Family Issues

Nobody quite does bilious like The Chapman Family. But, as Camilla Pia find out in the shape of a brilliant new single, their bite certainly lives up to their bark…

When we last interviewed Kingsley Chapman (for a OnesToWatch feature back in May 2009, Fly fact fans) the singer spoke incredibly passionately about a ¬first album that would slice right through modern music and expose his contemporaries as talentless, vacuous fakers. “We started this band as a reaction against nice little indie pop songs about going down a disco, getting drunk and pulling a girl,” he seethed, amidst an onslaught of press-perfect soundbites and inspirational patter. The album, however, was promised by the start of this year. It’s November, and only now have we got a new single, ‘All Fall’, heralding the Teeside foursome’s return – at last – from the wilderness. It’s a punky, vicious track propelled by buzzing basslines and hurricane riffs with Kingsley screeching over the top “we all fall down, and then we hit the ground”, supremely con¬fident sonically yet hinting that things are perhaps not as alright as they seem. Then we read of “strained relationships”, “bouts of depression” and “near bankruptcy” in the accompanying press release and you’ve got to wonder, what on earth has been going on in camp Chapman? Should The Fly be worried? “We just populate the world with lies,” Kingsley chuckles.

The Chapman Family frontman has just finished a band practice when we call him at home in Teeside, and besides grappling with his girlfriend’s “horrible little attention seeking” dogs he actually appears to be in very good spirits. “The album is coming out in February,” he adds with a smile, “so a full year late. The truth is we are just very meticulous and really protective over everything we do, so we’ve been trying to make sure everything is right with the record. Plus it’s not like we’ve ever been fashionable or part of a scene so we weren’t in a huge rush to release something and jump on a bandwagon. We won’t be getting the banjos out and doing a Mumford or anything,” he laughs. Ah it’s good to have them back. No other guitar band over the last year has been able to talk the talk quite like Kingsley Chapman can. “Do PRs or journalists in London ever do any work?” – on Twitter, “an unfunny sexist lump of lard” – on Chris Moyles, and, “people have been led to believe that if they want to make it in the music industry they need to have no education and some sort of disturbed childhood” – on X Factor. Nothing new to us perhaps, but to hear a musician actually speak up about it is refreshing. And as we get onto his favourite subject to rail against, the stupidity of modern celebrity culture, Kingsley unsurprisingly really goes to town on it. “Watch Hollyoaks, buy clothes from Topshop, sing a nice song that will get your band on Match Of The Day, it’s like indie stars want to be TV presenters and TV presenters want to be pop stars,” he says incredulously. “The nonsense lure of celebrity shite. Matt Bellamy playing on a space ship, Katy Perry fannying around with bubbles on her tits next to Snoop Dogg on a cloud, that bint Pixie Lott changing her style every single second and not meaning anything to anyone apart from shifting units in various territories,” he continues his tirade. “These people don’t project the right image to me, there needs to be a shift change, a musical apocalypse.” He’s right of course, and while interviews with the band have always made for great reads the question remains, can The Chapman Family come up with the musical bite to match their bark?

Kingsley is, of course, all too aware of this, which is perhaps why they have spent the last year slogging away at creating their “small scale, low budget ‘Pet Sounds’”. “We know we need to be able to deliver musically,” he says firmly, “and now after sacrificing pretty much every aspect of our social lives we ¬finally feel confident that we have got something that both fulfills what we knew we could do and matches up to what we built it up to be.” “And it’s not just ten different versions of ‘Kids’,” he adds. “We’ve got an accordion on there, a glockenspiel and a seven minute track, three minutes of which is just noise… We just want to jolt people into making them realise they are actually alive,” he explains, “and to make them more socially aware. People are brainwashed, they would rather vote for some idiot on a TV programme than go out and protest about changes in law and policy that affect them. So if by us shouting a couple of slogans through an iPod makes kids sit up and go hang on something isn’t right here, then we’ll have done our job.”

‘All Fall’ is out now on Electric Toaster.