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More chatter surrounds These New Puritans when dull bands abound. With debut album Beat Pyramid on the way very soon through the righteous Angular/Domino axis, Drowned in Sound went to listen to Jack Barnett recently after years of hearing and watching from a distance; eyes and ears pointing skyward as Barnett barked down myths from his zeppelin, dressed in all black, taking Everest.
Myth inflated, myth punctured – wild accusations flew throughout as questions for the interview proper were put by Tom King. You can read that in the coming days. For now Jack Barnett offers up a track-by-track guide on that debut album; featuring Michael Barrymore, apocalypse as ultimate art, Indian restaurants, Timbaland, more chatter…
At times of course, this is wildly pretentious. But what did you expect? There are no timid tigers.
On ‘..ce I Will Say This Twice’…
“You can talk about the circular stuff, I always have to talk about that.”
On ‘Numbers’…
“It’s our attempt to recreate numerology in a song. It’s a pop song with a dubby beat. But I say “numerology is all shit”, so it’s all deconstructed immediately.”
On ‘Colours’…
“I have nothing to say about ‘Colours’. Maybe this isn’t going to work…”
On ‘Swords of Truth’…
“You couldn’t call it dance indie. It’s a drum beat ripped off Timbaland and Vybz Cartel. It’s a really good song if I do say so myself.”
On ‘Doppelganger’…
“The reason why we called [Beat Pyramid] that is that we wanted to construct a pyramid with its secrets and geometry. There are themes running throughout; mirroring, cycles, silver. I think it’s important there’s an overriding theme to it, because songs like ‘Doppelganger’ and ‘Elvis’ don’t fit together at all.”
On ‘C16th’…
“It’s about an imagined scenario. In the future everything will crash and magic will reign, and the magicians will say to the scientists ‘we were right’. That’s their mantra.”
On ‘En Papier’…
“It’s a song about water.”
On ‘£4’…
“Our first EP cost four pounds, and we put this at the start of the set to encourage people to give us their moolah”.
On ‘Elvis’…
“I always laugh when I’m singing it. I’m not sure why that is”.
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On ‘Infinity ytinifnI’…
“I’ll tell you about that. It’s an imagined celebration of the melting of the polar ice caps. TNPs descend from a helicopter, melting the icecaps and cause global disaster. Then we fly off to Everest and safety and start our own civilization. It’s so boring to go on about the environment; this is our reaction to that. It’s a positive thing for art. The apocalypse actually happening would be great, it’s the ultimate artistic event.”
On ‘MKK3’…
“I looked up love poems on the internet and took bits of them and wrote them into the song. Apart from the ‘Michael Barrymore masturbating’ line. That’s a cry of pleasure.”
On ‘Navigate-Colours’...
“It has parts of ‘Navigate Navigate’ and ‘Colours’. I think cross-referencing is so undervalued in music. I was listening to Genesis today; prog is an underrated genre.”
On ‘4’ and ‘H’…
“I put these on the end. One was recorded in a park on my phone, the other on my laptop in my garden. I have a library of sounds from since I was seven… just to be drawn on”.
On ‘Costume’…
“If you listen to the lyrics it says ‘we’re not trying to relate to you’… it’s a ballad but deliberately unsentimental. I wrote it in an Indian restaurant, eating an Indian. Not an actual Indian though.”
On ‘I Will Say This Twi…’…
“I think we’ve talked about this already...”
Beat Pyramid is out on the 28th of January; read about why we're looking forward to that and 2008 here.
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