Noisettes

www.thenoisettes.com

So which strand of their cornucopia of psychedelic mental ness best sums up The Noisettes?  That the drummer spent three solid years of his teendom locked in his room playing drums eleven hours a day and never, ever going out?  That the guitarist had his own personal school bully and only started playing guitar to impress Jimmy Page?  That the singer trained for the circus and once choreographed a burlesque routine in which a woman laid a golden egg out of her vagina?  Actually, those will come later:  If one thing is to sum up The Noisettes’ anti-conformity, multi-stylistic freakoid upturning of popular music culture it is that they were formed while trying to sabotage the first ever gig by The Feeling.

“There was this band,” explains sun-bright singer Shingai Shoniwa, a woman so far removed from the mainstream rock fringes that she has been known onstage to play her guitar with a loaf of bread, “and some of them are now The Feeling and they were all a couple of years older than me and they were the superstars of Brit (the Croydon stage and music school where The Noisettes met).  The teachers were tipping them, they were the favorite band.  Basically we were sabotaging them because they had their big concert in the foyer.”

“They were rehearsing,” adds dark-eyed and fidgety guitarist Dan Smith, a man so many light years beyond contemporary rockular thought that he wrote four vibrantly eclectic tracks for his first EP and then decided to call it ‘The Three Moods Of The Noisettes’, “and she dragged me in there and we started dancing in front of them. I thought this girl was amazing, she’d inspired me to do something I never would have, I was so shy.”
 

He was a shy, blues-loving Croydon-via-Camden boy, the product of put-upon schooldays and a home life colored by his father’s history playing harmonica in blues bands - indeed, it was the night his dad came home from work claiming he’d jammed with Jimmy Page that a 13-year-old Dan decided he’d learn to play guitar dead quickly so that Jimmy could discover him within the week.  She was an effervescent actress and ex-choirgirl from a Zimbabwean single mother, the niece of one of the Bhundu Boys and a drifter of the estates of South London from Lewisham too “Foresthillbrockleynewcrosscamberwelldeptford…” who chose to take classes circus skills rather than cookery in her Deptford youth club and hence was buzzing with the desire to trapeze-swing from lighting rigs and cartwheel across indie club stages.  They’d met that very day when Shingai decided to sit down next to the kooky weirdo in her music class and sing along with the cranky cool music he was playing on his guitar in the park and from vastly disparate beginnings, a love affair was begun. Requited musically, unrequited physically.

“We had a dysfunctional love affair that never came to fruition,” Dan explains, “I really fancied the shit out of her and that kept me seeing her when we were doing the band.  It’s always been one of those weird Romeo and Juliet things where they never actually have each other and they both die.”

Shingai grins broadly. “It’s a cliff-hanger.”

After the short while it took Dan to talk Shingai out of her dream of an acting career and into his dad’s blues band, the sort-of-couple launched themselves into London artistic society in whatever guise it would have them.  Community-minded from the off they wrote a musical theatre piece for a Deptford youth workshop called ‘Harmony In Harlem’, made short films, worked with drama classes and played avant garde noise gigs in pubs. Shingai delved for a while into singing with Skunk Anansie and even joined the Lost Vagueness crew as a burlesque performer and co-creator of the now legendary ‘Golden Egg Routine’.
There was this one piece I devised with this girl who dressed as a swan with all these feathers,” she remembers, “and I was singing as if she was hearing this music in her head and at the end she’d do a strip-tease, getting rid of all the feathers and then she lays a golden egg on a little nest, literally out of her vagina.”
  

After which there was nowhere for Dan and Shingai to go but rock.  For much of the early 00’s they played shambolic jazz-noise gigs under the moniker Sonarfly, who made healthy men prolapse and children run screaming into the paths of trucks. Or, as they put it, “it didn’t work out with our previous drummer”.  But fate fondled their dangles the day they parted company with said drummer, two days before heading into the studio to record the first Noisettes demo, and four days before their next gig was booked. That night Dan found himself entranced by the drummer for an act called Willis he caught on ‘Joolz Holland’:  “I really noticed the guy, he was playing an egg-shaker and hi-hat and moving around.  Then the guy who was producing our EP said ‘you’ve just lost a drummer, I know this guy’ and he turned up at Bush Studios the next day and I went ‘I just saw you on the TV last night’.”
  

Jamie Morrison, the afro’d veteran of around 16 previous bands who’d never done a day’s work in his life was psychedelically mental enough to join The Noisettes simply by dint of spending his entire teenage years as the Drummer In The Attic.
  

“I didn’t go out of my room for a number of years,” he says.  “I left school early and locked myself in my room. I was 16 when I came out properly.  I came out a lot different.  I had an entire floor of the house to myself and every day I’d wake up and play drums for ten or eleven hours a day.  I’d play from eleven till five then I’d have my dinner then play for another four or five hours then I’d watch a film and go to bed.  I did that every day.  I was so anal about stuff.  I’d sit with a drumstick and a drum and play it for hours until it sounded right in my head.  I did it for hours and hours, weeks and weeks.”
  

Obviously, Jamie was in.  That was on a Friday in late 2004.  On the Saturday and Sunday The Noisettes recorded their first single, the four-track ‘Three Moods Of The Noisettes’ - a brilliantly warped, scattershot concoction of punk, dirty blues, acid-rock and general nutter-scree that they pretty much made up on the spot.  “It’s called ‘The Three Moods Of The Noisettes’,” says Shingai, “but we knocked another track out a few weeks before it was supposed to come out, so there were four tracks.  Dan was like ‘that don’t matter, don’t worry about it!’  We’re united by blues and psychedelic music and rock.”  They mixed the single into the early hours of Sunday, then on Monday The Noisettes played their first gig, entirely improvised.  “The crowd were so up for what we were doing,” says Dan.  “That’s when it really happened.  When we united with Jamie it all became clear.”
  
And so began the most unconventional and imaginative band in modern rock.  The Noisettes played anywhere and everywhere - on a rooftop in Shoreditch (Dan:  “They wanted to steal our equipment.  We had to go and play another gig and when we came back they’d locked all our stuff inside so we had to break in and lower all our equipment down through a window”), in squats, on boats, in schools and timber yards.  They played their instruments with Hovis, did gigs fresh from hit-and-run accidents (Shingai: “I got run over three days before and it was too late to cancel the gigs so I convinced the doctors to let me out of hospital a few days earlier”) and did tap-dance busking gigs in Greenwich. And, most dangerous of all, they took their lives in their hands to play support on the riot-plagued Babyshambles tour of 2004.

“Shingai’s equipment was stuck together with tights,” Dan laughs. “Nothing worked. We went from those gigs to playing with Babyshambles.”
  

Even their deal was bizarre. Releasing ‘The Three Moods…’ on the tiny Side Salad label in the UK, they found themselves unexpectedly snapped up by no less legendary a label than Motown in America. Cue a debut album recorded between Croydon and California, and reflecting all the chaos and confusion that entails.
  

“Imagine going to a  jumble sale,” says Shingai. “It’s like that. There’s no real theme. Words are not my slave; sometimes it’s more about the way they sound and how you execute a note with it. The album was recorded over quite a long time, over a couple of years, a quite a few different headspaces as well. Sometimes it’s really working men’s club, sometimes it’s really punky and sometimes it’s wide and special and accidental pretty textures.”

“It’ll shake you by your shoulders and make you throw up,” Dan elaborates, “then other times it’s really serene.”

The clues are there in the spiritual emancipation rattle-anthem singles ‘Iwe’ and newie ‘Scratch Your Name’, but the album writhes with a seething paranoia and darkness that’s belied by its genre-obliterating power.

“Sometimes I think that makes the best song,” says Shingai. “If you can sing about something violent then I like the backdrop to not be violent or if you sing about something really mellow it’s good if the music is really sinister. It goes back to the nursery rhyme. I wouldn’t say you’d put the kids to bed with it, but some people might.”
  

Hit-and-runs, stripping geese-women, wild-haired reclusive drummers and the sabotage of everything evil in rock. Cuddle up to The Noisettes: they’ll give you sweet psychedelic nightmares.