I thought wow, this is a piece of something awesome.
SG: Plus because we’re from
Liverpool, the Beatles connection is always a big one. They went from classic song
writing to experimenting with all kinds of sounds. We don’t do all the drugs
that made them split up so hopefully we’ll be able to do what they would have
kept on doing!
Finally, what can we expect from
Clean Cut Kid in the near future?
EH: In short, we’re doing about 25
festivals and we hope to get our album out. But it’s quite a frustrating
process because you have to make sure it’s released in certain ways. We
wouldn’t stick it straight out there if we could though. I do see the benefit
because, for example, if you don’t play certain festivals then your music won’t
be on the radio, because they only play the bands that are at festivals around
that time.
MH: It’s our debut record, and you
only get one chance for your debut record to be out. You want the most people
to be able to access and hear it and know that it exists, so hopefully it’ll
get its best shot.
Clean Cut Kid’s latest single Pick Me Up is out now. They have a headline
tour lined up including a date at London’s 100 Club, plus a whole host of
festival dates booked too.
Hull, Fruit (07/03) *
Leeds, Oporto (08/03) *
Manchester, Sound Control (09/03)
Liverpool, The Magnet (11/03)
Brighton, Patterns (12/03) *
London, The 100 Club (23/03)
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