Everything In Its Right Place

Profile: Everything Everything
Words: Harriet Gibsone

Everything Everything first rattled cages last year with debut single ‘Suffragettes Suffragettes’, an unusual love song based around the unforgettable, melancholic question, ‘Who’s going to sit on your face when I’m gone?’. Quite. Now, after keeping our attention with the riddling rambles of ‘Photoshop Handsome’, the Manchester quartet return with their most thrilling song yet, the R’n’B-enthused musical Frankenstein ‘MY KZ YR BF’. “Loads of it was based on real life,” frontman John admits to The Fly as we sit in their rehearsal space in Kings Cross. “I put in lines like ‘he was looking at me like “woah..!”’ because it’s totally ridiculous and I’d never say that! I listen to a lot of American R’n’B and hip-hop and there’s this ridiculous attention to detail in their songs. That’s something I’ve been amused by and fascinated by – the fact that they are saying ‘…and then I paged back’, it’s like – why are you telling me that you paged back? Surely this is about the relationship, not your phone,” he says sat in his surreally combined green nurses scrub top and jeans, “Imagine these people who are so obsessed with themselves and gadgetry – and imagine them in Afghanistan and they’re getting bombed to fuck all the time – imagine how much those things would all pale in
insignificance.” The band are certainly not afraid to dip into the more apocalyptic approaches to lyricism, dabbling in images of “Chasing homeless cheerleaders, through the sewers lit by burning polythene bags” and “Children climbing over fridges in a rush to see the death of the sun”, but their music remains unpretentious, comfortably citing Radiohead and The Beatles as their strongest influences instead of self-indulgent music student tosh like “fucking Satriani or Steve Vai”, as bassist Jeremy spits. Amidst the landscape of easily digested chart toppers, this ¬fiercely intelligent gaggle of musicians must be worried that their tongue in cheekness and bizarre tangents might put o  some listeners? “Well”, John stamps, “Those people can just fuck o  and listen to their shit music.” We salute you Everything Everything – genre-bending satirists and pop purists, the ideal cure for everything bland and unchallenging in 2009.

‘MY KZ, YR BF’ is out on Young & Lost Club on October 5th.