Life can conjure up funny parallels from time to time. While the Digital Economy Bill was being steamrollered through Parliament – the nail in the coffin for modernisation of the music industry – the Indelicates were pioneering a pay-what-you-like system with their second record, Songs for Swinging Lovers. ALEXANDER BRITTON spoke to ‘culturally dead hypocrite’ Simon Indelicate about piracy, situationism, Lady Gaga and everything between.
It is fairly widely held opinion that music needs to wake up, embrace the internet and view it as a source of good rather than evil. Three years ago, Radiohead tested the waters of the pay-what-you-like model with In Rainbows, and Brighton-based band The Indelicates decided to use a similar model for their latest album, Songs for Swinging Lovers. For a household name the risk was minimal, but for the lesser known – but equally talented – Indelicates, there was a reliance upon people throwing a few coins into the internet equivalent of a tip-jar.
Yet, Simon Indelicate believes the reduction in the cost of producing an album means pay-what-you-like makes sense. He explains: “Music has been transformed from a scarce to an abundant resource. Consequently, the actual market price of recorded music has shrunk to almost nothing.
“The only scarce resources that we control are the ephemeral notions of hype, personal connection, reputation, reliability and consumer goodwill, but these are valued differently by every customer.”
But what if the customer doesn’t truly value these abstract concepts? “People know that we need their money if we are to carry on. There is less revenue overall, but we are not paying money to parasites from the revenue, so we still end up doing better than when we were signed. As such, this system works,” Simon says.
“We’ve sold nearly five thousand downloads and made more, on average, than we would have from royalties. We’ve already spent a lot of it on making the third record – so everyone should be happy.”
This all sounds fairly idyllic, but surely there are certain problems about going it alone. As Simon explains, many venues are tied up by booking agencies, making a tour nigh on impossible. However, he says: “If you want us to play near your house, we will do our best – but there is nothing to stop you finding a neglected back room of a pub, promising the owner an increased bar take phoning us up and booking us yourself.
“If you’re DIY we will do it for travel costs. If you form a band and support us yourself we will do it for nothing. There’s no money left, there’s a (pretty much) Tory government, the record industry is in tatters, guitars are still affordable and releasing music (on corporaterecords.co.uk among others) is free. What the fuck are you waiting for?”
After their blistering debut album American Demo, which combined the barbed, the blunt and the beautiful to create one of the most stirring albums in 2008, the Indelicates decided to leave the shores of England and record the follow-up in Berlin. Despite the lack of a record label, the band felt the pressure was much higher when going it alone, “this is especially so when you are quite unreliable and you have to shout at yourself for slacking off to play Red Dead Redemption and stealing from the stationery cupboard.”
Many music writers have suggested that the extended stay in East Berlin has an influence upon the sound of the new album, especially in the haunting piano-driven track Roses, but Simon is quick to refute this: “I can’t really say that Berlin left its trace on the album because I’m, honestly, not that much of a cock.
“It’s a very exciting city and it’s interesting in a way that hardly any of Europe is and if I was, say, Damon Albarn I probably could make a case for a corner of its atmosphere having made its way onto the record. I won’t though, cause of the cock thing.” Fair enough.
It seems clear that the Indelicates want to break from the traditions of pop and give it a healthy dose of wit and intelligence that many believe it needs. With critics lauding their efforts as the “seeds of a smart pop revolution”, a sharp philosophical twinge is often apparent in their music as they condemn the passive fan and, arguably, slate the system in which they are trying to succeed in, a philosophy related strongly to Situationism.
But Simon suggests he may have grown out of this stream of counter-culture based thought. He says: “As time goes I dislike more and more the patronising attitude of Situationism to the class of people it dismisses as passive victims. While Situationists dressing up as Santa and handing out unpaid for gifts in a department store was very funny to me at 16, I now can’t help but think of it as just a bit mean to make children cry for having done nothing but fail to live up to the theories of cultural materialists.”
“That said, Debord, Vaneigem et al have their place in the canon of the counter-culture and as such directly or indirectly influence most of what comes out of it. There’s definitely a touch of it in We Hate The Kids…”
But the band don’t always set out to tackle such complex themes, as Simon admits. “Indie guitar rock is all very well, but making Lady Gaga style pop music is quite fun too.”
And yet, the undercurrent of Situationism in the Indelicates’ work sits in stark contrast to the constant leitmotif of unashamedly capitalist America. Is the repeated reference to the States born out of love, hatred or adoration? “Love. I thought we’d made that pretty clear? It’s like this, If it was 200BC I’d want to live in Rome. If it was 2110, I’d want to live in China. It is 2010 and I want to live in America because that is where shit is getting done,” Simon says.
“It’s flawed, often wrong, but – crucially – unfinished and with the potential to correct itself. There are still things left to do there. Europe feels like a petty museum about itself, its calcified class systems and its vulgar, chintzy high art.
“I’d take America any day.”
Songs for Swinging Lovers is out now from corporaterecords.co.uk.
By Alexander Britton
Tags: indelicates, interview
