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Hot Puppies
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Article
written by Various Writers
Oct 19, 2006.
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The band formed in 2000 when the boys, who had previously been in the Soulhive Movement, were joined by the girls and became the Hot Puppies: Becky Newman (vocals), Beth Gibson (keyboards, vocals, theramin), Luke Taylor (guitar, vocals, songwriting), Ben Faircloth (bass) and Bert Wood (drums). They’re a young, grounded and excitable 5 piece who laugh easily and are a source of much unprintable but hilarious comment/ slander. They finally got round to releasing their first album, the excellent ‘Under A Crooked Moon’ this July on Fierce Panda but you should also get hold of the version of ‘Green Eyeliner’ on the Purr single as it rocks. Originally from Aberystwyth, they’re now based in Cardiff and are frequent visitors to London. They go out on a headline Club NME tour in November so see them if you can. Ged M and James A interviewed the band at Cargo in August 2006.
SXP: You’ve been around for 4 or 5 years. Was the Purr single your first?
Luke: That’s probably the first one I care to remember!
Bert: I think we were making records as soon as we started but they were home-made.
SXP: What happened to ‘All Washed Up’?
Luke: That was just a demo really.
SXP: And then you had ‘The Drowsing Nymph’ and ‘The Dawn of Man’, both on small labels.
Luke: It was a way to get something out really. They weren’t particularly good.
SXP: ‘The Drowsing Nymph’ was on the album as well as ‘Green Eyeliner’. Why re-record them?
Luke: The first version of ‘The Drowsing Nymph’ we released was fucking awful!
Beth: I think a song just develops over time and the old recordings didn’t reflect how we were playing them now - in any way!
Luke: With the album it was putting to bed everything up to that point. You’re documenting what you’ve done so you can do something new and we’ve got plenty of new stuff now which is exciting. But it would have been wrong to think that because a couple of people in Aberystwyth have already got these songs, we can’t possibly use them even though they’re good.
SXP: Have you got to the point where people are requesting individual songs?
Luke: Yeah, it happened last night. Someone said *adopts old lady voice* ‘Green Eyeliner’.
Becky: I think I might have shouted “cunts” at them! I felt guilty afterwards.
Luke: It’s quite good now. You see people at gigs singing along here and there. That’s different. That’s nice.
Beth: That first happened at the album launch. People were singing along to songs they shouldn’t know!
SXP: What do you put that down to: marketing? MySpace?
Luke: Just momentum really. Even when we first started there’s always been someone there who’s enjoyed it. It’s a combination of getting a few good bits of press here and there and people actually starting to get what sort of band we are, which seems to have been only the last couple of months really.
Becky: And we’ve got the album now, rather than just the singles so people get more of an idea.
SXP: There’s not really a duff track on there is there?
Luke: I don’t know. I think there is! *laughter*
SXP: It’s odd that there are lots of potential singles on there and you’ve gone back to re-releasing singles.
Luke: Well, that’s not up to us. We wouldn’t want to do that but it isn’t our choice.
SXP: Are you happy with the press you’re getting? You had that big feature in the Guardian.
Becky: Yeah, that was great. It was really nice talking to that [journalist Mat Snow].
Luke: We’ve had a few things in the Guardian and they’ve always been really good. You can’t be too into them or believe them or anything like that - obviously, that’s what everyone says. Considering we have zero budget for PR basically, it’s been great.
SXP: One of the comparisons that’s always made is with Pulp. Are you happy with that?
Luke: As happy as any other one really. [Mat Snow] said “Blondie”. I said we like Blondie but it’s the fact we have drums, keyboards, bass, guitar and the female singer that means you’re going to sound a bit like Blondie. If there’s someone we actually like it’s Pulp and Jarvis Cocker, as much for the lyrical content as the music. But that’s not saying we’re like Pulp.
Beth: That’s a nice comparison though.
Ben: The comparisons have got drastically better. We got anything: Elastica, No Doubt; we used to get No Doubt a lot!
SXP: One of the bands you remind me of is the Long Blondes: the interest in how you look, character-driven songs, songs that emphasise the feminine side, lust for the movies and a Fleetwood Mac dynamic – two couples within the band. Is it all coincidence?
Becky: I think it’s quite unintentional. I’ve not listened to them.
Luke: I saw them at Electric Gardens and it didn’t remind me of us. It’s not a comment on them, I just didn’t hear it at all. To me, some of their stuff sounded more directly like Pulp. If you have a female singer, sometimes you get lumped in easier because there are less female members of bands. No-one compares the Automatic to the Arctic Monkeys but that’s the same thing. I think we’re just out at the same time. Two years ago when we were getting going properly, everyone used to say “you remind us of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs”. No one says that now! I just think that was the big female-fronted band of the moment. Next year, I guarantee you, unless we’re the big fucking female-fronted band, it’ll be someone else. It’s just the way it goes.
SXP: Fair cop! I want to pursue the lyrics point at least. How do you tap into your feminine side for lyrics to be sung by Becky?
Luke: I’m actually a woman! If you write a story or a screenplay or something, unless you’re Quentin Tarantino, you’re going to have female characters in it. I’ve been around women. *laughter* You just change a couple of small details.
SXP: Were you out on a limb growing up in Aberystwyth if you were listening to Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave?
Luke: Less than you might think. The thing about Aberystwyth is that it’s the last stop on the train track, so that tends to draw in peculiar people!
Bert: Outcasts!
Luke: One thing that’s made our rise to the top of the charts – which we’re still on – longer is the fact that, when we started, a lot of people down here [London] would say: “this sound is going out so we’re going to change our sound”. Whereas we just didn’t think like that, which in the long run is a good thing but really slows you down.
Beth: It’s good because you’re really playing good music, not chasing trends.
Luke: In the short-term, if you’re doing a certain kind of music this week, you will get listened to but we were completely out of step with that, we had our own things we wanted to listen to.
SXP: You have theremin and marimba integral to your sound – especially the marimba on ‘The Bottled Ship Song’ - which marks you out from other bands. Have you always played such instruments or are they recent discoveries?
Beth: Yeah, we’re probably just getting a bit more confident about using different things now. On ‘The Bottled Ship Song’ that part was just on the piano but when we came to record it we said let’s try marimba and it sounded really good. Same with the strings really. It just adds something to the sound.
SXP: Sounds like the marimba remind you of the 50s, which takes us to the last track on the album, the cover of the Ink Spots’ ‘Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall’. What’s the fascination for 50s music?
Luke: That’s the next challenge for us. The last album is a lot to do with time and finance and getting everything we’ve done to that point out of the way. The next thing we’ve got to do is to make music that we would listen to completely and that for us is getting out a lot of the guitar and the rock sound – getting rid of that. It’s hard especially when you don’t have a lot of money to make an album; sometimes the ideas you get can’t be clear if you don’t have the time. You’ll get them half done so I think that’s what we’ve got to do next. There’s quite a lot of things battling for position in some of those songs.
SXP: Are we going to hear harmonies and barbershop singing?
Becky: Yeah! We want to do a lot more to concentrate on those things.
Luke: The songs are more orchestral – not in a Richard Ashcroft way, more in a fun way.
Beth: It’s already started with the last album, with all the strings, getting a bit more orchestrated. We can get that a lot better, now we’ve done it once.
Luke: But still in a danceable enjoyable way. Not ‘Bittersweet Symphony’!
SXP: In another interview, you talked about your look and how important it is not to look like all the other people who lived in Aberystwyth. You were slightly ruder than that! *laughter*
Bert: Something about “having two eyes is an advantage”!
Luke: It was in Disorder. I regretted saying it as soon as I said it!
SXP: Care to revoke it?
Luke: No I don’t. I probably meant it, I just regret saying it in public!
SXP: The element of theatricality comes out in the videos. ‘The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful’ is especially good. There’s a moment when you’re choreographed dancing together and it’s all of you. You expect that from a boy or girl band but not an indie band.
Ben: You look at me. I’m actually drastically out-of-sync because I’m in a bird costume. I didn’t do anything, I just went “squawk”!
Bert: You can see the appeal of being in one of those kinds of bands when we had a crack at it. It must be a hell of a good laugh!
SXP: How do you come up with the themes?
Luke: The guy who does the videos, he’s a really good friend of ours and he’s been on tour with us a couple of times so he’s got exactly the same points of reference, and I think it would be so difficult to find anyone else. He loves David Lynch and John Waters. For me, ‘The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful’ could be a clip from an early John Waters film. It looked like Pink Flamingos.
SXP: Have there been any surreal moments?
Luke: Surreal is when you go and do the Jonathan Ross show and Harry Shearer from the Simpsons is there. That’s a bit strange. You want to laugh when you see him because you remember Spinal Tap and think: that’s you?
SXP: Are you disappointed that Top of the Pops is no longer on TV?
Ben: We feel for Art Brut more than us, in all honesty. They were probably only about a single away from it!
Luke: We’d probably be disappointed if it was as good as it was in its heyday but last time I watched it was fucking awful! I remember being 15 when there was more going on and getting quite excited about Pulp or someone on it. It’s calling out for a proper balls-to-the-wall live music programme.
Bert: I saw the Tube on the telly and I got really excited but unfortunately it was a reality TV show about the tube!
SXP: Where do you see yourself in 6 months to a year?
Luke: Musically, I think we’ve got slightly more of people’s attention. It gives you the chance to reach out a bit more and try something new. A lot of people say: consolidate what you did on the first one but I say: no. Don’t completely rip up what you did before but just try and push it further.
SXP: Any songs that you really want to cover?
Luke: We really want to do a song from the Lost Boys soundtrack ‘Cry Little Sister’. And there’s a Danish glam rock band from the 70s called Catapult who have got a song called ‘Let Your Hair Down’ which is just the greatest glam rock sound. It’s absolutely outstandingly good.
SXP: You cover the Ink Spots’ song which was based on a poem by Longfellow. The song’s lyrics are pessimistic but the poem is very positive. Are you a glass-half-full or a glass-half-empty band?
Luke: Depends what day it is. The current album is probably glass-half-empty lyrically. The second album, the stuff we’re working on now, is glass-half-full, it’s glass brimming over. It’s harder to write well like that but we’ve cracked it, it’s going to be a lot less moany on the second album.
SXP: Thanks for that. Is there anything we’ve missed?
Becky: You didn’t ask us our favourite coloured eyeliner.
SXP: What’s your favourite coloured eyeliner?
Becky: Blue!
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