White Lies in frame for fame
CHARLES Cave – gloom-mongering bassist and principal songwriter behind rising indie upstarts White Lies – is perusing a Borders bookshop in central London when CityLife catches up with him.
But not for him the latest Patricia Cornwell or I Can Make You Thin, by Paul McKenna.
“I’m reading some books about the occult, and I’m currently looking at the Atlas Of Lost Cults,” he explains chirpily.
“We’re looking for pagan symbolism to use in our artwork and I’m trying to research what the hell it’s all about.”
It’s fair to say White Lies are a trio fascinated with the darker side of life, whether it’s their monochrome clothes (“I don’t think my wardrobe contains anything that isn’t black,” admits frontman Harry McVeigh) or their musical output: melancholic-yet-rousing anthems about fear, emotional turmoil, kidnappings and murder.
Yet, despite the doom, they’re being hailed by the indie cognescenti as 2009’s safest bet.
Although critics’ choice lists can be notoriously unreliable (last year, Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong were expected to sell tonnes of records – which is only true in that they now all probably work in HMV), the band themselves certainly feel as if these are the last few days of their former lives.
“I feel like a bit of a bystander,” says Cave. “We feel like we’re on a station platform, watching a train speeding by with our reflections in the windows.
“We don’t quite feel like we’re on board yet. But it’s amazing to see everything coming to plan. We get constant pleasant surprises, like picking up a magazine and seeing ourselves or usually, a very, very old friend that we haven’t spoken to in years suddenly sends us a message saying ‘I just saw a poster of you in the toilet’”.
Having played their first gig at the Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen last February, they ignited an A&R stampede, with Universal offshoot Fiction emerging victorious from the scrum, and the label’s managing director, Jim Chancellor, triumphantly declaring himself to be “over the ******* moon” at signing them.
It’s easy to see why: eliciting comparisons to Interpol and Echo & The Bunnymen, the formula for the just-out-of-their-teens Boy Division is 50 per cent Editors + 50 per cent Killers = roaring widescreen cinematic pop brandishing choruses primed for arenas and more hooks than Boy George’s bedroom.
Added to that is Cave’s glowering, noirish lyrics: their bounciest song is called Death and new single, To Lose My Life, is pivoted on the refrain: ‘Let’s grow old together/And die at the same time.’
“I guess I’ve always been wary and scared of the concept of death, really,” explains Cave.
“I experienced the first death in the family (of his grandparent) when I was 11 and it really freaked me out.
“There was quite a long period of time when I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t get my head around the thought of it. It just felt bizarre that one day, I wouldn’t be alive.
“For me, it’s the strongest question in the world to think about: what is the significance of life when there’s always going to be death?”
“I’m a massive fan of David Byrne and I know he once said in an interview that ‘singing is a great way of making people listen to music for longer than they usually would,” he adds.
Emotions
“I would disagree with that entirely and say that writing songs is a great way of getting people to listen to your emotions for longer than they usually would.”
White Lies weren’t always so concerned with providing mediations on mortality.
Having known each other from school in Ealing, the group – completed by drummer Jack Brown (who also co-founded the cooler-than-thou Chess Club night and record label) – spent a three-year musical apprenticeship in their first incarnation, Fear Of Flying, singing Good Books-shaped jauntily effervescent pop songs about Routemaster buses and pets.
Two Stephen Street-produced singles and a barrage of self-consciously ‘zany’ press shots featuring them sporting lurid Technicolor clothing later; they decided to call it a day in 2007.
“We were very young,” shrugs McVeigh. “I look back at that stuff and it’s like when you take your girlfriend back to your parents house and your mum shows her lots of pictures of you as a child.
“It’s not embarrassing but it’s you doing embarrassing things at the time.”
“We were just learning how to write songs,” he continues. “The White Lies songs are the songs we always wanted to write, but we didn’t know how to do it, so we came out with default cheesy indie-pop.”
With only two weeks to go until they were due to take up places at their chosen universities, and feeling Fear Of Flying was cantering along a road marked ‘Nowhere’, they penned two songs in quick succession – Unfinished Business and Death – and immediately felt reinvigorated.
On the day they concocted the former, they issued a bulletin on MySpace, trumpeting ‘Fear of Flying is dead ... White Lies is alive!’
Conveniently, White Lies was unveiled to the world in the same week as Anton Corbijn’s Control was released in the cinema.
“It’s a definite coincidence,” laughs McVeigh. “I have yet to see that film. I think a lot of journalists picked up on that and assumed that was the impetus for the band.
“To be honest, although we respect Joy Division, we don’t really listen to them.
Tears For Fears
“It’s funny being compared to bands like Tears For Fears, because there will be say, one band member that likes them. And the only '80s music we all agree on is Echo And The Bunnymen.
“Collectively, our biggest influences have been from Talking Heads, Interpol and Secret Machines.”
From then on, they didn’t look back. Nick Cave, Morrissey, and Mark Ronson have all been spotted in attendance at their gigs, but what of their trademark outfits that ensure they’ll never be papped bulk-buying Persil Colour in Tesco?
“We hated the idea of people looking at what we were wearing and judging us,” elaborates McVeigh.
“So we thought black was a very neutral colour that would blend into the background. And also, it looks good. It definitely fits the music and the mood of the band.”
Should this make them sound like misery-hounds that one might deliberately omit from a Facebook round-robin party invitation for fear they might cause people to suffer an existential crisis and attempt to drown themselves in the punch bowl, White Lies insist “we take our music 100 percent seriously but we don’t take ourselves seriously at all”.
“In the same way the lyrics are written in an intense emotional time,” points out Cave, “whenever we’re not writing or performing, we have to maintain a level of humour. If we lived and breathed the music, we’d be basket-cases.”
Augmented by a 20-piece orchestra, assured debut album, also called To Lose My Life (produced by Ed Buller and Max Dingel, who have worked with Suede and The Killers) has its glossed controls set for ‘epic’ so much that dry-ice should surely billow forth when you open the cellophane.
“It’s a weird, exciting period for us,” muses Cave. “I was in Jessops, getting photos developed, and I heard Vampire Weekend. And I’m thinking ‘Why are you playing that kind of music in Jessops?’
“But they do now. And maybe some day I’ll hear us in Jessops.”
“Today, the NME Awards tour,” he laughs in a mock rallying cry.
“Tomorrow... Jessops.”
The single, To Lose My Life, is out on Fiction now. The album follows on January 19. White Lies perform a free show and signing session at HMV’s Market Street store on Monday. The performance is at 6pm. Entry is via a wristband which can be collected from the shop from 9am that day. The group return here as part of the Shockwaves NME Awards Tour (Glasvegas, Friendly Fires, Florence And The Machine complete the bill) on February 6 and 7.
Published: Wed, 06 February, 2008
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