Devonians, The Rumble Strips, may make it into the big time this year....
Rumble Strips: Will they be one of 2007's breakthrough bands?
British band Rumble Strips are poised on the brink of success - but they won't let it go to their heads, they tell Elisa Bray
16 March 2007
Charlie Waller - Lead Vocals / Guitar
Henry Clark – Keyboards / Trumpet
Tom Gorbutt - Sax / Bass
Matthew Wheeler - Drums
The Rumble Strips have just been Radio 1's drive-time single of the week and are about to release their first commercial single with the label giant Island. Considering, then, that they're on the brink of living up to the accolades that dub them one of 2007's breakthrough bands, they are surprisingly restrained as they lounge across the tables of the London pub where we meet.
"I haven't really heard 'Alarm Clock' on the radio," singer Charlie Waller says. "My mum phoned me up and said that she'd heard it. She texted in saying 'I'm the mother.' She was really excited," he says, laughing. "I saw us on MTV the other day," keyboardist and trumpeter Henry Clark chips in, some latent excitement bubbling.
It's clear that the band err on the side of cautious humility, but then their music started off as a slow burner. Now in their late twenties, the band began playing together in their home town of Tavistock, Devon, when they were 13 years old. While their peers were getting into dance music, Waller was learning riffs on his first guitar, bought by his uncle. "I just thought he was the coolest man in the world. He used to wear leather and earrings and all his girlfriends were really pretty and exotic. Every now and then he'd turn up on his motorbike and slip me a pound coin. He bought me my first guitar and every time he was down he'd show me little riffs."
Meanwhile, the saxophonist Tom Gorbutt was playing clarinet with Clark, in the latter's dad's band. They were musically united when Waller and drummer Matt Wheeler joined the music club that Clark's dad started on a Saturday afternoon, where they learnt to play Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa hits. Gorbutt recalls: "We'd get quite a lot of stick because there was always dance music around at the time we were growing up. I think maybe we were a bit weird."
But it is this early ensemble that became the foundation for their distinctive soulful brassy pop, crystallised when they converged on London a couple of years ago to take The Rumble Strips to the next level. After abandoning ties with all other bands in late summer 2005 (Waller had been playing and writing music with Mark in Vincent Vincent and the Villains), they completed "Motorcycle", their first single, released by the independent label Transgressive Records.
Waller says: "Because we'd been through the problems that being in other bands causes when it starts to go to another level, when we decided to do it there had to be absolutely nothing else. It was almost quite arrogant because we weren't signed. But it comes across when you're in a band and you're not serious about it. You sacrifice a lot of relationships to focus on this one thing. That decision was a big change for us."
The second turning point came when they were all staying with Gorbutt's then girlfriend, now wife, who was supporting all four of them on her dole money. Waller remembers: "She got quite angry at times that we weren't pulling our fingers out at certain gigs. We did one gig she thought was lacklustre and afterwards she started laying into me: 'I've been paying for Tom on my dole money and you put in a performance like that, you bastards!'" Sure enough, her comments made a considerable impact: their next gig, when they supported The Zutons at Hammersmith Apollo last June, led to them being signed by Island.
The fact that Tavistock was "quite out of the loop in terms of the music scene" is what, perversely, shaped their music. They shared a love of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - they talk animatedly about the way they "can go from manic to sublimely beautiful melodies" - but their individual tastes were developed through older relatives' music collections and scouting through second-hand record shops.
Even their name, The Rumble Strips, conjures up the brazen image of an old rock'n'roll band. "It sounds quite old-fashioned, but then it sounds modern because rumble strips are quite a modern thing [they're a road safety feature that alert people drifting off course]. I like the idea that we're stopping people from falling asleep on the motorway of life," Waller suggests brightly.
The band's sound, characterised by catchy saxophone and trumpet-led riffs, stomping percussion and gutsy soul vocals, was born, practically, out of what each member could play and years of live performances. "We've always been a live band just because we've been playing for so long without recording," explains Waller. "Anything you write or arrange is with the idea of being played. And a lot of the time, because we've not had a bass player, we were trying to get the low end on the drums so we could fill out the bass, which shaped the [sound of our] low, rumbly drums."
Waller, whose distinct, powerful voice belies his slim frame, puts his singing style down to years of rehearsing without a microphone. "I've been rehearsing in a ramshackle way for so many years, it forces you to be loud and fighting to be heard. Twelve years singing in bands without a mike makes you have to sing loud. And then once you're miked up you can say it's like soul."
Their themes add a complexity to their bold and upbeat arrangements. "They're quite miserable songs, really. I like that thing of really upbeat, jolly - almost heroic - music and miserable words. Celebrating the misery," Waller says chirpily. The themes - namely the weather, girls and, especially, "being lazy and trying to fill time" - seem to be inspired by their earlier days struggling to break through as a band and their former rather grim day jobs.
While Waller was a labourer and did some maintenance work in a grotty Wandsworth nightclub with Gorbutt, Clark wins top trumps for being an undertaker. "It was pretty weird. It got to the stage we were playing biggish gigs and I'd get up at six in the morning and go and check the bodies out. It was two such different worlds," Clark says matter-of-factly. Waller recalls: "We'd be rehearsing and Henry would be in his suit and in a long undercoat and mid-song he'd get a call and would say: 'Right, I have to go and pick up someone who's been killed in a railway crash.' We used to borrow the hearse sometimes to put the equipment in and get to the gigs."
Keen not to neglect their local supporters, after they return from the South by South West festival in Austin, Texas, they will do a tour of the backwaters of South-west England. "It's important to go and play those little out-of-reach places," says Waller. "Especially in the South-west. Bands just never go down there. And it's better for us to do a gig when people are really excited about us."
They may have clocked up a series of high-profile tours, including support slots for The Zutons and Dirty Pretty Things, but it is their first tour with The Young Knives and support slots with less well-known bands Good Shoes and The Maccabees that hold more significance for the band. "We genuinely like what they're doing. When you become friends on that level it makes it seem more realistic and possible. It makes it seem more tangible," Waller says.
But the band's dreams are already more tangible. Late last year they returned from Los Angeles where they recorded their debut album, due for release this summer, with Tony Hoffer (who has produced Beck, Supergrass, The Kooks and Belle and Sebastian). The intensity of two solid weeks' recording and not being allowed to play gigs, coupled with the frustration of having nowhere to let off steam, focused their efforts. Gorbutt says: "It did bring an urgency to it. The schedule was 'keep going, keep going' and I think we tend to work quite well in that situation."
And they are confident they are bringing a new sound to the pop music scene. "I don't think we sound particularly like anyone else. We've got guitars in the band but we're not a guitar band. We're not like an indie band," Gorbutt says.
Still, they are resolute in not playing up to the hype. "It's kind of exciting, but I think we've always had this thing that it doesn't mean anything unless you do actually make it. Things get said about a lot of bands. There are a lot of one-album bands," Waller insists.
So what would get them excited? There's a tentative silence before Waller mumbles: "If the single got in the charts, that would be amazing. We had to think about that. In a couple of weeks we could be listening to the chart show..." He is quick to dampen the mood, in case they get too carried away: "But it may well not happen."
Then that little glimmer of excitement creeps out again. "If we went on television..." Waller's eyes light up. "Being on television just seems... cool, doesn't it?" "Oh yeah," Clark agrees. "That would be amazing."
The new single 'Alarm Clock' is out on Monday on Island Records; the Rumble Strips are touring from 20 March to 12 May (www.therumblestrips.com)
independent.co.uk
