It’s finally a sunny day in London, but everyone’s still comes out in black attire for the gig tonight, after all we are in North London, fashion over sweat always. Andy Huxley, lead singer of Vile Imbeciles chomps on takeaway food from an ice-cream box, coincidently representing exactly what this band is about, they do exactly what isn’t said on the tin. The contradictions don’t stop there, SUPERSWEET are lead into VI’s mini-bus, decorated black on the outside but white and restful in the interior, and the band themselves are far from the “wankers” that some press labelled them as. They are smart, witty and diverse individuals frank about their direction for their second album; they awkwardly laugh and apologise that it’s “desperation” and “poverty” that got them to refine their raw sound.
On the surface, Vile Imbeciles appear to want to sell out and change their sound to reach a mainstream audience to get the readies flowing. But their passion as musicians just simply gets in the way. Huxley remarks how it was their intention to attract a wider crowd, but “It didn’t work out exactly as planned. We were gonna do a big rock album, and when we released it, everyone was like “It’s really weird!?” Whether weirdness or harnessing their experimental origins,
Queenie was a Blonde is a successful album retaining their fan base easily, evident at their heaving gig tonight.
Last time around, with
..Ma, Vile Imbeciles were pinned by much press as producing music called “death jazz”, which funnily enough the band has no recollection of calling their music. Huxley and newly joined drummer, Evan Reimhold devises together VI’s music as an adapted version of “Death Charge”, the genre placed on Chicago band, Soil. “We’re British Death Charge”, Huxley blurts out “with freepost rock mixed with a bit of pop”. The band is happy to “have a label if it sells records. I think the problem is that some people can’t do that, maybe if we do that we will get somewhere”. Vile Imbeciles might actually be on to something. “Death jazz” circled the press airwaves drawing the attention of many and they don’t have to compromise their own music ambitions to “sell records”.
Apart from Soil, the music the band listens to certainly varies with each member. Bassist, James Hair identifiable by his Cruella de Vil mop, asserts “I don’t listen to anything new really; whatever goes in my head entertains me enough”. For the member who thinks up the names for the band’s albums and songs, he’s certainly got intelligence circling in his noggin, despite “…sitting quietly in the corner”.
Huxley takes on a different approach with listening to music “I listen to Radio One every morning”, and not Edith Bowman as he proudly corrects us “That’s afternoon! It’s Chris Moyles, Jo Whiley in the morning. I think if you listen to about half an hour to an hour of really bad music...” Cheekily interjecting “Then you feel better about your own?”, luckily the band laugh and Huxley offers a insightful answer to his obsession with mainstream radio: “Well, no, it gives you a good cultural reference point about what you are doing, otherwise it’s not relevant, you have to know what you are up against, it doesn’t seem to make any difference but it matters on a sort of whole, otherwise you just end up doing something..” Crap? It’s that something which keeps VI from being a conformist band, content to embrace their dissimilarities.
Informed by name generator, Hair, the second album was dubbed Queenie was a Blonde deriving from “A great poem. In a book by Joseph Moncure March, it inspired William Burridge to write”. In the 1920s, the publication was extensively banned, but its controversial themes made the poem popular during this period. The content in the second album similarly has notorious tendencies, particularly hinting at S&M. Questioning the gents about their sadomasochism songs ‘Puncher Me In Touch” and ‘Hammock of Pain’ results in an embarrassment usually provoked with the mention of sex and parents in the same sentence.
Huxley braves the question sniggering “Personally I find sex repulsive. You are saturated with sex today everywhere, it’s outdated to be sexual”. Gaining confidence, Huxley verifies the songs as a response about how they were “fooled by it for a while, taken in and seduced by it”, with Hair simultaneously slipping in “we were chewed and spat out”. The only problem is that their realisation comes after the album is out: “Now we are singing it and it’s kind of like “OH GOD” “I can’t and don’t wanna be sexual on stage”. When Vile Imbeciles does perform, sex is the last thing on their mind, the performance a vacuum for such indulgences, and only their cracking playing resonates through the air.
Mildly promoting their last album, Vile Imbeciles still were seen as a marmite band, you loved or either hated them. As a result, their returning single 'Bad Ideas' received the ‘genius’ slating by the press, “So the single is called Bad Ideas and that is what you expect” Huxley grimaces but turns on the attention to SUPERSWEET, “You’re a good magazine, you are always really positive, it doesn’t bother bitching!”.
In answering what Vile Imbeciles think is a bad idea when it comes to music, Huxley digresses into the reality of the industry: “Most music is crap, but you have to do something crap if you wanna be big to make money, it’s just fact, the crapper you are the bigger you get – the worst ideas that you have, the more people like you”. However, the front man does scramble together a snippet of an answer, proposing: “You know horseshoes, that’s got amazing and crap right next to each other – that’s us on one side and MIKA’s on the other. Both marmite bands but we are good and their crap...He’s a bad idea” The pop listener, sex-hating singer ends with a defining statement: “Most ideas are bad ideas, only a few are good” and with that we’re hooked on watching what Vile Imbeciles’ does next, bad idea or good, ultimately it’s all experience to become the good idea in music today.
Words: Gemma Dempster
Photography: Krittiya Sriyabhandha
Photography Assistant: Siriya Mahittivanicha