Hailing from their adopted homestead of Dalston, Male Bonding deliver catchy, hook driven rock that will unite father and son as well as any fishing trip (without the years of counseling). Having just been signed to Seattle’s Subpop, (first UK act!) one wonders how this fiercely independent trio will cope with working with an established label. These youthful noisniks ebb and flow from abrasive guitars parts to shout-y choruses with conviction, a tricky blend reminiscent of Nirvana but with a little less angst and well, a few more major chords, (yes, even more…)

Creation of Male Bonding: Quite how Male Bonding came up with their name is unclear, was it that chance meeting in a Turkish men’s bath house, a sly sideways glance at the urinals, or merely an expression of their resemblance to the hairier gender of our species? We think they worshipped KASMS so much they named themselves after one of their songs (ok, ok, it was the other way round. Boo).

Song to Win Over an Audience: Male Bonding seem to be straddling genres: on the one hand their music is undoubtedly tinged post-punk and on the other they dabble with electronic sensibilities Check out ‘Pumpkin’ and its dabbling in rock guitar riffery, mutating into a jarring head-exploding melody. Pa Pa Pow!

Secret Sixth Sense 1: NOT “cutting edge” enough. We’re not slating! The refreshingly honest band freely admitted that their music owed a lot to previous bands from Nirvana to Wipers, confessing their hard-music grafting might not be the next big thing, but hell to MB’s modesty, we dig their unruly style.

Secret Sixth Sense 2: The lothario three-piece recently toured with Brooklyn's Vivian Girls, so any chance of inter-band coital canoodlings? Before you overheat your loins, the highlight for MB was “watching Meet the Parents” at the Vivian Girls flat, wow, nothing like commitment driven films to get the mood going.

Failed Ambitions: Cited as being fans of GG Allin; for the uninitiated Allin is an American punk singer famed for defaming, often chowing down on laxatives before a gig, resulting in a rather unhygienic live performance. As of yet, MB have not gone all “Number 2” incontinent on stage, come on MB, you’d make a killing with a Pampers deal!

Male Bonding Fans: If MB fashion is anything to go by, their fans are “Party On Dudes” Bill & Ted, Weezer, and Saved By The Bell’s Screech. Oh, don’t forget they must be wearing eclectic Dalston “lens-free” framed glasses to qualify like a ding-dinging microwave.

The Male Bonding Experience: Their retrospective outlook, celebrates the days when ‘distortion’ was not a dirty word, and 7” format was the norm. Harking back to a grimier time, MB are a refreshing antidote to our health and safety, highly-visual, time obsessed society.

Like two-Netherland beer-swigging peas in a pod, the hairy faced vocalist Bad Morsch and drummer Leon Caren had just as much difficulty creating from scratch controversial answers as discovering a sharp razor between them. Stumbling with endearing accents, the dark-wave duo attract all the mature crowd, from young “rocker” pensioners to the repressed air guitar enthusiastic getting his weekly jollies from their transformative act into a curiously English-accented show. This band is all over the shop, hailing from Amsterdam, but with their distinct French nametag, The Moi Non Plus, singing with a London-bred accent but interviewed with shy Netherland slurs. Anyone else enticed by their enthusiastic whoring of European culture?

Creation of The Moi Non Plus: Bored at spending their time stationary in a secluded caved life, the boys thought “Hey! Let’s organise a weekly night of poetry and film!” Not pushing each other’s button, the duo cheated on their poetic film dalliance by joining separate bands. In a tragicomedy type bloodbath, the bands “didn’t work out” and they reunited their passions to create The Moi Non Plus. Aw.

Song to Win Over an Audience: Eagerly telling us how “’I Lie’ would be perfect for an honest competition” The Moi Non Plus, declare how they “often thought about performing ‘I Lie’ as accapella, I (Leon) can do the beats, and Bas can do the “den enerrr” guitar.” So what if they would have to play a cover on demand? Out of sheer annoyance, Bas resorts to “That song by The Beach Boys ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ I have as my ringtone! “ Though Leo confesses its irritancy “we hear it all the time. We work in the same office and its keeps going, it’s crazy. They played it at The Lexington today and he kept picking up his phone!”

Secret Sixth Sense 1: A serial teleporting fiend, Leo recently discovered “I’ve been finding out that I can move from standing up to my knees really fast. I can stand on my stool and then jump to a specific position, like a cat – land on your feet.” The cat-like extraordinaire lends his skills to being very receptive, but also dallies in wonderment of the twelve other dimensions: “I’d quite like to check them out.” What about Bas you say? He’s um, got, some, serious badminton tricks...

Secret Sixth Sense 2: Leon beguiles us again with his Rain Man memory of his childhood, being 9 years old and some kid “who was very dishonest about a game of marbles; he lost and he took them all back”. Kids can be cruel, those nippers.

Failed Ambitions: The addicted-to-work duo have some corking career success to fall back on, with Bas founder of That Dam! Magazine while Leon Caren created the underground arts collective SUBBACULTCHA! Despite their selective touring schedule, the band shiver over their worst gig in Holland : “it was horrendous!  The girl doing production was on another planet, she was going on about us being too late and making us start. So we just had to play, it was live check not even sound check, and eventually we started, and our songs are kinda weird, so she didn’t know we started so she came on stage and was like “You gotta start man! It’s time it’s time!” and we were like in the middle of the song, that was pretty bad. There was no audience. Only one paying customer that ended up there”

The Moi Non Plus Fans: In the past the band warmed up to “these guys, old rockers going yeah “great show””. But this 2010, the band are now making music for the lay-dies recreating their saucy namesake reference to Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Je Taime Moi Non Plus.’ Mulling over their imminent dance record, Leo sighs: “Every time we say that people start to laugh...we’ve set this goal, we want to play songs that will make girls dance, with dub-tribal elements”. Expect weeping old male fans and perplexed girl-groupies stuck between head-rocking dance movements. 

The Moi Non Plus Experience: The Dutch duo are so hardcore live and in real life that they make the drug-fanatics look like buck-teethed children. When you manage to grasp their fleeting live performance, open your senses and you’ll reach that instinctive high Bas proudly boasted about when working “We have a natural, natural, cocaine habit, we don’t use cocaine, but feels like we use cocaine”. Gah, If only we could be so wild!

Words: Owen Wilson and Gemma Dempster

Photography: Burak Cingi (The Moi Non Plus)