Published at 11:24, Thursday, 29 July 2010

Appearances can be deceptive. When bands are involved though, what you see is generally what you get. Big hair and makeup? They’ll probably sound a bit like The Cure. Parka and stubble? Oasis. It’s part of a code, perfected over 60 years of pop, that’s meant to help us find the things we like.

Wild Beasts

Then you get a band like Wild Beasts. To look at, they’re four rather pretty young guys, in indie-boy uniform of floppy hair and wide-eyed intensity. They might sound like a thousand other groups, from Travis to Mumford and Sons.

If you’ve heard their records, it comes as a bit of a surprise. They probably ought to have goats’ legs and beaks, dress as Regency dandies and live in a hut in the middle of a forest, coming out at midnight to hunt. That’s good, in case you were wondering.

Songs like 2009 single Hooting and Howling mix the theatrical weirdness of Kate Bush with chiming guitars and Hayden Thorpe’s soaring, strangely beautiful falsetto. They are utterly unique. Where could they come from but Cumbria?

Bass player Tom Fleming, 25, says growing up in Kendal helped make Wild Beasts the band they are today.

“I’d like to say it hasn’t influenced us, but inevitably it has,” he says. “We’re one of the very few groups to come out of that area, so when we were kids we never had any elder brother bands. We always had to be magpies, taking things from everywhere.

“We want to create music that, I suppose, people growing up in the same situation as us have a feeling for.”

Whether or not they’ve achieved their goal, the band have been causing a stir in the UK music scene. Achingly hip since their 2009 album Two Dancers, they’ve notched up countless festival appearances and celebrity fans like Jools Holland and Daniel Radcliffe.

Their most recent triumph came on July 20, when they found out they’d been shortlisted for the 2010 Mercury Music Prize.

“It’s reassuring,” says Tom. “It does feel like validation, like people are listening now. We go to countries we’ve never heard of and they know the words to our songs.

“We still rehearse, we still write, we still go out for drinks during our time off.

“But almost invisibly, almost without anything changing, people have started to come to our shows.”

Not that there’s been any kind of overnight success story. All former pupils of Queen Katherine School, Kendal, the band have been digging away at the musical coalface for more than eight years.

It started in 2002, when school friends Hayden Thorpe and Ben Little took up writing songs together as Fauve, the French word for ‘wild beast.’ The band changed its name when drummer Chris Talbot signed up in 2004.

Tom joined as bassist when they moved to Leeds the following September, to get closer to the music industry.

“Leeds is a great place,” he says. “It’s very supportive, there’s lots of ideas and energy about, but it’s still a manageable size. It doesn’t have that cutthroat side of London.”

Snapped up by indie label Bad Sneakers in 2006, they went on to sign a major deal with Domino Records in 2008. Their rise to cultish semi-fame soon appeared unstoppable, winning them fans in countries as diverse as Turkey, Sweden and Poland.

As he speaks to the News & Star, Tom is mid-way through packing for his latest three month megatour.

“To an extent it does drive me a bit crazy, living out of a bag”, he says. “I think we all remind ourselves that this is what we asked for, this is what we wanted.

“This one involves going to Spain and Ireland and Portugal, trying to pack for every possible weather. More than one pair of shoes, a very long, good, heavyweight book, and your phone charger is also very important.”

As soon as they get back, the band will be heading for the studio to work on their third album. They’re nothing if not hard working, he explains.

“We do get a lot of ideas happening, but ideas are the easy part,” he says.

“Anyone can have ideas – it’s about getting down to it. I’m very tired, but there’s no choice really.”

“Being in a band is a very hand to mouth existence. We need to just work our arses off and then we’ll get there.”

Wherever they still need to go, the band are delighted to be playing Kendal Calling in the meantime. They’ll be joining fellow Cumbrians British Sea Power, at an event that’s grown substantially over the past five years.

“I think I would have killed for it when I was a kid,” says Tom. “This sort of area’s always had a lot of musical things on, but it’s not been validated by having anything contemporary like that.

“I think the artists it’s getting are really impressive. It’s ambitious, it’s not just a local festival for local people.”

Listen to Wild Beasts at www.wild-beasts.co.uk

Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk