Lords Of The Dance - Wild Beasts

Wild Beasts made gentle waves when they released their debut album ‘Limbo, Panto’ in 2008, but failed to gain mainstream appeal with the record. It wasn’t until the release of ‘Two Dancers’ last year that they stole the hearts of music critics and fans alike. It became one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2009 and deservedly thrust Wild Beasts into the spotlight.

Joking that it looks somewhat dubious to be leading a girl down a dingy side street in Portsmouth, Hayden and Ben from Wild Beasts show me to their tour bus. Sitting beneath the seedy LED lighting of their surprisingly plush bus, the singer and guitarist open up about their American tour, the popularity of their second album and what it’s like being signed to one of Britain’s most legendary labels.

Talking about the sold out shows of their first ever American tour, Hayden, the falsetto of the band, gushes about how well it went for them. “It was beyond our wildest expectations,” he says. “To go away from home and play to different people was a big watermark for us.”

“We hadn’t toured the first album out there so it was good to get that off our chests,” explains guitarist Ben. “People were really wanting to hear the old stuff, which was quite cool.”

When any band releases a follow-up album that is so different to their debut, and ultimately one with mass appeal, it makes me wonder whether the change is a natural evolution of their sound, or a more calculated decision to boost their popularity and sales.

As we discuss how the follow-up to ‘Limbo, Panto’ was not the album I expected from Wild Beasts, Hayden says the band don’t think it’s fair to be pigeon-holed after one release. “For us, it’s unusual that bands should be expected to define themselves entirely in the first album,” he says. “It’s sort of expected that the more rope you give people, the more they can sort of tug and the more they’ll want to deal with it.”

Ben describes ‘Limbo, Panto’ as “the hardcore Wild Beasts album”. Hayden says it helped the band create a blueprint for their sound. “It’s like the ten commandments,” explains Hayden. “You stick to them as best you can, but at the end of the day they’re way too heavy to practise.”

Hayden insists Wild Beasts’ change in sound is the organic result of the band exploring different musical styles. “I think it comes back to the first album,” he says. “We were so sure of what we didn’t want to be that we swiped away a huge amount of things that we desperately didn’t want to be... The more you do that, the more you find paths around it and ways of working with it. It was simply a case of musical progression”

He adds: “I think we’re blessed in the sense that when we all sit down together and play, we sound like us; we sound like Wild Beasts. That’s not ever really been an issue for us.”

The genial singer talks about how, because he was “terrified of London, terrified of what I thought it would do to me as a person, terrified of what it would do to use as creative people”, the band have remained decidedly insular. Hailing from Kendal in Cumbria, Wild Beasts are the first band to emerge from the town.

It raises the question of whether the absence of a musical legacy made it harder for the band to get heard in the days before their signing to Domino Records. Hayden believes the lack of a legacy has been a positive influence: “We’ve never had that sort of DNA of a city to have to answer to. It’s nice writing from scratch; our stories are made from scratch, which is an empowering feeling really. You feel like you can do what you want.”

As they prepare to kick off their UK tour, I ask whether there are any songs they love or hate to play live. “It’s not love or hate,” says Hayden. “The songs mean different things to you as time goes on. Sometimes they fall between the gaps and they don’t represent something that you feel any more, or feel at the time.”

“When you play live you kind of have to give them away,” says Ben. “You have to give them to people and you have to play them well.” As they both agree they would never refuse to play a song because they were bored of it, Hayden says: “I would hate to be the band who is selfish enough to deliberately take away what people want, because it’s for them. It’s not for us.”

So what has extensive touring, which they’ve “learnt to love”, taught the first band to emerge from Kendal? “I think this goes for gigs everywhere – people want something intimate and personal and something for them, for that night, for that moment. We felt that things can go wrong and things can morph and you can react to the situation.”

Wild Beasts are touring Europe this month before they embrace the festival season, playing the Great Escape, Liverpool Sound City, Stag and Dagger, Dot to Dot, Latitude, Lovebox, Green Man, Kendal Calling and Bestival this summer.