INTERVIEW: DEMOB HAPPY
I first came across Demob Happy back in 2019, I had the pleasure of being invited to a party which happened to be at the famed gothic mansion Knebworth House. Not your average party venue i grant you. The idea of Social Distancing was an unknown and enjoying the company of friends was at that point very much taken for granted.
With Knebworth being known for its long history with music, it was no real surprise when we were told a mystery band was due to play in library at some point over the evening. That band turned out to be a trio from Newcastle who promptly filled the space with a sonic assault of psychedelic, drop tuned, glam infused perfection. Our host had good taste and we were not disappointed with her choice!
We caught up with Matthew Marcantonio (vocals/bass) and Thomas Armstrong (drums) to talk origins, influence and honesty and what happened on their recent tour of the USA /
Shirt - Pronounce, Jeans and necklace Models own
GG: Welcome guys, Its been a wee while since we met at Knebworth house last year… what’s been going on in that time?
Matthew Marcantonio: Since we last crossed paths and right up until the world went on pause this year, we’ve pretty much been on the road non-stop. We’ve done four big ol’ tours in America as well as tours at home and in Europe. In between touring tends to be a time for sporadic creation and writing new material, then we’re back out again. After the bulk of the touring wraps up and there's a little more time we then take all those demos and jams and raw ideas out to the middle of nowhere, lock ourselves away and start thinking about what the next album wants to be. We had just got home from Wales after almost a month in isolation writing together when the country went into lockdown. Which, at the time of writing, is where we’re still at.
Shirt - Toga Archives
Coat - Toga Archives
Shirt - Xander Zhou, Bolo - Toga Archives
GG: Can you tell us a bit about how you guys met and explain the band's name?
Thomas Armstrong: We met in Newcastle, where we grew up. Adam and Matt were at school together and got so sick of it before the end that they dropped out to do a music course at the local college, which is where they met me. The three of us started writing together and recognised there was something cosmically fortuitous about our new alliance. It just felt good. So we kept doing it and it kept feeling good and we kept getting better. Soon we moved in together and got into the full swing of the band alongside the customary exploration of drugs and alcohol and girls and prog and a small cast of members who passed through the band in those early years.
As for the band’s name, its an old military term which highlights feelings of apathy towards duties which have burdened your soul. Later, as we got more pissed off with what we saw of the establishment around us, that meaning took on a new resonance. But at the start it was really just a name; we liked the way it sounded. And I think that’s as good a reason as any.
“We found a table and dragged it into the rain. Put our list underneath and burnt that fucker up.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe not, but things started to get better the next day” Thomas Armstrong
Baz: Suit & Tie - Richard James, Shirt - Gucci, Tie Pin - Toga Archives / Matt: Suit, Shirt & Tie Richard James, Tie Pin - Toga Archives / Tom: Suit & Tie Richard James, Shirt - Filippa K, Tie Pin - Toga Archives
GG: You toured the USA last year… any great stories from this period?
Thomas Armstrong: To make those tours work, to make the money stretch, the shoe-string, cowboy approach we had to take was at times like some kind of chaotic, traumatic, barbaric endurance test, and it was also probably the time of my life. Touring that way, stories breed like rabbits and you could probably fill a book with the tales from this year alone, so it’s hard to know where to start.
On the last US tour there was this three week period where our luck just seemed to go to shit. It felt like we were cursed. We broke down four times, the last of which was in 45C heat in the Arizona desert and had we had to limp into Phoenix and abandon our vehicle; our new hire car was impounded in New Orleans; we had a guitar and a bunch of Matt’s clothes stolen; we had two near-crashes; we lost a box of our vinyl; we were almost struck by lightning — it hit a tree right beside us in an explosion of white flame; there were speeding tickets; missed gigs, the list goes on. Shit just kept coming our way to the point where all we could do was laugh.
On a scorching hot day in Birmingham, Alabama, we decided to try and end this ourselves. Someone had an idea to write down the full list of our misfortunes on a piece of paper - 27 items in total - and burn it in one big fuck you to end this terrible run of luck. It turned out to be a harvest full moon that night, which some believe signifies change - we would take whatever we could get.
We took the list and a metal bucket out on the roof of the venue we were playing, of course the sunny day had taken a sudden turn and it was now chucking it down with rain. We found a table and dragged it into the rain. Put our list underneath and burnt that fucker up.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe not, but things started to get better the next day.
“Maybe this is too intense, but I don’t like to lie, and singing someone else's experience feels dishonest to me. I always just wanted to make my own music and say my own thing. That’s where I have the most to give” Matthew Marcantonio
Shirt & Pin - Toga Archives
Suit, Shirt & Tie Richard James, Tie Pin - Toga Archives
Suit & Tie Richard James, Shirt - Filippa K, Tie Pin - Toga Archives
GG: How does the writing process unfold with you three as a unit?
Matthew Marcantonio: It can happen in a few ways. I’m responsible for the melodies and lyrics, and after that it's about half ’n’ half where the crux of the song originates. Sometimes one of us will bring an idea or riff into the mix, or i'll bring in maybe a verse and chorus idea, and we’ll work up a song around it. Or, we’ll just create something completely new from messing around in the studio. ”Less is more” happened that way. Sometimes whole songs will come in fully formed and we’ll just echo and learn what was written already. “Autoportrait” happened that way, which was something I had demo’d then brought to the boys.
Thomas Armstrong: Whatever it is that we have we then lock ourselves away -usually in a remote Welsh cottage- and we work those ideas and demos into Demob songs.
Who were your early influences? I remember you guys pulling off a very impressive QOTSA cover at Knebworth. Would you consider drop tuning a big part of Demob Happy's sound/culture?
Matthew Marcantonio: Yeah I think we just about pulled it off…when we found out Morwenna was a big QOTSA fan, we just had to, you know? We did “Songs for the Deaf” - we’ve played it together since the band started, just because it was always so fun to play, and I think it's ingrained in our memories in such a deep place there was no need for us to practice before the party. Maybe that was obvious but I was too drunk by that point to notice!
When we first started we did a few covers I think, some Strokes, some Kings Of Leon, I suppose the regular rock and indie stuff that you might imagine a band kicking around in a practice room in 2008 to do, but we never spent that much time doing covers. We were more concerned with writing our own songs. It’s been that way throughout my whole writing life really, I’ve never been that bothered about learning other people's songs. It's never felt natural to me to sing other people's words. Maybe because I think I could never improve on how the original writer did it, or because it's simply not true to me. Maybe this is too intense, but I don’t like to lie, and singing someone else's experience feels dishonest to me. I always just wanted to make my own music and say my own thing. That’s where I have the most to give.
We do tune down a lot in our songs, maybe 50/50 to regular tuning. It can give riffs a bit more power and kick and thunder, and my voice sounds great in the key of C too, which is a few tones down from where a guitar normally sits, but it's not a rule, and some songs don’t wanna be that low. It just depends where it sounds best.
We’ve often come up with songs that have started their lives detuned, but that just seem to be a bit sludgy that low, when we can hear them in our heads with pizazz, so we’ve decided to bring them up a few tones to give it a bit more life and excitement, 'Mother Machine' started that way. And some start high, like 'Succubus', that I realised sounded a lot sexier in drop B. It's always just about finding the most natural place for it. It depends what you want.
“It's always been a natural fascination of ours, to combine the dark with the light. it creates a certain harmony” Matthew Marcantonio
GG: get notes of Lennon or Beatle esk psychedelic vocal styles mixed with elements of Glam rhythms as a foundation in the most part… would that be a correct analysis?
Matthew Marcantonio: I think that’s fair, we like it groovy and dark, but we like it sweet and soft. It's always been a natural fascination of ours, to combine the dark with the light. it creates a certain harmony between everything from the melody and lyrics, to the guitar tones and production, even to the artwork and videos, and on. If the song and melody is more upbeat, it feels right to me to counteract that with a dark subject matter, and if the song is dark and brooding, the melody can be bright and sometimes sickly sweet. I can talk about love without feeling like it's too close to being a plain old love song, and I can talk about the Orwellian occult control of the earth without it ever being too dang depressing. But It was never a totally conscious decision to do this, we just like it, and I think it just keeps people on their toes. It stops our music from ever being predictable, there’s always something there that doesn’t feel totally “the way it should be” - maybe this hinders some people from getting on board with what we do, but I know it ingratiates us to others.
If the three of you had to pick your favourite Demob Happy track, which would its be and why?
Matthew Marcantonio: I suppose we love all of them in ways, but some hold certain memories with us that might make them more special, beyond whether or not we think it's a good song. We always talk about loving the production of “I Wanna Leave” - we felt it delivered exactly what we wanted, which is always very difficult to do. When you set out to achieve exactly something that you can hear in your head, you’re more often than not doomed to fail, because in reality it's unattainable. But on that song we felt like we just nailed it. It doesn’t happen often. And I love “Junk DNA” because I feel like I encapsulated my mind in the lyric in a way I’ve never been able to better. You could read the lyrics and think they were just pretty words, but if you know where I’m coming from, and the references I’m making, you can read a few levels deep, and that took a long time and lot of effort and rewrites to pull off in a way i thought was exactly right. I revel in that subversion, because either way I’m still saying the same thing.
Finally… what can we expect from the forthcoming new album?
Matthew Marcantonio: Well a funny thing happened when we were last away writing, we talked a lot and jammed a lot and played each other demos we’d been working on individually between tours, and to our surprise there was a vibe or a theme or an undercurrent, or whatever you wanna call it, present in the stuff we had been working on separately before coming together. So we spent some time exploring that and uncovering it. It’s a different flavour for Demob whilst also feeling more like us than ever. And right now it’s something for us to know, and you to keep your ears peeled for.
Demob Happy are currently making their third album, listen to latest single Mother Machine Here