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One of the funniest stories in recent pop history was provided by Brakes frontman Eamon Hamilton. As keyboardist with arty rock provocateurs British Sea Power – they of the T S Eliot quotes and vintage military uniforms – Eamon would make regular expeditions to gather bits of woodland for the band’s stage show – which is rather an amusing action in itself. Whilst perched in a tree, and selecting which twigs to snaffle, Eamon managed the Frank Spencer-like feat of sawing through the branch on which he was balanced, which of course sent him swiftly plummeting to earth, and then rather less swiftly to the hospital.
Today, Eamon is suffering from nothing more threatening than a bout of sniffles (“I picked up a cold in Oslo – it’s not often you can say that is it?”) as he and the rest of Brakes prepare to open up for Editors as part of their current jaunt around the UK. It’s now been several months since Eamon flew the BSP nest to concentrate on Brakes, leaving behind him, one presumes, only some discarded WWI battle regalia and a teasing promise to return for BSP’s ‘headlining slot at Glastonbury 2007’. Since then, the focus has been less on Prufrock and foliage–fondling and more on being in Brighton’s answer to Velvet Revolver. Because of course, Brakes are a Supergroup. They are The Electric Soft Parade’s Tom and Alex White on guitar and drums respectively, and Tenderfoot’s Marc Beatty on bass, with Eamon as the Teutonic-voiced singer, balding guitar prince and polemicist-in-chief all at the same time. They’re the sound of Slash and co if they’d been raised on hearty sea air and a shared love of Electrelane, and crucially, if they weren’t rubbish.
It’s this last point – not being rubbish – where Brakes excel. Their distinctly not-rubbish album 'Give Blood' was released in July 2005 and since then, they’ve been rigorously touring the record, with only a couple of weeks in January . So, if things are going according to schedule, Brakes should be just about ready to start bemoaning life on tour, right? “I hate that!” says Eamon, before espousing some of the joys of playing live. “You’re playing in front of people every night, they’re paying to see you, and you’re helping them have a good time. It’s great.”
Eamon does concede, however, that there are difficulties inherent in this transitory existence: “I personally find it hard to write material when I’m on tour. ‘I woke up this morning feeling… sick’ You can’t really say something like that.” And as well as a dearth of lyrical inspiration, there’s the small matter of the to contend with. Our excited enquiries about one of Brakes’ tour buses – a kind of A-Team meets American Hot Rod affair, complete with flames on the front – are met with wry exasperation. “It was more of a van than a bus, and because it was small, you’d end up squashed next to the rest of the band. It might have looked cool, but on the inside it was living hell. Perhaps the flames were a signifier of this.”
As they’re still a relatively small touring act, Brakes’ approach to life on the road is a necessarily low-maintenance, self-reliant one, which can be equal parts alluring and impractical. “We had lots of long drives in Europe. We did 12 hours between Oslo and Copenhagen a couple of times. We’d get there five minutes before we were supposed to go on, we’d be carrying our own stuff, we’d set up and immediately go on.” Sounds romantic, we say. “Yeah, but when you’re involved in it, it’s a fricking nightmare.”
It’s the same combination of spontaneity and DIY, punk sensibilities that the band adopted to make Give Blood. Recorded in five days and mixed in a further two, the album was finished in the time it might take Chris Martin to set his piano to ‘angsty’ and start off a few Coldplay break-up rumours. The result is a dizzying rush of 16 rampant, restless, angry, vital songs which, you imagine, couldn’t have been made if the Brakes had used a more laboured recording process. Eamon admits that Brakes have “no plan” (apart from one rather Del Boy-esque intention: “It was my New Year’s resolution to become a millionaire. But we split everything four ways and then there’s the manager. So we have to make five million.”), and while this spontaneity works brilliantly on record, it can rather play havoc with the actual mechanics of laying down tracks. As the band discovered when, on one of their rare days off, they headed into the studio to record B-sides, only to realize that they didn’t have any. Nevertheless, Eamon is unfazed by the constraints that touring has placed on the band’s time, saying mischievously, “There’s five days between the Editors shows and SXSW, we’ll record an album then!”
At SXSW however, Brakes will have more to worry about than a few piffling B-sides, as they are due to go head to head with their almost-namesakes, The Brakes. Based in Philadelphia, The Brakes’ music ‘recreates the classic sounds of yesterday’ according to their website; according to Eamon, this American Stereophonics are trying to muscle in on our own Brakes’ success. “They tried to sue us!” he says indignantly of the bands’ tussle over the rights to their name. “They’re playing at exactly the same time as us on our biggest night at SXSW. I’d love to have a fist fight with them.”
So, mock threats of violence aside, we just have time for Eamon to sing a few bars of The Band’s ‘Get Up Jake’ – which he says he hopes to cover – and to discuss whether he and Brakes will be abstaining from anything this Lent (“perhaps we’ll give up our disbelief in God”), and then he’s off. Witty and unique, Brakes are one of Britain’s most underrated bands. Come on, let’s help them make that five million.
