Interview: The Drums
IT'S breakfast in an ornate hotel in West London and Jonathan Pierce – magnetic frontman of NYC buzz-band The Drums – is musing over the melancholy nature of his lyrics.
“I know for me, I’m kind of always in despair,” he ponders, downing a (half-empty, one suspects) mug of coffee.
“I have happy moments, I think, like everyone. But I think everybody is fundamentally miserable at the end of the day. I think only children can be purely happy.” God only knows what he’s like when he’s hungover, eh readers?
Usually, it’s the kind of pop star soundbite that makes you want to suckle a shotgun, but Pierce delivers it with such open-hearted sincerity that it feels tangibly real.
This is a man who could have an existential crisis while deciding which brand of toilet paper to buy.
“Even when I sit down to write a joyous, happy song, that eternal hopelessness creeps into the picture. Our happiest song is called Let’s Go Surfing. And literally, it contains the word ‘hopeless’.”
He hiccups in mirth. “We turned around and said, ‘Jesus Christ, we have a whole album of really sad songs, I hope people don’t list it as the Number One Downer of 2010...”
Currently, The Drums are the first heralded guitar-band of the new decade; anointed by indie bugle the NME as ‘New York’s official coolest band’.
It’s easy to see why. The quartet are the sound of what would doubtless emerge if Factory-era Manchester possessed a beach, fusing the miserabilism of Ian Curtis with the poptimism of sun-dappled LA, like a kind of (Beach) Boy Division. Even Boy George – as unlikely as it sounds – is smitten, declaring that The Drums remind him of The Smiths, adding that they ‘look like four rent boys’.
'Instant bond'
“You’ve probably seen this in the news, but Boy George, is like stalking us,” laughs Pierce.
“He’s a huge fan. He keeps coming to the shows. We actually had dinner with him not so long ago and he’s a really nice guy. It’s really cool to meet these iconic figures in pop music.
“We’re all big fans of The Smiths, so to go to Manchester – which to us, is like visiting Graceland – and play this little club and see Mike Joyce in the audience ... that’s such a surreal thing.”
As the son of a pastor, Pierce grew up in a New York suburb desperate for a secular subculture.
“We had very strict rules in our house,” he admits. “There were years when we were not allowed to watch TV at all.
“Music had to be religious. So when I discovered The Smiths or Orange Juice, I’d literally have to sneak it into the house and keep it under the mattress like it’s a Playboy magazine.”
He met partner-in-rhyme Jacob Graham – the Marr to his Morrissey – at Bible Camp: a lifelong bromance was forged out of a mutual enthusiasm for keyboards and Kraftwerk.
“All Christian kids get shipped to this camp to hang out,” he remembers.
“I hated it. It was boring. I would rather be alone in my room by myself than wake up and be forced to play volleyball at seven am.
“But Jake was the first person I’d ever met who listened to the same music as me. So there was an instant bond. This was before email or anything, so we just kept in contact, writing letters to each other.”
Disaffected
This isn’t Pierce’s first bite of the pop cherry. Around 2003, he and hometown friend Adam Kessler formed electro-pop troupe Elkland, signing to Columbia records at 21, and were left feeling used and abused when they were dropped two years later.
An arena tour with Erasure, remembers Pierce, was a particularly harrowing career lowlight.
“At first, it was kind of a novelty,” he recalls. “But it was God-awful playing to crowds of 50-year-old men.
“It was not where we wanted to be. That was a horrible couple of years. We felt they [Columbia] took something that we had which we thought was really special and destroyed it. It obliterated my faith in a lot of things, and I washed my hands of the music industry.”
What followed was Pierce’s own annus horribilis: he moved back to NYC and got a rent-making job hawking shoes, ‘knelt down in front of people every day who couldn’t give a **** about me’.
“Fast forward to a year and a couple of months ago, I was talking to Jake on the phone and I was like, ‘I’m bored, I’m depressed’ and he said, ‘Me too. Why don’t we start that band we always talked about?’”
And so, our disaffected duo headed to Florida, penning a raft of that would eventually comprise their Summertime! EP, released on Moshi Moshi last year.
Originally, they modelled their music on doleful Factory Records band The Wake, before alighting on a sound that resembles what might have happened if Martin Hannett had gone to work for Sun Records.
Aptly, the first song they penned is called Best Friend, while the track Let’s Go Surfing –which features the jauntiest whistling this side of Peter, Bjorn and John – ignited a major label bidding war, with Universal emerging victorious from the scrum.
'Tangible'
“It’s a political song,” clarifies Pierce. “It was written on inauguration day when Obama was coming into office, and we kind of felt like we were let out of prison finally. George Bush went away. It’s a song of unbridled freedom.”
The Drums lo-fi simple aesthetic is a direct reaction to the ‘pop will eat itself’ nature of what has come before: the cut-and-paste sonic collages of new rave, the overuse of autotune, the endless remixes, the regurgitated beats in hip-hop and R&B.
The Drums aim to cut through this aural bulimia. “What’s important to us is the song,” explains cherubic-faced drummer Connor Hanwick, “And we feel in the last ten years, the song has been forgotten and replaced with glossy production or remixes or mash-ups, or ‘so-and-so is featured on this album’.”
“You have one side of the music industry where Lady GaGa is ruling,” adds Pierce, “and I think people have fun with that during the day, but for me when you come home at night and you’re alone, you need something tangible.”
Although neither Pierce nor Graham could play guitar when they formed The Drums – favouring ideas over aptitude - they did have a manifesto: no song was to be over three minutes long.
“Things are dire right now,” points out Pierce. “I feel like we don’t have time to listen to eight minutes of noise just to get to three seconds of a good melody. We want to get in, get out.”
Having recruited Hanwick to keep time from downtown New York and reunited with Elkland guitarist Kessler, The Drums are now finding themselves tipped to ‘do a Franz Ferdinand’ and upstage the headliners as opening act on Saturday’s NME tour.
“It’s all moved so fast and it’s still moving so fast and we’re trying to keep up with ourselves” says Pierce, his blue eyes widening. “We just want to music for ourselves.”
“In that way,” concludes Hanwick, “we’re probably the most selfish but least self indulgent band around.”
Best Friend (Universal) is released on April 5, 2010.
Published: Fri, 05 February, 2010
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