Interview: Bat For Lashes

Feature for The Skinny
In a music business where female artists are so often forced into pigeonholes – Duffy the doe-eyed kitten, Lily Allen the feisty brat, Kate Nash the kooky every-girl – it’s only the true individuals who stand out over time. The talent of non-conformists like Kate Bush, Bjork and PJ Harvey burns far [...]

Interview: Yahweh

Feature for The Skinny

Lewis Cook has a level-headedness that belies his youth. When most teenagers fly the family nest for the boundless freedom of university life, their first year away from home is spent drinking, watching daytime TV, attending the occasional lecture, boiling pasta, and more drinking. But the 18-year-old Cook – whose own nest-exit [...]

Interview: RBRBR

Feature for The Skinny’s Mill supplement

XTC, REM, MGMT… and now RBRBR. The world’s latest musical acronym is an Edinburgh electro outfit who refuse to take themselves too seriously, as drummer Paul reveals when I ask what it stands for: “This week, it stands for Robbing Banks Regularly Boosts Revenue, last week it stood for Raging [...]

Interview: The Little Kicks

Feature for The Mill magazine:

If Ladbrokes were to offer odds on the next unsigned Scottish band to ‘make it’, one of the favourites would surely be the Little Kicks. The Aberdeen quartet have steadily built their reputation over the past few years, playing to packed tents at the T in the Park and Connect festivals [...]

Interview: Asobi Seksu

A feature for The Skinny:

Without knowing Asobi Seksu’s back-story you could make an informed guess. Perhaps they are a Japanese band inspired by hearing Kevin Shields’ distorted guitar soundtrack Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray’s prolonged cinematic flirtation in a Tokyo hotel?
No, ‘Asobi Seksu’ means ‘playful sex’, not ‘cross-generational platonic romance’. But it is Japanese, and [...]

Interview: The James Orr Complex

After reviewing his album last month, I offered to interview the man behind the James Orr Complex – Christopher Mack – for a feature in The Skinny…
If you had to stick a pin on a map of the world and then emigrate to that point, you might well find your hand drawn to Brazil. For [...]

Interview: Late of the Pier

A feature for The Skinny…
Late of the Pier’s introduction to the mainstream in September was likely to have caused one of two reactions. Either ‘rush out and buy the album’ excitement (if you’re under 21, easily swayed by hype and still possess an open mind) or dismissal along the lines of ‘not another bunch of [...]

Interview: Neon Neon

Neon Neon may not have won the Mercury Music Prize, but arriving for the event in a pair of time-travelling cars (if Emmett ‘Doc’ Brown had his way) with lego-brick medallions hanging from their necks, the eccentric duo could not be missed…
Interview feature for The Skinny
Boom Bip and Gruff Rhys have differing memories of the [...]

Interview: Yeasayer’s Chris Keating on Beck, Barack Obama and the second album

Yeasayer have been touring their debut album All Hour Cymbals relentlessly for the past year, so have Brooklyn’s finest experimentalists had time to even contemplate the follow-up? I tracked down singer Chris Keating to find out the latest for The Skinny.
It’s not long since you returned from your European tour. Did you enjoy that?
It was [...]

Interview: Hot Chip

This is a feature I wrote back in February for The Skinny, the week before Hot Chip released their third album. It all came together too late to tie in with the album release, so here it is on the eve of their T in the Park set…
Interviews with Hot Chip often begin with the [...]