Southend band These New Puritans exploded on to the national music scene in 2008 with their album Beat Pyramid.  They have since supported the likes of Bjork, Suede, British Sea Power, the Kills, and the Klaxons and have just released their third album, Field of Reeds.
KELLY BUCKLEY caught up with twin brothers Jack (songwriter, producer, vocalist,
multi-instrumentalist) and George Barnett (drums, loops) to talk about their home town, songwriting and a possible residency on Southend Pier.

 

So you’re from Leigh. Are you still living here?

JACK: I’m living in Leigh at the moment. I’m always moving backwards and forwards between London and Essex.

It’s great getting off the train and smelling the sea air. There’s nothing quite like it, especially when you move away for a while. Coming back, that’s what hits you immediately.

Leigh has changed so much over the past few years. It’s a completely different place to the one I grew up in, where the average age seemed to be about 80 and it was all charity shops, not the trendy kind.

JACK: I love the islands: Canvey; Foulness. That whole landscape is like nowhere else in the world.

GEORGE: I live in London at the moment, but all of our family are in the area. It’s my favourite place.

Were you always on some sort of path to being in a band? When did your interest in songwriting and singing begin?

GEORGE: I never expected to be in a band, but music was always in the house.

Our parents were good friends of the Brilleauxs [Lee Brilleaux was the frontman of Dr Feelgood], who had children of the same age. We played together a lot. In fact, there is a “Congratulations on the twins” card from Lee somewhere at my mum’s house.

One music-related memory I have of Jack is when he went into Fives Records when he was about eight and asked for a Velvet Underground record. They were surprised.

JACK: Actually, I think it was the old HMV in Queens Road or maybe even Golden Disc.

I’m always expecting the High Street to be how it was about five years ago for some reason, so I’m always a bit surprised when Golden Disc isn’t there.

But no, the last thing I thought I’d be in was a band. I always did music, and always wrote songs and recorded them on an old four-track tape recorder my older brother let me borrow, but being in a band happened sort of by accident.

I thought I might write music for adverts or films, or be a sound engineer.

Tell me the story how you first started These New Puritans?

JACK: It grew out of me writing music. I started when I was about eight, writing songs on my guitar. As I say, my brother let me borrow his tape recorder to re- cord them. Then George learnt the drums to play along with me.

When we went to St Thomas More School we met Tom and I sort of taught him the bass. We’d just record really noisy music in our loft after school.

Where was your first gig? How did it go?

JACK: Our first gig was at Focus Youth Club, in Southend. I remember we played for about ten minutes and ended with a cover of this reggae song called Get the Devil Out.

We’d always only play for about ten minutes (all of the songs about four times the speed that we’d rehearsed them), which you can sort of get away with in clubs in Southend and London. But I remember for our first gig in Italy someone had signed a contract that we’d play for an hour and a half and we did our usual ten-minute set and they tried to physically stop us leaving the stage and force us back on. I think we managed 20 minutes the next time.

Tell us about getting signed to Domino.

JACK: We were playing a gig in the basement of the Royal Hotel and it ended when this bass amp George had made out of a record player’s speakers blew up and started pumping noxious black smoke into the venue. Someone came up to us trying to make us carry on playing. It turned out to be Joe Daniel from Angular Records and he put out our first release just after that, and through that we were signed by Domino.

GEORGE: Everything went from there. I got invited to start working in Paris at Dior home, assisting Hedi Slimane, then as the music was picking up Hedi invited the band to go to Paris to write and record a ten-minute soundtrack for Dior in the top studios of Paris. Then we recorded our first album just after that and it’s gone from there.

JACK: But now I think of the old albums as a bit like old embarrassing photographs. Which isn’t to say I don’t like them. I’d feel like that about any album.

Imagine if there was some permanent record of what you were like when you were 19 – it’d be weird. I still think about the songs as we play some of them live, but I think of them as things that are still alive and changing.

How quickly was the ride from that initial turning point, to becoming famous?

JACK: It’s funny how it’s all become quite international, from the beginnings of driving a van that kept breaking down, up to London and back and playing gigs in Chinese restaurants in Middlesbrough. For this record, there were Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Icelandic, Portuguese, French. Counting it up over the last two albums there have been 12 nationalities represented.

But the mastering of Field of Reeds came down to three people from Essex – me, Graham Sutton and Stuart Hawkes – quite a nice way to end the process.

Do you tend to have a particular method when writing lyrics?

JACK: Music is easy to me, or at least it flows naturally, but with words I have to sit down and work at it, like a nine to five type of thing.

With this album the biggest change has been that I’ve tried to move away from abstraction or obscurity. At a certain point you can’t avoid writing about certain stuff, or you get feelings that just override any other consideration. In a way it’s almost a bit like when I’d come home from school and write a song about how I felt on my guitar when I was eight!

What is your favourite song off the new album and why?

JACK: Hmmm, I like particular moments more than songs. The combination of double bass and very low piano on Spiral and Organ Eternal I really like. They have a similar grainy tone, those two instruments. I could listen to those two instruments playing together all day.

What’s next for These New Puritans?

GEORGE: We are touring extensively, all over the place, and Jack never stops writing music. Maybe we will release a fragrance – that’s where the money’s at.

Are you planning to play in Southend at all any time soon?

JACK: There is nothing planned but I want to do a residency at the pier, hopefully at the beginning of next year, with everyone getting the pier train down to the gig. I remember drawing the pier when it was burnt when I was younger, all the burnt timber.