More about: Shame

It’s typical. You wait a lifetime for a year off – and then two come along at once.

Or at least they did for Shame. The South London five-piece had flogged themselves half to death touring what felt like the whole world several times over in support of their debut album Songs of Praise. Interviews at the time – we’re thinking the last ever print edition of a formerly famous new music inky in particular – captured the band’s state of near collapse, frazzled beyond all existence.

Come the start of 2019, they parted ways - not as a band but as individuals, to replenish themselves in body and soul alike. Charlie Steen, their bleach haired singer and guitarist Sean Coyle-Smith visited Cuba, an experience that Steen describes as  “the best holiday I’ve ever been on, and I think Sean might say the same.” The band’s bassist Josh Finerty headed east to Berlin and the other two members – drummer Charlie Forbes and guitarist Eddie Green – chilled in London.

But in February 2019, when they reassembled in the capital and work started in earnest on what would become Drunk Tank Pink, album number two, nothing much happened. They were floating round South London, rehearsing and writing new songs – or attempting to, according to singer Charlie and bassist Josh, who joined us from their respective abodes on separate Zoom streams to tell all. In truth, nothing of any worth was emerging from their increasing frantic and frustrated efforts.

“We had this quiet period and then it was weird trying to do it again,” recalls Charlie. “It took us a little while to find a practise space that we liked and hadn’t closed down. We used to write in the Queen’s Head in Brixton [a notorious party spot and onetime home to Fat White Family] and the Drop Out Studios in Camberwell. When we came back both of those had closed down. So we were chasing around for a little while.”

There were a few - but only a few – fragments of songs already there, mainly riffs or sketchy ideas on voice memos on mobile phones. “The first track we wrote after Songs of Praise was ‘Human For A Minute’, but that that changed in the studio from how we used to play it live. I remember Sean coming up with the riff for ‘Water In The Well’ when we were in Santa Cruz in America we were doing a Coachella run. That was 2019."  

Josh adds: “I remember with ‘6/1’ we had as a voice note but that was one wasn't even 2019 it was from pretty early 2018 even. We were sitting on that for ages.”

In the end, it was another trip out of the claustrophobic environs of London that would break the impasse. The parents of a friend of the band (nickname Makeness, real name Kyle) had a farm in the highlands of Scotland and had converted a room into a practice space for bands there. The band only spent a week there knocking ideas into shape and forming new concepts, but it was, as Charlie says, a formative moment in shaping the album.

“It was more like the catalyst for the writing really,” he continues, “We'd been at a semi loose end in London trying to come up with stuff but that’s where we seemed to get more in the flow of it.”

Quite a culture shock – or at least a temperature shock – after the sun and sea of Cuba we suggest.

Not one that Charlie was bothered about though. “Scotland is one of my favourite places in the world. We got to be in the highlands, with nobody else around us, looking out on some of that stuff, the hills and the landscape, is insane, and walking up on the hills and stuff.”

Can he detect its influence now he listens back to Drunk Tank Pink?   

“Lyrically, definitely.” He says, “‘Snow Day’ is quite literally about going up that hill and obviously 'Acid Dad' and ‘Water In The Well’ too. Kyle’s dad was Acid Dad [mentioned in the song ‘Water In The Well’], that’s what we called him. But I think there is something in the music as well.”

The result is an album that contains much of the bursting, righteous energy of the first album but manifests itself in a more focused, more philosophical and – even though the word seems odd to apply to people still in their early 20s – a more mature way than before. Take their current single ‘Nigel Hitter’ and its surreal black and white video taken from real footage of children being effectively programmed from birth in a 50s American hospital.  

Or even the album’s title, which refers to a very specific shade of pink deliberately designed to calm down the inhabitants of any room painted with it, a state of being that, by extrapolation, the whole of modern consumer culture at large is attempting to pull off. Like the music itself too, more controlled and yet more able to burst forth at the required moment, moving away from raw punk to the more mannered weirdpop of early Talking Heads, it’s a clear step up, thematically and conceptually more bold and ambitious than before. 

With the album finally finished and set to drop early in 2020, the band assembled just before lockdown to make the video for ‘Water In The Well’ in Brockwell Park, Brixton. It rained non-stop. “I remember hoping it would get sunny half way through the day,” says Josh, “so that those chopping and changing shots, the yin and yang shots, would be sunny and rainy. But no, it was just rainy.”

The video, which also sees the five piece crammed with minimum social distance into a tiny car and larking around the park and adjacent estate, now looks like a weird time capsule from the time just before lockdown.

With the band now fully refreshed and the LP primed for its assault on the charts, it was society’s turn to take a break, and for the remainder of 2020 they were kept in a state of hiatus. They held onto the album to see what was coming next. They managed only one live gig - a socially distanced benefit for their longtime rehearsal space Brixton’s Windmill - and the third lockdown saw off any chances of fulfilling the UK tour they’d booked partly out of desperation to play, and partly out of concern for ailing venues across the country that had played a part in their rise to fame.

The slowdown has, at least, helped them get their ducks in a row with videos and artwork. “It’s something that in the past was always done at the last minute,” Charlie says, ”in the van on the way somewhere or in a dressing room. We’ve really been able to work on getting the same aesthetic across the board.”

But at the same time, they’ve definitely come full circle, and the same band that at the end of 2018 had toured themselves half to death are now gagging for a gig or 100. “I’d like to play a week long residency at the Windmill,” declares Charlie as proceedings draw to a close. You never know, it might even happen – one day, anyway….

Drunk Tank Pink arrives 15 January via Dead Oceans. 

More about: Shame