I Should Coco

ARCHIE BRONSON OUTFIT
Words: Matt Glass

It’s been four years since Archie Bronson Outfit made ears ring with their bluesy howls, but new album ‘Coconut’ sees their primal roar refined, if no less raucous…

We kinda got known when we started out for that illuminated plastic goose. It was a talking point, but somebody nicked it. Somebody came to our gig and walked off with a huge plastic goose! It’s cool though, we were thinking of dropping it anyway – we’re not much of a gimmick band, it doesn’t suit us.” It’s nearly four years since Archie Bronson Outfit’s scuzz-blues blasts were last heard and it’s not only the goose-shaped hole onstage that marks them out as a different beast to the one that enjoyed the whirlwind success of ‘Derdang Derdang’. Since then, drummer and lyricist Mark Cleveland has shifted his drumkit from the spare room to make way for a baby, and two thirds of the band used their sabbatical to enter wedded life. But – as The Fly learnt at an ear-piercing distortion display at a sold-out show at London’s Lexington last month – marital bliss hasn’t quelled the three-piece’s lust for making the kind of ballsout riff-heavy tracks that thrust them into public consciousness. “We’ve still been playing regularly,” says frontman Sam Windett. “Mark and I went off and did stuff with [side project] The Pyramids and we’ve still been rehearsing together all the time. “We didn’t plan for it to take this long, but we didn’t feel rushed to push another album out. We felt like we had to take a step back after the madness around Derdang – especially in London. It’s good to give things a break and have people asking ‘what happened to Archie Bronson Outfit? What are they up to now?’”
The answer, of course, is neatly summed up on the band’s third album, ‘Coconut’ – thundering slide guitars rammed through distortion pedals and growling bass lines layered over urgently trippy drum beats. It’s encapsulated perfectly on album opener ‘Magnetic Warrior’, where Sam’s muddy guitar sleazes over a tribal cacophony of drums, whistles, bongos and any number of other things you can thwack with mallets. A pained wolf-howl reverberates around the room before Sam’s affected screams of “I think I’m ready for more/It’s just a trick of the light.” It’s raw and intense, but with a light-hearted edge. Quite frankly, it’s confusing – but in a we-can’t-stoplistening- or-we-might-spontaneously-combust kind of way. “We made this album in a very different way – certainly in production terms,” says Sam. “The way we write hasn’t changed – we get together in the studio and write as a band, going through piles of cassette tapes of ideas and sections we’ve come up with. “But [producer] Tim Goldsworthy brought a different vibe to the album. He helped bring that out of us, and lots of the drum parts we play now are layered and use a lot more percussion. ‘Coconut’ is Archie Bronson Outfit taken to extremes – it’s dancier than before, poppier than before – but still recognizably us. It’s more processed and produced, and it’s much tighter than anything we’ve done before. It’s been clipped, but there’s still an edginess about it in a trashy, thrashy way. Lots of songs were taken in as sketches and ideas – we’d play Tim the essence of the song and he’d mess around with it, loop things and change the direction we were going in. It was really interesting. Everything on this album is a lot more abstract – the lyrics are less about one direct thing and more about cryptic ideas – things cut up from various other songs.” But creating a wall of sound in the studio might be an easier task that recreating the aural onslaught onstage – live shows are, after all, where the three-piece first made waves before being spotted playing at their local pub, The Cat’s Back in Putney, by Domino Records boss Laurence Bell. “We wanted to try and replicate the album live,” says Sam. “and that meant getting more people in to play with us. So we’ve got Christian playing keyboards, Duke Garwood doing all kinds of stuff for us and Mark’s wife Viva [of Gideon & The Shark fame] is coming with us whenever she can. “We’re looking forward to getting out on tour again – especially in Europe. It’s more of an adventure out there, isn’t it? We’re going to hit these tour dates hard in short, sharp bursts.” Archie Bronson Outfit, coming to a town near you. Plastic goose not necessarily included.

‘Coconut’ is released on Domino on March 1st.