Les Sav It

Perennial underground heroes renowned for their riotous live shows, Les Savy Fav’s latest might be their mainstream breakthrough. about time too, says Mischa Pearlman…

If there’s one fact about Les Savy Fav that people tend to know, it’s that their live shows are, well, pretty mental. And it’s true. The last time The Fly saw the Brooklyn band in concert, it was in an empty,  abandoned shopping mall at the end of this year’s South By Southwest. Tim Harrington, the band’s frontman, was surfing the packed crowd on a folded table, his sizeable frame held aloft by a score of arms beneath him as he ferociously barked and belted out his vocals. The time before that, at London’s Scala, he somehow ended up hanging off the stage right balcony by his feet, as those below looked up aghast, afraid he might slip and fall down onto them. There was an audible gasp when he very nearly did, but he lives to tell the tale. In any case, he wasn’t worried. “You know,” he chuckles, “there’s always so many people around you to land on! I really love playing small spaces and trying to be everywhere at once. Because, hopefully, it’s as liberating and exciting for our crowd as it is for me. After all the hard work we put into the band, we want to have a good time on stage. And for me to have a mic cable that’s so long I need a cab to get back to the venue after eight songs, I think that’s the coolest thing you can do!” Despite his energetic, aggressive, intimidating and reckless stage presence – and you’ve never truly been to a gig until a large, hairy, bearded, near-bald man in either a dress or a gimp mask has pinned you down on the stage and simulated fucking you from behind with an uncontrollable smile of delight on his lips) – Tim Harrington is incredibly sweet in conversation, full of a fierce intelligence, a caring thoughtfulness and a wry, twisted sense of humour.

“Are you on the loo?” he asks at the start of the interview. “It sounds like you might be on the loo.” When it’s explained to him that it’s just an echo exacerbated by the speaker phone, he sounds slightly disappointed. “I am actually on the loo,” he says. “It’s my throne. It helps me think. I conjure all kinds of magic here.” Did he write the new album – the band’s fifth, entitled ‘Root For Ruin’ – on the loo? “Some of it,” he laughs, “I wrote a lot of the saxophone parts on the loo.” Needless to say, there are no saxophone parts on the album. But ‘Root For Ruin’ does continue where last album, ‘Let’s Stay Friends’ left off. Even though that record was recorded with a multitude of other artists and this one was just Les Savy Fav – completed by Seth Jabour (guitar), Harrison Haynes (drums), Andrew Reuland (guitar) and Syd Butler (bass, and founder/owner of the band’s label, French Kiss Records) – there is a hint of the more accessible, less abrasive sound that permeated the previous record. Although it begins with the typically brash and uncompromising ‘Apetites’ – “Show us your teeth and show us your tits and show us the scars from the shit  that you did,” intones – there are also hints of a previously unseen musical  and emotional vulnerability, notably on ‘Let’s Get Out Of Here’. “Yeah,” he says. “I did try to pick it up at the end a little bit, but I think that’s a little bit true. I have this thing where I never write the way Iggy Pop would write where you repeat one word. I’m always adding five extra choruses and verses because I have so much I want to say and I want to fit it all in. But with that song, I was trying to do something different and more simple. There’s a fine line between being accessible and being obtuse. I could never write a ‘Ohh, baby, baby, baby’ song really, but at the same time, I wanted to avoid writing my lyrics as a wordy thesis. I wanted to just present myself and what I was feeling more simply and directly. But I was wary of also writing like Led Zeppelin, because their lyrics bore the crap out of me.”

With its Modest Mouse-esque melodies, ‘Let’s Get Out Of Here’ could well be the song that takes Les Savy Fav from the upper echelons of the indie world and plunges them, like one of their gigs, belly first into the arms of the mainstream. But if that happens, it’s only going to be on their own terms. Because, while they may have a few more ‘radio friendly’ tunes on ‘Root For Ruin’, they haven’t changed the way they operate at all. “There must be something in that,” ponders Harrington. “We definitely still indulge ourselves however we choose and I think that’s a good thing. I don’t know entirely how that informs what we do. We just want to make fun, awesome songs, and in my mind we’re still far away from the commercial world. But over the years it’s definitely got closer to us and I don’t really know why. The way I always look at it is that a lot of the people who interviewed us when we were starting out were at high school, and these same people are now professional writers who cover us. There must be something in that.”

‘Root For Ruin’ is released on Wichita on September 13th.