12 Tell me a bit about the ‘Crap Cardboard Pet’ EP... It’s three tracks. The cassette (courtesy of Hidden Bay records) also may or may not have two secret tracks at the end. People say it’s a strength of ours that our songs sound like they’ve just been rattled off casually. Which is what they’re meant to sound like, but actually that wasn’t the case with these ones. They were written, by and large, in 2017. But because they’re so long and we have all these rules about instrumentation and no changes or effects, it was quite difficult to come up with versions that had momentum but obeyed the rules. Minimalism is tricky! We tried a few versions and made and released our first 7 inch during the time these were in the oven. I’m quite proud that Cardboard Man in particular does seem to have this sense of building, a dynamism to it, despite the guitar riff just bulldozing through the whole thing. The final track is a 9 and a half minute spoof manifesto, again with a continuous riff. It is actually extremely difficult to play a simple riff with character for nine minutes. And then find some lyrics that will keep it engaging. That was the mission. I don’t know if we succeeded, but people seem to be vibing most with that song, and are sometimes surprised when we tell them it’s over nine minutes, which makes me happy. We wanted to see how far you could take the principles of minimalism into pop without things getting too tedious. Where did the idea for Landlords come from? As a member of the human race I have a feeling that this is from experience. I was living in this ex-council flat near Deptford for a while which had a really stupid arrangement whereby certain things (like the outer portions of walls, the telecom) were still the council’s
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responsibility. If there was an issue with something our landlord would inevitably say it was the council’s problem and they’d say it was his and you’d get locked in this endless Kafkaesque whirlpool of call-centres and shirked responsibility until you eventually gave up. It’s an example from personal experience, but this kind of thing is so widespread now it often just is the system - they make things bureaucratically impossible, everyone knows this and decides not to bother, and then they can report that complaints have statistically reduced, or whatever. This particular landlord was also very flashy and was just a ‘professional’ landlord, even though he did basically nothing for us. We were working full-time to support this annoying guy’s lifestyle. It felt very strange and the injustices of renting felt very palpable. We’re donating part of the proceeds from this single to the excellent London Renters Union, who are doing great stuff in fighting these kinds of issues.