Issuu

DOWN WITH BORING

** PLUS ** PL U

S ** PLUS

PLU

BEE BEABADOO IN ASHTON IRW BL BOY PA O CKMAN MARIKA HA S THE CRIB COOK WILL JOSEPH + MORE!

ISSUE 49 · NOVEMBER 2020 · READDORK.COM

** PLUS ** PLU

NOVEMBER 2020. THIS MONTH...

Live. Forever.

2020 has been a year like no other. The venues shut, festivals silent, a vibrant live music scene has been forced to switch to standby. With shows still unable to return as we know them, and a whole industry on its knees, we ask what happened, where are we now, and what's next for live music in the UK.

44.

Shame

The wait for Shame's second album may seem to have lasted longer than it actually has. As they stand on the edge of a huge 2021, we get ready for a record that isn't supposed to be funny, but...

52.

Ashton Irwin

He's already conquered the world as part of 5SOS, but now Ashton Irwin is going it alone - in a more honest and open way than ever before.

58.

Beabadoobee

One of 2020's most anticipated debuts, beabadoobee's 'Fake It Flowers' has arrived.

62.

Boy Pablo

One of modern bedroom pop's early pioneers, Boy Pablo is carving out his own space with the help of alter-ego, and star of his debut album, 'Wachito'.

readdork.com 3.

Index.

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November 2020 | readdork.com | Down With Boring

Ø6 Intro 44 Features

readdork.com

Editor Stephen Ackroyd Deputy Editor Victoria Sinden Associate Editor Ali Shutler Contributing Editors Jamie Muir, Martyn Young Design Lot 105

Scribblers Abigail Firth, Aleksandra Brzezicka, Alex Cabre, Beth Lindsay, Charlotte Brennan, Chloe Johnson, Ciaran Steward, Connor Fenton, Dom Allum, Finlay Holden, Jake Hawkes, Jamie MacMillan, Jasleen Dhindsa, Jay Singh, Liam Konemann, Melissa Darragh, Neive McCarthy, Phoebe De Angelis, Sam Taylor, Steven Loftin Snappers Ashley Verse, Callum Harrison, Cameron Nicoll, Connor Laws, Hannah Diamond, Jamie MacMillan, Kay Ibrahim, Liam Evans, Luka Booth, Matteo Sanguinetti-Bird, Molly Daniel, Ned Botwood, Sam Gregg, Sarah Louise Bennett, Thomas Jackson PUBLISHED FROM WELCOMETOTHEBUNKER.COM UNIT 10, 23 GRANGE ROAD, HASTINGS, TN34 2RL All material copyright (c). All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of The Bunker Publishing Ltd. Disclaimer: While every effort is made to ensure the information in this magazine is correct, changes can occur which affect the accuracy of copy, for which The Bunker Publishing Ltd holds no responsibility. The opinions of the contributors do not necessarily bear a relation to those of Dork or its staff and we disclaim liability for those impressions. Distributed nationally.

38 Hype 66 Incoming

Editor’s letter

f you listen to those who govern this country, most of the people featured in this magazine need to get new jobs. Better jobs. Not just the artists, but the people that release their records, put on their shows, those who create the magazine itself. All of them. Better jobs. Viable ones. It doesn’t matter one bit that those jobs brought billions of pounds into the UK economy before huge swathes of the music industry was forced to shut down in order to protect from a deadly pandemic. The years - decades often - of experience and learning that’s gone into perfecting a craft that enriches the lives of so many? Nope. Can’t do that. Better jobs, please. Quickly now! No, we don’t want to acknowledge that those people are already fiercely skilled - marketing experts,

image specialists, tastemakers, trend readers, copywriters, graphic designers - all talent forged in the fire of necessity, to get their work out there without on limited resources. Or that most of them also do other things on the side to make ends meet. Retrain. Make yourself useful. Better jobs. Yes, Dear Reader, it’s not often we get outright political - and that’s something that needs to change - but make no mistake, the very fabric of our culture is under threat by ideologues who have never liked us, what with our tendency to become concerned with things like human rights and decency. Though these are indeed ‘difficult times’, it’s hard not to suspect there’s something altogether darker at play. There are so many, many prisms through which to view the spectrum of COVID-19, and its impact on our world, but the live music

sector especially has been ravaged. This month, we’ve tried to work out where we stand, and what might happen next as so many try desperately to find a route through to the other side. While help from those in power might be slow to come, delayed and require jumping through a series of often inaccessible hoops for many to access, there’s no impression anyone is going to go down quietly. You can check it out just over the page - it feels like the most important thing happening this month, after all. Just remember, music is without doubt - the best thing in the world. Better jobs? Ha. Fuck off.

Stephen

‘EDITOR’ @STEPHENACKROYD P.S. Down with Tories.

The Cribs

After nearly two decades in the biz, Wakefield trio - and indie legends - The Cribs have wrestled back control for their eighth album, 'Night Network'.

Will Joseph Cook

Feeling a bit glum? Will Joseph Cook has the answer.

Connie Constance The end of 2020 is ridiculously good for EPs, and one of the coldermonths’ highlights comes from Connie Constance.

Fickle Friends

Yep - it seems the perfect time to have an EP called ‘Weird Years’ on the way.

Sundara Karma

Sundara Karma have fast become one of the most interesting, inventive band of their class.

Ed Nash

For Bombay Bicycle Club's Ed Nash, the last few months have allowed him the freedom to crack on with something new.

Bow Anderson Edinburgh native Bow Anderson has hit her stride this year with a handful of irresistiblyretro pop tunes

Subscribe to Dork. Get every issue direct to your door, anywhere on the planet. readdork.com

RESEARCH SUBJECT

I DONT KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME

VISUAL

REFERENCE

THE DEBUT ALBUM ‘RAZZMATAZZ’ DELIVERANCE

23 OCTOBER, 2020

FEARLESSRECORDS.COM • iDKHOW.COM

A PRESENTATION OF MUSIC AND THE SPOKEN WORD

Intro. THE BEATING HEART OF P OP.

Live. Live. Forever. Forever. 6. DORK

The doors of Brixton Windmill, complete with COVID safe warnings. October 2020

2020 HAS BEEN A YEAR LIKE NO OTHER. THE VENUES SHUT, FESTIVALS SILENT, A VIBRANT LIVE MUSIC SCENE HAS BEEN FORCED TO SWITCH TO STANDBY TO STOP THE SPREAD OF COVID-19. WITH SHOWS STILL UNABLE TO RETURN AS WE KNOW THEM, AND A WHOLE INDUSTRY ON ITS KNEES, WE ASK WHAT HAPPENED, WHERE ARE WE NOW, AND WHATâ€™S NEXT FOR LIVE MUSIC IN THE UK. BY: JAMIE MACMILLAN readdork.com 7.

Intro.

18. DORK

ST UF F YOU NEED TO KNOW T HIS M ONT H...

‘FYI’

Intro. Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes are going to perform a livestream show from London's O2 Academy Brixton. The interactive event will take place on 13th November.

Victoria Monét has shared a new remix of her single 'Touch Me', featuring Kehlani. "This song is a very personal one," she explains, so 'there' we 'go'.

Black Honey have announced their second album, 'Written & Directed'. Due on 29th January via Foxfive Records, news of the record follows on from the Brighton foursome's recent single 'Run For Cover'.

“OUR IDEALISM WORKED AGAINST US” T After nearly two decades in the biz, Wakefield trio - and indie legends - The Cribs have wrestled back control for their eighth album, 'Night Network'. By: Liam Konemann. he way that things have been going lately, some of us really needed

The Cribs. It’s only been three years since their last album, ‘24/7 Rockstar Shit’, but that’s a long time away for a band so relentlessly committed to being a band. Last year, The Cribs took a year out for the first time in the last fifteen years. They told the occasional interviewer that they were taking a break. Which was true, for the most part. It just wasn’t the whole of it. In light of the pandemic and the state of the world in general, Gary and Ryan Jarman are trying not to focus too much on the reasons they’ve been away. Everyone’s got their own things to be dealing with, they say. So here’s the short version. After ‘24/7 Rockstar Shit’, things kind of imploded. “Release week’s always a crazy hustle anyway,” says Gary. “Especially with that record, we dropped it on people really quickly. We didn’t take any singles to the radio, we didn’t do any press. We were just doing it like an experiment. Like ‘let’s just see what happens when we drop the record on people’. And then the release week was insane, because it was mid-week at Number 1. So we get to the end of that week, and everyone’s buzzing, and literally the next day we break with our management.

And we’d been with our management for fifteen years.” Practically overnight, The Cribs went from being in the middle of a ‘really intense album campaign’ to questioning whether they still had one at all. Disoriented, they decided the only thing to do was to self-manage and turned their attention to getting the lay of the land. “And it turned out that the lay of the land was a complete mess,” says Gary. “Like completely chaotic. Personally, I went from expecting to be touring a record to all of a sudden getting my accountant to send me accounts, getting my lawyer to send me legal documents. I was sitting up burning the midnight oil, just trying to figure shit out. We opened Pandora’s Box, and we were just like, we’re not gonna be able to do anything until this is sorted out. And that took two years.” Those two years were mostly spent going back and forth with labels and subsidiaries, trying to figure out who held the rights to what - and why, Ryan says, “they believe they own it”. There was the salt in the wound. The legal contests revealed that some of the professional relationships the band had built over the last decade and a half didn’t count for as much as they’d thought. “[What was difficult] was also the realisation that people we had trusted and seen as family since me and Gary were

twenty years old had been…” Ryan trails off. “Finding out that things weren’t as they seemed was hard,” Gary finishes for him. “I equated it to a divorce in a lot of ways. There’s an emotional element to it, letting people go and accepting that people that you previously loved and cared about - which we did in our naivety - that things [with them] weren’t as they seemed. The music industry is a business, we learned that the hard way. Our idealism essentially worked against us.” So that’s the short version. You could also make the argument that the Jarmans’ idealism was also working for them, though. What else could have made them dig in against better-resourced conglomerates week after week, other than an unshakeable belief in The Cribs? They prevailed, anyway. In February, it seemed like things were back on track. We all know what happened after that. The pandemic, says Gary, was like “climbing a mountain top and then getting kicked off the mountain at the end.” They’d been so ready. But nobody is under any illusions that theirs is the worst experience of the year, which is one of the reasons the band prefer to focus on the upside of things. And there have been upsides. Since they announced their new record ‘Night Network’ and released its first

single ‘Running Into You’, their relationship with their fans has been overwhelmingly positive. “It was just so visible how much people had missed us,” says Gary. “When you’ve been locked down and isolated, to have that flood of goodwill and love expressed meant the world to us.” ‘Night Network’ is lyrical and melodic, more similar to ‘Ignore the Ignorant’ and 2015’s ‘For All My Sisters’ than the furious punk of ‘24/7 Rockstar Shit’. There are few hints to the difficulties of the last few years on the album, and even the ones that are there are sanguine. Album opener ‘Goodbye’ is the record’s most explicit acknowledgement of recent events, but lyrics like “Goodbye to the ones who told you you’re the one that’s changed, spoken through veneers that help to keep his story straight” are tempered by doo-wop vocal harmonies. The Cribs aren’t interested in holding onto a grudge, it seems. ‘Night Network’ exists partly because Gary, Ryan and Ross Jarman can’t help but make music when they’re together, and partly because of Dave Grohl. Obviously. “We had to keep going back and forth to the UK, and because we would all be together we were just writing songs anyway,” says Ryan. “It’s habitual,” says Gary. “It’s what we do.” They had been writing

bits and pieces for a while when the band supported the Foo Fighters at Manchester’s Etihad Arena in 2018. At this point, says Ryan, they “had one foot out the door”. “We got talking to Dave Grohl, and he was like, ‘fuck all that stuff, if you get it sorted out come out to our studio and make a record’. That gave us a small target to aim for. It was like, if we do get through all this it would be cool to go and make a record over at Dave Grohl’s studio,” he says. Getting into the studio with the new songs wasn’t exactly a turning point, considering the album was recorded while the business side of things was still in chaos, but it did provide a glimmer of hope. “We only really made that album because we’d had that invite. It was from one of our heroes, and we just couldn’t turn it down,” Ryan says. “The positivity just came from the fact that we’d been given this opportunity by somebody that meant so much to us, so we got our act together.” “It was hard to see the forest for the trees at one point, because the business side was so all-encompassing. Once we actually got the guitars out, the contrast just made us really realise why we enjoy doing it,” Gary adds. Trust Dave Grohl to just appear out of the dark with a solution, like some kind of grunge knight riding in on a white horse. Ryan grins. “I would hear readdork.com 19.

44. DORK

THE WAIT FOR SHAME'S SECOND ALBUM MAY SEEM TO HAVE LASTED LONGER THAN IT ACTUALLY HAS. AS THEY STAND ON THE EDGE OF A HUGE 2021, WE GET READY FOR A RECORD THAT ISN'T SUPPOSED TO BE FUNNY, BUT... BY: JAKE HAWKES. PHOTOGRAPHY: SARAH LOUISE BENNETT, SAM GREGG.

readdork.com 45.

52. DORK

ASHTON IRWIN

HE'S ALREADY CONQUERED

THE

T NOW WORLD AS PART OF 5SOS, BU ALONE ASHTON IRWIN IS GOING IT EN WAY IN A MORE HONEST AND OP THAN EVER BEF ORE. By: Abigail Firth.

readdork.com 53.

58. DORK

BEABADOOBEE

TED ANTICIPA T S O M 'S 020 ONE OF 2 IT E'S 'FAKE BAD O OBE A E B , S T DEBU IVED. ' HA S A R R FLOWERS Young. By: Martyn n. lum Harriso graphy: Cal

Photo

readdork.com 59.

e g , boy 62. DORK

s u i ? n e

BOY PABLO

out his Pablo is carving y o B s, er ne io p early achito'. bedroom pop's debut album, 'W s hi of ar st One of modern d an ego, the help of alterown space with Steven Loftin. By:

nlike the grey and rainy skies of his hometown of Bergen, on Norway’s west coast, boy pablo’s music is bright and sunny, enveloping you like a tropical heatwave.

Nicolas Muñoz dives into the world of lovelorn romance, peering in from the outside with his breezy pop. When his third single ‘Everytime’ found its way out to the world by way of YouTube algorithm magic back in 2017, it thrust the spotlight his way. As the view count racked up, various EPs, all along a concurrent theme (‘Soy Pablo’, ‘Roy Pablo’) followed. Now it’s time for his debut, and instead of continuing this trend, it goes entirely left-field for a wholly immersive vibe. Muñoz takes on the role of the eponymous Wichito Rico (the translation from Chilean meaning ‘Handsome Boy’) the protagonist of a romantic journey befitting the twee, charming nature of a Zooey Deschanel rom-com. “I decided early this year, because it may have made it easier for me to make it interesting, both for like the listener and to myself,” Muñoz says of the decision to step into Wichito Rico’s shoes. Citing it as a far more interesting move than just putting “down like ten songs in a playlist.” “All the songs are about myself,” he continues, “but

“ALL THE SONGS ARE ABOUT MYSELF, BUT IT WAS SO MUCH MORE FUN TO MAKE A CHARACTER COME TO LIFE” BOY PABLO

it was so much more fun to make a character come to life through the music videos and make a whole story about him.” So, is it all written out, a la a Hollywood script, or is it more of a see what happens on the day, then? “When we were getting together, we made the whole story,” he explains. “So everything’s planned out. Me and my manager, who is also the art director for this project, we’ve been

having so much fun watching movies and watching different series. We were quarantined together in April, and were just watching a lot of movies and trying to merge ideas, and talking together about who Wichito Rico is as a person.” Citing their movie playlist as featuring Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre, and Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket; those quirky and naive vulnerabilities echo through the concurrent storyline of Wichito Rico, readdork.com 63.

death of an optimist

the debut album

out 4th december