CityLife

Show are missing the sun

When you’ve been hailed as one of Manc music’s most deeply emotive new rock outfits, a band whose lyrics alight on themes of impending global apocalypse,  finding the correct environment for recording your debut album is absolutely vital. 

  For Manchester’s Missed You At The Show there was only ever one destination deemed suitable for the indie-rock quintet to indulge their deepest neuroses. That place being, erm..., sunny Majorca, slap-bang in the middle of summer.   “Well, it was nice to have a change of scenery,” smiles the band’s laconic singer/guitarist Mike Poplawski, over drinks in a Northern Quarter bar.    “We went over in the middle of the holiday season, so there was a fair proportion of British people having a good time. Did Majorca have any effect on our music? I guess the sunshine puts you in a good mood every morning. But most of these songs were written from my bedroom in Salford, and that environment will always have the biggest influence.”   Indeed, for all those blissful recollections of the sunshine, MYATS were never going to return to their home city having undergone a David Guetta clubland  musical makeover.    With debut single Human – released on Monday – the five-piece make good on their promise of their live shows, transferring the exhilarating abandon and darkside melodies onto a standout release that recalls Biffy Clyro at their most anthemic, or a more widescreen, acoustica-dappled Smashing Pumpkins.     Of course, from day one, MYATS have never been shy of highlighting their music’s hugely commercial blast radius.    Seemingly bypassing the customary checkpoints of the Manchester underground rock circuit, they first came to wider public knowledge at the finals of The Printworks Battle Of The Bands finale – performing to hundreds of passing punters during a busy Saturday afternoon in the courtyard.   However, just when it seemed like MYATS were about to stake their rightful claim as poster boys of the current Manc alt-rock circuit, they were no sooner hot-footing to sunny Spain, eager to tout their rambunctious indie-rock gospel to more international audiences.    “That’s all down to Sergio,” Poplawski explains, referring to his band’s Spanish-born keyboardist.    “His dad has a house in Majorca, and he basically put us up for a few weeks. I guess you could call it our Beatles in Hamburg sort of moment; those few weeks of gigging and recording in Majorca really tightened us up as a band, it bonded us.    “There was the challenge of playing our music to Spanish crowds; like ‘would people get it?’. Amazingly they did – there’s a real appetite for rock music over there.”   “The funniest thing is,” adds gregarious drummer Aaron Colton, “is how some of those Spanish venues picked up a copy of our CD. We’ve got friends who’ve been over to Spain since, and they say, ‘you’ll never believe this, but they’re playing your CD right now in some random bar in Spain!’”   But MYATS have always exuded a international flavour. Comprising members from Canada, Spain, Thailand and, erm... Wigan, the quintet initially met at Salford University, where they studied on the same music degree course.   Commandeering all that international personnel is MYATS’s leader and spokesman Mike Poplawski, a Canadian-born singer-songwriter who came here three years ago.    Born and raised in Montreal, then spending a large chunk of his adolescence living in Poland – his parents are both of Polish descent – Poplawski credits his  early musical appetite to his father, who would “record the Top 40 off the radio every week, and we’d listen to it non-stop”.    Soon cultivating teenage rock obsessions, in particular the angsty sounds of Radiohead, Our Lady Peace and The Smashing Pumpkins, Poplawski’s creative instincts took shape when his family uprooted to Poland, where, he says, “I spent a lot of time in my room playing the guitar and listening to music.    “Where we lived was pretty remote; we were miles from the nearest big city.”        Poplawski took it upon himself to find the big city. When he arrived in Manchester, he wasted little time in persuading Sergio Llopis (keyboards), Suthee Phoncheewin (bass), Aaron Colton (drums) and Shaun Holland (guitars) to assist him in his first English rock venture.   It was a project he maintained from the start would need to be “a total democracy. In Poland, I’d been in bands where I was being a bit too autocratic and telling people exactly how I wanted things to be; which wasn’t very good because it creates this bad tension. With this band, everyone is encouraged to make their musical input.”    Certainly, the driving rhythms and soaring guitar epiphanies of their live performances attest to the collective efforts of MYATS, but on a more emotionally  engaging level, it is Poplawski’s lyrical outlook which elevates his band’s music from the world of efficient stadium indie-pop and on to more rarefied artistic realms.    Their standout track, Suburban Kids, inspired in part by the recent hit American indie flick Juno, is a touchingly bittersweet snapshot of adolescent restlessness, while forthcoming debut single Human might well be the greatest slice of apocalypse-obsessed angst-rock we’ve heard since Muse.    “Human came from all those stories about the world is going to end next year,” Poplawski explains. “It basically got me thinking all these self- appointed messiahs we have now; people telling us how to live our lives and deciding what’s good and what’s not good for us.    The song is basically me thinking about the end of the world, and asking ‘who are we supposed to believe?’”   Roadhouse, tomorrow. Info at missedyouattheshow.com.