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 A
lot has happened since the last time UK Music spoke to London trio the Noisettes back in June.
They’ve been busy bees touring up and down the country and recently did the
Frog tour with the Holloways and tabloid favourite Pete Doherty and his band,
Babyshambles. Things did not go well on the Birmingham date of the tour which culminated
in Noisettes singer Shingai Shoniwa being rushed to hospital and guitarist Dan
Smith calling Doherty an egomaniac. But Dan is keen to play down any ill
feelings.
“It’s not really a big deal. What happened
was we were putting our gear up and Pete walked on stage and kind of put his
front out and waved to the crowd and everyone went mental. It didn’t bother us
that,” he explains, “but we were
playing halfway through our set and Shingai did a cartwheel, and when she
landed from it, her shoulder popped out of its socket. It was just painful for
her and we had to stop the set, get an ambulance backstage. We had to carry her up loads of steps to get
the hospital. They put her on morphine and that, and put her shoulder back in
place. It was a horrible night”.
They’re
currently touring with the mighty Muse, a band who have won plaudits and many
accolades for their live shows. And despite various hiccups, such as having to
end their set early because drummer Jamie Morrison fell ill things are running
as smoothly as they could do in the world of rock and roll.
“Muse are the masters of playing the arenas
and festivals, it’s definitely their thing.
We’ve watched them every night to see how they do it, and it’s a total
eye opener, they’re amazing. Playing to their crowd, you really have up your
game. Really, just play the best you can play and try and be as entertaining as
you can because most have come just to see Muse, they don’t give a toss about
the support acts, but it’s been good,” says Dan. ” The only bad one we had was Glasgow.
It wasn’t terrible, there weren’t any boos or anything, but every time we
finished a song, it was just quiet. I think Glasgow can be quite hard sometimes, but generally,
it’s been good, considering no one’s heard any of our music before”.
Their
debut album, What’s The Time Mr. Wolf, is due out January next year and over
the course of two years was recorded in various places, Croydon, Cornwall and LA.
“It basically took us a long time to find the
right way of working,” says Dan. “We
also needed to write some songs, because we came up with a load of stuff over
the two years that we’d been playing gigs and we’d been rehearsing but after a
while it looked like those songs were good for live performances, but some of
them weren’t actually good songs really. So we wrote a load more in that studio
in Croydon and we produced those ourselves”.
The
album was partly self produced following their recording sessions in America. As Dan explains, “We learnt a lot about what we wanted to get out of it. We learnt about
how to trim songs down, how you make things punchier, how you get these sounds
in the studio. Me and Jamie did a lot of that production stuff in particular, because
he’s always concerned about getting his drums sounding really good, so after we
did that for a bit we felt confident enough to just try it”.
Both
Shingai and Dan attended Brit
School, where other past
students include: Lily Allen, the Kooks, the Feeling and Imogen Heap.
“You could either get in if you were related
to a famous rock star or something, if you were minted and you paid a lot of
money, or if you just came from the area you had to have good qualifications,
you had to have decent GCSEs in music and art.
I had an A in music and A* in art, so that was how I got in,”
recalls Dan. “It was a mixture really. It
was mad because the school I came from was so f*cking different and the same
with Shingai’s school, if you were remotely different you‘d get a good time
there. Then when you get to Brit, everyone’s totally different, everyone’s a
unique character dressing up crazily and stuff like that”.
Their
debut album hasn’t even hit the stores yet, but they’re already eager to start
recording some new tunes, and their particularly excited about touring. As Dan
puts it, “Our album took two years so
we’ve got a lot of touring to do to catch up on the time that could have been
doing that”.
So
there’s definitely lots to look forward to in the future, but has being in a
rock and roll band been all it’s cracked up to be so far?
“Yeah it has been and stuff I could never
have imagined as well. I couldn’t imagined how hard you have to work. You think
everything happens by chance, like winning the golden ticket in Charlie And The
Chocolate Factory or something, but it’s not like that. You have to work really
hard,” reckons Dan. “And when you think you’ve worked the hardest
you’ve worked in your life, you’ve got to work even harder for longer. It’s
cool, it’s humbling. We all look at people who have made it like Madonna,
Michael Jackson or Elton John, you might think they’re the luckiest people, but
they really worked f*cking hard to get there and made big sacrifices in their
lives”.
Their single, Don’t Give Up is out
on 20th November.
For more info:
www.thenoisettes.com
Words: Helen Duong
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