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www.WoodenCauliflower.comBy Ryan Pilot
The Chapman Family intend to knock some sense into the overcrowded, watered down indie web that currently clogs up the ears of the kids today. Having played a successful set at Glastonbury, and landing a place on the current NME Radar Tour with electro-pop overnight success La Roux, the band are already penetrating the musical consciousness of the country with their scratchy, noisy post-punk poetry.
On stage, front man Kingsley's persona is enigmatic; he is at once uncomfortable and confident. He has a powerful presence and yet appears introverted, with an arm covering his eyes when it is not busy combing his guitar strings as he punches out deep, anxious vocals. It is as if he is apologetic for what he has to say, however much he believes in it, as if it will offend his audience.
“[The Chapman Family are] trying to react against the general apathy of people who don't necessarily recognise that the country's going to shit,” says Kingsley. “No one seems to care but everyone sort of seems to enjoy listening to The Hoosiers telling us everything's all right, or The View telling us to go out and have a party ... You're never going to get us singing songs about going down an indie disco and fannying on with a girl and taking her home ... there's always going to be us fighting against something.”
Kingsley started to form The Chapman Family in 2005 when he and guitarist Paul, whose attic he had been living in, started playing music together as a reaction to the derivative touring indie bands that they saw each week in their home town of Stockton.
“Everyone else was ripping off The Libertines and everyone else is singing in cockney accents, even though they're from South Bank [a Middlesbrough council estate], which is just ridiculous,” says Kingsley. “Or you'd get touring bands come in and they were just shit, every single one of them, just shit.”
Stockton is a Teesside town full of people with little ambition, where someone with bigger ideas can get easily frustrated with those around them. With Joy Division-inspired bass lines, jerky guitars and desperate vocals, the music of The Chapman Family conveys the frustration with apathy that Kingsley has.
“I think people in Teesside are really insular and think that we're up against the World,” says Kingsley. “But ... with going to other various towns and cities throughout the country [I've seen that] it's exactly the same as everywhere else.”
Kingsley spent four years away from Teesside at Sheffield Hallam University studying fine art before forming The Chapman Family and he now works at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. However, he makes it clear that this is no pretentious arty-farty band that he is in.
“I started out and I wanted to paint, I wanted to be an abstract expressionist, but soon realised that I was pretty shit at it, so tried my hand at video and performance art and stuff so there's probably an element of that that came through,” Kingsley explains.
“We're not like art-rock like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are art-rock ... I don't think the band is an art project. I think it's a rock band and it's separate,” says Kingsley. “But if you bring elements of what you've learnt from art school ... you get influenced by everything up until that point in your life when you are sitting down and writing a song.”
Perhaps then, the awkwardness in Kingsley's stage persona comes from a fear of appearing pretentious. He sings, with his north-east accent, lines such as 'you are not impressing anyone' on 'You Are Not Me' which come across as an attack on the shallow bands that are trying to be another self-indulgent, fashionable London export. Kingsley is a North-easterner through and through and would not entertain the idea of moving to London for the band's sake.
“I enjoy being from the north east of England,” Kingsley says, but admits it would be easier and quicker to do well in the capital: “The NME reviewer can go and see you on a Wednesday as opposed to like waiting three months for him to go and see you ... Yeah it'd be dead easy if you went down to London but I don't see the point because I think the music that we make, the songs that we do have to have some sort of identity and have to have some sort of northern identity. I think you've got to be honest to where you're from ... If you went to London you'd be polluted by the effects of living in London and crappy city life, whereas here you can sort of do your thing ... you're not gonna wanna try and get into some crappy little scene that celebrates itself.”
Kinsley's frustration about the apathy of people, about the “lack of revolutionary spirit” as he put it, is of course not directed exclusively at those from his home town, but nationwide. We are in a time of great change, America has a black president, we are damaging the planet dramatically, the internet is evolving , expanding communication methods and of course we are in a recession.
“In every recession or every sort of bad time something good comes out of it,” explains Kingsley. “So you had like acid house and grunge and Madchester and all that shit came out of the arse end of the Tory government. Then you had the punk rock movement or new wave or whatever out of the bleakness of the seventies. And then you got Elvis and rock n roll out of the depression. But now that we're in the shit perhaps something should happen. But I dunno, I think the general consensus with the public is that they don't care, they really couldn't care less because they'd prefer to go and watch The Feeling tell them that everything is all right.”
The Chapman Family play Evolution Festival in Newcastle on 24th May.
www.myspace.com/thechapmanfamily
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