The coagulative product of countless musical influences and bands of childhood, English indie quartet Hatcham Social have been around since 2006 and have played at Great Escape in the past. That didn’t stop then coming back again to play to a fit-to-bursting Green Door Store. If the trains coming in and out of Brighton station felt a little shakier than normal, the blistering noise and jumping around of the band playing directly below may have had something to do with it.
Made up of brothers Toby and Finnigan Kidd (the latter choosing to leave the original Klaxons line-up to dedicate time to the band), bassist Riley Difford and guitarist David Claxton, Hatcham Social specialise in a jack-of-all-trades indie rock which sounds like a bit of everything, but have cultivated it since 2006 to create a sound which is recognisable and yet uniquely appreciable. The band aren’t afraid to experiment: tracks from both the debut album You Dig The Tunnel, I’ll Hide The Soil and new album About Girls were played during the band’s set on the sunny Friday afternoon, and the more softly-spoken approach of the latter were of stark contrast to the harsher, rougher earlier tracks – but regardless, the reception was great, and the applause well deserved.
They’re also unafraid to experiment outside of their music. Their first releases were mini-albums on cassette tape, and About Girls was released a month early to pre-ordering fans, alongside extras, in an online pledging campaign. It also turns out they’re pretty smart when it comes to creating a great album in the recording studio – not hard when a member of The Charlatans is helping you out when you first start out.
After playing through their set, Finnigan and Toby took a seat on the pavement to talk About Girls and its unique release strategy, the internet and something called “Beatles from France”.
What keeps you coming back to Great Escape?
Toby: Good shows? They’ve always been good here.
Finn: It’s always a festival that, when we are asked to play, we always remember. I don’t think we’ve done a show here we’ve not liked.
Toby: No.
I was chatting to Toby there [just before the interview] and he was kind of surprised at the reception. You’ve released a couple of albums, people know who you are, why do you get surprised?
Toby: You just never know really, do you? You go all around the UK and you never know. I just thought it was really friendly.
Finn: It’s really nice when that happens. Sometimes…especially with new stuff out, there are people who are very much looking and judging whereas here they were enjoying it.
Kind of like a ‘community’ sort of thing rather than just going to a gig. It’s a cliche but it’s like “being part of it”.
Toby: Things become cliches because they come true sometimes, don’t they? That’s how cliches work.
Tell us a little bit about your new album, About Girls.
Toby: [To Finn] Came out about three weeks ago?
Finn: Yeah.
[awkward silence, then laughter]
Tell me a bit more than that. How does it differ from your first album? How have you cultivated and improved your ‘sound’?
Toby: I guess the main thing was, with the first one…it wasn’t really the ‘first one’ because we actually released two tape-only ‘mini-albums’, which were recorded on analogue gear and that was an hour’s worth of material. For the first ‘proper’ album there was some development and it had more of a sheen to it, I guess. With this one [About Girls] we did a lot of writing in the rehearsal studio and there were certain songs that worked really well live. And you end up trimming a lot. With this album, I think we wanted to get something that was really fun to play live, so we kind of took those elements forward. Also, when we recorded this one it was very much kind of a ‘live’ [record]…getting the sound of the band so that everywhere we went it would sound the same.
So the point was to have it be well-produced but not sound ‘produced’?
Toby: Maybe it was a reaction: at the moment the trend seems to be very much [that] the only kind of things that bands are allowed to do it seems is to say ‘you’re experimenting’ – and we love to experiment, in subtle ways. But we didn’t want to sit there and say ‘oh we’ve got synthesisers so we’re experimenting’. We wanted to go ‘this is about sort of a live band thing, and [live] songs’. Maybe it was a reaction against that. We almost performed quite quickly in the studio and got the energy out.
Finn: It wasn’t really like a ‘studio’ album.
It’s like a ‘live’ album that’s not a ‘live’ album. It captures the live sound but at the same time it’s got the edges rounded off.
Toby: We worked with some great engineers and producers and stuff but rather than spend weeks on every track getting all the tiny little built-up layers.
‘That note’s slightly off key, that won’t do’ – that kind of thing.
Toby: Yeah. We were still trying to make a good pop record but we weren’t trying to make all of those million tiny shiny things. We wanted to keep it bare bones.
Finn: We just wanted to make some rock-n-roll.
You launched a Pledge campaign for About Girls, in which fans could pre order it, get some extra bonuses and that. It came out early on Pledge?
Toby: It came out a month before [the full release], in March.
What made you think you should go for a Pledge campaign?
Toby: It was Simon at Fierce Panda [the band’s record label], who did both the albums, and basically he’s really good friends with one of the Pledge guys and I think that they had been talking a lot about what they were doing and he came to us and said ‘this may sound a little weird, but have a chat and see what you think’. It was very much about…because we’d had a few changes [in the band] and it had taken a while to get the new record together in terms of new managers and new members and it was like…getting people involved and starting again and getting things happening again. That was [Simon’s] thing about it, wasn’t it?
Finn: Yeah. It was really nice to make things interactive.
Toby: It was kind of interesting because we’d never done something like this before and we were doing things for them [fans] or with them that we wouldn’t have done otherwise.
And demos and other things that wouldn’t have seen the light of day otherwise.
Toby: Especially because there’s not really the…we’re not going to be releasing loads of physical singles in the same way where there’s B-sides and ten different demos. We might do a few of those but it’s not happening as regularly as it did [in the past].
You’ve got a very refined sound that sounds a bit like a little bit of everything that’s great about modern indie rock and roll. Who are some of your biggest influences?
Toby: Uh…there’s loads, aren’t they? The thing is, with this record in particular, I think a lot of bands go into a studio with five records and go [points at imaginary records] ‘we want to do this this time, we want the guitar like that, the drums like this, we put it together and it’s going to be like this kind of record this time’. And I think we just kind of wanted to go ‘you know what: we’ve written some songs, we’ve got some words, maybe we can say something which means something, whatever’. But hopefully there’s some poetry in there and we got some melodies that are interesting and how can we reinforce these with the instruments that we’ve got and our skills?
So not too many ‘direct’ influences, just things you’ve been listening to all your life?
Finn: Yeah, subconsciously I guess.
Toby: When we went in [to the studio], we were trying not to listen to or reference…other things. Instead of being like ‘oh this sounds a bit like this’ you just mute that and don’t think about it, and just try and do what you think you’ll like.
Finn: …what you think will emphasise the emotional impact of that part. You might think ‘okay, a heavy guitar sound or a lighter guitar sound will work here, or more complicated, or simpler’, because of what you want to emotionally happen there. There are certain things you can and can’t do, rather than just ‘oh, it’d be really cool if it was like louder or something…’
Finn: If we were going to say main influences…things like the Beach Boys.
Toby: We did the “Beatles From France” thing, that was really fun. We did this thing where it was us, Charlie from Electricity in our Homes and Brandon from Goodnight and I Wish – and then random other people would come in at different shows like Andrew from The Violets.
Finn: John [Robinson] from The Questions.
Toby: John from The Questions…yeah, which is right in your neck of the woods [The Questions were a Scottish band active in the Seventies and Eighties]. So yeah, we had this thing called “Beatles From France” and it was just us playing The Beatles with a one day rehersal every time. People would ask us to play [a song], just because it was a fun thing. We played really fast and unrehearsed, and we all loved The Beatles. The fun of those songs and the enjoyment of playing them was an influence on this angle.
Finn: Kind of makes you realise you just want to have fun playing music.
What’s next for you guys then? More touring, more festivals?
Finn: We just want to tour as much as possible really.
Toby: We’ve started writing the next record – we’ve got about twenty songs for it.
Looking to cut that down then?
Toby: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. I think we’ve got one particularly we think is going to be a good template for where [the record’s] going so we’re going to go and start recording that in the summer.
Finn: Next month or something. I’m still doing what I’m doing, doing an album, co-write/co-produce an album with this girl called Mercy. She’s had one single come out through Cool For Cats [record label] called Sleepwalker. I’ve got to finish that album which is something quite different because her vocal range is totally different and she plays keyboards, so it’s a totally different thing.
So there’s some of that subconscious musical expansion going on there too?
Finn: Yeah, exactly.
Toby: I would say a lot of our influences probably come from people around you, because I think it’s much more interesting to do loads of things with people – finding good qualities of people around you rather than sifting through old records all the time, although that’s brilliant in itself. But that’s a different thing. I think it’s really interesting at the moment as well particularly…the internet has unleashed the history of music to everyone’s living room, and there’s an obsession over that…so maybe it’s time to turn it back on that a little bit and try and make an island. [laughs] Hatcham Social Island!
In this audio excerpt, Toby explains why the age of the internet means that bands and artists can’t just hide behind a wall of exclusivity anymore.
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