The Noisettes - London, UK - Spring, 2005
By: Tim Dellow
Let's open with a radical statement, shall we: The Noisettes are one of the most important bands of our generation. Whether people realise it now or not. History will prove it, and we'll help to write it - a snail-trail of compliments and opinions that scourers of yellow-tinged pages will pick up on. Or, in today's e-reality, floating in a digital non-space, uploaded into an open mind.
Radical statement number two: The Noisettes are one of the best live bands of all-time. Any idiot can see this. Just get off your arse, be thankful you're alive, and in the right place to go and see them, and turn up at one of their shows.
This is what you might see: a sprawling Hunter S. Thompson caricature; flailing limbs and bug eyes, octoplasting his drumkit in a jazz-punk odyssey (Jamie), churning up the waves and propelling us into a hydropathy pool of honest, open connections, yeses, and... and... and... And a f**king pole, that's what. A mast. Steering Albatross lovers everywhere with the angular pull of his strings (Dan); tearing at the tendons of the crew, tugging them across the waters, and lapping at our faces... And... and... and....And then f**king what? The masthead. The mermaid (Shingai) with her eyes to the sky, leading us from the treacherous waters of the past into something real. REAL. She shakes, she squeals. She's losing it, she's loosening it. We come. We arrive.
'You have to feed off each other, you know,' starts Shingai, the frighteningly charismatic South Londoner who's bubbling with so much energy she can't refrain from kicking me under the table. 'Like someone takes the helm, and then passes it to someone else. I think everyone is leading the ship at different times.'
A slight pause. Jamie opens his mouth before Shingai dives in:
'It's all about clash. The only way you can avoid a clash is to all be the same, and all be clones. A lot of human-beings spend their whole lives trying not to clash with other people, and basically, submerging their own personalities.'
It's dangerous, too. We can't make the next evolutionary jump if everyone's trying to be the same. If everyone just thinks about themselves. Followers who take the lead out of the leaders, tie it round their waists and sink to the bottom, drowning in their own complacency. Magazines discrediting originals, and encouraging endless pastiche, endless self-referencing, tragic rot.
'It's easy to talk shit when you don't really understand it. It's a shame that people have got those positions of power, and they're not really interested, 'cos if they really were interested then they'd go out on a limb,' explains Dan, on their recent slagging by a certain music-weekly. 'I think fear is a big part of it. Why a lot of bands end up standing the same...' reiterates Shingai.
'Fear of letting go, basically. Just being yourself. It's always modelled on someone else, or modelled on the same...But there's just not that many bands around at the moment that excite me, you know, apart from the Mystery Jets or Scout Niblett, stuff like that, just in general.' (She splutters. Suffering from the same lack of coherency I get, as I'm sure you (astute reader) have detected, when attempting to describe something I actually care about.) 'People that aren't afraid, you hear a record or you see them live and you just see them. There's just this veil of shit, this veil of pretentious kind of f**king goup.'
Which is why The Noisettes work. A triangle of three distinct individuals, united but not agreeing. Communicating.
'Communication is conflict. You can't have real communication without conflict.'
Who said that then, Shingai?
'Me.'
As the table erupts in laughter, I salivate at the possibility of a rock star actually worth quoting.
'It'd be nice to think that we could all wake up in the morning and confront our fellow species. We're homo-sapiens. And sometimes I think, we're supposed to be the highest, most intelligent form of animal; we actually forget that we actually are animals and try and iron that out.'
Who's she quoting this time? Some 1890's devolutionist? Darwin? Nietzsche?
We suggest that humanity is an abomination against nature. It's actually more natural to be less human.
'Exactly,' glows Shingai; 'And you can fight it. It's interesting; it comes out in a few ways, like sex, making love, physical conflicts, or making music, communicating with people. Or nature. Seeing what the sun does to your eyes. Certain things that bring out the animal in you. I don't want us to all be ironed out and in twenty years just be like the computers that are trying to drive us in that direction, and iron out evidence, or the trace of animal, animal-ness.'
But technology isn't all bad. Chances are you're reading this online. Technology can liberate, even encourage evolution. It's an opportunity to transcend the constraints of what we are, become less animal, less human, something better.
'You can use it to control, though,' states Shingai flatly.
The Noisettes are one of two bands that are genuinely different. A refreshing proposition. The Mystery Jets are the other. They're the bands that we've been searching for. At the turn of every century, something always happens, something different. Neither of these bands sound alike. That's important. The Noisettes are jazzy, jam-led structures, with punk leanings, and character-squawking vocals enticing you to do something more productive than just wiggling your bum. Although not excluding that activity.
'Honestly, man, what you were saying about the 1890's and the turn of the century, things happen. Things go on at the turn of every century, and it's your responsibility - what are you going to be a part of? The chaff or the wheat. And it's our responsibility - f**k it, we were born in the 80's, do you know what I mean? The people born in the 1870s/80s went on to live and go through the first and second world war, or destroy themselves. We have that opportunity right now (and similar responsibilities), and it excites me so much.'
Especially as it's been a millennium. I find that proposition exciting.
'I think it's a lot to do with optimism as well,' adds Dan. 'I've been talking to William a lot, and Blaine (both from the Jets). And I think that both of our bands are, in what we write about, you can't really pinpoint it to specific lyrics, but there's this feeling of optimism - but it's an optimism that's surrounded by a kind of cynicism and pre-Judgement Day rhetoric.'
'I think we're really sensitive,' leads Shingai. 'I don't want to sound like, you know, there's lots of people of different ages into this, but our generation is a sensitive one.'
'It's just 'cos we think. I think it's caring, isn't it? In a way....' Jamie considers.
'And knowing what not to care about, in a way.'
[Light-hearted interlude. Read this, brew yourself a cuppa. And get back to the first step of having your life changed by The Noisettes:
Ladder-climbers from Big American Record Companies when trying to sign the band to a major-label (they've since been plucked by Interscope / Universal):
'Everyone's always like, 'You want sax or keyboards?' Everyone in the business is always like (adopts whiny accent to mimic the obnoxious plugger in 'Spinal Tap') 'Shingey, you play piano??? Jamie should have a drum-box - like a whooping thing! Like Alicia Keys!!!' Everyone here in the UK, meanwhile, keeps saying Grace Jones. But we think Shingai's just happy to be herself.]
So let's focus on her for a second. Wearing what appears to be a leotard, over which she has squeezed into a tight-black pair of jeans, which she leaves open at the crotch. Erotic, confrontational, and funny as hell, she laughs and dances like she's on fire and screams and belches like she's possessed. Lyrically complex, but unafraid to utilise her unique vocal-chords as an instrument in their own right.
'A lot of it's influenced by the characters you talk about in the songs. You know. You end up inhabiting them. I think you have to drop some of the vanity, in terms of doing trusted and tested vocal styles. You have to go with the possession of the piece, musically, I think, my voice is, or who I connect with more are like, male singers, like Tim Buckley or Beefheart.'
But she's not afraid to be herself, despite allowing the characters of her songs to lead her in various emotional directions. Like a voodoo priestess, or a practicer of magick, her ritual performances ultimately lead her, and her audience, closer to her heart.
'Yeah, it's acting, but you're also possessed. Because, if you get to a bit in a song where a person's really angry, or talking about loneliness, it's the part of you that comes in, that's the part you can't control. And that's natural - if you can mediate that with techniques of performance (that's fine), but you can't let it be driven by technique. It's not real, you know.'
Being real matters. It's all too easy to zip up the cat-suit and prance around like king of the jungle, say, playing the part of the heroin-chic London rocker, with the model girlfriend hanging off your arm like a malnourished wafer, but ultimately you'd be killing yourself. And squandering your artistic potential.
So many junkies made great art; Coleridge, Cobain...
'I think Doherty has become a victim of it,' says Shingai. The drugs and the press. 'I think he should go to St. Elizabeth in Jamaica and stay with a load of hardcore Rastafarians and just completely clean out and do cold turkey. Because I think that chemicals is... once you're addicted to chemicals you're always going to be... some people take pills to sleep, take pills to stay awake. Take pills in-between. You know what I mean?'
But it's a musical paradox. Take 'The Man With the Golden Arm' for an example. Frank Sinatra delivers his best ever role, playing a junkie trying to clean up, and offered a career through drumming in a jazz band. But the opportunity to escape that music is undercut by its role in reflecting and creating the seamier side of life. Music creates artists. But it also destroys them.
We ask whether they feel if they are directing their art towards a particular aim, or whether it's directing them as people.
'It's whatever happens,' states Jamie; 'It's a reaction. I've never thought of it like that. It's a reaction. If I started to contemplate it in those terms, I'd go mad!'
'I agree with Jamie,' speeds in Shingai; 'but I also think, that on another level, one of the last things that can unite us, in this age, apart from kinda (shoots us the filthiest look imaginable)... is music. It's such a powerful medium, it reaches people, it's instantaneous. And you can't waste that opportunity. You don't want to be put on this earth to waste that opportunity of communication; it's communication with the audience as well - it's vital. You see the amount of power that you have, and it's scary.'
Sun Ra once said that every person is an instrument, and we all just have to play our part. But you have to be yourself to play.
'I'd rather be remembered for giving 110% of what I believed rather than be remembered for something in-between. Well, you wouldn't be remembered if you were doing something in-between. Whether people love or hate it.'
There's a sudden interruption. A few of their friends have arrived, and the tone descends (thankfully) back to Earth. But amid the friendly chitchat and cross conversations, Dan tugs at the arm of my sleeve.
'Tim, Tim...' he says earnestly; 'I think we do have an aim; To project. To project.'
He continues this clandestine exchange, holding the microphone to his mouth; ensuring the tape transforms his voice to magnetic blisters of sound, to be popped in the ears of those prepared to listen.
'We have large ambitions of what we want to do and being the best at what we do. There's an easy way of writing songs that people can follow up... and we've stuck for about seven years on our train of thought, and moving around developing our style. We started out jazzy and quite funky, and ended up with a bit more rock and, I don't know how to explain it really, we want to travel a lot...'
He loses his train of thought, language itself breaking down as he struggles to explain his music, his passion. Shingai jumps to his rescue, before floundering herself; 'This is the bit where I know what you mean Dan. We want to combine that ambition with...'
Explaining the music, that's not their job. They wrote it, and that's enough. But it's our responsibility to try to convey their sound, the importance of their sound, to you. And for once we're lost for words.
The band seems to think we have power in our writing. ('That's part of the power you have, because who you have to respond to is not someone who's patronising you and telling you to water everything down, and put a dummy in the mouth of the general public.') They're wrong. Language leads, and uses me, just as music does to them. The difference is, the difference is... Christ! There's no difference. We're all dumb animals. Or bright animals. It's all the same. And we're all trying to find ways of coming to terms with that. In a nutshell, The Noisettes can help. Consider yourself a king of infinite space.
Post Script...
RELIGION AND MARRIAGE
Shingai: 'Once the ring's on the finger... no more orgasms! No more head, no more tongue...'
Dan: 'When I was 21, I decided there was no point in being part of any kind of religion because that divides people, and there are so many things that divide people against each other; religion is a big one. Along with race and class...'
Jamie: 'It just breeds a lot of elitism under a really humble banner...'
Dan: 'I watched the Grammy Awards, and God forbid we ever won a Grammy. I'd like to just go onstage with a cyanide pill in my pocket and say, 'By the way,' (fakes a slow and painful death) and then die onstage. It's the only way you'll wake some of those Christians up.'
Artists in this article: The Noisettes