Warmduscher interview – “We’d be like ‘what the fuck is going on?!’”
We know this much – environment plays an undeniable role in the creative process. David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy is indelibly bound up in the tension of the divided city. The Clash’s Sandinista would have sounded very different if they hadn’t taken in the street sounds of New York and Jamaica while recording it. Even the soothing ambient classic 76:16 by Global Communication was said to be inspired by the rolling Somerset fields that the pair looked out on as they created it.
The considerably less leafy environs of Willesden Junction in North West London are not mentioned maybe as often as the streets of Manhattan or certain districts of the German capital. But the area, and more specifically the characters that inhabit it, are central to Warmduscher’s just-released fifth album Too Cold To Hold, recorded in the area’s Narcissus Music studio.
That’s what singer Clams Baker – who our more acid house-loving readers will probably know as a regular live and studio collaborator with Paranoid London – and bassist Benjamin Romans Hopcraft told Juno Daily when we joined the pair as they supped a few lunchtime beers at the somewhat surreal German Gymnasium restaurant next to London’s King’s Cross station.
“A lot of the tapestry of what was going on around the area the place did fall into the lyrical content of the album,” says Hopcraft, among the slightly surreal sight of Oktoberfest-outfitted waitresses serving foaming German beers up to businessman and travellers on a weekday lunchtime, “Those kind of places are the kind of places I’m from. What I’d call normal London, those under privileged areas. I mean, it’s relatively desolate, at least compared to what London has become. Places where you see people sat out taking drugs openly, where people disappear into strange looking bars and buildings that are officially closed but there’s some sort of business going on there.”
“You’d walk past an open door,” Baker adds, “not in the studio, obviously but in the area – and you’d see crack heads in there. There was a lot of, erm… activity! For me, not in the wrong way, but it was quite inspiring.”
Songs from the album like ‘Top Shelf’ and ‘Staying Alive’ certainly seem to have a more noticeable social critique element to them, both dealing with people living on the margins of survival. Even the first single to emerge from the album, ‘Fashion Week’, is dedicated not to the models and fashionistas that inhabit the catwalks and free champagne bars of the industry, but the punters who sweat and strive all week in the service of looking good. The briefest watch of its hilarious accompanying video, which plays footage of ludicrously inaccessible, high couture off against clips of Black Friday riots and shoppers fighting each other in the New Year sales, will reveal that this lot – as if you didn’t know already – are very much on the side of the little guys and gals of this world.
There is, however, one even more literal, couldn’t-be-clearer influence from the area on the Too Cold To Hold tracklisting, namely the wild Amen break flurries of ‘Cleopatras’.
“’Cleopatras’, one of the songs on the album, we named after the pub next door to where we were recording…” reveals Hopcraft.
“The brothel…” corrects Baker.
“Yeah, the brothel,” concedes Hopcraft.
So, we enquire, purely for professional reasons you understand, this pub was secretly a brothel?
“It was quite open about it,” Baker elucidates. “I mean, we didn’t go in, but there were all these airbrushed pictures of women on the outside. It’s right on the high street. It’s just, er, it’s a brothel.”
This being Warmduscher, though, they took the idea and ran with it, imagining energy vampires from a faraway planet descending on the place with a view to sucking the life out of the human population.
“It’s cool,” continues Hopcraft, “because being in an underprivileged part of London, it was great for us to be making music there. We’d come in to the studio and we’d be laughing about all the weird interactions we’d had on the way to the studio or one lunch breaks. We’d be like ‘what the fuck is going on?!’ And it would find its way into the music. There was a lot of it that was open ended and Clams would still be writing lyrics for it while we were editing.”
Even the pub – Maloney’s – where the band would retire to for lunchtime refreshment, was “another world” according to Baker. There’s a clear link, evidently, to the band’s spiritual and actual home of South London, what with Baker living in Clapham and Hopcraft in Brixton.
“I find Brixton interesting,” says Hopcraft, “because much as it’s changed, all the people you see out on the street, they’re all the same characters you’ve seen since you were a kid. Chatting shit and coming up to you like it’s the first time they’ve ever seen you, even though you’ve known them all your life. It’s a very communal space for people who are just out on the street doing stuff. I mean, the KFC (on the corner of Brixton High Street and Coldharbour Lane) used to be full of people selling drugs. Now it’s full of people starting their own religious cults.
“People skating outside the Ritzy… I used to skate round there and you get talking to people, they’re homeless but they’re just one shade away from being you. They’re just the same as any other people who are interested in life. There’s a lot of really interesting people in Brixton, they’ve not been replaced. I can see Peckham High Street has been completely replaced now. But in Brixton they’re trying but they don’t really know how to do it.”
As well as being, in Clams words, being the first album where the band – all of which have other musical identities and duties – have begun to concentrate on Warmduscher as “the main thing”, Too Cold To Hold also marks the band’s first step into self-production, with Hopcraft alongside Jamie Neville (Kae Tempest, Wesley Gonzalez) taking the helm.
“We’d got the stage where we thought – let’s just do it like that,” Hopcraft says. “We’ve all been in other bands. Adam (J Harmer) is an amazing guitarist, Clams has been making music for years. I’ve been making music with my friend Jamie for years. It’s like, there are all too many minds here already.
The responsibility has been a learning process for the six piece band and its inter-personal dynamics, the pair agree. As a result, the album has become not only their most natural and organic sounding production, but at the same time its rawest and definitely its most varied. From the BBC 6Music-playlisted ‘Pure At The Heart’, with its MOR-keyboard chug and Bee Gees-like harmonies, to the low slung funkiness of ‘Body Shock’ and ‘Too Cold To Hold’, the weird jazz of ‘Immaculate Deception’ and closer ‘Weeds In The Garden’, it’s the sound of a band achieving the confidence to take their rock ‘n’ roll template and really twist it up into genuinely new shapes.
“We all ultimately serve the song,” Baker concludes, “everyone has an open mindset. You might have this song, but if someone has something to add to it, rather than saying ‘no, it has to be my vision’, nine times out of ten it’ll actually come to fruition because someone will do something completely different with it.”
“You learn how to communicate in quite a un-serious way, even if the subject is quite serious,” agrees Hopcraft. “Everyone’s willing to let people mess with stuff.”
Ben Willmott