Olly The Octopus Christmas Single

Folk troubadour and political commentator Olly The Octopus is doing something a little different this Christmas, with the unveiling of his debut single 'A Call To Arms For Hippies', released next Monday 14th December through Kind Canyon Records. The track will be released as a charity single in aid of MAP (Medical Aid for Palestinians), just in time to compete with the eye-roll worthy X-Factor finalists in the Christmas charts.

Olly is best known for his adventurous musical antics infiltrating everywhere from London's Scientology HQ to one of Boris Johnson's Mayoral Assembly in Bromley. All of his antics have been captured and indexed on his YouTube channel, viewable by clicking here.

'A Call To Arms For Hippies' is fantastic. Equal parts talent, humour and originality, this debut single shows yet another brilliant section of London nu-folk goodness. Having previously produced releases by Emmy The Great and Stars Of Sunday League, it's no surprise that this is one of the most defiantly creative singles of 2009.

The single is available to pre-order over at www.eardepartment.com and will be available to buy both there and on iTunes from next Monday 14th December. You can listen to the track and see the video for it below.

Emmy the Great - Interview

Immediately I fail to ingratiate myself with Emmy the Great. She is smiling and more than willing to talk, but press-fatigue is evident in her voice as another ignorant journalist snatches her sound and tries to pin it down in the handy box of definitions he brought along. “Anti-Folk was in New York in the nineties, but that, again, doesn’t apply anymore. When something happens that is a reaction to something, or is vital and crucial for a moment, it dies out really quickly.” Suitably schooled, I avoided further talk of definitions and movements. I had tried to wrestle her music into a little box called folk, but she wrenched it from my grasp and set it free in a Narnia-sized wardrobe named “indie.”

The topic of genre rarely fails to irritate musicians, so I threw the letter D in there and asked if Emmy was particularly conscious of gender when she writes music? “Well, all my songs recently have been about a break up, it’s from the female perspective.” Her songs range from the playfully rude to the sexually explicit. Perhaps people react differently to this frankness because she’s a woman? “I have a male friend who said he heard my album and he felt defensive on behalf of men, he said we’re not all that bad. No you’re not all, but it was just this one person whose character I was trying to assassinate. I found it really interesting that my male friends would listen to my music and get bridled.”
Readers of the award-winning music magazine The Stool Pigeon may know more about Emmy the Great than they think. For a year now she has been writing sporadically under the dastardly cunning pseudonym of Emmy Moss. Although she harbours no ambitions to be a journalist, “it’s really helpful being on the other side. It gives you real insight; I know when not to probe, and I would never be rude to a journalist because so many artists have been rude to me. It’s like, how great do you think you are? I’m interviewing you because you’re in a really cool band and I think you’re really good, don’t be an arsehole about it.” A colourful but short article in the October issue of The Stool Pigeon demonstrates such behaviour. Emmy had tried and, due to his temper, resoundingly failed to interview Yoni Wolf (of the band Why?). Even though he’d previously agreed to do the interview he was unhappy and had, she wrote, “the look of a caged animal about to be experimented on, or someone who is being asked to hand over an internal organ.” Although she displays remarkable empathy when discussing it, “I completely understand, he was in a really bad mood, but you can’t then be an arsehole and expect someone not to write that you were an arsehole. Sure you’re playing the worst venue in Brighton but surely you want to be written about? You make music surely you want people to hear about it?”.
Emmy doesn’t want to take the journalism thing much further, “ if you go too far to the other side you will never be a Jedi.” The dark side? “It’s not the dark side it’s just the other side. When you’re a critic you’re always observing and not just enjoying. When you’re playing music you don’t want to have to see other bands like that you want to be able to interact with them. You have to stop being a critic when you’re playing music.” With an album out in February, her confidence is only growing. “I started taking responsibility for my songs. I used to be like, the song will come out, I’m not gonna look at it, it’s gonna come out and then I’m just gonna play it. Then I started looking at them and saying, I don’t like that and putting something else in because I didn’t like that that line. Taking responsibility for it.” A reputation for spikiness had preceded her, but Emmy proved thoughtful and funny. I for one can’t wait for her first album... it’ll be great!

noah and the whale interview

first published 19th february 2008

If there is a folk revival happening in London, then Noah and the Whale, must surely be its emerging stars. With a couple of singles out and an album on the way, their support is growing as their sound evolves. I met them at the ICA, halfway through the Young and Lost Club’s (their label) first ever tour.
The band consists of five youngsters. Guitarist and lead vocalist Charlie Fink writes the music. A good-looking fella with a mass of dark curly hair, he's crafted a stage melancholy that seems to vanish when he's not performing. Charlie's brother Doug is the band's drummer, with the physique of an athlete he looks suspiciously like a young Willem Dafoe. Tom Hobden is the fiddler, a quiet and somewhat reserved chap. Laura Marling, her solo career currently on a stratospheric rise, sings and plays various percussion in the band, whilst Urby Whale plays bass as well as a cacophony of other instruments including the xylophone and harmonica.
I ask the band whether their group has a leader. A room of fingers all point at me, I fleetingly think they want me to join and lead them, after weighing up the pros and cons I realise they're pointing at Charlie who is standing next to me. Urby isn’t sure about the question, "Leader's a weird word. Focal point I think is better, Charlie's the man where it all starts." Laura reiterates this point. "If Charlie left it wouldn't be Noah and the Whale." In answer to this Urby comes up with an exquisite pun, "No, it'd be Laura Marling and the Whalers." With his ever-present hat and jovial grin, Urby is an articulate chap. Perhaps the best way to describe him is as someone with whom you know it would be truly spectacular fun to get drunk with. I had developed a theory that Urby was the creative centre of the band. This was based on little more than the fact that people who wear constantly wear trilbys are invariably creative and interesting. However, Urby himself as well as the entire rest of the band assure me that it is Charlie who is at the heart of the music they make. He’s an undeniably gifted writer and producer. He produced Laura's album, which is getting the plaudits it deserves, and he composes Noah and the Whale's music. This is a man who understands how to build complex musical structures. He’s also got a razor-sharp wit. A nice oozy camembert backstage, as well as a few throwaway comments, betray Charlie’s love for cheese. It would probably be a few years away but I hope he doesn't retreat to the country and morph into this generation's Alex James.
There are a significant number of artists in this country, as well as in the US, who are producing folk music. There has been an undeniable resurgence, if not in terms of a quantifiable increase in output, then at the very least as an influence on contemporary mainstream artists. It is far more acceptable now, for the lead singer of a rock band to occassionaly strum away on a 12 string acoustic. In my eternal quest for (yet constant struggle with) definition, I can reel off a list of different sub-genres and offshoots. There’s anti-folk, folktronica, indie-folk, folk punk, folk metal, glam-folk and plenty more. With all these people producing music, there are those commentators that would group them into certain genres. Do these groups exist? Is any “movement” merely the construction of a media eager to pin down and define? “I think it is basically a construct, it's a media thing. Having said that there are a lot of people playing similar kinds of music, but I don't know any of them.” It remains the case that a number of musicians with similar sounds are playing with and supporting each other. Although perhaps to define something as a movement their must be a marriage of individual action with collective intent. “I don't know, I think bracketing bands into groups demeans the music.. Each person’s individual ideas within that creative thing are much more important than the concept. That's not saying we don't think there's a lot of good people in that scene.”
One active proponent and star of the current anti-folk movement in London is Emmy the Great. Her songs combine comedic whimsy with an often very frank and honest pain. She used to play with Noah and the Whale but is no longer with the band. I had read a vicious internet rumour that Emmy was kicked out of the band. When I raised this question wih them, laughs erupt edfrom around the room, "Emmy's a very busy girl. She played music, we played music and she played with us, then she went to do her own thing." So is it a lie? "There was never a formalised thing saying she's got to play with Noah and the Whale. She was never under contract." I realized too late that cunning politicans they aren't, but no one had fully answered the question! However, I didn't sense a real amount of animosity and perhaps it's best if that story simply enters into anti-folk-lore.
Brilliant folk songs have been cropping up with alarming regularity on adverts for everything from mobile phones to cars. Think Joanna Newsom for Orange, Devendra Banhart for T-Mobile and a myriad of other similarly unpleasant examples. The plastering of beautiful music over some cack-handed corporate attempt to sell things, is, I feel, a horrible and jarring juxtaposition. The music that Noah and the Whale have released so far often has had a happy and uplifting texture to it and would probably be ideal for selling a whole host of different products. I wonder aloud how long it will be until a Noah and the Whale song is played in some advert. When the reply comes, "that's a very topical question," I get a little worried. "To be honest, I personally feel pretty nihilistic about that kind of thing. Not if it's a product we don't like, but if it was for cheese or cinemas or something." Urby suggests Ben and Jerry's. "Yeah, we wouldn't promote smoking or McDonalds but otherwise… I don't take adverts into account when I write music, so I just don't care really."
It felt wrong to ask a question about Laura Marling's solo career, even if it was in relation to the band as a whole, but she is selling a lot of records so it became an inevitable point to raise. Having spoken to Laura a week earlier, I was disappointed to see that the intervening period as a basically famous person hadn't lead to outrageous demands for champagne fountains, beluga caviar and bowls of exclusively blue Smarties. Like Dizzee with Roll Deep would Laura be bringing the band on her wave of success? "They're on their own wave of success." It's fascinating to see how the band deal with Laura's identity as a solo artist. A number of people in the crowd were excitedly chattering as they saw Laura appear on stage that night, perhaps unsure if she would actually be appearing. She though, is extremely unwilling to use this occasion to promote her own music. She says she wants the two to be seperate. There were clearly a number of people who were there at least in part to see Laura, when Charlie mentioned her album being out that day they raised an almighty cheer.
"I think we get classified differently by the media just because Laura's a solo artist and we're a band.” This may be true, although in fairness this could be because of the greater difficulty in interviewing a roomful of people rather than one individual. There is a real difference though, when trying to quantify an individual artist as compared to a band. A solo artist is literally one voice, one point of view and one person’s ideas. Yet with a band, even with the afore mentioned “focal point,” it’s more difficult to ascertain where the creative energy and inspiration comes from. The mass of discussions, compromises and executive decisions cannot be examined to be understood. Urby sums this conundrum up quite nicely. “Band's a different word to solo artist. It's two words.”
Noah and the Whale have had two singles pressed already. The first was “Five Years Time,” it provided a nice introduction to the band. Particularly the video, which helpfully names each band member. The song itself is an undeniably happy number. , the ukulele strumming giving it a certain bounce. The lovely chorus of “love love love, wherever you go” and some chirpy whistling put Noah and the Whale on the radar of a number of UK folk fans. The b-side “Jocasta” was less jolly but had a higher tempo. Doug’s urgent drumming on the frame of the drum is an interesting device he’s used a few times to good effect.
Their single out now is “2 Bodies 1 Heart.” It is a slower more ambient sound to their other work and just edges the right side of sentimental. It is somewhat overshadowed by the excellent “Rocks and Daggers.” A genuine crowd pleaser that has people clapping and singing along. It’s a nice track to see live as it allows fiddler Tom to show off his talents and the vocal harmonies come together beautifully.
The video to “2 Bodies 1 Heart” (and “Five Years Time”) was directed by James Copeman. The latter is a hilarious montage of the band as athletes. From the colours of the outfits to the angles and the actual cuts, if Wes Anderson directed music videos, this is precisely what they would look like.
Having recorded their album, I asked how similar it is to their previous output. “It's different from the singles. It's the texture. Some of it's very sparse, with sounds we'd never used before.” A video on youtube gives a tour of their studio. This is anything but lo-fi. Room after room of a plethora of instruments gives the impression of a more than complex recording process. “We’ve used a lot of distortion which links in with the grunge thing.” Kind of like post rock? To which Charlie suggests the magnificent, “post-grunge-folk.”
They reckon that the gig that night was the largest they’d ever headlined. With awareness growing and some sell out nights already it seems their future success is all but assured. How far do they think they’ll go? Charlie smiled sarcastically, “Heard of a little band called the Red Hot Chili Peppers? That's pretty much where we're headed.”
As partB’s exploration of success last week demonstrated, it’s a hard thing to define. “The thing about success is that you're never gonna have a constant goal.
I've don't think there's anyone who's had one goal, achieved it and then thought oh brilliant.” At this point Laura momentarily assumes the role of interviewer, “Wasn't your one goal to support this band called Thanksgiving, who no one's ever heard of anyway? Then you did it last year.” Charlie responds, “Yeah there was like 20 people. It’s true, our biggest ambition was to support Thanksgiving, then we did it and everything since has been downhill.”
Like any real artist, their goal isn’t this ill-defined notion of success. “to be honest, you write music completely independently of any goal you might have. You'll try and create the best thing you can create. Then once that's been done, you think, now what are my ambitions with it. But those ambitions are kind of, "who cares" ambitions, the creative ambitions are much more important.”

Noah and the Whale’s single “2 Bodies 1 Heart” is out now Young and Lost Club