CityLife

Talking a load of TOKOLOSH

TOKOLOSH in the John Rylands Library

Start a new band and it’s definitely helpful to have a media-friendly talking point. For TOKOLOSH, they have three. Firstly, that name, always written in capitals – both an in-joke and a potentially controversial choice (a tokoloshe – traditionally spelt with an e – is a pygmy-like African sprite synonymous with sexually evil deeds and malevolent intentions).

Then there’s the band members, which shapes TOKO-LOSH up as a kind of supergroup of Manchester’s contemporary music scene: frontman Liam Frost, The Earlies brothers Christian and Nicky Madden and their drummer Richard Young, and The Whip’s Nathan Sudders.

And lastly, there’s their live debut, a free show in the startling beautiful surroundings of the Historic Reading Room in the heart of John Rylands Library, on Deansgate.

It’s a first for the band and for the library, which has also never hosted live music before. And it’s proved massively popular; all 130 tickets for the show, offered through the band’s website, went within hours.

“We wanted to do something different,” says Liam, “and there’s nothing more different than playing in a beautiful venue where no one’s ever played before. And where people are normally telling you to be quiet.”

By virtue of making music in neighbouring postcodes, they’ve all known each other for a long time. Nathan and the Maddens go even further back (“Basically their mum and dad raised me,” Nathan smiles, who was lined up for The Earlies before joining My Computer and then The Whip), but they’ve all shared stages down the years.

“We’ve played with a lot of people – and still do,” sighs Christian, the band’s pianist and dry humoured mouthpiece. “We’re just looking for some routine in our lives.”

That shared history shows in their obvious sense of camaraderie as they crowd onto a sofa in the library foyer. And it’s even more obvious when they start weaving the myths about the band’s beginnings.

“We read a review of Liam’s second album (We Ain’t Got No Money, Honey, But We Got Rain) and it criticised him for being a ballsy vocalist,” says Christian.

“And I just thought, ‘I’ve got to work with that guy’. It mentioned Springsteen and Meatloaf and I thought, ‘Where’s all the balls these days? People need to have them out’.”

Liam laughs. “This sounds like a Blink 182 interview already.”

The truth of the band’s origins is that Richard was looking to start a prog band, one reminiscent of Chicago Transit Authority (“Latterly Chicago, before Peter Cetera took a front central role and they wrote the theme tune to the Karate Kid,” Christian explains) and drafted in Liam to front it.

Discontented with the way he’d been portrayed as a solo artist by his Sony-backed label Lavolta, Liam was looking to explore different aspects of his writing and of his voice.

“I’d been at a major label and done all that pop songwriting,” Liam explains. “It wasn’t anything I listened to or enjoyed. I just wanted to get as far away from that as possible.”

The name, though, was more of an emergency measure, a working title that started to define the music (in particular, the provisional titles: TOKOdisco, TOKOhorse, TOK de France, and Nathan’s debut track NathOKOLOSH) and quite quickly meant they couldn’t back out of it.

“I’d get texts saying, ‘Are we TOKing tomorrow?’,” laughs Christian. “Before long it became impossible to separate ourselves from it.”

Now, they’re all hooked. “Everyone that’s spoken to me about the name reckons it’s really cool,” says Nathan.

“It’s right that it should sound a bit strange, because I think that’s where the music is, too. There’s all these people wandering in with different ideas.”

Christian raises an eyebrow. “I don’t think we can gig South Africa, though,” he deadpans. “But that’s cool.”

They heralded their musical intentions last autumn with The Hollow – an epic and brooding lament that marries pop flourishes with prog-rock bridges – and the album is now virtually finished (“We’re looking for a 1980s-style record deal preferably, we’re hoping life-changing amounts of money will exchange hands,” says Christian  “There’s a lot of big issues to deal with: Liam’s boiler’s ******, Nathan’s got to get a new car, Richard’s got a baby, I need to buy more self tan.”).

For the uninitiated, the band’s helpful cultural pointers are predictably unhelpful: Michael McDonald, UFC fighter Jonny Bones Jones, fitness guru Tony Horton, soul diva Chaka Khan and indie outfit Friendly Fires.

“There was a period where all those bits of ideas seemed difficult to get together,” says Nathan. “But it’s a good album. The Whip’s manager said to me, ‘I’ve never heard a band sound so British’.”

Christian agrees: “I’m into prog, but I don’t file TOKOLOSH next to other prog bands starting with T.

“There’s that many bands that can’t play or sing any more that as soon as you play anything that doesn’t sound like you bought your instrument yesterday, people call it ‘proggy’.

“It’s now 2012 and there’s been a good 50 years of popular music,” he smiles. “You’ve got to be trying to do something different.”

John Rylands Library, Deansgate, tonight, SOLD OUT.