Lazily lumped in with the spurious 'New Acoustic Movement' as much as anything because of their Mancunian contemporaries Alfie and Badly Drawn Boy when they started out, I AM KLOOT have since proved themselves to be a tightly-knit musical trio of seriously impressive repute.
Their debut album "Natural History" was a fine statement of intent with Elbow's Guy Garvey at the controls, but it was with 2003's eponymous second album that Johnny Bramwell's boys started to really gain ground critically, going on to win this writer's Album Of The Year award on W&H into the bargain.
And if there's stil any justice at all, Kloot's new album "Gods & Monsters", will be the one that breaks through on a much larger commercial scale. It's a typically diverse and quirkily brilliant mixture of Johnny's dark and witty commentaries set to increasingly intuitive musical backdrops cooked up by rhythm section Peter Jobson and Andy Hargreaves, and if you hear a better album this year, this writer will baste his local telephone directory in butter sauce and eat it in one. There's confidence for you.
Anyway, regardless of such culinary conditions, it's all more than reason enough to get the lowdown from arguably the UK'S finest lyricist at this moment in time. W&H call Johhny Bramwell at home and finally run him down after a previous attempt failed while the band were queuing at the US Embassy for the visas required to play Texas's prestige South By South-West Festival. The lengths people go to avoid us, eh?
Johnny is in typically chatty and sardonic form when he takes our call and is only too happy to discuss the making of the new album - not to mention having a hearty laugh at some of your reviewer's theories en route. As always, it's a pleasure and a totally entertaining conversation to boot. Your correspondent gets off on the wrong foot, though, when he suggests the album's sound is rather harder than Kloot's previous work, with maybe more electric guitar than before.
"No, I don't think so, and there wasn't any conscious decision to change either," sas Johnny firmly.
"I'm still playing my acoustic through an amp like I've always done. And all the songs on the new album are all recorded from basic guitar, bass and drum tracks. It was deliberately quite loose, because with a number of the songs we hadn't fully rehearsed them when we went in."
"The thing is that our playing's actually got much better now," he continues.
"It's become really intuitive and maybe in that sense the songs sound more direct and sharper, but not harder. I mean, also I think it's true to say that it's less romantic sounding, certainly less romantic than the first album was. There's more prose and less poetry."
OK, but there's certainly more layers and certainly more keyboards than ever before on a Kloot album. I know with the last album you introduced Peter playing some piano and you've been playing a mean live version of (second album highlight) "Here For The World" with Peter at the ivories instead of his bass, but is this a significant development?
"Well, we got into that because the studio we used (Moolah Rouge in Stockport - ed) had all these mad instruments lying around and we had no idea how to play them," Johnny reveals, laughing.
"It's cool, because we just started messing around and getting these different sounds, so it became a very fresh approach. For instance that cheesy, hammer horror organ sound on the title track (as played by drummer Andy Hargreaves, fact fans) is from a Wurlitzer Fun Maker."
A what?
"Hur hur! Yeah, it's an old organ from an OAPS home," says Johnny, chuckling.
"It's a bit like the old bontempi organs everyone had round the house. It's got its' own cassette deck, so you have a tape to play along with and pre-set rhythms. What appealed to us was that it has all these sounds you just can't get anywhere these days...not even if you search around on the internet."
Will this alter the live approach? I remember you telling me previously you didn't want to add additional musicians outside the core trio of you live?
"That's still the case," Johnny replies definitely. "Peter will play bass and keyboards live on some songs, but it's integral to what we do just to have the dynamics of the three of us onstage. These songs are robust enough for us to make them work on stage, and we're not into exactly replicating songs live anyway. It's not our thing."
"Having said that," he continues, after a quick pause, "I'll probably be using more foot pedals onstage, which should be a laugh 'cos I'm really short-sighted. God knows if that'll work properly!"
Right. But let's get to the songs on the album itself. I may be barking mad with this theory, but what with the album's illustration of the dog and everything.....(deep breath) is the album anything to do with the old 'God is Dog' backwards theory?
"I love these ideas of yours Tim!" laughs Johnny.
"Actually, that is a good one, but no, really it's more about individuals turning their backs on religion, money, materialism and so on. The idea is that "Gods & Monsters" are all these things, and they're clogging up our lives. It's not really a thematic record as such, mind, but there are certainly a lot of songs about escaping or at least wanting to escape from something, like in the song "An Ordinary Girl", for example, although in that case the girl escapes by becoming a witch and disappearing off into the supernatural."
Well, it beats queuing for Ikea of a Sunday, certainly. But as ever your ability with observational lyrics is unsurpassed. I love the way you can paint vivid pictures with often the simplest of couplets, like on "An Ordinary Girl", where you sing: "She's mugging her lovers, she's bleeding the buggers." That's great. It's like a cross between Ray Davies and John Cooper Clarke...
"(Laughs) Well that's not a bad mix! Though I think perhaps I was hoping you'd say John Cooper Clarke and Harold Pinter! I dunno where it comes from really, because I've been singing all my life. Of the songs I write, I'd say on average I don't really think about 99% of it much at all....but the other 1% I think about too much maybe."
He pauses to consider this for a moment and then picks up the thread.
"I think most people don't seem to bother with lyrics at all. I mean, let's face it, the main thrust of hit records nowadays is either abut being shagged or about a bloke being pissed off because she's fucking off and leaving him. Very few people seem to go beyond that."
Sad, but unfortunately difficult to rebuke. Still, with I Am Kloot there's always lots to get your teeth into lyrically. Another one that really makes me laugh is "You're on your marks and off your face" from "The Stars Look Familiar." That's hilarious. You once told me you used snatches of conversation in your songs, but do you record such gems in a notebook when you hear them or whatever?
"No, no, it's more a case of waking up with a pocket full of beermats with ideas for stuff that people have said and I've noted in a stupor," replies Johnny, quite openly.
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"It's usually rubbish, of course, but the odd good one sticks. That line from "The Stars Look Familiar" is more me a having a sly dig at someone, though I'm not saying who! It's also about disappearing off on your holidays. Hey, I'll tell you what: I got some great lines I used on this LP from a toilet wall. Very poetic stuff, I can tell you. Dunno who wrote them, but if they detect which ones and try to sue me.....I'll deny everything, y'know!"
Haven't even spoken to you, mate. Your secret's safe with me. But let's get away from such potentially libellous whispers and talk about the song "Stray", which is the album's acoustic song along the lines of "No Fear Of Falling" from the first album and "Not A Reasonable Man" from "I Am Kloot." Is it a conscious thing to have 'the acoustic number' on each album?
"No, it's not deliberate," says Johnny, scotching another of my theories.
"It's more me deferring to Andy and Peter. If they feel something sounds strong enough on its' own then they don't want to pursue it because they feel it'll be a distraction. My own writing process is straighforward enough, but I tend to defer the arranging to them. It's great, a very creative process that way. Andy and Peter always seem to instinctively know when something sounds better without any embellishments."
Right. Meanwhile, another aspect of your work as a whole is that it's broadly 'rock' or 'pop' or however you want to simplify it, but you incorporate loads of other influences, like the jazzy time signatures on songs like "A Strange Arrangement Of Colour" and "Strange Without You" from the new album. Do your listening tastes inform this?
"Hmm, yeah, but not in the way you might imagine," says Johnny, a little obliquely.
"I mean, "Sunlight Hits The Sky" from "Natural History", "A Strange Arrangement Of Colour" from the second album and "Strange Without You" from the new one all have very jazzy rhythms...and also "Dead Men's Cigarettes" off the new record as well. But you may laugh when I tell you it was some songs off a Dead Kennedys EP that gave us the idea to use those sort of rhythms."
Yeah, what wasn't what I was expecting.
"Yeah, but they dipped into that kind of thing a number of times. Take "We've Got A Bigger Problem" now from the "In God We Trust" EP...."
The cocktail jazz rewrite of "California Uber Alles"?
"Absolutely," replies Johnny. "You see what I mean? But the name of a band can colour the way you think about a style, can't it? I mean, mention terms like jazz and people start thinking about Matt Bianco...."
Yeah. Or Jamie Cullum.
"Quite, " says Johnny. "Point proved to perfection."
Fair enough. So let's change the subject: tell me more about "Avenue Of Hope". It's a real showstopper, with that big, filmic feel that informed "Here For The World" on the last album. It's also quite possibly the finest thing you've yet recorded. It makes me think of old blues number "St.James Infirmary" a little in feel....
"Maybe I picked up on that,"says Johnny. "Pete's played me that, I think. Who does it?"
Oh, loads of people. I love The Triffids' version for one...
"Yeah, I think I might have heard that. But to be honest "Avenue Of Hope" came about as our take on the "Fistful Of Dollars" theme. It's the one song on the album that came out the way we'd exactly intended at its' inception. We're really proud of it."
So you should be, too. But what about arguably the album's darkest song: "Coincidence"? That's pretty heavy, isn't it?
"(quotes first line) "Love may have just come to bury me, but I'm not afraid of what I see"....yeah, well it IS pretty dark," Johnny admits.
"But at the same time the lyric and music works in a double-edged way. There's a feeling we all have when we're feeling defiant and we all say "I'm not afraid", which is what the lyric says on the surface, while the music is saying: well, you should be afraid. Broadly, it's about pushing on against fate and coincidence. It works well in the context of the album, though we deliberately didn't put it on last. It IS melodramatic. We do it live, we did it at Glastonbury and the line about "we are gathered here by coincidence" really suited the whole occasion."
I can imagine, but I also agree you were right not to place "Coincidence" at the very end. Instead, this honour - rightly, in my opinion - is bestowed upon "I Believe". For me, this is another of those truly great songs - along the line of "Proof" from the last album - which is sounds simple in execution, but just hits the spot perfectly. It's also very hopeful as a way to sign off, and opens with yet another great couplet: "I believe in the Hallelujah chorus of the shopping mall." I know you have to go now Johnny, but tell us a little about this first.
"Yeah, well I agree it's a really good song," says Johnny. "It's certainly pretty tongue-in-cheek. I'd love it if it got picked up by some evangelical radio station in the States or something like that, because it could be misinterpreted that way."
"Having said that, though" he says in conclusion, "It's not entirely cynical either. As soon as we recorded it, we just knew it would be the last song on the album. It sounds like the an ending somehow. Besides, we like the crescendo and the chaos in the arrangement as it concludes."
He pauses and laughs one more time:
"It's just like us to be attracted by something chaotic, isn't it?"
Maybe so Johnny. But then would I Am Kloot sound so wonderful if you weren't? I think that could just be a rhetorical question, somehow.
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