Description
A rumble on the horizon. Gritted teeth, nuclear fizz and fissured rock. A dab of pill dust from a linty pocket before it hits: the atom split, pool table overturned, pint glass smashed ? valley fever breaking with the clouds as the inertia of small town life is well and truly disrupted. Here to bust out of Doledrum, clad in a t-shirt that screams SOCIALISM and armed with drum machine, synth, pedal and icy stare are Working Men?s Club, and their self-titled debut album.
It?s hard to believe that the three fresh-faced music college kids who bounced out of nowhere and onto the 6 Music playlist with the sweet-but-potent, twangy guitar-led ?Bad Blood? (Melodic Records) in 2019 are the same band who clattered back there with maddening techno-cowbell- puncher ?Teeth? less than half a year later ? and that?s because for the most part, they?re not. Having signed to Heavenly and with the hype around them building, underlying tensions came to a boil a mere five days before the band?s all-important first London headline show, and wunderkind frontman Syd Minsky-Sargeant was left high and dry; guitarist Giulia Bonometti had decided to focus on her blossoming solo career, and drummer Jake Bogacki was against the new electronic direction Minsky-Sargeant saw Working Men?s Club taking. (?I guess WMC started off as a bit more guitar-based, tryna copy stuff in our own way, like the Velvets and stuff like that, but I didn?t want it to be that anymore. It became dancier and dancier as I tried to experiment?, he explains.) All that remained of the outfit was Minsky-Sargeant himself, recently recruited bassist Liam Ogburn, and ? given the band?s indebtment to wood panelled, community-run venues for an early leg-up ? a rather pertinent name. But with staunch determination burning in his belly, Minsky-Sargeant quickly assembled a lineup consisting of himself, Ogburn, and Mairead O?Connor (The Moonlandingz) and Rob Graham (Drenge, Baba Naga) ? both of whom he had met at the Sheffield studio of producer Ross Orton (The Fall, M.I.A., Arctic Monkeys) ? replaced the live drums with a drum machine, and rush-rehearsed the new setup before going ahead with the show. ?If it wasn?t for Sheffield then we probably wouldn?t have played that gig? he says. ?I was shitting myself, because I didn?t know what would work or not.? Luckily, something stuck: ?After about three gigs with that lineup it was already way better than what we?d had before.?
