FEATURE: YOUTHMOVIES

Oxford’s Youthmovies are one of Britain’s most interesting and intelligent bands. You can glean this just by listening to their music – try either their stunning new album ‘Good Nature’ or, for something a little further along on the ‘out there’ radar, their superb collaborative EP with Adam Gnade, ‘Honey Slides’ – which, along with stuff being put out by the likes of Tellison, Dartz, Johnny Foreigner, I Was A Cub Scout and Pennines, is helping to reshape the music coming out of these shores into something both exciting and exasperating. This is mainly the case for one reason, especially where Youthmovies are concerned – there are no reigns, no barriers, no rules by which they feel they need to abide. Of course, at the same time, they’re not deliberately trying to make a point or statement by writing meandering, lengthy, improvisational pieces – they do it because that’s what comes naturally. It just feels right.

“I don’t think,” says singer and guitarist Andrew Mears about their debut album, ‘Good Nature’, “that there’s anything conceited about saying ‘This is where it came from’. It’s just what came out. Everything that came out is there. It was just a case of getting in a room and playing it out, really.”
Of course, there had been a lot of planning beforehand – they didn’t just make it up on the spot and start recording. Well, not entirely, anyway.

“We did of lot of tightening up before we went into the studio and we were pretty happy with how we wanted things to be. But there were a couple of tracks that we deliberately left unwritten before we went in. We had a sort of rough idea of what we were doing, but we deliberately didn’t write the middle of one of the songs because we knew we wanted to bring in some of the improvised stuff that we do at some live shows. So we didn’t bother writing it and just winged it in the studio. Thankfully it worked out, given that we were paying for the time!”