Where the wild things are now From their 2008 debut to ‘Present Tense’, their fourth album, released this month, Wild Beasts have remained nomadic in song as much as anything else Photogra phy: Jenna foxton / writer: R eef Younis
Cut adrift in Kendal, disenchanted in Leeds, and faced with the fear and loathing of London, geography has played a central part in Wild Beasts’ history. Half-heartedly thrown in with the (thankfully) defunct ‘Gangs of New Yorkshire’ scene, courtesy of their tenuous Leeds connection, the band has survived the cynical scenes, outlasted the buzz bands and stayed committed to stubbornly making it work wherever and however they can. In fact, their transience has probably helped them not just survive but endure. After touring themselves into oblivion from the release of their 2008 debut album, ‘Limbo Panto’, to the gruelling end of ‘Smother’ (the band’s third and last LP, of 2011), I’m sat with one of British guitar music’s quieter success stories in a pub in South East London, just around the corner from the Deptford studio where their latest album, ‘Present Tense’, was recorded. Now with semi-permanent roots in London, Hayden Thorpe,Tom Fleming, Chris Talbot and Ben Little’s latest migration over the north/south divide feels like a natural, almost inevitable, culmination of Wild Beasts’ wonderfully nomadic habit. But even though they seem to have settled in the likeliest of concrete jungles, they’re still a band that proudly defies
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definition with every release. “That was absolutely the climate we came up in, but I don’t think we’ve ever had to survive a scene because I don’t think we’ve ever been cool enough,” says Thorpe. “What we do is probably always going to be, and always has been, divisive enough to create a healthy and unhealthy distance for us to not have to rely on that. In our early days we’d probably have loved to have been in a scene to give us a piggyback but we had to brave it out and we’re better for it, and have independence in that sense. “There was that New Yorkshire thing,” he smiles, “and it was quite shocking at the time because I’d left Kendal feeling a little burnt that we couldn’t make it work. The ideal was that we would develop in our own little pocket but then to arrive in Leeds and be so disenchanted with everything around you was quite devastating. We almost proofed ourselves because we had to. Ladproofing might be too strong a term, because our music was never going to be sung from the terraces, but it was about the terraces, and there’s something beautiful about that.” “I do think we feel a great kinship with Leeds,” says Fleming, “but I feel like if we’d started to come up now, in