Song, by Toad

“I don’t think we’ll ever feel cool.” reckons David Tatersall of the Wave Pictures, despite their being recently signed to one of the hippest labels around: Moshi Moshi. Nevertheless, they’ve just played the main stage at the End of the Road Festival and had people bellowing requests at them left, right and centre. So cool, maybe not, but something is certainly bubbling away in the land of the Wave Pictures. It was the same last year at their show in the considerably smaller venue, The Local. They could have virtually played a whole show of requests.

“That was really strange,” admits David, “and again today, I don’t know how they get this crowd, they do such a good job. For all our friends as well, all our friends play bigger gigs here. Like Darren Hayman, say, and Jeff Lewis, and I don’t know where they all come from because most of the time we play in bars and nobody knows us and every gig is their first time hearing it. It does seem like End of the Road really know what they’re doing and really get an audience that’s into it. Like last year in the tent we had no idea what happened. There was lots of people and they knew songs from CD-Rs that I’d forgotten that we’d done, and it was really, really fun. These are CD-Rs that maybe 50 people in the country have, maybe 100 people at most, but it seemed like everyone who had them was there.”

The video is taken from our interview, and cut in with some footage of their live performance. The sound for the live show is appalling because the sound system overwhelmed the mics on our wee camera, but we’ve learned our lesson and won’t make that mistake again. The wavering crackle of their early CD-R recordings is replaced by a more strident, polished sound on stage. Simply put, they make a racket.

I think I got into The Wave Pictures, about a year ago or so, at the very end of their status as a CD-R band. I obviously caught something of a wave of interest, because within a month or two of my noticing them they had been signed to Moshi Moshi, and vinyl singles and shiny new albums were being discussed. I couldn’t help but wonder exactly what it was that finally made a band that had actually been around for a while seem so suddenly palatable to a record label. Partly, it must be said, it’s unfair to blame labels for not signing a band they probably just hadn’t heard.

“It’s really different. We’ve got friends who are on labels, they got on labels very quickly, before they’d done a lot of stuff and it’s a really different frame of mind – sometimes they’ll have to write songs to fill out a debut album. We already had been a band who was completely left alone by the world and we never were interviewed, like this, and no-one was all that interested apart from a few friends and we just did shows and sold CD-Rs at shows. So we already were kind of sure of ourselves. So then it’s just different dealing with the speed of labels, how long they want to take on everything. It has its advantages. The disadvantage is that no-one really hears what you’ve done.”

David’s explanation is sensible enough. Even a label as tiny and embryonic as Song, by Toad Records has a lot of bands getting in touch, so the idea of a random CD-R slipping through the net is all too plausible. This impression is reinforced by his explanation of how things started to change after the release of Sophie, their 6th album.

“Even Sophie was put out by a label, a really small label [Smoking Gun], but just putting it out through somebody else rather than it just coming from us, even that made a bit of a difference. It got to more places, and people like you heard it, and we got more reviews and that’s why Moshi heard us and Moshi obviously can get the word out more.

“It is hard to understand because when I’m listening to bands I never think of all the intermediary stages, you know. Like when I watched Pavement when I was 15 I just assumed that Pavement played loads of gigs in their home town, built up a fan base, travelled a bit built up a bigger fan base and eventually they’re playing at a festival in Reading. The truth is probably two businessmen worked Pavement’s image and those guys sat around.”

If they sound intentionally disingenuous, then they shouldn’t. I’ve never met such a non-rockstarry bunch of lads in my life. Not that I’ve met a lot of rock stars obviously, but the idea of these guys turning into high-maintenance primadonnas seems about as unlikely as I can possibly imagine. Even simple things, like asking them about being part of a larger scene in London – witness their appearance on Welcome to Our TV Show, for example – doesn’t bring out the slightest amount of showboating or slyly inferring any sort of hip scenester behaviour; quite the opposite in fact:

“Well that is the kind of atmosphere they want to create for their TV show, like when you used to watch TGI Friday and the settings would make it seem like everyone in the bar was mates. That’s kind of what Jeremy Warmsley’s going for on that. And he does a good job, I don’t mean to be disparaging, but he’s not a mate. He’s a nice bloke, I don’t want to say anything mean about him, he’s very nice, but we don’t hang out with Jeremy Warmsley, we’ve met him like twice. That was the first time we met Hot Club Paris. We were in a roomful of strangers and we sat in a corner and ate all the free food, and yeah, it was a nice day, a nice day. Good people, all good people, I don’t want to diss anyone.”

This is another of the opportunities that working with Moshi Moshi has opened up for them, so they may not have silver jumpsuits in their immediate futures, but they definitely starting to witness a change in how they are going about things. Not least, their recordings have slightly evolved from that gorgeous lo-fi quality, and sound a lot more polished these days. For the most part I think this is only partially successful. I loved the less-polished aethetic of their first albums, but then there are songs which I like better on the new recordings, with Leave the Scene Behind being the most obvious example.

“You get more freedom in the studio to try and do different stuff.” is Franic’s take on it. “When you’re recording on a tape machine you just do it really quickly and you can’t mess around with it too much because you’ve just got two or four tracks, so you get stuff done really quickly.”

He adds: “The [new] Berlin album is slightly different sounding, similar to the home recordings.”

I would have assumed that a band like this would have embraced the new boom in DIY methodology, but David isn’t anything like as keen as I would have expected, especially for a band who have recorded the vast majority of their own material.

“It’s just getting worse I think, with computer recording. It’s easier in a way, but it’s harder to get a good sound than when you’re restricted on a four-track. Most four-track recordings of anyone just sound good, like tape just had a good sound.”

Franic chips in: “We just recorded some Bruce Springsteen covers, and Dave’s old cassette deck has two microphone inputs. Left and right, and that was really good. Two mics and you stand in the bedroom and you record a bit of this and that. You know if you need a bit of mandolin now you walk closer or further away, and if Dave’s singing needs to be louder he takes a step forward.”

“It’s how everything was be recorded for years and years.” David continues. “If you had like a box set of Billie Holiday, there’s like a dozen of them and they recorded with two mics, it’s just what people used to do and it’s really fun. Instead of moving a little controller up and down you’re moving backwards and forwards yourself.

“That’s something about studios in general is that they kind of limit everything. The distance between the quietest thing and the loudest thing is incredibly limited when you’re studio recording as opposed to a live show or a home recording, and it does really change the atmosphere.”

“The main thing with us,” he continues, “is that none of that side of it is all that considered. We never really thought about having a progression. I guess the thing that no-one knows about us is that the first thing we ever did was go in a studio. The first thing. We didn’t know about home recording, so the first thing we did as a new band is what all bands do, which is go and get some random guy to make us a demo and it sucked. So then we tried to record ourselves at home, because my sister’s boyfriend at the time had a four-track.”

It seems reasonable to suggest that the long friendship between Franic and David is partially responsible for their biblical degree of level-headedness. It’s been well documented that they grew up in the same village, within about a hundred yards of one another, although they only started playing together at about the age of fifteen, about eight years after David started playing the guitar.

Drummer Johnny Helm joined the band somewhat later, by which time they already had a sound and had written plenty of the songs still featured today. His rendition of the superlative Now You Are Pregnant was terrific at End of the Road. Given it sings about the loving “the view out of my Glasgow window” I am bit confused though, because David went to university in Glasgow, while Johnny and Franic met whilst studying in Cardiff.

“On all the recordings of it I’m singing it” explains David. “Just because it was a song that people liked to hear, and we’d often come off stage and people would ask ‘why didn’t you play Now You Are Pregnant?’ And the truth is that for a band like us you really can’t play the same song too many times because you end up going through the motions. I ended up with Now You Are Pregnant where I was forgetting the words because I’d be singing and not enjoying it all because I’d sung it so many times.

“Not because it’s not a good song, but the thing about bands and songwriters that’s different from fans is that the person who’s writing the songs likes everything that they’ve written equally – and dislikes them all equally. I don’t think any of my songs are better than any of the others, they’re all as good as I could do, for what that’s worth. I never tried to do something bad. And I was singing Now You Are Pregnant again and again and feeling bad for all the other songs. And because people wanted to hear it and because Johnny knew all the words because it’s a song that he liked and we played a lot, we started thinking that’s a good, fun thing to do, would be to have Johnny sing it, but that’s only the fourth time we’ve done it.”

It’s just such a sensible, plain vanilla story, and seeing as I don’t have a natural end to this interview, I think I might just end on David Tatersall’s explanation of their occasionally rather tortured lyrics. Just read this – they’re so fucking normal. Reassuring isn’t it.

“The guys you’ve got to worry about are the guys who sing really happy music. Read the story of the Beach Boys, it’s a tale of misery and woe. Read the story of John Lee Hooker, where every night he just sings the blues; every night he comes off stage feeling good. He’s got his suit and his sunglasses on and he’s got some whiskey and he’s happy – he’s sung his blues. That’s the truth of music. The sad ones are the happy bands, that’s who you’ve got to watch out for.”

Toad Vimeo Page | Wave Pictures Photos on Flickr

The Wave Pictures – Leave the Scene Behind (Old Version)
The Wave Pictures – Leave the Scene Behind (New Version)
The Wave Pictures – Long Island
The Wave Pictures – Now You Are Pregnant

Website | More mp3s | Buy Wave Pictures music direct from the band

Again, the sound on these things is appalling, so feel free to watch them anyway, but you have been warned. Hopefully it won’t happen again.