Beak> interview
Rock music has a noble history with the humble typographical mark. From New York punk funkers !!! to doom rock’s Sunn O))), Stellastarr*’s superfluous asterisk or ∆, there’s a pleasing bullishness to any band that sticks by such an ungainly name. Continuing the tradition, awkward formatting’s latest flag bearer is surely BEAK>, who upped the ante once by naming their first album >, and who are now setting new standards in bloody-minded nomenclature by announcing its follow-up, >>, out in July.
Not that it matters to BEAK>’s members, Portishead multi-instrumentalist Geoff Barrow, Billy Fuller (full-time member of Fuzz Against Junk and former bassist in Robert Plant’s backing band The Strange Sensation) and Matt Williams (who releases terrifying free-form jazz chaos as Team Brick); in the hands of less experienced, more eager-to-impress types, stunts like this might stick in one’s craw, but BEAK> are, broadly, are unbothered.
“I guess the album’s just pronounced ‘two’,” explains Fuller, matter-of-factly, when asked how one should actually refer to his band’s new album. “I mean, we’ve always used a greater-than symbol at the end of our name because it looks like a beak, and this is the second album, so there’s two of them.
“Apparently,” he adds with a satisfied flourish, “it’s un-Googleable too.”
“It makes absolute sense to me,” continues Barrow, at a loss as to what the problem is. “We’re BEAK>, with one greater-than sign, and here’s two greater-thans.” There’s a grin on his face as he speaks, and of course, when it’s put like that, there’s not much room for argument. But combine the rogue typography with BEAK>’s taut, uncompromising but surprisingly spacious-sounding take on 1970s krautrock, all endlessly-mutating motorik with infrequent vocals and even rarer lyrics, and there’s more than a little sense of being awkward just for the fun of it.
“Well fuck, sure, you’ve only got to look at us really,” concedes Barrow, once it’s put to him like that, glancing at his shaggy-haired, unshaven band mates wearing ripped jeans and faded t-shirts. “But no, I don’t think it’s awkward-awkward. Perhaps it’s awkward if you compare it to modern produced music – it sounds different to that, but we’re definitely not out to produce awkward music.”
That difference is audible within seconds of pushing play on >>, with startling effect. Barrow’s drumming on opening track The Gaol sounds beautifully clear and roomy, Fuller’s bass crisp and punchy, and Williams’ electronics swoop overhead giving the feeling of a band performing in front of you unmodified, with an immediacy and dynamic range that so many albums appear to have had beaten out of them by a producer with one eye on Radio One. It’s an effect achieved proudly (and perhaps aptly for a band that are so unbothered about doing anything particularly music industry-friendly) by being lazy, explains Barrow: “It’s just about leaving the desk as it is, and sometimes it sounds good, and sometimes it doesn’t. But the main thing is that we’re not going to get into it and bother to clean it up.”
Of course, how a record sounds is only one side of what makes it a difficult or easy listen, and BEAK>’s approach to songwriting isn’t exactly conventional either. But again, Barrow doesn’t really care: “We just want to do cool stuff, good stuff, good music that basically the three of us agree on and go ‘yeah, that’s cool’. And that’s really where it ends. The actual outside world is irrelevant really, because we don’t sell a great deal of records.”
The numbers they do sell, however, are important. BEAK> are signed to Barrow’s own label Invada (also home to Fuzz Against Junk and Team Brick, amongst other wild and weird musical diversions), and Barrow defends his baby admirably: when I spot an advanced vinyl pressing of >> on a nearby table, he immediately gets his salesman hat on: “We’ll do you a deal,” he offers eagerly, “but no freebies! It’s my label, fuckin’ right I’ve got to sell these! When it’s Universal’s money, you can have as many copies as you like!
“Seriously, though, if Invada doesn’t make money it’ll die,” continues Barrow. “I’m not a cash cow for it. We’re not very good at having brunch with music supervisors or doing that corporate game of ‘Oh we’ve got a track on Buffy the Vampire Slayer 5’, because there’s no point in us having those discussions: their boss will go ‘that sounds a bit weird – why don’t you get Feist?’ and that totally makes sense for them. So we have to do what we do, which is the basic thing of being a record company, and creating things that people want.”
Perhaps it’s a maturity thing – BEAK>’s average age is 35, making them virtual pensioners in new-band terms – or maybe down to the knowledge that between them, the members of BEAK> have sold millions of records and played to hundreds of thousands of people in other incarnations, but such all-about-the-music, screw-the-mainstream rhetoric doesn’t sound as disingenuous as it often can; Barrow, in particular, talks about this band with a kind of child-like glee that doesn’t always come across when he’s discussing the often more complicated machinations surrounding Portishead.
“It’s just fun,” he says, laughing almost in disbelief as he tries to explain what the basic aim of BEAK> is. “I mean, when we’ve gone to the States, and when we’ve gone to Europe playing festivals, it’s been fun, hasn’t it?” His band mates nod, and Barrow continues: “How many things do you do in life that you can actually say are fun? You can go to your mate’s barbecue and you can come back from it going, ‘yeah, that was alright’, but being a band and being able to travel and play and have a laugh in the van, we’re privileged to be able to do it and say afterwards, ‘that was really good fun’.
“And really, it goes back to making me feel like when I was 16, and I’m sat in front of a drum kit with my mates, playing whatever it was. None of the rest of the stuff matters, whereas it might with Portishead or whoever.”
“There’s so much to think about in normal life,” chips in Fuller with a smile, his west-country burr sounding almost apologetic, “that BEAK> is a kind of retreat, a kind of sanatorium. It’s like a pill.”
“Take these, Mr Fuller…”, offers Barrow. “…and off I drift,” counters Fuller.
There then follows a long discussion about the history of slavery in Bristol (>>’s centrepiece Wulfstan II is apparently named after a 9th-century bishop who was particularly opposed to it), the city’s role in the civil war and the cultural state in which it finds itself today, and the realisation by Barrow that “Bristolians [himself included] have always been pretty apathetic cunts”, not really bothered by London’s shilling, or doing anything particularly ambitious that might make millions. “It’s that slightly rum aspect of what Bristol’s always been about that I find really fascinating,” he explains, and that inspiration is certainly in evidence with BEAK>: whether it’s the band’s approach to writing, recording, playing or even typesetting, it’s unapologetically, adamantly, and actually quite inspiringly, just for the fun of it.
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BEAK> live at Brixton Academy, supporting The Horrors, 25 May
“We played with The Horrors once before in Sheffield and there were these two girls hanging over the front going, ‘who are you!? You look like my dad!’ It was amazing,” laughs Geoff Barrow in anticipation of the forthcoming BEAK> gig, and while tonight there are no heckles, there is a sense that the majority of the crowd, now assembled for the Horrors spectacle, are simply bemused by the three blokes on chairs playing front of them.
“They all just fancy Josh, and that’s all that matters! I really love the Horrors, but for the girls at the front, until the band goes on, nothing’s going to exist,” concedes Barrow, and unfortunately, for the most part, he’s right. While BEAK> play, the crowd is thin, distracted and impatient, and there’s little in the way of appreciation, even when they finish the epic set-closer Wulfstan II with the kind of poise, menace and precision that makes it stand out so brutally on >> .
The following day, Barrow tweets to say that “the show was a ruff one”, and from a crowd point of view, he has a point. But from a playing one, it’s a joy to watch something so bloody-minded sound so good. Barrow, Fuller and Williams scuttle out onto stage, sit down in a semi-circle facing one another and set to work building a wall of rhythm and texture that feels like the work of one machine rather than three distinct musicians, like Battles without the ADHD or berserk tendencies. Sure, they’re not natural performers – it’s no coincidence that none of them are frontmen in their other projects – and the Brixton Academy stage half an hour before a Horrors show is not their ideal habitat, but there’s an enormous amount of vicarious satisfaction to be derived from seeing a group play exactly what they want, how they want and, to a large extent, to hell with the consequences.
