Hailing from Antwerp in Belgium, indie darling five-piece School Is Cool are self-aware, intelligent and, importantly, talented in the field of musicianship. Their solo Great Escape show saw them play a late evening set at the 100-capacity venue above the Hope bar on Queen Street, and the 105 dB sound system did their refined, classically-inspired baroque indie rock great justice.
Playing a variety of songs from their debut album Entropology, School Is Cool – singer and guitarist Johannes Genard, drummers Matthias Dillen and Andrew Van Ostade, bassist Toon Van Baelen, and violist Nele Paelinck – source their sound from a number of notable indie acts: Kate Bush, Florence and the Machine, The Pixies. They find themselves compared to Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire. Already superstars in their native Belgium, Entropology sold 10,000 copies in its first week, their Facebook has 16,000 fans, and they’ve already played shows in the UK to rapturous crowds. They are, without a doubt, ones to watch in the near future.
Lead UK single The World Is Gonna End Tonight led the charge with energetic violins and catchy verses, whereas the darkly comic Car, Backseat, Parking Lot – noted by Genard as a song about “the Belgian tradition of murdering prostitutes” – was an altogether more mellow effort, dotted with jingling glockenspiels and cute little keyboard jabs. But the band are capable of packing a punch beyond their indie-inspired roots, On The Beach Of Hanalei a smattering of drums and brushes spun over a dark tale of Hawaiian tragedy. There’s a gentle air of despair around the tales they tell, but it’s all put to cutesy, intelligent rock music. To great applause, the band left the stage and Brighton after just one day – but despite this still found some time for a chat with 7Bit before they had to move on to whatever venture awaits.
How would you guys basically sum up what School Is Cool is?
Johannes: : It’s an ugly word but it’s an indie band, I guess?
It’s not an ugly word, it’s just one that’s used too much.
Johannes: : It’s an overused word…but we’re an indie band. I guess, yeah…literally because we released our first album ourselves in Belgium, so that was very ‘indie’. I think…the best idea is to sort of sum up some bands that we like: we like Arcade Fire, we like The Dodos, we like…Kate Bush, we like The Eighties [Matchbox B-Line Disaster].
Your album is out in the UK later on this year. I’ve had a chance to listen to it and I really liked what I heard. Are you worried about it hitting the UK or are you quitely confident?
Johannes: : I think one of the psychological criteria for being musician is that you sort of have to….believe in yourself. That’s really horrible! That’s a horrible way to put it! But it’s the only way of putting it. You sort of have to take it for granted that people will like it because you have to make the same assumption when getting on stage, and when it hits you in the face and it’s hard and…y’know, it just comes all over you! I mean, yeah! [laughs] You have to assume people are going like it or you shouldn’t become a musician. It’s a bad idea to become a musician if you’re afraid people will hate [your music]. We know the UK is a very tough market to penetrate…
Andrew: : [laughs]
Johannes: : That’s what he said!
But you’re excited more than anything?
All: Yeah!
Matthias: : It’s an honour for UK people to listen to our Belgian music.
It’s not really that “Belgian”, I guess. Music is, in a horrible way, pretty “international”. It’s great indie music rather than something quintisentially Belgian.
Matthias: : Yeah! That’s what I would love to hear, that our music is in a way universal. Every band should be universal because we’re Belgians, and when Belgians criticise us maybe they have this feeling of ‘oh, they’re good for a Belgian band’ or ‘they’re maybe softer but when you go into another country they won’t have any feeling of affiliation with you, so they’ll be strict – and that’s good, because if they like it, [it’s] much better.
Your first single is ‘The World Is Gonna End Tonight’. Can you talk us through what the single is about?
Johannes: : The title says it all really. It’s about the end of the world, literally – not that we believe it’s going to end anytime soon. Certainly not this year. But it’s certainly…I thought it was a good sentence to begin a song with or just…y’know. I saw this documentary that The Beatles wrote certain songs out of the title: they thought of a sentence and they liked it.
Things like A Hard Day’s Night, and things like that?
Johannes: : It was a sentence that came up organically when Ringo was drunk or something, and we thought that was a really fun…a nice title for a song, I’ll make a song out of it. That’s how we sort of went about [it]…but the song is also about the idea of ‘what are you actually going to do when you find out the world is going to end tonight?’ Literally, what are you supposed to do, how are you supposed to react to that: are you supposed to grab the nearest girl that you like and proclaim your everlasting love or are you supposed to, I dunno, burn churches or something? Go on a killing spree or something?
You’ve mentioned influences like The Pixies and Kate Bush, Florence and the Machine, and that kind of thing. Is this stuff you guys grew up listening to or is it something you focused on on purpose?
Johannes: : I was a big fan of Nirvana and that taught me to play the guitar…I taught myself to play the guitar to Nirvana, and then I that Nirvana really loved the Pixies so I bought their album and they say about The Pixies that not many people loved or liked the band, but everybody who did started a band – and that’s seriously what happened, it was like ‘oh, I love the Pixies, let’s just [start a band].’ The first cover we did, without talk of School Is Cool or anything…we covered ‘Where Is My Mind’ and now we play ‘Levitate Me’ – it’s from the first album.
How did you come together?
Johannes: : I wrote some songs on my laptop and entered them into a competition in Antwerp, the town where we live, and…I was selected for this competition and I realised ‘shit, I have to get more people on stage because I can’t play all those instruments myself at the same time,’ because that would be ridiculous. I saw the people that I needed and I knew were reliable and talented and then he came along [points at Toon] – not that he’s not talented – but he replaced our former bassist.
Are you guys going to focus on playing live for a while to promote the album in the UK or head back to the studio?
Matthias: : It’s part of a plan to sort of…start writing songs but at the moment we’re concentrating on the live performance because that seems to be the focus of the music industry as well today, and we’re still…we’re gonna release in France as well, we’ve released in Holland and we’re going to release in England, so we’re going to have to play this album for some time. But it’s always healthy, always good to make more songs, of course – but to get into the studio [again] might be a bit too early.
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