‘In detail you are even more beautiful than from afar. I could learn you, like the blinded would do feeling a way through the dark.”
Wild Beasts at Mongkol RCA Studio last Friday.
Wild Beasts’ Hayden Thorpe’s piercing voice could hardly be mistaken for anyone else. The lyrics are from Palace, a song by the indie rock band from Kendal, England, and one that elicited a loud cheer last Friday at Mongkol RCA Studio, where Thai and international fans enjoyed a parade of sentimental yet powerful tunes from the band’s fourth album Present Tense, as well as a mix from their back catalogue.
Wild Beasts formed in 2002 when lead singer Thorpe and Ben Little started duo Fauve (French for “wild beast”) and began writing songs. Drummer Chris Talbot and bassist Tom Fleming joined later. The band’s second album Two Dancers, released in 2009, was nominated for the 2010 Mercury Prize.
Friday’s opening act, Thai band Samurai Loud, warmed up the crowd with their wild costumes and entertaining tunes, and The Whitest Crow’s attempts at Alex Turner-type swagger built up the energy before the Beasts finally came onstage. Yes, Thorpe’s soulful voice with bassist Fleming’s sharp contrasts in a hauntingly low register was uplifting in songs like Wanderlust and Daughters. But often when the rhythm shuffled in, words the audience had came to hear were lost in the rhythmic throbs of bass and drums.
Before the show, Life sat down with Thorpe to discuss the origin of the band’s name, their music and their first experience of touring Southeast Asia.
Why Wild Beasts?
That’s a teenage hangover from one night. As teenagers you kind of see yourselves as these bohemian artists who are going to be wandering the streets of romantic cities, smoking cigarettes, and then the truth hits, you are stuck in a farming town and you kind of realise the beauty of that, the crudeness and bluntness of that, and your environment becomes an inspiration and you draw upon your surroundings. So you make a decision, rather than trying to be a picture of this kind of artist you want to be, why not be your own person and try to stand up for that?
You just had a show in Seoul and you will move on to Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City and Beijing. What has the experience been like so far?
Great, better than expected. We’ve come to these places and we never knew if anyone was actually going to come. In Seoul, there was a great crowd. It was really a wonderful time, and I was really surprised that people were interested in us. We go on to Vietnam, Malaysia and China from now and it’s pretty remarkable if you think about it, in terms of how we’ve been in the band since teenagers and I don’t think we had ever envisaged coming to these places. At the age of 17, friends had decided to go travelling and they went to these beautiful places and we were at that point committed to our bedrooms and basements and growing pasty-faced, obsessing with these songs. People thought: “You guys are weirdos.” And 10 years later, we are asked to come because of those nights we spent in our bedrooms.
What’s your inspiration?
We were lucky because when we were in our late childhood and early teens, Britpop was enormous, although a lot of the stuff hasn’t aged well. At the time it was culturally important; it was significant. Equally we grew up during the CD generation and our interpretation of the internet and music has always been kind of retrospect, which I think is healthy. It makes us what we are. In a positive way we kind of have been able to build a craft before knowing what you can do with it on computers and things. Also, 80s music has always been a huge inspiration because we are all 80s babies and I think in a way you kind of follow your records back to your childhood and it is something that’s important because that is the world that you were born into.
As opposed to many other bands, you write songs together. Why is that?
I think we’re quite old-fashioned in the sense that we are a band, we collaborate, we make a mess together. We kind of live through the joys and burdens of depending on one of us to find our sound. You know, life is built on promises you give to one another I guess, and it has become rare to write songs together the way we do.
