It’s too early for this, and yet here we are at10am, in what looks like your average, slightly scummy beige room. Except in one corner is a rectangle of crackling astro turf. On it sits a small paddling pool, a beach ball, and a plastic bucket and spade. Bunting is strung up on the walls to add a celebratory feel. Completing this peculiar faux seaside scene are three rickety, striped deck chairs, each cradling one Young Knife, resplendent in their usual tweed and tie uniform, looking suitably sleepy. It’s quite a different scene from the last time we saw them playing to a rabid crowd at the London Barfly many, many months ago. They might look like mild mannered geography teachers, but believe, when they hit the stage spittle will fly, glasses will fall and their neatly pressed shirts will become very sweaty indeed.
Henry Dartnell (singer/guitarist), his brother bassist/singer House of Lords (that’s Thomas Dartnell to his mum) and drummer Oliver Askew are the latest in the British rock canon to immortalise and dissect the everyday with a slightly sardonic twist. Take their flagship tune ‘Weekends And Bleak Days (Hot Summer)’, which perfectly encapsulates the numbing futility of a dead-end job and everything that sucks about working during the summertime. With its taut, repetitive guitar line and Henry’s clipped vocals, the song certainly owes a debt the jerky, minimalism of post-punk acts like Gang Of Four, but the three-piece are far from brazen copyists. Songs like ‘In The Pink’, ‘Tailor’ (an eerie ode to the dying art of a clothier), and ‘Another Hollow Line’ temper the jagged edges and falsetto yelps with the melancholy beauty of The Kinks and hints of Pavement’s off-kilter, lo-fi loveliness.
It seems the brothers Dartnell have been preparing for their time beneath the bright lights since they were six-years-old, when they first discovered the joys of amateur dramatics. Henry took the lead role in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and House played “a fucking tree wearing a massive sheet of green paper”. (Years later, Henry scooped the role of Dracula with House as his henchmen Ghengis.) Having met Oliver in their teens and under the questionable influences of Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Pop Will Eat Itself and the Senseless Things et al, they formed an ill-fated ‘grebo’ band. Once their original singer joined the navy, Henry took over on vocals, roped in his brother and The Young Knives were born. But it wasn’t until they finished university that the band finally became a viable option. As Henry puts it: “If you live in London you see people who are in bands and think it’s feasible, but if you live in the Midlands you see people in the pub who sell drugs, beat people up and work in factories. There aren’t many popstars round there.”
Lucky for us that they decided to give it a crack, moving to Oxford and releasing one mini-album, ‘The Young Knives Are Dead’ on local label Shifty Disco. This in turn, hooked the tastemakers at Transgressive Records. Time to meet the boys…
Gang Of Four’s Andy Gill produced your debut album. Were you at all worried by the negative production experience The Futureheads had with their first album?
He was jabbing the bread knife at me shouting, ‘I’m going to fucking kill you.’ The doctor said we should never be alone together.
Henry: Wary, but we didn’t really know the facts behind it and my opinion is that they were not pushy enough to get their own way.
So you’re saying you have bigger balls than the Futureheads.
Henry: Yeah. They probably didn’t like something and then went away and mumbled about it, which is understandable because you’re a bit in awe of someone like that. It was a good process because it made us think about the songs and which parts are really important, which are the ones that we won’t let him touch. It’s mainly him encouraging us to come up with new ideas – ‘Is this a bit too stupid? That idea is a bit rubbish.’
House: Of course he comes up with some dreadful ideas!
Henry: Oh yes. He didn’t like the album title, ‘Voices Of Animals And Men’.
House: He sent Henry a message saying, ‘Why don’t you call it: ‘Pure Heavenly Rain’?’ He thought there was something ironic in it.
Henry: I replied, ‘That’s probably the shittest album name! NO!’
Henry and Oliver met at school in the swashbuckling sounding town of Ashby-de-la-Zouche. What did you two bond over?
Henry: We met in an electronics technology class. We sat at the table with only two girls and flirted with them the entire time!
House: Did you get a kiss off the girls?
Henry: I didn’t, but there was one girl Jenny Rees, she was a bit of a goer. She had the biggest tits! When I was 13, she was amazing. Ooh, she got me all over-excited. There was one party once and she said, ‘If you’d have gone I would have definitely got off with you.’ And I was like, ‘What!’ [Henry splutters eagerly] ‘When’s the next party!?’
House of Lords, last time I met you down the pub you had recently spent the night sleeping in a public toilet.
House: It was just after a sold out gig at the Oxford Zodiac. Someone said, ‘Come back to ours’, so I went back to with these two girls. At about 5am I walked out, went 100 yards down the road, realised I’d left my bag, turned back and I had no idea where I’d just come from. So I ended up sleeping in a public toilet. I tried chucking stones at Oliver’s window, but he didn’t wake up. Anyway, there was that time that you were locked out of your house and you had to book a hotel.
Oliver: Yeah exactly! I didn’t sleep in a toilet!
Henry: You booked the hotel next to your house! You handed in your home address, ‘Yes, yes I do live just next door.’
House: I woke up at about 7am and went to Londis for about an hour because I was so fucking cold. I looked at everything in great detail. Checked all the E numbers. They were like, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘I’m not sure I’m just looking.’ They made me leave in the end, but I bought some margarine.
Margarine! That’s not even anything you can ingest on the spot.
House: Oh, I was too hungover. And anyway you can never have too much margarine.
Would it be fair to say you’re into DIY ethic?
Henry: I do sometimes go to B&Q on a Sunday.
When was the last time you did some DIY?
Henry: I’ve done quite a lot recently because I’ve just moved into a new house. I do have a drill. I am a real man. But yes, we do like the DIY ethic, mainly because we think our ideas are much better than anyone else’s, so if we do it ourselves it will be brilliant.
House: Yesterday we were doing this B-side about a train, I went ‘Woo Woo’ like a rockist scream mimicking a train and the guy who was recording it hated it! He liked it later on, but that’s the thing, if you do it yourself you don’t have to go through the discussion of whether you’re allowed to make the train noise your record.
We do like the DIY ethic, mainly because we think our ideas are much better than anyone else’s, so if we do it ourselves it will be brilliant.
So House of Lords. I hear you’re a bit of a ladies man.
House: No! I’ve just got the one lady now.
Okay, so before that you were the band stud?
Henry: There was a point during the last tour when you became very charming. You seemed to be able to chat quite freely with lots of women and invite them all back to the van. You’d have seven or eight girls sitting there. And then you’d demand a kiss off all of them! You had a way with the words. It wasn’t like he was slagging it about.
Oh, no, not just sticking it in any hole.
House: I wasn’t sticking it in ANY hole.
Henry: It was more wooing and entertaining. We were in that club in Bath and he was dancing next to some girls, chatting. He walked off and a couple of girls followed him like he was the Pied Piper. Then he walked past us again and there were six girls in tow, all in a single file line!
House: I was very impressed with myself, but basically they wanted some free t-shirts.
I’m particularly fond of the video for ‘The Decision’ with the cannibalistic farm couple. How did you decide which member of the band was going to get devoured?
Henry: House of Lords has the most meat on him. He’s value for money. Oliver would be such a pain in the ass to eat, you’d be picking around the bones for hours.
What small things make you disproportionately happy?
Henry: My willy! [cackles]
What sort of sibling relationship did you have when you were kids?
Henry: We used to fight all the time about nothing. I used to get quite violent. I had the top bunk and once I engineered this bucket of water over the door. He saw me do it and slipped through. I was so angry and I took this broom and smashed it down on his head. Like, ‘If you don’t get wet I’m going to fucking smash your head open! Those are the rules.’ He was crying in the corner then he got so angry he ran downstairs and I could hear him going through the cutlery drawer. I locked myself in the toilet and he was jabbing the bread knife at me shouting, ‘I’m going to fucking kill you.’ And I thought, ‘Fuck! He is!’
I pushed him to the edge. Then the doctor said we should never be alone together. One time I also smacked him round the head with a metal bar. My mates were over and I was like, ‘Watch this!’ I did it and they all went, ‘Fucking hell’ and I was like, ‘That’s cool isn’t it?’
What would you say are the prevalent themes on the album?
Henry: Death and mediocrity. They’re character driven. I do like people-watching.
House: While you would overhear a conversation on the bus and maybe discuss it later, he’ll mimic the voice then and there and go on some tirade!
Henry: It’s not that I hate all people. People are really interesting, how they deal with things quite apart from how I would deal with things.
What was the inspiration for ‘Loughbrough Suicide’?
Henry: It’s really about somebody who is pathetic, someone who is always threatening to kill himself to show everyone. It’s not saying, ‘Isn’t this guy an idiot.’ It’s kind of about people going to therapy and them saying, ‘It’s so good, I love going to therapy.’ But basically you’re paying someone quite a lot of money to sit there and let you talk about yourself and for them to be interested, which we all like. It’s a bit like prostitution, therapy. We’ve got interviews to talk about ourselves and we don’t have to pay for it.
How about ‘In The Pink’?
Henry: That was inspired by Oxford a bit. When you’re trying to be creative and artistic a lot of people claim you have to be very depressed and angst-ridden and to have had lots of tragedy in your life. As if there’s some merit to suffering.
And the title?
Henry: ‘In The Pink’, as in not being very well as opposed to any smutty connotations. I didn’t even think about it! Do you think we should get some merchandise emblazoned with the phrase?
