On The Phone With Working Men's Club
Working Men’s Club are back. More intense and unapologetic than ever, releasing two singles at the beginning of the year: moody electro-pop banger ‘White Rooms and People’, followed by March’s in-your-face techno track ‘A.A.A.A.’ Due to current events, the band have pushed back the release of their self-titled debut album to October. We managed to cop a sneak preview of the record and chat with young and energetic frontman, Syd Minsky-Sargeant. The last time I spoke to Syd, we were stood in a painfully cold, pitch-black field in the middle of North Wales, so a telephone conversation was a welcomed second interaction…
You’re starting the tour with Noel Gallagher followed by a support slot with Confidence man. Given your style of music, and theirs, does it feel any different playing those two gigs, and to two different crowds?
Syd: We’ve never played with either of them before, but yeah I guess they are two very different crowds. It’s weird for us because they’re bigger venues, but then it definitely feels less intrusive playing to different audiences if that makes sense. So we’ll just see. It depends if they go ahead as well, I’m not really thinking about gigs at the moment because I just don’t know if they’re going to happen or not.
Did you always see the band taking a more electronic direction, or was it more of an instant moment? Do you think you’ve got more exploring to do or have you found your sound?
Syd: At the start of the band obviously we were more guitar based, we couldn’t really find a sound because there was this constant conflict of what we wanted to do. I was writing electronic music before ‘Teeth’. But when I wrote it and we was decided that it was going to be a single, I guess that was a marker in the fact that we had recorded and released dance music, but I wouldn’t say it was necessarily a marker in our sound. To answer the other question you asked - yeah, we are still developing our sound. Personally, anyway. Obviously the first record is done now, but when the second record is released, that will be very different again. I wouldn’t say that we are one thing. I’m 18, so there’s plenty more things for me to discover and to try and pursue as well, so I’d say it’s just about experimenting at the minute, which is what I’ve been doing for the past few years anyway really.
Well, as the songwriter I imagine you’ve been sitting on a few of these tracks for quite some time. How will it feel to finally be able to play the whole album live, and which song are you looking forward playing the most?
Syd: We started playing the full album recently on the last tour; other than a couple of songs which we probably won’t play. I wrote the album fairly closely in time to when we went to record it in the studio, so half of it was old songs and half was really recent songs. So I think, going back to your last question, it’s interesting how the album develops and reaches in to different sounds and genres. It keeps it interesting to play as well because, obviously we’ve played in a lot of different environments with different members, so it’s nice now. We’re less happy about the record and more happy that we’ve got a line-up that works. We can make the sound really work well with what we’ve got now and that is exciting me even more. The record works well live, which it may not have, so working that out and working out how to play it live was the best part.
I’ve listened to the album through, I think it’s great. Do you have it in the back of your mind that these are going to be played live whilst you’re recording and does that have an impact on your sound?
Syd: I write and record at the same time, when I’m at home. So really it’s more about making it sound as good as possible right there and then. The idea of playing it live is actually at the back of my head at that point, I’m not really thinking about it because, a lot of the stuff I record and produce at home, I don’t actually have the intention of playing it live. It’s more for it to just sound as good on a record as possible, so I think that’s half of the battle. Then when I take it to work with Ross in Sheffield we can make it in to something else after that. When it’s done though, that’s when I start thinking about playing it live. There’s been times in the band where we would go to the studio before not working it out live. It was just taking it from the bedroom and working out very quickly how to play it live, but I don’t think that works as well. I know that’s what a lot of people do, and we used to do that. You know, when you’ve got new music and you’re excited to play that music but you don’t necessarily have the option to record it first. It’s difficult. But I think doing it that way from now seems a lot more impactful when you go to play it live because it sounds fully formed do you know what I mean? And I think it’s better to play stuff when it’s fully formed rather than when it’s just half an idea.
The recording process, can you tell us a bit about that? You worked with Ross Orton, the producer. How influential has that been? And how influential have the other members been on the record?
Syd: To be honest, on the record it was just me and Ross recording, and Liam playing bass. The other band members weren’t on the record, apart from a few little bits. It was mainly Ross that influenced me in terms of another person. He works very closely on the drums, you know, that’s his thing. So it was making kind of shitty sample drums and then taking it and making them sound really big. It kind of blew my mind a bit, he was making drum sounds out of synthesisers and different things, so it made me think in different ways. I think he as a person is quite inspiring too. He doesn’t take shit, which will only make sense if you have met him, but you work very quick because you want to keep the vibe going, and if it slows down, everything slows down, the whole process slows down. So you’re trying to work proper rapid. Not in the sense of ‘track it once, that’s enough’, kind of thing. More just to maintain the flow of ideas. When we got to the studio with the demos, the songs were there, we just wanted to work on how everything sounded, which was really crucial and I think Ross really got that. The thing is, we’re mates. There was never this thought of ‘we’re working with this producer, what’s he going to think of this’, which other people might get. There was no social pressure, so that made things a lot of easier. It just flowed really well and we worked really quickly and we had a really good time making the record which was good. That’s why it worked so well.
You mention putting your mind to other things. What’s next for you guys?
Syd: I don’t know, we’ve all got other projects, so I think the next thing we will be working on is them. Then, making another record I guess. There’s a lot of songs in the bag that weren’t on this record, and then other songs that I’ve written post-recording. It’s funny really because it just depends on how all this Coronavirus thing pans out, I mean it could really fuck things up and push us back months.