The Laurel Collective have too much energy. They accost me with coffee and chatter and manic wondering when I get to the studio where they’re recording and I leave with stories about psychotic girlfriends and nazi UFOs and cakes on penises and cults and lots and lots of smiles… A little scary but what do you expect from such a sporadic and multi-influenced band who are riding high on having just signed to Domino records and are about to release their first album? Not to mention being about to play a Big City Redneck Presents night… So, between the coffee and teas and raucous laughter they manage to tell me a little bit about themselves… I must tell you that I found it far too difficult to differentiate between the members while listening to the interview. Therefore they will hereby be known collectively as The Laurel Collective (except Bob, because he was quite possibly drunk and therefore easier to spot...).
Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin….
Al Green
BCR: So have I interrupted some album recording?
Laurel Collective: No, we’re rehearsing some covers of some songs by an amazing young girl called Micachu who’s pretty much already been tipped to be the next Bjork.
Laurel Collective: Bjork’s given her the OK… She’s ready to stand down.
Laurel Collective: There’s a baton to be handed over.
BCR: A Bjork Baton?
Laurel Collective: Yeah, ahha! … We’re doing a gig with her in a week or two. She’s producing our single and we’re going to cover her tunes.
BCR: That’s nice and incestuous…
Laurel Collective: it’s a very incestuous scene…
BCR: So you’re releasing a single very, very soon, how do you feel about it?
Laurel Collective: Very, very excited. This is our first record that we’re putting out so…
Laurel Collective: Has anyone got any secret records?
Laurel Collective: We’ve got a very, very old rusty CD that’s still knocking about Rough Trade.
BCR: A secret shameful CD?
Bob Tallast
Laurel Collective: It’s just that it’s er… nineties.
Laurel Collective: Nineties? We’re not old enough to have started in the nineties. The early noughties.
Laurel Collective: We always thought that it would just be us burning off CDs in our shed and to have someone actually say, yeah, we’re going to invest in your band and we’re going to make the record for you. In a factory.
Laurel Collective: The thing that makes it really special is that there’s going to be a vinyl release as well which you just can’t do on your own. That’s the thing for me, just to touch the vinyl.
BCR: Are you doing a limited vinyl? 500 or…
Laurel Collective: 1000. A proper release.
Laurel Collective: How many of them are we going to buy?
Laurel Collective: Half of them. We’ve been told which shops…
Laurel Collective: Apparently stacks of your very own vinyls make really good coffee tables.
BCR: So that’s the plan is it?
Laurel Collective: Yeah.
Laurel Collective: You probably could get to number one these days just buying all your own vinyl.
Laurel Collective: That’s illegal. I know for a FACT that’s illegal. FACT.
Laurel Collective: Shit. We’re fucked then.
BCR: You’ve got Domino backing though…
Laurel Collective: We’ve had play on XFM and Radio 2 last week, Stuart Marconi and Mark Radcliffe. It wasn’t Ken Bruce or Steve Wright or anything.
Laurel Collective: It certainly wasn’t Wogan.
Charlie Andrew
BCR: I was going to ask about John Hillcock [XFM] who seems to have championed you from early days.
Laurel Collective: Yeah, he’s been a real dude with us, he picked it up ages ago. He played a song that isn’t going to be on any of the upcoming releases called Cruel Thing which has a kind of West African type guitar line in it.
BCR: Where did that come from, because I know on Gunmouth you’ve got those African style percussion in there…
Laurel Collective: Well, it used to be a lot more beats and stuff. It was more like Beck, Hip-Hop-py but weird.
Laurel Collective: Now it’s a lot more Indie but we chuck in everything but the kitchen sink.
Laurel Collective: Not electro stuff like everyone else, like Late Of The Pier and all that kind of stuff. If we were doing that now, trying to get signed we would have missed the boat.
BCR: Well, trying to sound like one particular thing you’ll never get to a second album because it won’t be you.
Laurel Collective: I think that’s definitely us because a lot of people come to our gigs and the first thing they say is that they don’t quite get it and then they get into it.
Laurel Collective: It’s creates a stronger hold, it becomes special.
Laurel Collective: Guys at Domino said that, Ruth, who got us the deal said that, our producer said that, so…
BCR: So far, it seems that you’re musician’s musicians, would you agree?
Laurel Collective: I think we made a conscious effort to ditch anything in the live set which was on backing tracks and samples and stuff like that. We just felt it was more a performance. A lot of people are doing that now and it’s not to say that I don’t like that, some bands are really good at, but I think the live set, to us…
Laurel Collective: Should be live, raw and organic, not someone pushing buttons. Also, the creative aspect of it – taking sampled music and recreating it live… they feed each other.
Laurel Collective: Originally we started out more sample based, a lot of our tunes were like that.
BCR: You had more people but were more sample based?
Laurel Collective: You end up with someone who plays violin that you sample, but still with a backing track on stage…
