The Big Pink's debut, ‘A Brief History of Love’, championed fiery digital noise, sky-soaring melodies and a love for two cities which launched Milo Cordell and Robbie Furze firmly into the stratosphere.
They’ve just returned from six weeks of hard touring in the States which saw them closing off proceedings at Coachella Festival.
They are now halfway through their first UK headline tour before a summer of festival slots including Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, Isle of Wight, T In The Park and Wireless.
So what are The Big Pink all about?
Gemma Brosnan Dos Santos catches up with Milo and Robbie to find out.
1. You started out doing aggressive industrial music through Hatechannel. Was it a conscience decision to embrace psychedelia and become more experimental or just a natural process of evolution?
Robbie: I think it was a natural thing, but I think the stuff we did with Hatechannel we wanted to just do noise stuff, we wanted to create the most extreme thing we thought music could be.
Milo: It was also seven years ago and we were different people back then, we were growing up and trying to emulate these amazing guys we saw at shows, clubs, parties, whatever and just wanted to be more aggressive than them, more extreme, more underground.
Robbie: We didn’t really have that much equipment and when we started to do the Big Pink we just wanted to approach things a bit more delicately and get more into melodies and make noise more beautiful, it sounds like it was a conscious decision, but we were just bored of it being one aggressive thing I guess. You can listen to white noise for a certain amount of time but it can get a bit boring to be honest.
2. How do you manage to create an emotive record with those sky-soaring beautiful melodies and still retain enough grit to feel the aggression of the concrete backdrop? Or is that the secret of your genius?
Milo: I guess we just never really think about anything for too long, we just literally throw ourselves into the deep end and try and get out as quickly as possible, I guess that’s our metaphor in terms of making music, just throw ourselves into one song and just do it, the body of the song, the guitars, the noise etc are done within two days and they definitely reflect the period of time in which we wrote it so I guess by not really thinking about it what could be a mistake actually turns out to be a gift. If you think about it too much you start thinking ‘I can’t do this melody, it’s a bit too much’ but if you don’t give yourself time to think, you just go with your initial judgement and I always think your first reactions are usually the right ones.
Gemma: So that you capture the essence of that moment instead of messing around with it and destroying the soul of the track?
Milo: Yeah, we did that on one song, Stop The World, and it just wasn’t really us because we just spent so long preening it and we preened the chorus and we preened the verse and it just sounded like two different songs and lost its identity.
3. Do you think New York influenced your album more than London?
London is one of the best cities in the world, so we needed to record the album somewhere that had the speed of the city and I think New York upped it a bit. We loved it so much there that we wrote and recorded the song, ‘Tonight’, just for that city.
4. The title of your album ‘A Brief History of Love’ has various interpretations. Would you describe it as being about love in a city or love for a city?
Milo: I guess it’s just a brief history of everything we have done up until this point and a brief history of our lives and as you get a bit older in life love seems to really takes more of a hold on you and I guess we started to release over the course of this record that these songs are love songs, not necessarily about falling in and out of love with someone, they are about a love for life and that if you are not loving what you are doing, what am I trying to say? It’s an imperial love, an all encompassing love; it’s a love for everything.
Robbie: It’s about realising that love is the most important thing and is all that matters and that once you have that nothing else matters, it sounds clichéd but you do get to the point where loving your friends, loving going out, loving the world, loving your job, not giving into life just accepting life is love and loving
Milo: It’s all the cheesiest things that anyone has ever written a song about just done in our own way, it is about those things, you’ve got to enjoy it, it’s the only one you get, you know?
5. What was your first experience of love?
Milo: Pain. I found it very painful. It’s on the record, my first experience of love.
Robbie: I think for me it was when the Big Pink started I truly realised what being in love with things is, it wasn’t that I hadn’t been in love or that I didn’t love things before, it’s just at that point, I realised, this is it.
Milo: Which is a good thing and bad thing you know because you think ‘I can’t believe I only realise now what it feels like’ but at the same time it’s really good because you realise what it is and have so much to look forward to.
6. Have you ever made love to one of your own tracks with the lights on?
Milo: I’ve made love to Robbie but….
Robbie: I’ve done the whole record.
Gemma: With the lights on or off?
Robbie: The lights on. It worked, it was quite cool, a bit self-indulgent perhaps, but I had a good time, but definitely not the best sexual experience I’ve ever had.
7. Robbie – Before the birth of Big Pink, you toured with the grandmaster of noise Alec Empire - formerly of Atari Teenage Riot, and the man credited with almost singularly inventing the genre of ‘digital hardcore’. How much did he influence you?
Heavily I think, especially with the concept of noise and using the guitar and synth in a free-er way, to let go and be free of constraints, he was hugely inspiring. Everything since we started listening to music and opening up our minds to it has been an inspiration and an influence, everyone from Kurt Cobain to Sam Cooke.
8. Milo - You started Merok (which released formative records from Esser, Rainbow Arabia, Titus Andronicus, Salem, Telepathe and Crystal Castles) in 2005 after seeing The Klaxons play. How do you manage to juggle the label and The Big Pink?
I wanted to put out bands who were starting from the same page, who read the same books and listened to the same music, I can't do as much as I used to, I’ve learnt to let go and be less of a control freak such as allowing other people’s handwriting on the envelopes. I have to get other people to do it.
9. How important are live performances?
Robbie: Very important, it’s our chance to present our music. It wouldn’t work with yellow jumpsuits.
10. You’ve previously described Otis Redding as one of your biggest musical influences. Why?
Milo: The lyrics are brilliant, just simple but also totally heartwarming and poetry as well, they are not ignorant in any way.
11. You’ve mentioned before that you admire the brutal lyrical honesty of soul music and its shameless approach to emotions and love. Do you think your lyrics are honest?
Robbie: I think they are all honest and we mean everything we say, none of it is a lie, we mean it which is why I think it’s translates, maybe we say things how they should be said rather than pretending to be in a certain state of mind which I think is really boring.
12. Your videos and imagery are an abstract collective of both past and present. How do they represent/reflect your sound or are they meant to?
Robbie: When we first started, all the imagery was put together by Milo from the internet and when we first started it took a while to see the perfect backdrop for our songs and then it all tied together in a weird synchronistic fashion I guess and then Milo just sources these images which represents exactly what the music is about for us, from rock stars, the gods…
Milo: I think it’s really critical that sound and vision go together.
13. The name of the band is taken from The Band’s album or at least references it. Were you fans of the album or just amused by the phallic suggestiveness?
Robbie: Both really, I love The Band and the concept of being a band like The Band was important to us, we’re not a project like Massive Attack, the idea of being on the road for 15 years and that whole ethos is very important to us along with references to the illusions of grandeur, the phallic thing and the punk reference is very important to us
14. You’ve been bored enough of the average photographer’s lack of imagination to go as far as pretending to be a gay couple to liven things up. Would you consider yourself gay icons?
Milo: I’ll roll with the gay icon thing. If you say I’m a gay icon, I’ll take it. I’ve got no objections, men, women, the more the merrier.
Robbie: We don’t really give a shit. I think some of the gay magazines tried to do that to us and when they found out we weren’t gay were quick to discourage interviews. It’s irrelevant really; we were just having fun because we got a bit bored. We did some really boring shoots and thought we could make it more interesting and then someone gave us an idea and Milo was doing some research into Dennis Cooper’s work and the composition of imagery was really exciting for us.
Gemma: I love the dressing gown shot
Robbie: It’s almost like a yin/yang kind of thing, not that we’re opposite, it just fits together
15. You’re not over keen on the ‘shoegaze’ label. Do you think it lacks grit?
Robbie: I just think it’s lazy and it lacks imagination. We’re not really against it, it’s like calling it a classical album or a folk album - it’s not. I don’t think we’ve actually defined our sound to be honest, we’re still all over the place and in terms of me and Milo working together and being creative, we haven’t defined who we are as artists musically as we don’t even really consider ourselves artists on the whole so it’s impossible for us to comment on what genre we are creating because we don’t fully understand. We just really fell into this.
Milo: I think we're more comparable to people like Stone Rose, Smashing Pumpkins and Dinosaur Jr, bands who maybe embraced shoegaze for a short period of time but eventually went on to do their own thing rather than follow a set pattern. I think there was an element of that genre that, whilst being fairly loud, also sounded quite washed-out as well. A lot of the English shoegaze bands were quite soft and washed-out, whereas I'd consider our sound to be quite ballsy.
16. In terms trying to define the Big Pink, Robbie has been described as the brains and Milo as the heart. Do you agree and can you explain how this dynamic works in terms of the songwriting process?
Robbie. I actually haven’t heard that before, I’m the brains and he’s the heart? I don’t think I’m the brains. If I’m the brains and he’s the heart, we’re in severe trouble.
Milo: I think what they are trying to say is that I’m just a baby, I’m just a novice, I’ve never really done it before which again offers that yin and yang thing, there might be a bit of naivety in it.
Robbie: I think that’s what’s so nice about writing music together because I’ve played music for years but Milo and I approached this in a much more free way. We just locked the door and a few days later came out with a song, that’s pretty much it really
Milo: I think it has a similar approach to a hip-hop tune, always starting with the beat or noise and building it track upon track, making and building it as you’re recording it which is different from a band with four people making music, it’s more like a bit like a rapper or MC might put together bits free-styling.
How do you see your sound developing in the future?
Robbie: We tend to go into one thing at one time, like one week it could be hip-hop and we end up writing a hip-hop tune, even if it’s not obvious by the end of the process, but the basis of the song would certainly originate from those kind of hip-hop associated beats. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that when we start writing a song, even we have no idea where it may end up so as for future directions, who knows?
Milo: Impossible to say, we'll just keep on writing.
The Big Pink play HMV Forum, Kentish Town, Thursday May 13
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