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Don’t call them twee and don’t mention the chair; Slow Club are all grown up. ‘Me and You’, the song that so many people fell in love with, is noticeably absent from their debut album and their set lists too.
“We hate it,” said Rebecca. And Charles agrees: “it’s such an old song. It’s probably one of the first songs we wrote or played together, and it’s like, a lot has happened since then. We were both at school. I don’t know. People change, don’t they. I think our song writing’s got a lot better. I can’t imagine being in a band and getting a hit like that when you’re 16 or something and then having to play it forever.”
“Do you wanna be playing that in 12 years’ time?” Charles asks Rebecca, “Because it’d be awful!” Rebecca plays the drums onstage; she’s laid the chair to rest. She started playing it because “it was what was in the garage. The chair kind of sounded nice. It still does, but we’re kind of sick of the song that I played it on [Me and You]. It’s not really a big part of it anymore.”
When someone from the crowd shouts “where’s your chair?” at the gig that evening, she tells them she doesn’t play the chair anymore because everyone seems more bothered about that than their music, and on the surface it seems true.
Slow Club have been busy recently. This year they played SXSW,Glastonbury and toured with Jamie T a few months back amongst other shows. “We just had a right good time because every audience we thought ‘they’re not gonna like this’,” said Rebecca of the Jamie T stint, “but everyone responded really well. It was quite a short tour, but I got really ill because there was too much partying.”
The duo, which formed a few years ago whilst still in school, also played dates across America this year. “People don’t go to gigs over there to talk; they go to listen to music,” said Charles. “There’s a lot more places that are just music venues. The people thank you for going to their city and it’s really weird because you get people driving to LA from San Diego which is a four hour drive. It’s brilliant. It’s so cool to see all these people. We went to Canada and met my best friend’s brother who we’d never met before. He’d got all his Canadian friends and they were driving for like three hours. To them it was like just around the corner.”
With the topical debate about illegal downloading still raging on and battle lines being publicly drawn, I asked the band how they make enough money to live. Charles said people in America buy a lot more merchandise than the Brits. “Merch sales in America were what kept us eating,” he said.
One great thing to come from their tour in America, besides lunch money, was their cover of ‘The Killing Moon’ by Echo and the Bunnymen which is up on their MySpace. Charles said it happened spontaneously when they were visiting their friend Annie, because the Killing Moon was one song in her record collection that they all knew. “She had this big vibraphone, Becky had a keyboard and I was playing a glockenspiel and we did percussion, then we did vocals. It was so much fun doing that. We did it on a Mac book with a microphone like that,” says Charles as he points to my low quality Dictaphone, bought on offer from Argos. “It’s just really kinda lo-fi but it sounds really cool. We’re trying to get our album to sound like that,” he chuckles. “We honestly are!” insists Rebecca.
It’s such a stunning cover that it seems obvious that Slow Club would want to release it, or play it live. But Charles disagrees: “We haven’t done anything with it really. We kinda made a band that day called the Really Big Band.” Rebecca interrupts to declare “it’s a shit band name,” and demands, in the most cheeky and charming way, “I want a new band name for it!”
“We were like ‘yeah! Let’s just get a super band together,” continues Charles, “and that night Annie was DJing and she played it and one of her friends from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah wants to be in it. I think every time we go to New York we’re just gonna record with this band and eventually it’s gonna be this thing that never gets played live. It was really fun.”
Slow Club were also at Glastonbury this year, playing three gigs. “We played in Shangri-La at 1 am which was pretty painful,” quips Charles. “You were wasted!” teases Rebecca as Charles continues: “I’d been watching Neil Young and I was like ‘shit, we’re supposed to be playing in half an hour’ but I didn’t know where it [Shangri-La] was. I was just really drunk. I was kind of going to people ‘Shangri-La?’ and they’d kinda point and then I’d go ‘Shangri-La’ and they’d point again. I was kinda just bouncing off people. When I found it, it was so weird because I borrowed a jumper off someone and I was wearing someone’s hat and we were both wearing exactly the same outfit. We both had these kinda cream cricket shirts with caps. It was ‘hello, we’re Slooooww Club’.”
They’ve already recorded a Christmas EP and, in their words, are trying to sweet talk Moshi Moshi into re-releasing ‘Yeah So’ on vinyl. “I think we’re gonna make a second album early next year,” said Charles. “I’d like to be a bit bigger and play to bigger crowds, added Rebecca and then, with great emphasis, said, “I’d like to be called something other than twee.”
Charles thinks people who label them so narrowly haven’t seen them live. “We’d love to have albums that sound like cool and interesting, but to carry that off you have to have a thing about you, like Jeffrey Lewis who’s got this crazy voice. To carry that off you need something else and, I dunno, I just don’t think we’ve got that.”
Slow Club might not have Jeffrey Lewis’ sound, but as the night’s gig proved, they’ve got a passionate fan base, a stellar catalogue of stunning tunes and more than enough charm. Rebecca, in her typical self-deprecating manner, announces onstage she wishes she could be Swedish and 16 like their incredible support band First Aid Kit. One of the sisters shouts “I wish I could be like you”.
“You can be me,” retorts Rebecca, “you just have to drink too much white wine, live in Sheffield and make a lot of bad choices.”
