Kagoule: That was me trying to not write a song

Image: Kagoule 

Guitarist and lead vocalist Cai answers the phone on a Friday afternoon and self declares he's hungover, "I had an album launch last night at Rough Trade with a free bar."  

He then adds, "There was a 25 day old baby there, the guy brought him without any ear filters. We were like, what the fuck are you doing man? It was a great night."

Meet Kagoule.

It's not often a band barely beyond their school years can lay claim to a Rough Trade launching of their debut LP, but when you're piecing together dynamic alt-rock, reminiscent of the nineties era when bands like Dinosaur Jr. and The Smashing Pumpkins where stomping the yard, it's easy to see why.

Oh, and they're also signed to Earache Records, you know that fucking giant pioneering metal label with offices rooted in New York?  

Explaining to Cai that we've been hammering our promo copy of Urth in the office, after catching the trio at The Mad Ferret in Preston earlier on in the summer, he makes a plea to venue, "Our drum stool is still in Preston, tell them to give us it back."

We're with Cai on this one, so yeah give them it back, because respectively they'll be ripping up the festival stage next summer and they'll probably need a drum stool.

Playing out like a grainy montage of one of those 8mm films, each song on the album is intricately structured and sewn with lo-fi grungey textures to separate them from the mound of DIY bands trying to achieve a similar aesthetic.

Lyrically unhinged, their music is only to be understood by those that exist in Kagoule's outlandish world, though with Kagoule it's best to let your mind wander than to try and understand, especially when their music captures the essence of an era that gave us so many formidable institutions. 

Cai makes it apparent that all those comparisons came when they started making music, and only when listening to the bands they were being compared to, did he acknowledge the similarities.

After all the band started recording five years ago, where you listening to Fugazi's 13 songs on the bus to school? Probably not. 

You guys all went to school together, has it been music from the get-go without thought about an alternative? 

I don't know man, even now. It's like am I definitely doing this? It's only recently in the last few months where it's been like this is what I want to do.

But back then it was just something to do, we liked the same kind of music and played covers. At no point then it was like lets start a band now, called it this and make some of our own songs. 

How was school life, was it just you three jamming and heading to gigs? 

I was into things like thrash metal and grindcore, Scandinavian rock and then Lawrence kind of introduced me to lighter music, you know the indie stuff?

I think that's when I started to change my tastes. And then we'd jam, we'd do stuff like Arctic Monkeys and whatever was in NME at the time. And then Lucy had really cool shoes and awesome hair so we gave her a bass guitar. 

Your sound appears to be influenced from indie music resonating during the nineties. Is that the kind of music you were all listening to and have your listening habits changed at all since? 

It's not really changed, the music I used to listen to I wouldn't say I disliked now it's just grown a lot. I've been introduced to a lot of amazing things in the past few years.

I really liked 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' by Donovan last night. I've always loved folk and that kind of thing.

I didn't expect you to say that.

That's like the one genre: I had my metal phase, then I had my hip hop thing and that, but folk has always been there alongside that.

Is it coincidence that you're being compared to all these nineties indie bands, or was it a conscious decision to emulate that era? 

It's coincidence, then we were told in reviews and things, you sound like this person and this person, you know Smashing Pumpkins and things like that. When we checked them out, we were like, "fucking hell this is wicked."

Now I spend myself listening to Slint, loads of nineties alt-music and it massively influences what we want to do. But at no point did we say, "we want to sound like this", although we do really love that kind of thing. 

You wrote Made Of Concrete five years ago, what elements of your sound have you jigged around with since then? 

When Lucy joined we only had one song called 'Monarchy', that was the second song I'd wrote. I did write something really terrible, like oh god an embarrassing 'my first song' kind of thing.

So we had that, I'd never wrote a song before 'Monarchy' really, [Kagoule] it's the first band I've ever been in and the only band i've ever been in, and then I bought a delay peddle. I played a riff to my step dad, I was like, "Oh hey check this peddle out" and he was like "that riff you're playing is really good", and that became 'Made Of Concrete'.

We definitely found not like a style, but guitar playing wise, I'm learning what I want to do with with it. Apart from that it's just like it has got more bendy and hectic I guess. 

Talk us through some of the album, there's some interesting themes to your writing going on - Open Mouth is always one that intrigues me? 

All the songs I write have an initial meaning to me and they only make sense to me. So with the songs i'll make it all like metaphorical and use imagery and things like that, so other people can actually get it and it's not too personal.

'Open Mouth' was more like I wanted to kind of do a spoken word kind of thing, although it gets sung towards the end. It has not got a chorus, you know here's a speech and then an intimate guitar bit, that was me trying to not write a song. 

Does the concept of the lyrics come before the music or vice versa? 

I think they come separately to be honest, the music isn't inspired by the lyrics and the lyrics aren't inspired by the music. I really like making guitar riffs and I really like writing separately, but I'll start with a melody on guitar and it gives me something to fit the words too. 

How do you guys come to write a song?

I could never play drums like Lawrence can, no matter what, I can't play drums at all. I'm trying to beatbox a riff and he's like "what the hell are you talking about Cai?" He just does thing, "I'll just leave it to you, you're really good man, do what you want."

I bring in a riff, we'll jam on that for a bit, Lawrence always comes up with something we're into. I don't think we've ever had to say "don't do that" to him. He kind of adds a lot of dynamic to the songs, a lot of hooks in the song are in the drums.

Lucy is so good at quality control, you can write a riff and in your head it's the best thing ever, but she's like that's a fucking Foo Fighters riff, and you check it out and it's like oh damn it is. Without her there'd be so much crap in the music. 

Is it true that Lucy had never picked up a bass guitar before? 

Before it was Kagoule, me and Lawrence played music together and there was nothing to it. We knew Lucy was a character and we were drawn to her and we gave her a bass guitar and she played 'Crying Lightning'. And we were like, "Yeah you can definitely play that, you can play the four notes that we're writing."

I gave her a bass guitar for the first time, she'd never held a guitar before, and she could play it better than a lot of people who are just picking something up.

It's not like we handed it to her and it was like slap bass and she was playing jazz runs and stuff, but yeah she could fucking do a good strumming and that's what we needed.

Lawrence draws all of your band artwork right, is he always drawing weird shit? 

Oh my god man I can't even fucking get into it, it's such a beautiful way to start drawing. He's definitely not drawing still lifes and flowers and all that, he came from the other side. He'd just like doodle in his maths book and yeah he has no intention to be an artist or anything; he never took art or anything, he just like drew in his book and stuff.

He does the pen on paper stuff and I just decided I wanted it to be themed with all the images and logos and stuff. I wanted everything to be a different shade of bruise colour and then I ended up with yellow which is kind of like skin in a way, but I really wanted a yellow album. 

You've got some US shows coming up, how did that come about? 

I just really wanted to go there, Earache's offices are in NY as well and we're going to be playing Rough Trade in NY. We've got Rough Trade East in September, and then we're over there too. We're doing Europe after America then UK later in the year. A few months ago, I didn't even think i'd be doing anything like i'm doing now.

Thanks Cai

Kagoule's debut album Urth is released Friday 21st August via Earache Records.