Meeting Wild Beasts

It’s freezing cold. There’s snow everywhere and the sky weighs a grey tonne. There are no
mountains, but the scene reminds me of arduous trips to somewhere hilly and damp with
the aim of “experiencing the Great Outdoors.” The snow’s decayed from fine goose down
to wet porridge, though there’s still something nice about it; maybe it’s the contrast from
the usual dull brown to a now-interesting shade of dull grey.

Fitting, then, that I’ve just got off the phone with Tom from Wild Beasts, last year’s winners
of the Boar’s Album of the Year, or rather “Wild-Beasts-From-Kendal-in-the-Lake-District”
as every media piece I can find seems to term them. While the band are confessedly glad
to be out of Kendal and living in London, place seems to be a very important element
of their writing. The “gravity” of the Lakes imbues their music with a certain melancholy,
though Tom, the bass player and co-singer, notes that they still feel like “country kids
traveling to the big city.”

It’s perhaps this sense of grounding, he says, that allows Wild Beasts to explore the music
they’re making and avoid the kind of London-centrism that affects many bands at this
stage of their careers. This tour kicked off in Birmingham and has taken in Manchester,
Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Cambridge and even my own beloved Belfast, showing that it’s still
very important to the band, even three albums in, to get out there to the people that listen
to their music, and appreciate them. This shouldn’t be seen as out of some dull sense of
responsibility, however, as Tom is careful to note that this is about dignifying their fans
with recognition – not merely a pioneering visit to divest them of their ticket fees or a self-
absorbed crusade for applause.

This connection with fans is part of what the band really appreciates about the whole
music game. Tom was amused to note that people as far away as Mexico understood
what a band from a small agricultural town in the north of England were writing about,
which I guess shows that the band is intimately aware that people are ultimately just
people, and the feeling of spaciousness in their background gives their music a quality
which transcends hometowns and national borders.

It is, however, no surprise that Wild Beasts have managed to make a connection with their
fans. Since the (at first unsuccessful) release of Limbo, Panto in 2008, and a (thankfully)
near-miss with a Mercury award for Two Dancers in 2009, the band hasn’t stopped. To say
this isn’t showing its strain would be untrue, with Tom commenting that, while they’re still
writing all the time and working on new material for the band, after the festival season this
summer they’re going to take some time to think. “We’ve done nothing else for five years
now, so it’ll be good to have some time doing something different,” he mused, though he
was quick to deny that Wild Beasts are going on hiatus; they’re just cooling off for a bit.

There’s no shortage of creativity still at Wild Beasts towers, with the band going to their
rehearsal space almost every day to “work on a sound, or a bit of a tune, or sometimes
that eureka moment,” though there’s a sense, and a positive one at that, that the band
want to explore what they can each produce outside the confines of being a successful
recording name.

Make sure, then, that you get down to the Copper Rooms on 11th March to see arguably
Britain’s best band, and take in their show before they return to the beautiful wilderness of
the Lake District tundra for hibernation – though just until the sun comes back.