Young Knives interview

2006 was, by all accounts, a good year for the indie population. True, these days, the musical hype machine spits out a ‘hot new band’ approximately every five minutes, but in a year which saw the the likes of Klaxons and the Arctic Monkeys rise to prominence, the standard of the bright young things was particularly high.

One example of this was The Young Knives, the punk-pop Oxford based trio, who had the comfy knitwear and tweed look down pat long before Alex Turner and chums rocked up to the Brit awards decked out like country gents. They wowed critics and audiences alike with their raucous debut Of Animals And Men, a shouty party-starter that jarred wonderfully with their purposely square sartorial style. But, like fellow 2006 alumni The Guillemots and We Are Scientists, it’s taken them till now, almost two years later, to release the follow-up, the elusive ‘difficult second album’. Surprisingly, lead singer Henry Dartnell doesn’t attribute this long wait to the success of their first offering.

“Our first album was totally stupid, in hindsight. It was our ‘stupid’ album. When I listen to it I think ‘oooo, Weird.’”

Given that one of Of Animals And Men’s lead singles features the immortal line, “You were screaming at your mum and I was punching your dad”, there is an element of truth to this, but it’s not as if the subject matter of this month’s Superabundance is any more rooted in normality than its predecessor.

“There’s some quite dark stuff on there actually,” explains Henry. “That’s just us being generally sick and twisted.” This is rather unexpected, because, for one thing, the band, at face value just don’t seem sick or twisted at all. Three, nicely turned out boys hailing from Ashby-de-la-Zouche, devoid of either black-varnished bitten nails or malnourished complexions, it’s difficult to believe they could exude the tortured creepiness of, say, Gerard Way.

But Dartnell persists, “I just like things like filthy jokes about dead people. Dark subject matter is more interesting. People sit around going ‘oh, I like flowers, they’re pretty.’ Or ‘Ooh I fancy girls,’ and that’s OK, but I’m more interested in songs that are bittersweet. I like it when a song sounds very poppy but is actually about something really horrible and macabre. It’s a bit more rock and roll.”

With lyrics like “Fake rape, real snake” you can’t really deny that The Young Knives are flirting with the macabre, but the overall tone of Superabundance is anything but gloomy. In fact, rockier in production but folkier in the melodies than the first album, it compromises mainly of storming pop gems that are actually spiced up by the sinister subject matter.

It’s gone down well with the mass media, lead single Terrafirma made the jump from indie station staple to being showered over the Radio 1 play-list like aural confetti. Catchy hook aside, Dartnell has his own theories about this.

“Maybe Radio 1 were just a bit readier to put us on by the time Terrafirma came out, because we had a fan base and now there are people that listen to us,” he says thoughtfully, before adding with slight mortification, ‘I really shouldn’t say things like that because it sounds big-headed.”

Personally, I think it’s precisely that kind of self-deprecation that is (at least partially) responsible for their rapidly growing profile. The swaggering, laddish appeal of groups like The Enemy begins to grate after a while, and the knowing geekiness, and humour that The Young Knives have always possessed, is a very refreshing step in the opposite direction. And now that they have the super-catchy choruses, hitting the big time could be a perfectly reasonable ambition for the band in tweed. And as you’d expect, from men in wellies and herringbone, they are so nice and polite, and in possession of such witty mid-set banter (a real rarity these days), I’m inclined to hope they succeed.