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 “People like inadequacy because they don’t feel intimidated and I think we became something that people could identify with. A lot of the people that get into us are the ones that aren’t too cool for school. “
Sitting in a Soho coffee on a freezing, gloomy winter’s afternoon, Infadels mainman/ guitarist Matt maintains his East London electro-rock band remain underdogs despite being proud producers of their soon to be massive, hotly tipped trance/ rock anthem Can’t Get Enough.
“We are a band that you aren’t told to like,” he insists, “You don’t pick up the NME and read about them saying ‘check this band out’, even though it’s two years before we’ve come out. We’re just a band that have found our own little niche.”
The niche he’s referring to is the potentially highly lucrative one nestling somewhere between mainstream indie rock crossover success and serious clubland credibility with global reach (he’s recently taken up DJing) meaning rock stardom (or DJ fame) is surely within his grasp. Though as he’s quick to point out, The Infadels are far from an overnight sensation.
“Alex and Bnann and I were previously in a band together called Balboa and we spent three years trying to get it just right,” says Matt.
“We really tried to have a career, writing lots of songs, being really professional and attacking it all really seriously but we failed on all counts and made the most disastrously boring music ever known to man. Nobody ever heard it and nobody ever will. The last time we went into the studio as Bilbao I remember getting the tapes back, listening to it and thinking ‘What’s this got to do with me? Fuck this, this is rubbish! And smashing the CD up,” he laughs.
One of the reasons for his despair was the fashionista circles he found himself trapped in, around the unfriendlier elements of London’s cliques and wannabe elites.
“We were playing a lot of trendy east London parties, such as Electric Stew and the Great Eastern Hotel; that whole scene around Output Records. I actually played on a few records with Output, but that’s not talked about much and my name is not on any of the credits for some reason,” he continues.
“So we found ourselves in that scene and I started feeling very claustrophobic, having a bad time in life generally because I found myself mixed in with all this bullshit that I wasn’t interested in. I didn’t even like most of the music. I remember drinking too many free tequilas one night and destroying a roadwork fence constructed of about 35, ten foot tall steel poles, pushing every single on of them over which really upset this poor resident. It was Sunday night and he came running out screaming his head off and wanted to murder me, but fortunately I had someone with me and managed to diffuse the whole situation.
This was in 2002, just when the whole political situation had kicked off between the Middle East and the Western way of life and I suddenly realised what a kind of frail delicate situation life can be. The nineties to me had been a very hedonistic escapist time. I didn’t have a care in the world, everything was great, and I spent the whole time just escaping and having this wonderful time in this other world. Then suddenly it all came crashing down for everyone and people started to realise it’s all about the present and everything could change at any moment.”
Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff) How did the Infadels emerge from there?
Infadels: “At the time there was another member in the band with us who we felt was getting in our way a lot, so we said to him ‘this isn’t working, you do your thing, we’ll do ours’. We then reworked the best tune we’d got which was ‘Leave Your Body’, which I produced with the guys. I’d never really used a computer before, but I thought let’s see what happens. We cranked everything up, distorted it, and fed it out through amps, then banged it out on a twelve inch, and went off camping in Italy with the last money we had. Our attitude was ‘that’s that’. Soon afterwards we got a phone call saying that John Peel was playing it, so we came back and lied to everyone, saying we had loads of tunes, we were a great band with a great live show and that’s kind of how it was born. The new name Infadels suited us because we’d really lost our belief in ourselves and the safe world around us. We spelt it a bit wrong and it fitted.”
Skrufff: It sounds like you didn’t do much different from what were doing with Balboa?
Infadels: “There’s not much difference, that’s true in terms of the ideas. As people, we love the Stones and we love Kraftwerk but we were always very anti-retro, we don’t believe in trying to replicate that kind of music because it already exists and it’s perfect, and over time it’s got even more perfect. Bands like Gang Of Four stand out more than they did back then because the people around them have fallen away and just left them, but they were always doing what they wanted. We never wanted to be a retro band, we always wanted to be quite futurist.”
“Getting away from the nineties post modernism to something genuinely modernist is very difficult to do; going into the unknown is harder than going into things that are tried and tested methods and in a way, a lot of today’s music is perfect versions of past formulas. It’s quite easy to perfect that past formula because you see all the mistakes, but when you are trying to go forward, there’s no mistakes to lean from there’s not anything, you are just bumbling around in the dark. So I think our attitude has changed massively, from trying to get these perfect sounds and perfect sonics and getting it all to work, to just working with who we were and making a noise and accepting our inadequacies as programmers, producers, songwriters, performers, players.”
Skrufff: Did you really have a job at one stage cleaning the roofs at Heathrow Airport?
Infadels: “Yeah. That was a bit of a low ebb, to say the least.”
Skrufff: Did you go to university or study?
Infadels: “Yeah I did. I met Alex at university, we did a music degree which was a fucking waste of time. Basically it was an excuse to get six grand on loans and go clubbing. And that’s what we did. We see our sound now as being a product of going out for the last fifteen years and seeing everything first hand. We had no boundaries to where we went, from Ben Harper, to shamelessly buying a ticket for Counting Crows. And every Saturday night we would go to the free parties in Brixton down under the arches and we listen to drum & bass and acid techno. I also used to every club, from the End to Aphex Twin parties, from Megatripolis to Whirlygig. I was never in a scene as such, we just used to go round and love it all. Some things we didn’t like as much, the acid techno wasn’t quite our bag for instance.”
Skrufff: Was the plan to make a living as musicians at that stage?
Infadels: “Just to have a fucking great time. We had dreams. I grew up as a kid and Alex’s dad was in a famous rock band, Yes, so his dad was going to him ‘Don’t be in a band’ yet he was driving round in a limousine playing to 60 000 people. If you’re six years old, or seven or eight, you think this must be the best job in the world. My dad was a teacher, I never wanted to do that. I didn’t really have a plan. I knew somewhere along the line I wanted to make great records, great albums. I always felt that not doing music for me was a betrayal of who I was. I was determined to do it through thick or thin, whether people liked it or didn’t, money or no money. I was going to do it, and I was hugely anti-corporate and anti-capitalist, a typical student, really. Then I realised I’m not winning at all, I’m just going to end up being a very sad person, being very cross with the world. That’s not me at all.”
Skrufff: What happened with your stint in Japan before the Infadels?
Infadels: “I was yet to meet Bnann and I was in a band called Mighty Atom. We were signed in Japan and we sold 2000 records over there. I just got a Japanese contract and just signed it. Put four tracks together, sent it off, and the next thing was I got a royalty cheque and a note saying well done, you’ve just sold 2000 records, when’s the next one? This band was terrible, making awful trip-hop music so I was like ‘I’m not being in this band, it’s shit’ so I just left, which was probably a bit of a stupid idea. I went off to Thailand and the band then pretty much fell apart.”
Skrufff: What were you doing in Thailand?
Infadels: “Pissing around. Dancing on the beach. Having a good time.”
Skrufff: you recently licensed a track for a mobile phone advert, did you make an absolute fortune?
Infadels: “No, not at all. We got enough money to pay for Jagz (Kooner) to come and work with us. That’s where it all went.”
Skruff: So he produced the whole album?
Infadels: “He came in when we were 75% finished. I’m the main producer/music person in the band and Bnann’s more the songwriter. I was feeling very lost with the whole thing. I’d got it so far, and I had this intense vision, then I was like ‘Guys, I’m fucking struggling here, I don’t know how to get to the end’. We met Jagz and loved him to bits, he really liked us and loved the band. He came in and he’d made albums before and he took us home really. That’s where the money went. I would like to have said we did the whole thing ourselves – we did most of it ourselves but we did need someone.”
Skrufff: What was the problem with the electroclash story of you playing a particularly thankless gig in 2002, when you said: “The glazed eyes of the coked - up fashionista are massive{?}…”
Infadels: “Did I say that?”
Skrufff: I think it was your bass player?
Infadels: “That sounds like something Bnann would say….”
Skrufff: Why was that? You didn’t like the electroclash?
Infadels: “I’ve actually never slagged electroclash off, I’ve slagged the people that went to the gigs and the people that built it up to tear it down. To me, as a word, I think it’s great, because it’s like the clash, it’s like electro and that music is still happening today. Then people started slagging it off and I was like ‘Fair enough. I can see why people are slagging it off’, but there were great artists in that movement, such as Gonzalez. Gonzales’ first album actually if you listen to it, tells you how to be a great musician, in it, it actually tells you. It’s almost like a bible on how to make good music. You can listen to and say ‘now I know how to do it’. There’s Peaches who is a great artist and even Fischerspooner have done some great tracks. I don’t like all their stuff, but ‘Emerge is a fucking brilliant record. It’s as good a record as you could make. I don’t understand why all this gets slagged off.”
Infadels- Can’t Get Enough is out on January 23 on Wall Of Sound, followed by their debut album We Are Not The Infadels, the following weekk.
http://www.infadels.co.uk
Article by Jonty Skrufff
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