got the M
LYF
anchester four-piece WU LYF isn’t the first act to refuse to play by the rules of the music industry, but at face value they sure seem one of the more persistent at it. While the likes of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits have long used humorous misdirection to mislead the media and contort their public image, in their short life to date WU LYF has opted for nonparticipation. While most young bands exploit every opportunity they can scrounge to increase their profile – whether it be tirelessly speaking with the press or leveraging the ever-expanding powers of the internet – by their own making, you’ll find scant concrete information about WU LYF anywhere, on or offline. What you will find, though, is plenty of ‘band to watch’ hyperbole from the likes of NME and discussion at length about how enigmatic the band is and the lengths to which they go to achieve obfuscation in the pervasive digital era. But on the eve of releasing their debut album, Go Tell Fire To The Mountain, and conducting what he says is only the band’s tenth-ever interview in their near three-year existence, vocalist/organist Ellery Roberts sets the record straight – it’s all bullshit. “The mystery is a media-created myth,” Roberts sighs in a thick Manchester accent. “We’ve had our names on fucking Facebook for a year. Everything’s out there if you want to find it, it’s just the website that we operate through [worldunite.org] has been more about the art than talking about ourselves. We talk about what we’re doing, rather than what we are, so I think the whole mystery thing is just fucking cheesy. There’s been so much speculation and cliché after cliché – ‘they all dress in white’ and ‘they burn crucifixes’ and so on. We probably haven’t helped that ourselves, [but] I’ve never felt any massive need to tell the world about myself. I just want to create stuff. There’s a level of narcissism that operates in the music industry and I think maybe people found it a little strange that we weren’t so interested in ourselves. The fact that I’m a white Englishman is probably almost a boring thing.” Swiping aside the spectacle of mystery the press has concocted around WU LYF, on the basis of their superb debut album this is a band that needs no such gimmicks to stir a groundswell of interest. Forging haunting and beautiful with bloodcurdling and primal, WU LYF plies a brand of anthemic, tribal indie rock laden with grandiose emotion yet rough and dangerous. Their riveting sound centres on the juxtaposition of Roberts’ pained howl and the stately resonance of his organ. Combine that with reverb-drenched guitar and a drummer who sounds like Keith Moon incarnate and you have what Roberts calls “heavy pop”: primal emotion expressed in a pop manner so it’s universally accessible, or, “pop music with its guts hanging out,” as he puts it. The roots of Go Tell Fire… lie in a semiallegorical narrative Roberts has been piecing together for the past two years. He’d originally aimed to turn these ideas into a film, but says he soon realised that at all of 20 years of age he just didn’t have the means to make that happen. “We’ve got our spirit, we’ve got our determination, but we ain’t got a fucking film crew,” he wryly chuckles. • 36 • THE DRUM MEDIA 24 MAY 2011
“So it became easier for me to tell the story through music and the emotion and feeling rather than a fixed narrative and for me that was more interesting because it was more ambiguous. We looked at each song as a theme, which made making the music easier because we knew how the song should feel. And we’re pretty religious about feeling – if it didn’t make us feel the right way, we got rid of it. We saw the record as each song working together as a complete piece rather than as individual songs, so every song that felt too different and too much like a stand-out single we left off.”
Having recorded the preceding 12” Heavy Pop/Concrete Gold single in a studio and finding the experience sterile and clinical, the band trawled through the back streets of Manchester looking for a setting that would better fit their dynamic sound. Wandering through the city’s former Italian district, they chanced upon an abandoned European-style church, decided it was to be the place they’d set up primitive shop and recorded Go Tell Fire… in a solid three-week stretch. In talking with Roberts, it’s clear he’s a young man with intelligence, conviction and awareness well beyond his years. In fact, when listening to Go Tell Fire… the same attributes can be applied to WU LYF’s music. With
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We talk about what we’re doing, rather than what we are, so I think the whole mystery thing is just fucking cheesy.”
the oldest member in the band a mere 21, the fact that they also self-produced Go Tell Fire… is testament that their creative well runs deep. And despite being serially courted by record labels ever since rumours surfaced in early 2010 of an extremely limited run of homerecorded demo EPs that the band was flogging for £50 each, they’ve chosen to self-release the album on their own label, LYF Recordings. As Roberts bluntly points out, “There wasn’t much that a record label could do for us, other than us signing away our authorship and rights.” Regarding the legitimacy of the £50 EP rumours, which have been claimed to be myth, Roberts says the reality has been distorted through Chinese whispers. As he tells it, the band recorded the demo to circulate amongst friends – they had no intention of profiting off it, so set the price at £50 as a joke, thinking no one in their right mind would be so stupid. Then a stream of A&R “mad men” caught wind of the band and were willing to shell out the outrageous £50 a pop for this “amateur shit”, so they told them they’d already sold them all. However, the band does sell its 12” Heavy Pop/Concrete Gold single – for a modest price, of course – and each copy comes with a bandit mask. To avoid having to deal with record labels to fund Go Tell Fire…, the band printed 500 copies of the single to sell direct to the public. Purchasing the single gains one membership to the Lucifer Youth Foundation
IN ONE OF THEIR FIRST EVER INTERVIEWS, WU LYF FRONTMAN ELLERY ROBERTS EXPLAINS TO JUSTIN GREY HOW THE YOUNG UK BAND IS SWATTING ASIDE INDUSTRY HYPE AND WRITING THEIR OWN FUTURE.
(LYF) and they’ve since sold well over a thousand copies and are re-printing them in batches of 500. “Basically it’s our record label, but it’s not tied down to just making records,” Roberts explains of the LYF. “It’s a battlefront that allows us self-sufficiency and freedom. We spent the initial money recording the record, but we’ve not wrote in stone what we’re planning to do. The way the LYF is structured allows us total freedom – we pick and choose what we want to do and we don’t do things unless we’ve got a gut feeling that it’s the right thing to do. We could fucking sell this record as a piece of meat and take it everywhere, but personally I don’t want to do that. It’ll be interesting to see how the record is perceived, but that’s not why I make music. I’d prefer to keep it simple and do something interesting and exciting – and obviously playing in the Sydney Opera House comes under that.” With only around 20 live shows under their belt, about a quarter of which were residency gigs in their manager’s coffee house in Manchester, it’s indeed exciting for WU LYF to get invited all the way out to Australia for two exclusive gigs at the iconic Opera House as part of the Vivid festival. While they’ve played two shows in New York, they’ve mostly played in the UK and here and there in Europe to date. But later in the year they’ve got more US gigs and dates in Japan and their touring schedule will only further expand as Go Tell Fire… gains the wide acclaim it’s due. However, Roberts stresses that the band will never find it hard to keep any fame that might come their way at arm’s length and, through the LYF membership scheme, says the band won’t put themselves in a position that explicitly maps out their future and curtails their freedom. Referencing the famed Spanish soccer club that’s owned and operated by its supporters rather than being run by corporate big wigs, there’s a revealing band quote on the above mentioned website that says, “We want WU LYF to be more than a band, in the same way FC Barcelona is ‘more than a club’”. And that’s more or less a mission statement for WU LYF. “I want the LYF to be owned by the fans; I don’t want a record label with a record boss making the decisions,” Roberts explains. “Obviously FC Barcelona is a cultural institution for Catalan Spain and much more than four stupid guys from Manchester trying to have fun with something, but that’s what’s interesting with WU LYF. It could be anything – there’s no anchoring it. We’re not going to put ourselves in a position where we’re contractually obliged to ever make another record and we could do something completely different. And we’re so young – the oldest fella in the band is 21 – and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life making music as a recording artist.” WHO WU LYF WHAT Go Tell Fire To The Mountain (LYF Recordings/Liberator), out 17 June WHEN & WHERE Monday 30 & Tuesday 31 May, The Studio Sydney Opera House
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THE CURE’S ROBERT SMITH
VIVID DOES IT AGAIN While these days punters are increasingly spoilt for choice as more and more new festivals pop up around the country, you’d be hard pressed to find another event as uniquely singular as Vivid Sydney – in Australia, or anywhere. Much more of a multidiscipline celebration of art than merely just another music festival, Vivid Sydney is dubbed the “festival of light, music and ideas” and from May 27 to June 13 will colour The Rocks, Circular Quay and, of course, the Sydney Opera House, with creativity and inspiration. While the event hosts peak creative minds from various strands of the arts, the lineup of stellar bands and musicians Vivid has enticed to play the Opera House in its short history is nothing short of amazing. With Vivid Festival bringing the likes of Brian Eno and Lou Reed to Sydney in 2009 and 2010 respectively, this year the lead gig will be The Cure, who will twice perform their first three albums back to back in their entirety with a lineup that evolves for each album. Both Cure shows sold out almost instantaneously, and we hear that tickets have since gone for more than $1000 a pop in online auctions. Others on the stellar lineup this year include seriously hyped LA shock rap collective OFWGKTA, who just in the last two weeks have incited a riot at an in-store signing and incurred the wrath of Tegan & Sara and the US Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation; Spiritualized performing in full their 1997 opus, Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space; Bat For Lashes; WU LYF; Tame Impala; Cut Copy; Architecture In Helsinki; ‘Saxophone Colossus’ Sonny Rollins; and others. WU LYF was over the moon to receive an invite to play Vivid 2011, particularly given that they’ve yet to release an album and have only played a handful of shows to date, none of which were anywhere near this scale. And it goes without saying that their heavy reverb and organ-driven sound is almost tailor-made for the Opera House. “We’re fucking crazy super excited,” Roberts enthuses. “For us to be asked to go to a thing like this is incredible. When we were asked to play it, we looked into it and found Brian Eno played in 2009 and Lou Reed in 2010, so it’s going to be pretty amazing. I’m a fan of Yo Gabba Gabba!, the kids’ TV show, so I’m pretty excited to see them play something.”