Yes Men

The Bees return with their most sumptuous and kaleidoscopic songs to date. Harriet Gibsone speaks to the Isle Of Wight virtuosos about their new record.

Our music gets used in anything with a chicken in it, synchronisations, ads, movies and Come Dine With Me…” Aaron, one third of The Bees, says. “Which you can’t knock because the record industry is different now. It’s not all about making money from selling records. Gone are the days where you can buy a big fat mansion from the records.” It’s a refreshingly brutal honesty, but if, four albums in, you only know The Bees for their ad soundtracks then it’s time to invest in an album – and what better record to start with than their latest? ‘Every Step’s A Yes’ is a lush, psyched-out, sweeping miasma of sounds, and their most complete body of work to date. The Isle Of Wight trio (joined by a gaggle of long-term band mates for their live shows) are Paul Butler, Aaron Fletcher and Tim Parkin. Tonight, they’re set to play their first London show since the release of 2007’s ‘Octopus’ at Bush Hall. There’re no nerves, though – even the fact that Oasis are on the guestlist leaves them unfazed. “They’ve said lovely things about us,” Paul explains. “Noel helped us get our guitars back after they were stolen at a London gig, and we bumped into them after we did a gig at Manchester City Stadium and Liam came up and said how much he liked ‘Chicken Payback’ because his kids liked it. So yeah, it’s an amazing hook-up.”

Their catchier singalong moments may entertain Gobshite Gallagher but, beyond their ability to make overwhelmingly feel-good classics, there’s a mass of heavenly compositions beneath The Bees’ hat. Just take ‘Skill Of The Man’ or ‘Pressure Make Me Lazy’, songs from the new album that gleam with a vintage hue and kaleidoscopic beauty comparable to no other band at the moment, or the soaring, Bacharach-tinged ‘No More Excuses’. It’s been three years since they released an album but, whilst they admit there’s been some “nice down time”, they’ve not just been dosing under a haze of suspicious smelling smoke; lead vocalist Paul was on production duty for the forthcoming LP from the ever eccentric Devendra Banhart, as well as spending a lot of time making music in Peru. And then it was back to the drawing board, or perhaps the chopping board in this instance. “We all get together in the kitchen to play,” Aaron reveals. “The songs were written with a lot more life experience, we just hang out in the kitchen until we feel like going downstairs into the studio. A lot of it was double bass, which is a new instrument for us. And that’s made it onto almost every song on the record to make this whole acoustic, organic sound, really,” Tim adds. “We sound like one band,” Paul interjects, “but it would be the case, ‘cause we’re from the Isle Of Wight and there’s nothing going on there.”

When they first arrived, with debut ‘Sunshine Hit Me’ in 2002, they were significantly “uncatacorizable” with their genre-hopping and inconsistent influences. However, the times have changed since the days where MySpace was just a glimmer in Tom’s eye and the world was not yet the globalised cyberspace it is now. Do they feel like they might have more of a place in 2010? “Yeah, the internet’s opened up enormous record collections for people who, you know, don’t have the record. They’ve got an enormous, record catalogue of music, and we’ve had that for a long time but now loads and loads of people have got very diverse, interesting music, so I reckon it’s all playing into our hands,” Paul admits. “And everyone who reviewed us was like, we’re ‘folk’ and we’re ‘rootsy ska’, we’re ‘African whatever’ but, basically, we’re psychedelic. Full stop.”

‘Every Step’s A Yes’ is released on Fiction on October 11th.