Yes, yes, pony, donkey, zebra... whatever!
From left to right: Lou, Sarah, Tahita, Igor, Andy
A new breed of music comes along the new youth and therefore New Young Pony Club happens, SUPERSWEET chats to Tahita Bulmer, the band's fierce lead singer about almost everything worth chatting about, including listening to NYPC in the French Revolution and the lowdown on their exciting debut album Fantastic Playroom.
“I have to say that every single one of them has come to us,” Tahita Bulmer says proudly when SUPERSWEET mentions her band New Young Pony Club’s friends on MySpace. For a reasonably new band whose debut LP Fantastic Playroom isn’t due out until end of June to have 30000+ friends is rather an impressive achievement.
“People come to us and say ‘We love your music, Igor’, ‘I love your hair onstage’ and ‘Lou looks really cute on keyboard’ or whatever comment that they leave… I think MySpace is a weird angle,” she sighs, her eyes watchful, “You can have 30000 friends but that doesn’t mean 30000 people are gonna buy your album. I think MySpace is getting so big that none of the friends mean anything any more.”
As a performer, her stage presence and the ability to throw shapes make Tahita (or Ty as she calls herself) look like a six foot tall female warrior, even though she barely passes as a petite in the flesh. Today she sits calmly in an art gallery down Brick Lane, sipping coffee, looking laid back yet remaining well composed. It is clear right from the start that Ty has the real frontwoman quality. She makes sure everything she says is heard, intensely engaging conversations with direct eye contact throughout. There is no need to expand on the questions asked; she answers them sharply and most intellectually.
That’s exactly what she has come to be associated with, Ty is fearless and full of confidence, often wrongly perceived as loud and outspoken. Her lyrics in songs like ‘Ice Cream’ are saucy and daring, draped with messages that challenge all the boys whilst still managing to leave them ever so curious. These are the words that only women with supersized personality can handle singing.
“We have a really good band relationship, I think the rest of the band are happy that there’re thoughts going into the songs and the lyrical contents and I’m not just singing a load of non-sense,” Ty lays out the politics of her band.
“I was brought up to believe that the fact that I was female wasn’t going to make me a handicap. I was told that I could be anything when I was a child - an astronaut, a ballerina, a cook, I could be a mom - you can be anything you want. Particularly in the world where everything is so superficial and people seem to be pursuing fame for its own sake, it is important for particularly young women to know that they can do things because they’re good at them not just because you’re pretty enough to do them or somebody says you should do them because you look a specific way. It’s not about how you look but it’s about who you are and how excited you are by what you’re doing. I feel it’s very important for me to continue saying that over and over and over again because I don’t feel like very many people are.”
She sits up, “It seems to be a real thing that if you’re skinny enough or if you’re tall enough then the world is at your own feet, and if you don’t fit that paradigm as a woman then you just have to accept dread and I really don’t, obviously that isn’t true!”
NYPC has just come off their big tour supporting the likes of Klaxons, CSS and The Sunshine Underground. For commercial purposes they were carelessly grouped together as a New Rave tour. That New Rave tag might prove to be a nuisance later on, but for now, it can’t have been more appropriate, as Ty will agree, “I particularly think it’s lucky because I’ve been thinking about doing this music for such a long time. I come from a background that’s really loving a lot of punk and a lot of dance music. I fell in love straight away with LCD Soundsystem when it first came out, it opened my eye for loads other bands that I had never even heard of from the early 80s, James White and the Blacks and Liquid Liquid and all the bands that have inspired LCD Soundsystem. It wasn’t so much like you jump on the bandwagon and try to fit in. It was more like a door that had all these bands that was locked and suddenly you could see this horizon and I wanna be part of it,” she pauses, “I suppose we’re lucky in the sense that the music that we love is music that seems to be on the crest of this wave now.”
Click to their label Modular’s website and you will find a whole section dedicated to pictures from parties, in the past year the label has quickly become the hip and dance-y label of England with bands like The Presets, Cut Copy and obviously NYPC themselves. Is the label now officially the hottest house for parties?
“They want all the coolest bands, they want all the coolest parties and they want all the coolest people and they just want all the coolest kids in clubs - the ones with the brand new trainers every week,” she says as-a-matter-of-factly, carefully not to sound patronizing, “They’re a great company and the reason we wanted to sign with them in the first place is because they said they were artists-led and they seem to have that attribute.” She goes on to give us an example of another Modular artist Bumblebeez, “He put his debut single out five years ago but he still hasn’t delivered the debut album, he’s worked with four different producers and they’re still putting money into him because they believe in him. They think he’s gonna be a great artist. It’s applaudable to stick by your guns if you believe in someone, that’s why we signed to them because they seem to really care about the artists that they sign.”
Modular has played a rather important role in hooking the band up with some hot DJs like Phones, Comets, and Medhi. We ask if any of these people took part in producing Fantastic Playroom, Ty says no. We then ask if it was important to produce it themselves and she immediately stresses, “It was important that we have to produce the first one just because it’s our baby and we’ve been holding on to it for years, and the idea that we will then give it to somebody else to play with just wasn’t gonna happen. It’s really important that at least this record has our stamp on it, I think the next record will be a lot more room for experimentation. This one particularly was like my child. I just have to wipe its nose and wash behind the ears myself before it’s left the house,” she laughs.
“It’s like having a video directed, you have an idea of what the song is about and obviously the director comes in and they give a slightly different idea of what things are about. I think for a band in its early stage it’s important especially when these days you can make your own music at home. If you have the skills you don’t necessarily need a producer. I mean the producer in the ideal world would be like the sixth member or the fifth member or whatever - they’re like that member of the band that isn’t there all the time but then he comes in and makes what you do bigger and better rather than necessarily putting their own stamp on it and I think a lot of producers today totally wanna leave their own signature on it. You know when you hear a record producer by Paul Epworth, you know it’s been produced by him within about two songs! And the same for James Ford and all the big guys that are coming out now in a few years time you’ll know their records as soon as you hear it.”
But ideally though, we ask, if they could have one, who would it be?
“Well, obviously for the Holy Grail it would be James Murphy, or Tim Goldsworthy, or Brian Eno, or the amazing David Bowie,” a bright smile appears on Ty’s face as she gets spoilt for choice daydreaming about her heroes, “If he wants to come and do our album that would be fantastic!”
“I think we have a definite sound, our own sound,” she talks about their debut album that apparently has taken four years since the first day it was written – just to also prove that the success of this band isn’t an overnight one. “There certainly are a lot of tracks on the album that we’ve been exploring that sound and trying to solidify it and see what we can do, but at the same time there are a few tracks on there that we’ve done something slightly more experimental; we’ve kind of mixed in R&B influences and sort of early 80s bands like The Smiths. We’ve tried not to emulate but let ourselves be inspired by and I think it adds a new slant to the whole post-punk thing that we love. I hope it’s gonna be an album that people are surprised in part by but not scared off or…” she jokes, “There’s no heavy metal on this!”
Bands often complain about the nature of record industries and how their collections of songs get delayed along the process, to the point that eventually they become irrelevant, four years of waiting for a debut album to release is hardly a petty wait. But if someone were to listen to their music twenty years ago or ahead even, would that make sense any more?
“It would be weird, isn't it? Say if you listened to our music and you were living in the French Revolution!" She laughs, "Everything is contextualised historically. Everything has its context: historical and social and current as well. Not just in the way lyrics are written but in terms of the sound as well.”
How exactly?
“The fact that there’s such a massive party vibe going on at the moment, I think that tends to happen when, politically speaking, a political party has been in power for a long space of time. It’s like the generation that grow up with that root kind of feel like they can’t fight it any other way apart from having a great time and releasing all their tension. I don’t think it’s any it’s a coincidence that you had the original rave movement at the end of the Conservative era and now you have the new rave.”
Embrace everything new and positive seems to be the way forward. There you have it, history of music and political crossover. If none of this becomes relevant in twenty years' time then worry not, just do what the headline on their MySpace says...
"When in doubt…clap!" and hope for the best, always.