The Strange Death Of Liberal England are not, they tell me, as we sit in Soho Square before their headlining, balloon-filled show at Oxford Street’s Metro, a political band. Despite the distinctive mouthful of a name, songs about ‘Good Old Fashioned War’ and a debut mini-album entitled ‘Forward March!’, it is very clear that whatever their political views may be it is solely the music that governs this peculiar slice of England. Nor are they a band that is afraid to be different, stating early on in tonight’s opening number ‘Modern Folk Song’: “Thanks but I think I’ll go my own way”. It’s in everything they do, from their music and the emotion they put into it (a rare commodity these days), to their stage show, to that name again – an opinion former before you’ve even heard the band. Is all this meant to be as provocative as it might seem?
“Andy suggested the name after a history book he was reading and it just seemed to fit from the start” Adam Woolway, the mop of hair of a frontman explains, “But I do think it is a provocative name that stands out – something we try and do with our music too. All that that name suggests is also quite apt given the climate we are living in at the moment, including our own political standing, though I for one would never call us a political band. Everyone’s got a political view whether they realise it or not and that’s going to come across if you’re in a band on a stage”. Andy Wright, strummer and basher of a variety of instruments, continues: “Unless what you do is a very conscious performance, which ours isn’t. We’re just ‘how we are’ on stage and you and your personality is going to come out. It’s not like we’re Rage Against The Machine or Billy Bragg or anything. We didn’t set out with a communist agenda or anything!”
Anyone witnessing the Metro performance would surely be convinced of how much this band cares about the music they are making. As they power their way through most of their outstanding debut mini-album ‘Forward March!’, the walls of this underground club are virtually dripping in the raw emotion of the songs and their delivery. They hover between several genres, but perhaps take more from post-rock than any other. In the landscape of ‘rock’ music, it is a genre that commands more presence than almost any other, basing itself around the dichotomy between violence and beauty. Yet despite the increased emphasis on vocals (these are at their heart ‘rock’, or even ‘modern folk’, songs after all) The Strange Death more than match this level of power. That they are able to carry this off is thanks in part to the arrangement and instrumentation of the songs, in particular the quiet/loud divide symptomatic of post-rock, but perhaps most of all it’s down to Adam’s voice. At times tonight and throughout the album, like the start of ‘Modern Folk Song’ or the delicate beginning to ‘A Day, Another Day’, it is the epitome of fragility, almost at cracking point. Yet when necessary, it transforms to a tortured wail or the bile-spitting anger of ‘An Old Fashioned War’ or ‘God Damn Broke and Broken Hearted’.
Adam is undoubtedly the centre of attention on stage, both from his role as frontman and the presence he inspires from his performance, but you get the impression that in this band everyone is as important as everyone else. This is something reinforced not just by the continual swapping of instruments between each other, but also the way that each individual member of the band gets so emotionally invested in the performance – whether their role at that time is banging the drums, attacking the guitar or bashing some percussion, they are all equally caught up in that one moment. The odd a capella break where they all sing as one, or any of the number of sing and shout along choruses that mark the most exhilarating moments in their music, confirm this feeling of a band that is addressing the audience as one entity.
The Strange Death first came to many people’s attention because of another thing for which they stand out: the eccentric nature of their stage show, during which no member speaks to the audience and any dialogue is replaced with large placards bearing firstly the name of the band and subsequently the titles of, or lines from, the next song. It is something Brecht used to do in his ‘epic theatre’ and I wonder whether this was an influence on the bands decision to use the technique? “It’s actually something that never crossed our minds when we were doing it”, Adam admits, “but it’s been mentioned before and when it was first mentioned we thought ‘Oh that’s quite fun, we can use that in interviews!’, so for the sake of the interview: yes! In all honesty though, I think we use them for the reverse of why Brecht did. He used them to distance what’s on stage from the audience, whereas we are trying to keep an atmosphere going, we’re trying to keep something going and actually trying to draw people in with it. It’s more like the signs that come up in silent movies in actual fact. We hope people will get something more from it rather than distancing ourselves from them. I think if we were to stop what we were doing after a hugely emotional piece of music, and stop and have a bit of banter with the audience, I think that would be more akin to what Brecht was doing than the reason we use [placards]. So ‘yes’ for the sake of pretentiousness and ‘no’ for the sake of truth!” Andy continues, “Our motivation was always to communicate with the audience without having to talk so it is the reverse of Brecht: instead of alienation hopefully people can connect more between songs.”
They do, though, seem to be a band that treats music as a true art form, as an expression of themselves that is almost redemptive in nature. When asked how the six members of the band came about playing in a band together, Adam replies “Mostly just out of dead-ends and desperation I think. Andy and I both went away to Uni, got home and found we didn’t have much to do, all of a sudden our lives were shit and we were unemployed or working shit jobs. We all knew each other anyway and came together to play music without any grandiose aims or anything. It was just a way to express yourself and just something to focus your energy on. And now it’s two years later and we’re sitting here with a record deal.”
As well as being named after a book, The Strange Death’s songs reference several literary figures, including Arturo Bandini (the hero of John Fante’s masterly novels) and Keats, and I ask whether they see themselves as being influenced as much by literature and other art forms as they do music? After careful thought Adam explains: “I’d say it’s all art forms really. When you write music you express yourself – those feelings come from somewhere and are feelings which are emanated from other things, whether it’s an art form or just looking at a tree on a certain beautiful evening or whatever. I don’t think I ever have written a song about that, but it might come! Art is a passing emotional expression and people pick up on that, like the way you interact with a certain painting. And that’s how you become influenced by it and it gives you the desire to express yourself. I think you’d be hard pushed to find original emotional expression or original ideas, it’s just a kind of interpretation of ideas.” Amongst other things, it is the purity of this approach and the commitment to their own way of doing things that gives The Strange Death’s music such emotional resonance.
The band deliver an undeniably powerful and captivating performance at Metro, and if you take the time to look around almost all of this gathered London audience has their gaze fixed on the six-piece throughout, soaring away with them and their harmonies. With songs like ‘A Day, Another Day’ with its communal “We are Bandini!” refrain, and the call to arms of ‘I Saw Evil’s “Is this all you care about?” create a real sense of this being more than just a performance by a rock band. It’s as if this strange group of figures on stage are preaching some sort of gospel. This kind of group experience, both between themselves on stage, and by dragging the audience along for the ride with them, is something the band seems to revel in. When questioned about a possible military theme running through the album (due to the title, artwork, a song called ‘An Old Fashioned War’, and lots of military style drumming) they dismiss this as, at best, a subconscious indicator of the times we are living in, preferring to see it as “Having a rallying call, creating an army almost, followers, people who won’t just look at you and think “Oh that’s nice music” but will feel something emotionally and want to come and join in. It’s certainly not a concept album about war, it’s more a general sense of having an army. There’s nothing more beautiful than a group of people coming together, not necessarily as an army to go and kill people, but to fight for a cause.”
Most people witnessing a performance by The Strange Death would find it difficult not to want to join this eccentric army after being thoroughly absorbed by the power of the music and magnetism of those on stage. There are, though, a few ‘after work’ types in suits in the Metro crowd that occasionally afford each other a curious glance at the noises that come from this motley crew, particularly the almost indescribable voice of this frontman with his orange candy floss hair that sprays out above a face that contorts into a variety of pained expressions throughout the show. This is nothing new to a band that developed playing the pubs and clubs of Portsmouth. As Andy freely admits, it wasn’t an easy place to cut their teeth: “People didn’t really get us straight away in Portsmouth. We’ve always kind of polarised people but in Portsmouth it was never the most open-minded of music places so to start off with, so quite a lot of people didn’t like us, but we always had confidence in what we were doing”. Adam chips in with some support for those on the South Coast: “I think certain people ‘got it’ and are still really supportive of us today, and we’ll never forget those people but I don’t know if it was the majority of people or just the loud ones [that] really, really didn’t dig it. And I think that was one of the first and probably the most important lesson we learned as a band: not to listen to those people. Even now as a band we certainly get bad reviews, but if we’d listened to bad reviews or bad press we would never have played a second gig. In some respects it was difficult at first, but if you’re not prepared to fight your corner, what are you doing here?”
As is entirely palpable, both on and off-stage, the band are loving being afforded this opportunity to parade their art in front of other people and as Adam confesses “We’re quite an ostentatious band – we’ve got the stupidly long name, we move about on stage, we want people to look at us”. They also seem to be enjoying all the things being in a band comes with. When asked what their favourite part about it is, Andy gives a very considered answer: “If you play a really good show that’s a real exhilarating feeling. But then also that creative spark of when a song really comes alive, that’s also great”, before Adam chips in with a far more honest assessment: “Getting drunk every night!” In fact, though, it seems clear that Adam and the rest of the band believe in the importance of music: “I think it’s just having an outlet or a vent for your own expression. And to have people listen to you, whether you’re political like Billy Bragg or whether you’re talking about wearing the same jeans for two weeks or whatever, the fact that people stand and listen to you is great – I think the best bit about being in a band has got to be the audience. And we did this thing called ‘Jail Guitar Doors’ organised by My Luminaries recently, the aim of which is to buy prisoners musical instruments to help them rehabilitate and give them some other way to vent their anger or frustration or whatever it is, and that just goes to show how important it can be to have something in your life, a medium to express yourself, rather than kicking a bus shelter or whatever.”
While this chaotic mob are still just starting out, they are already excited about the prospect of developing further. Speaking about the decision for a mini-album, rather than the full-blown version, Adam says: “Well we do think of it like one piece of work, but on the other hand because we’re such a young band and we recorded it quite quickly after signing a deal it’s also a way of us tying up the loose ends – this is the band from its beginning up to now. Now we can get on, and we’re all looking forward to the future and writing and recording again. That’s us established now [musically-speaking], and by the time you get to the end of track 8, ‘that’s the band’, that’s everything you need to know.” Andy rounds things off nicely: “Next time we go to write something we’ll be able to write it all from the beginning…”, and that’s a new beginning I, for one, can’t wait for.
As Adam says at the end of our interview, it’s nice to get things off his chest – “’Repent, repent!’ and all that” (referring to the slogan on one of the placards and the specially printed balloons that litter Metro tonight) – and “it feels a bit like being Catholic and going to confession”. You get the impression that each performance is the same for this band such is the emotional intensity, and it is a feeling shared by the audience. For, just like a band they are often compared to – Arcade Fire – watching The Strange Death Of Liberal England at the top of their game, like tonight, has the feeling of a religious experience. It took the Canadian band a while to gain the universal acclaim they now hold, and on this evidence there’s nothing to say that our own British incarnation won’t be worshipped just as much.
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