Interview: Hatcham Social
Hatcham Social
So, I find myself in Liverpool for this one, my old stomping ground, and the venue, The Magnet, is pretty much as I remember, sadly smells n all! The poster reads; Doors 7PM yet as I stand there, with other people, at 7.15, the doors are firmly closed. A quick call later and David from Hatcham Social comes to my rescue….
The helpfulness continues not too long after when the band and I all pour into the “closed” upstairs bar of Magnet, this is being used as the dressing room and inside, of course, there is a bar – with no staff. No sooner have we all sat down that David is up and behind the bar apparently serving drinks to everyone. I’m not entirely sure this was his intention, but I think he’s a helpful soul.
So Liverpool’s “finest tap water” in front of me we’re ready to start “the interview”. I say it like that because I went the least prepared I could be I suppose. No questions just a …. go with the flow approach. Not one for wanting to break my own rules even though this was planned, I sit and look at the four young men in front of me, their eyes eager to know my questions and a little panic rises from within. Oh shit… what are their names again?
Hatcham Social are a London band and are comprised of brothers Toby and Finnegan Kidd, David Claxton and Riley Difford. They started in 2006 “late 2006” Finn corrects me because “it does make a difference”. They have had two albums… “well three”…. if you count their (cassette tape only) “mini album”. Oh dear I fear that even the knowledge I do have isn’t up to their expectation, but we pressed on. How would they describe the main differences between albums?
“Well it’s tricky isn’t it?” Toby kicks in after what feels like a very long and awkward silence, “I think that umm…we just try to write good songs and we’ve just kind of changed around who’s playing with us and with the second. …Well the début album, we worked with Tim [Burgess] and Jim [Spencer] and you know that was really specific of the time because, actually we could have used a lot of other songs that we wrote very specifically for that album but we only used two songs that had been released or recorded before.Then I think that was kind of written in rehearsal spaces and then with this latest one, About Girls, which is when Riley and David came on board, there was a shift in who was working on it. I was playing guitar on the first album, we were a three piece… but essentially we just try to write better songs all the time. Essentially it’s the same ideas, we haven’t gone – oh that didn’t work lets try something else. We’re trying to do things that somehow have some kind of meaning to us. I would say that with About Girls we kind of wanted to err… we worked with it very much with the idea of what was going to be good to play live, have fun, because we found that there were certain songs on the Dig album that really worked live and others that in different venues didn’t quite work so well. I think that we tailored the thought process with About Girls more towards how we could get that sound anywhere and the crowd would enjoy it.”
David: “It was very plug in and play when we recorded it.”
Toby: “We really wanted to be able to plug in and play anywhere and it be a good representation of it.”
David: “That’s why you’ve got that other version of New York Girls.”
Toby: “Yeah, we’ve got one version on the album and there’s another version that we did with a guy called Laurie Latham which is much more like, you know, a produced version, it’s a really beautiful version but it didn’t fit so well.”
So, with a double mini album and two albums under their belt where do they start now with putting together their live sets? Toby: “Not many people know about the double mini album. They were released on tape only and didn’t have any press. They were all on reel to reels, on a 16 track, that was fun, we might go back to doing something like that.”
David: “Setlist wise we’re more spontaneous, I think it’s whatever we’re most excited by on the night.”
Riley: “Or what sort of venue as well. We played two shows at Kendal Calling, one at the Tim Peaks Cafe Dinner thing which was really great but then we realised…Ahh we can’t play all the heavy songs so we sort of had to strip back to…”
Toby: “…more melodic kind of numbers”
Riley: “Which was great. It was more of a challenge for us.”
David: “One of the things that we’ve been finding recently, we played at Union Chapel the other day and we were thinking about some of the songs we play and how we needed to reign them in a little bit because of the sound restrictions in there and obviously at points we can be quite an aggressive band and the sound in there is so beautiful so we were thinking how can we compliment the venue with the songs that we already have. It’s really opened our eyes I think as to how good some of the songs can sound when we do reign it back a bit.”
During two of the tracks at Union Chapel the guys brought on a new and interesting dimension, a violinist, what could they tell us about this? Is it something they’ll be looking at working with more in the future perhaps?
Finn: “We brought her on first at our Birthdays gig”
Toby... “Does she know what the birthdays show is?”
Finn: “It was our London show last month”
Laughing from all around someone interjects with… “Sounds like it was all of our birthdays.”
Riley: “Yeah it’s amazing! The reason we’re all in this band together is because we all have the same birthday… it’s crazy.” Much more laughter ensues…. did I mention how much I like this band?
David: “She’s [Gabriella Flatt] the most incredible violin player and the amazing thing is that violin is only her second instrument. It was a complete stroke of luck and incredibly flattering that she would want to work with us in the first place. The first song we did with the violin was Sidewalk” Embarrassingly f I then gush at how much I loved this version and wondered out loud if they’ve done anything like this before?
Toby: “No we’ve never recorded like that, I think that because we were going to play that song again, we felt like we weren’t doing it total justice. it wasn’t quite sitting how it does on the record and so when we knew we could get the violin and try that and rework it with the violin and a in a different way, you know, give it the emotion it’s got on the record and i think it does really work on that song. I want to get a recording of that.”
Finn:”Strings are going to be on the next album, bringing that new element in to it.”
David: “The last song that we played was a new song, and for us it feels like the way that we want to go in terms of it being quite truthful and quite emotional but it also has elements of us being quite loud, but showing our softer sides a bit, it’s quite a sort of murky kind of sound….I think what we’re saying is that that song can I guess maybe be seen as a forewarning of what’s to come.”
Toby: “Yeah I think that the sound will be moodier” Darker? “I don’t know about darker but it’s more expansive, more dynamics. Because the other one was just for live. I mean initially the last album was more influenced by like Depeche Mode and stuff, which weirdly when we took it away and recorded it that no one would ever know because we represented it in such a totally different way but a lot of the ideas and how the songs were written were from sort of electronic pop”
Well you really do learn something new everyday!
Toby: “It felt like a more original way of doing it, but i think so the idea of that was so well I guess a party album it was all meant to be have a rhythm and have that kind of live element. I just think by this record [the one they’re working on now] we don’t feel constrained by that and we can be more dynamic.
Riley: I think it will be more of a journey the other one was great because it was just loads of hits.
Toby: “As part of the next thing which is like a re-imagining of About Girls, so we say that it came from electronic roots, it was the baby of an electronic alien and now it’s returning to its roots by being re-imagined with this guy called Harry Love who is like a late 90s early 00s is when he was mainly releasing records. But he’s like a starch music producer guy, really cool references. It’s just really great. They are all full songs, not quite remixes you normally just take bits and re-jig it, but these are the proper songs but he’s just doing it so that now it feels like its in videodrome or something.”
So there’s lots going on for Hatcham Social right now, they’re both supporting and being part of the band for Tim Burgess’ solo tour, they released their single All Summer Long taken from the Harry Love album project Dreaming Of Electric Girls, and are constantly writing new material to play and record. You can find them gigging, on Twitter and on Facebook… and maybe in second hand jumper stores looking for that perfect jumper.
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