Leo and Milo Smee of the fairly infamous Chrome Hoof are a jittery duo, fluctuating between quiet control of their answers to giggling wide eyed non-sequitur intergalactic speech. It’s wonderful and the same oxymoron of behavioural trait translates to their music. At once controlled (it has to be with such a large band – sometimes as many as 15 people on stage, steady at around 10) and explosive it spans metal and electronica and psychedelia and drum & bass and orchestral and Disco and and AND! To pin it down would be to do it a disservice…
Tonight they’re collaborating with German Electronic legends Cluster who they’re meeting for the first time tonight and who they’ve never, ever played with…
BCR: Hello Chrome Hoof – first off, the collaboration tonight with Cluster, this is a real dive in right?
Milo Smee: Yeah. We sent them a couple of ideas and they said they liked them. The organisers of tonight’s event allotted us time to rehearse this collaboration but they’ve turned that down so it’s going to be a lot freer than it could have been which is good, it’s nice. We said “Cluster, would you like to rehearse our collaboration”, “No… “ so it’s quite good.
BCR: I think you’re going to end up with something quite chaotic… either in a good way or a bad way… How many Chrome Hoof and how many Cluster are going to be on stage at the same time?
Leo Smee: Eventually it’ll be all of us. About ten of us. I think it will start with two, three, four, five…
BCR: So an organic growth from a small kernel…
Milo Smee: Kernel? Yes, expandable polyurethane…
BCR: I like that, it’s a sort of mirror of how Chrome Hoof came about – you started as two… how did you go about finding other members?
Milo Smee: Not music columns or personal ads. Word of mouth, friends dropping in. Oh, that worked, that didn’t – do you want to play a gig with us? Yeah, alright…. Etc. Leo’s been more brave than me and gone up to people he doesn’t know on the street and said do you wanna join? It’s been pretty organic, about five years. A natural process.
BCR: I think that’s the only way to do it really.
Leo Smee: I did meet a few… obviously my goal back then was to find a prog keyboard player, with fuck loads of synths, that sort of frame of mind. I just ended up asking anyone really. Even a cool looking dude walking down the road – oh, he must be a mad, synth-tech, prog-head. He wasn’t but he was a nice guy. I did talk to a few session musicians and things – oh I don’t do anything under £200 – that didn’t work. Then it’s just friends of friends. We’ve been quite lucky.
BCR: It’s strange – I went and listened to all your other bands and … wait there’s too many – Booze, Firebird, Cathedral, Miasma… which must have been quite useful, such differing…
Milo Smee: Cross pollination, yeah.
BCR: Yeah, plucking people from all these difference things.
Milo Smee: It’s good networking if you look at it like that. If you drew out a spider diagram of all these little things and all the people it would encompass all in all, who all get on to a fairly good degree.
BCR: How do you manage to get on with that many people and still write good songs?
Milo Smee: Dunno…
BCR: It sounds so easy for that to go wrong.
Milo Smee: You have to keep things regulated to some degree, keep things in check. It can break down, things can get to breaking point sometimes. I dunno, we haven’t had that sort of pressure of record companies wanting us to have a hit single – we do want that but it’s been more a fun thing, an occasional thing and we haven’t had really punishing schedules. Most people in the band have jobs and other lives, lucky them.
Leo Smee: We haven’t! It is a fun thing. If you want to encompass so many musical colours and ideas… We’re not going to be on Top Of The Pops or NME or anything like that but I think as we’ve been going for so long because we’ve been enjoying it, doing what comes out of us. And actually rather than try and chameleonise to any certain time or music that’s happening now or last year or last month, we’ve been ourselves.
BCR: The last bunch of stuff that was released seems relatively more commercial to the rest of what you’ve done, was that intentional?
Milo Smee: There’s a couple of reasons why – it’s our first cohesive recording sessions to create one piece of work. The Rise Above EP before that was pretty packed with twenty minute songs, pretty DIY, in our homes and the last album was more focused and it was the first time a label had said, “sign a contract let’s do an album”. At that time, two, three years ago we were trying to think let’s do some more simple stuff, hooks or whatever. Explore, and try and bring people into our world rather than scare them off. If you play a lot of people some slightly unusual time signature or oblique melody or no melody, it’s ah, no, rubbish.
Leo Smee: A whole album of just weird time signatures and weirdness… personally I don’t think I could listen to a whole album of that. So you want to reign it in, you want the three minute song and the fifty second interlude and epic journey.
Milo Smee: There’s no rules but we all like short pop songs, good pop songs don’t we?
BCR: A bit of Shakin’ Stevens in your collection?
Milo Smee: You’re speaking my language…
BCR: I think it’s come at the right time – there’s a lot of bands coming out now who take more risks with the traditional format of commercial song and labels and festivals are realising there’s a huge audience for it.
Leo Smee: I think the minority is opening up a bit, not the majority but people want more than they’ve been given in recent times.
Milo Smee: Musical trends are so dictated by certain magazines and articles and stuff. There’s all the other stuff, word on the street, sharing stuff with friends, real lovers digging and digging to find something that they imagine must exist somewhere and they do somehow find it. But the majority of music which is designed to appeal to as many people as possible they have to sand off awkward corners to make it more and more pleasing to the average person. So, yeah, that’s one side of it but maybe we’re reaching some critical mass and people are thinking, we’ve had this too long. We’ve been doing a very similar take on music for quite some years and a lot of those years we would never have more than seventy people coming to a gig so things are getting better for us.
Leo Smee: Eighty people!
Milo Smee: Who knows where that might lead… eighty one people in ten years…
Leo Smee: It’s all been word of mouth though, we’ve never done any promotion like bands are supposed to do.
BCR: But there’s more strength in that.
Milo Smee: Yeah, there is more strength in that, longer process but…
BCR: I think there is a growing mass of us, if you do think there’s a longevity for this kind of music…
Leo Smee: That’s what I hope. That it will last. But you don’t think about that… I think bands like Mothlite, Miasma, Guapo, Chrome Hoof, that tree of bands… That sort of thing doesn’t cross your mind…
Milo Smee: We’re a bit frazzled from last night I’m afraid.
BCR: The Corsica Studios show for The Fear? I was going to ask how that went…
Milo Smee: First UK show, played Berlin six months ago.
Leo Smee: It was good. Took two hours to write the set, listened to the cassette tape on the way there and then did the gig.
Milo Smee: Very economical. We were much more nervous about playing The Fear gig… the material was hours old. We’re having a track out on I’m A Cliché - a French record label. It’s coming out on a compilation for them.
Leo Smee: In time, hopefully, we’ll record something.
Milo Smee: If we can keep that kind of pace up then we can do an album in about three days and then walk away from it which would be really nice.
