CityLife

Gamble with this Money

Avant-garde Mood-pop Money

In music – as in life itself – the key to any deep, long-lasting relationship is to build a sense of trust and mutual understanding. We expect our favourite musicians to be intelligent, thought-provoking and boundary-pushing. And in return?  Well, they expect us to be similarly open-minded and to come along for the ride.

This sense of mutual understanding is something we should bear in mind ahead of Manchester band Money’s biggest headline show to date.

Taking place next Friday at Salford’s magnificent Sacred Trinity Church venue, Money promise to serve up a multi-media spectacular in which specially made video and art installations will be used in conjunction with the band’s questing, melodic mood-pop. 

Ambitious, audacious and leaning just the right side of avant-garde, it’s a one-off event that boasts all the recognisable hallmarks of one of Manc music 2011’s most visionary young guitar acts.

And now, in the build-up to the show, all that Money ask from us, the good music-loving public of Manchester, is that key thing that all special relationships require: trust and mutual understanding.

“It does come down to trust,” outlines Money’s vocalist Jamie Lee, over the first of many drinks in city centre boozer The Seven Oaks.

“If you truly love and trust a band, then you’ll gladly surrender yourself to their way of thinking – allow those musicians on stage to communicate those songs in a way that’s completely truthful to their art.

“That sense of sacredness has perhaps been lost in the last few years, because of the way live music has grown into this huge industry.

“That’s why we’re making such a big deal about this Sacred Trinity Church gig – it’s about restoring something sacred to live music and giving our music the sense of occasion we think it deserves. And audiences have to trust us.” 

Money have been quietly building these foundations of trust on the Manchester circuit for a while. Comprising Lee on vocals, Charlie Cocksedge on guitars/keyboards, Will Kneale on drums and Scott Beaman on bass, the Manchester four-piece first came together in the summer of 2010.

In the 12 months since, the band have undergone various name changes (Manc audiences may have seen them as Youth, Books or Meke Menete), written and scrapped dozens of songs, and, all the while, doing what vocalist Lee calls, “the sort of development that all new bands need to go through. We’ve got incredibly short attention spans, which explains all the changes in this band.”

Money’s breakthrough moment came at the start of the summer when they cocooned themselves in their dingy Oldham Street rehearsal room, writing an entire new set-list of material and then signing a deal with Manc independent label SWAYS (home to CityLife faves such as The Louche FC and Ghost Outfit) not long after.

 As illustrated by forthcoming double A-side single, Who’s Going To Love You Now/Goodnight London, Money’s summer of creative renewal has been – no pun intended – hugely rich in reward.

The band’s music, a sort of taut hypno-pop built on glacial guitar lines, cacophonous drums and Lee’s mournful bark, is blissfully uncategorisable. There might be subtle nods to Joy Division in its naked emotion and to Spiritualized for its devotional intensity, but overall this is music delivered resolutely from its own place. And a hugely restless place at that.

“What constantly drives this band is an overall unhappiness with what we do,” Lee stresses.

“We’re always asking ourselves, ‘what can we do to make things better?’.
We’re always dissatisfied – that’s why we’ve changed so much this past year.

“As an artist, you can’t ever afford to stop and be satisfied with what you have. You just have to look at someone like Bjork, and the recent show she did in Manchester, Biophilia.

“That show was unlike anything we’d seen before; Bjork just keeps on moving and never stands still. That’s how we like to see things – if you want to keep yourself inspired, you have to keep moving and changing.

“A short attention span is a good thing if you’re an artist.”

The band’s vocalist, lyricist and passionate ideologue, 23-year-old Jamie Lee doesn’t so much speak to CityLife as breathlessly exhort his own musical religion.

Peppering his interview with phrases such as ‘music should be sacred’ and ‘live concerts should have a tribal element’, he brings to mind Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce channelled through Black Flag’s punk rhetoric. 
Raised in Balham, south west London, Lee’s earliest memory of music was hearing his father’s copy of The Beatles’ Rubber Soul at the age of 11, an album he soon became “obsessed about – it was on the stereo constantly”.

His defining musical love affair, though, would be with Bob Dylan, an artist he devoured throughout his teens and someone he claims to have “learned a lot from. Early on, I connected with his work in a very literary way; I see him more as an author than a songwriter.”

Relocating north in his late teens to study humanities at Manchester University, Lee soon found himself spending more time working on his own poetry and music than his academic studies.

“Money was born when Lee collided with artistic like-minds Kneale, Beaman and Cocksedge, three local musicians who shared his belief – not to mention his missionary zeal – that live music deserved a grander platform than the usual Manc music avenues.

Lee considers: “As a songwriter, if you truly believe that there’s something special about your music, then you should give it a special framework. You can’t do that on the pub circuit, where you’re on this conveyor belt with hundreds of other bands.

“I’ve been thinking about how long the popularity of music festivals can go on for: will people keep wanting to go to them? I don’t think it’s for us to judge, but all we can focus on is delivering a live experience that’s different and unique – something that truly communicates something.”

All of which brings us back neatly to Money’s long-awaited Sacred Trinity Church spectacular next Friday.

After a lengthy and low-key gestation that has seen them pegged as Wu Lyf-style obfuscators by certain Manc music observers (the band have only played a handful of secret shows and still have very little online presence), the real truth about Money is finally emerging: that they’re not being mysterious or even difficult, but simply precious about their respective art form. And if they are, then perhaps we should too.

“The most important thing,” Lee concludes, “is that we’re really ready to fail at this. I don’t want to look back on this period in a few years time and think we didn’t take the risks we needed to. We have so much freedom as a band, and we want to do exactly what we want with it. It’s our playground.”

Money play Sacred Trinity Church (Salford) on Friday November 4.