Indelicates - Songs For Swinging Listeners

When Simon Met Julia…

A roughly romantic band like the Indelicates could only have been born for reasons of the heart. Julia Clark-Lowes and Simon Clayton met at a poetry contest in Brighton, which the latter won. It was 2005, and that adventure, along with their many shared interests, bonded them for good. Her choice seemed like an incredible gamble: a passionate photographer, documentary maker, but above all singer and musician, she left the girl group she had helped found, The Pipettes, just one step away from their debut record and the huge commercial success that would follow. Her intention was to devote herself fully to a new and more intriguing project alongside the partner she had just met along the way, a figure already very active in the local arts scene as an author of musicals and Brecht-flavoured cabaret. With hindsight, at least for future listeners, it's safe to say it wasn't the wrong choice. Taking on the fictitious surname Indelicate, Julia and Simon set to work tirelessly to find the right stylistic common ground between their two personalities, discovering fertile territory for their passion for music in folk protest songs, but also in twee leanings and a love for a more politically engaged strain of new wave. The result of this turbulent, embryonic phase for the Indelicates was a handful of self-recorded demos, later made available to fans as a free download on their website.

The experience wouldn't have gone beyond this first scrappy adventure if Simon and Julia hadn't had, on their side, that innate talent for writing intelligent songs and then performing them with just the right attitude. Beyond the still-amateurish execution, they already had several very interesting arrows in their quiver: an anthem that arrived well ahead of its time, penned in a punk-pop key for these years of general collapse and dreams shattered without warning ("The Recession Song"); a couple of lethal jabs at the lying demagoguery of the Blair administration during the Iraq war ("The British Left In Wartime", "The Last Bombed City"); a splendid metaphor for the loss of innocence in music, with Bob Dylan transfigured into the guise of a Peter Pan who has definitively denied himself to his young admirers ("The Sequel To Peter Pan And Wendy").

With Godless America

But there was already much more than that. An awareness of the underlying lie behind today's sterile "indie" label, a genre that likes to present itself as removed from the market logic of commercial pop but which actually works the exact same way, just with slightly more refined semantic sweeteners, effectively condemning anyone who plays along with it (themselves as artists included) to a compromise with no real hope. And, following this line of reasoning, a wide-ranging bitterness aimed at every player in the circus of the record industry, starting with the younger generations stripped of their natural role as listeners with a critical conscience of their own, destined instead to become passive, bored, soulless consumers inside a stale and perverse machine. That's the sense behind viciously barbed songs like "The Last Significant Statement To Be Made in Rock'n'roll", "Fun is for the Feeble Minded" and "We Hate the Kids", among the most sincere and least banal things the Indelicates have ever written. No better treatment is reserved for the creatives, on a stage where there's apparently nothing left to invent ("New Art For The People"), nor for the puppet-masters of showbiz, peddlers of operetta-style rebellion and fairground hucksters rather greedy in perpetuating the relentless, corrosive idolization of pop stars. That was roughly the hidden target of a caustic but not cynical invective like "Waiting For Pete Doherty To Die", one of the many tracks launched online even before they became a proper band, which was inevitably misread but had the undeniable merit of earning the Indelicates a certain popularity, however underground.

The provocation paid off. Encouraged by the growing positive response within their narrow niche, Simon and Julia expanded the original duo into a full-fledged band, recruiting as full members the musicians who had already been backing them live for some time (including Simon's brother Alastair as second guitarist), to record their debut album, which saw the light of day in April 2008, released by the small label Weekender. Frayed and emotional, dishevelled and proud, naive and a touch snobbish, American Demo presents its authors and performers exactly as they are: different, and proud to be so, talented at writing songs with instant appeal and, above all, gifted with that literary streak that finally elevates lyrics to an element as decisive as the music itself. It's a provocative yet honest record (never ingratiating), wicked and crystal-clear, decadent and corrosive with a marked taste for humour, stuffed with more or less learned references and steeped in a retro-romantic aura (with obvious debts to Morrissey, but not only him), which burst into the airless English scene of those years suggesting a still largely untrodden stylistic path.

It's rare to come across bands with two expressive personalities so distinct and so compelling, easily recognisable in the splendid voices of Simon and Julia as well as in their respective signature instruments, guitar and piano, undisputed co-stars of the album. The Indelicates make the most of the potential of this double polarity, stubbornly insisting on the happy contrast between the two souls of the band, turning that very dialectic into their personal trademark: sulkiness and grace, alcoholic spleen and sophisticated delicacy, electricity and pastel tones are the aesthetic extremes that meet and complement each other harmoniously, elevating every song on American Demo to the rank of genuine, troubling and moving gems. Several of the early songs from the Brighton outfit are presented here with the emphasis their sound quality deserves, the fruit of sessions in a proper recording studio: needless to say, they gain enormously in depth and impact, especially the more muscular and noisy ones, but the overhaul also strengthens the episodes with a more pronounced (and winning) pop bent, such as "Sixteen" and "Julia, We Don't Live In The '60s". Add to the list the previously unreleased "Stars", gorgeously bittersweet in its reflections on a love built on domination and brutality, and these are the moments in which Julia gets to unleash her full many-sided talent and that weary but never fake grace.

Left off the tracklist, sadly, within the same vein, are "Burn All The Photographs" (one of Clark-Lowe's most intense performances) and the remarkable cover of "A New England", as well as the aforementioned divertissement about the former Libertines frontman. Yet there's plenty more in the pot. A new, sharp-witted boutade placed just where it should be, such as "Heroin", for instance, or the fierce disillusionment in the frontal attack on the political (but above all cultural) subservience paid by the English towards that Godless "America" which remains the implicit yardstick for every argument; and then the menacing political topicality allegorised behind the allusive, melancholy mood of "Unity Mitford", where the tale of a woman's self-destructive madness, infatuated with Hitler, becomes a pretext for talking about neo-fascist resurgences and the renewed intolerance of our own times; or the cutting essentiality drawn from the lessons of a great master — unfailingly credited — like Billy Bragg, whose polemical vitriol is softened on "Better To Know" into a good-looking pop-rock that brings to mind the scathing, disillusioned sound of early Hefner or the Scottish Ballboy. And finally a gem like "If Jeff Buckley Had Lived", dedicated to all those who, like them, truly loved Tim's son, but also to those who, as expected, would go on to accuse them of jackaling off his memory. A bitter, uncomforting song that aims to redeem the human side of the artist in a demystifying light: the most intense Simon on American Demo fires without restraint at the music press and the record industry that turned Buckley into a victim to be deified, an empty simulacrum of cursed clichés, a cult object to be exploited to the bitter end.

That's the (huge) amount of material on the table in a debut that would be reductive to call merely surprising, and one that, just a couple of years later, would lead to new, precious developments.

Greeks in the age of Rome

No, Julia and Simon Indelicate are not delicate at all. They may hide behind a cabaret spirit, affecting a Balkan accent in the circus march of "Be Afraid Of Your Parents", but their sarcasm remains a goad that lodges itself between the ribs even when you'd rather just let your guard down. The Indelicates represent a reality that, sadly, still remains somewhat overlooked on the international scene: and yet their debut, American Demo (so called because that's basically what almost every British band's debut amounts to these days), stood as a rare example of a well-judged blend of immediacy, compositional skill, intellectual fervour and singer-songwriter verve. Granted, it was a record fairly far removed from the prevailing taste of today's independent world, winking instead mostly at English alternative pop-rock of the 90s (with a touch of early Manic Street Preachers, most evident here on "Your Money"), keeping itself largely at a distance from the new new wave or folk-pop leanings that would be the easiest route for a band taking its first steps in England.

But Simon and Julia have little time for the safer paths. That's why, for Songs For Swinging Lovers, the pair left the label that had put out "American Demo" to found their own, Corporate Records, and commit to a new, modern marketing model: pay-what-you-want download. Songs For Swinging Lovers keeps clear points of contact with the previous record, both stylistically and thematically, remaining sharply polemical but still steeped in their characteristic humour, caustic and bitter.

Take, for example, the geographical leap that opens the album, from "America" (the track on American Demo) to "Europe" (which instead opens Songs For Swinging Lovers): from a martial anthem of extreme alienation (if England is "squalid and mean", siding with the ghost of a "Godless" America seems like the perfect way to close out the nightmare) to a theatrical invective against an emptied-out Old Continent, "drunk on inherited style and class". Taken verbatim from the book published by the English band (now already out of print) to coincide with the release of this second album, the words with which Simon explains the choice to open with such an oppressive track, one whose spirit genuinely conjures the ghosts of a Europe wrapped in rotting fumes, ring with his unmistakable bluntness: "We wanted ["Europe", ed.] to sound as unpleasant and disgusting as possible. [...] If it seems rash to despise an entire continent so radically, well, it is, really. [...] But there is something to be wary of. [...] The horrible tastelessness of 'high'-European fashion with its tailored suits and its utterly pointless polished stones. The way we cling to a comfortable pacifism while still relying on obligations and treaties with America to handle our security."

It's inevitable, then, in this view of the world — certainly not diplomatic, but not caricatured either — that the record takes on, compared to the debut, a perhaps slightly more melancholy, brooding atmosphere; it loses some of the aggression (which, regarding American Demo, had drawn a few comparisons to the English punk scene), making up for it in depth whenever Julia takes the helm on "her" piano tracks. Besides the already-mentioned "Europe", the stately piano murder ballad "Roses" shows her at her most spellbinding (a Kate Bush of the golden years), in its sinister progression recounting a sensual nocturnal murder ("The stark composition of essence and parts/ I gathered your limbs for a final dance/ A silent waltz to your songs unsung/ As the lifeblood seeps from your punctured lung/ Do you bleed diamonds/ Do you bleed rubies/ Do you bleed roses").

Songs For Swinging Lovers isn't just a corrosive statement of position, it isn't just intellectual pleasure but also, as ever, pure pop satisfaction. The triple shot of "We Love You, Tania", "Ill" and "Flesh" makes you sit bolt upright in your chair, not only for its melodic success and the unassuming simplicity of the arrangements, but above all for the fusion, now at its final stage, between two musical personalities and not only that. The first is a pure Billy Bragg-style ballad (its lyrics and mood recalling "Singer Songwriter" by Okkervil River), followed by another "polemical hagiography", the portrayal of modern man as a Huxleyan nightmare, a mix of assorted addictions and suicidal tendencies numbed by habituation, set to the sunny electroacoustic backing of "Flesh" (“Because you’ll never take enough of those pills/ You know you’re too clever to be mentally ill/ You’ll never fashion your damaged soul/ Because you’re too clever to lose control”).

A reference to "Brave New World" picked up again explicitly in "Savages", in which the partnership between Simon and Julia is essentially sealed, and not only musically (the song shows clear eighties inflections here, synth-pop proper, in fact). In a kind of dialogue between the two, it's put forward as a claim of "identity" (“And the world has no need/ Of the songs that we sang/ We are savages, you and I/ And we will hang, hang, hang”): fierce singers precisely because they're genuine in a world flattened by the standards of a nauseating do-goodism, of a "happy obscurantism", with no place to belong, no home to return to, no Ithaca to long for. It's also a song about their own irreducible sense of inadequacy ("We are Greeks in the age of Rome"), of a belonging denied alongside harmony ("We are ornamental swords, forged for the peace after the war"), and of everything that inevitable oppositions bring with them.

The only thing worth noting is a slight, frankly almost inexplicable dip with "Sympathy For The Devil" (just a reference), a pleasant enough country-pop ditty, but no more than that. More convincing is the engaging, rowdy popular feel of "Jerusalem", complete with blaring brass answering back the cheeky duet between Simon and Julia, who land one of their trademark barbs (“We all love The Smiths, and we dig The Clash/ But the smell of leather is intoxicating/ Brilliant minds, we are genii/ We excel at drama and formal debating”) and can't help but come across as likeable for that familiar dose of (self-)irony, which, it must be said, feels more natural here than in other, more celebrated songwriters (Will Sheff, to name one, among them).

There was no way it could be missing, after the song titles alone that were worth the price of admission on American Demo: a closing track entrusted to the three-quarter-time testament of "Anthem For Doomed Youth", a treatise on defeat and disillusionment for a generation "that hasn't suffered enough wrongs to be punk", "neither hungry, nor fighting, nor credibly poor". A generation "doomed" from the outset, which Simon and Julia recount with a light touch, small acoustic riffs and piano flourishes that alternate and flow into the final, hieratic waltz.

A lightness, a compositional wisdom that confirms this is a band that could provide more than one satisfaction in the years to come, if only they could secure support more substantial than the admittedly precious (and predictable, given the kind of people involved) friendship with Eddie Argos of Art Brut. As we'll see, that's not exactly how things would turn out.

Another American Story

The world seen through a worldview so controversial as to justify its eradication through violence. The thin line between what is lawful and socially acceptable and what must be suppressed with no chance of appeal. The sectarian drift of American religious thought, the collective psychoses. There's all of this - and more - stirring the minds of Simon and Julia Indelicate, who, only a year after their previous record, throw themselves into building their second country opera, one that finds recent counterparts in, for instance, "Hadestown" by Anais Mitchell (note the reprise, on this record, of the traditional gospel song "John The Revelator").

David Koresh is the designated heir to take the reins of this Protestant sect, one of many, which since 1959 has been preaching an imminent Second Coming of Christ - in this case, he himself will take it upon himself to declare himself the new Messiah, practicing polygamy even with minors and stockpiling weapons and explosives. On February 28, 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the federal body tasked with policing irregularities in the possession of the above, storms the "Ranch Apocalypse" with a warrant to carry out a search. A shootout ensues, leaving four BATF agents and six Branch Davidians dead. From that point on, the FBI is authorized to carry out a full-scale siege of Mount Carmel (the location of the ranch-community, not far from Waco, Texas), which will last fifty days, including a standoff during which Koresh claims he wants to finish a work on the Apocalypse that God Himself is supposedly dictating to him. In the end the FBI will move into action and, in a controversial fire that engulfs the ranch's church, every inhabitant will die: seventy-six victims (including David Koresh himself), about twenty of them killed by gunfire as they fled the flames.

A story that deserves to be told, one that brings out all the dramatic charge of the episode the Indelicates chose to tackle. Yet that dramatic force doesn't survive the telling, in a record that remains caught halfway between the heavy weight of its subject matter and the band's irreverent spirit, torn between two possible disguises for the work. Never truly caustic, David Koresh Superstar never manages to shift the emotional needle, which stays stiff and compressed due to the compositions' lack of sparkle.

The record in fact leans heavily into the group's more acoustic side, at times almost country ("The Road From Huston To Waco"), the side that on Songs For Swinging Lovers was perhaps the most predictable and least interesting part of the Indelicates' music (the less-than-charming "Sympathy For The Devil", here essentially echoed in "A Single Thrown Grenade"). Even the more "operatic" character of certain tracks - for instance "Something Goin' Down In Waco" - amounts to little more than a didactic, surface-level depiction, as is also the case with the programmatic "I Am Koresh". If the reflection is missing - though one could legitimately argue it's not strictly necessary for a work of art - what's harder to overlook is the absence of any real storytelling flair, which here seems to hem in the otherwise considerable lyrical gifts of Simon and Julia.

Pale, predictable flights à la Bacharach (the instrumental "The Siege"), the bass-and-guitar patterns of "McVeigh" and "A Book Of Seven Seals" reveal, in truth, less a variety of writing than a simplicity bordering on the schoolbook.

The end result is the dissolution of all this ambition - in theme and content alike - into a wan pop record, one that has neither the tenderness of human pietas nor the fire of real indignation.

Bitterness is the appropriate response (when it's the only one you've got)

Having lost sight of them in the shoals of their as ambitious as controversial country-rock-opera, we find the Indelicates today in a phase of pure expressive turmoil and abrupt stylistic retrenchment: as proud as ever of their own otherness, and at the same time hamstrung by a tangle of irreducible contradictions, explosive in attitude but hopelessly self-sabotaged by that chronic inability of theirs to pick one clear direction and then follow it through with dedication and success. The Indelicates return to the long-player format with the assembled version of the three EPs titled Diseases Of England, funded through preorders and released over the past six months by the family label, Corporate, following an odd sequence (debuting with the second part, then the first, then the third) that is only apparent, given the difference in quality (and the accompanying downward trend) between the individual instalments.

Reassembled according to the originally planned running order, the Sussex band's fourth album unfolds in a gradual sequence that makes the most of the songs' inherently varied nature, presenting it in a form that is iridescent, yes, but as coherent and linear as it can be. The opening, it must be said, is of the disorienting-but-not-entirely-convincing kind. "Bitterness Is The Appropriate Response" draws the listener into the late-empire atmosphere of the morbid England alluded to in the collection's title, but does so by diverting the band's angry streak into an electro-rock that isn't exactly thrilling, flattened out by hammering rhythms and smeared with dark, garish synth streaks that, however functional, will turn out, with hindsight, to be the sole (and necessarily the boldest) evolutionary step in sound on the whole record. What follows is one of their trademark rants, blazing and a touch too over-the-top, unlike the subsequent "Pubes", cast in an unusual dark-wave guise and duly underpinned by Julia's unhinged flair and Simon's delicious falsetto, both of which bring out all its ironic hostility.

Vulgarity, ignorance, cynicism and emptiness, propped up by the overwhelming power of old and new media alike, once again take centre stage as the undisputed protagonists of a polemical snapshot that retains all the sharpness of the band's best work. Fortunately, there's also a long, remarkable stretch in which that precious balance - which in the opening tracks, riding the long wake of David Koresh Superstar, had seemed lost - comes back to their aid, almost like a blessing. It's not just a matter of themes. It's their very nature that keeps steering them down tracks they've already crossed again and again. In the undisguised but never overwrought bitterness of a self-portrait like "We Are Nothing Alike" there's a return of the lightness found in some of the episodes on Songs For Swinging Lovers, and it's a welcome sound to hear again. Likewise, the paradigmatic "Everything Is Just Disgusting", closing out a truly superlative second stretch, allows the Indelicates to carry on, even on this new record, with one of their unmistakable anthems for beautiful losers (in the vein of "We Hate The Kids" and "Anthem For Doomed Youth"), steeped in just enough aching nihilism and boundless disillusion to intoxicate anyone who falls for it.

On "Class", by contrast, what prevails is a vocation for dark, grim theatricality - Brechtian, as they themselves would be quick to point out - with Simon called upon to dust off the unpleasantly corrosive inflections of the old "Europe", before dissolving that bile into the kind of expressionist, crepuscular vaudeville that has always been second nature to them. And it's Simon again who plays the showman when, on "Le Godemiché Royal", he talks unabashedly of vibrators and voyeurism in a crooner's voice à la Morrissey, almost greedily embracing the cliché and letting himself be carried along by the breath of an affected romanticism on the verge of wilting. Once again, decadent emphasis gives the English band an extra gear, guilty until now perhaps only of excessive self-quotation, but undeniably convincing. Julia, it must be said, doesn't just stand by. She serves her partner in art and in life superbly on piano, horns and backing vocals, before taking the helm again for a technical knock-out double bill. It opens with the elegant hymn to mistreated love that is "All You Need Is Love" (no nod to the Beatles intended), relying on a melodramatic pose that skilfully avoids mannerism and shines through the accompaniment of harpsichord and a fluttering mandolin. She then immediately doubles down with the old-fashioned, melancholy voice-and-piano of "I Used To Sing", her grace working its full charm, emerging every bit as credible as a Neil Hannon in a skirt: in both cases, a display of crystalline virtuosity and deft pop songwriting, aided no doubt by the wisdom of knowing when not to overreach or force the issue.

In short, Diseases Of England shines with all the superb artistry of one of the most gifted and courageous outfits on the current English alternative scene. The shame is that, alongside its undeniable unevenness, all their well-known limitations surface too, in a record that fades over the distance and crosses the finish line out of breath, running more on craft than on heart. After a hugely evocative central stretch - classic yet unpredictable, refined yet unacademic - comes the barer essentialism of a fragile duet ("Enemies") that recalls the band's earliest work and dampens the mood somewhat: admirable as a display of self-discipline, but bound to come off poorly given its unmistakable filler status.

On "Dirty Diana", Julia retreats into the safety and the familiar reflexes of yet another swooning whim, but her vocal flourishes, paired with the baritone grumbling her partner lays down underneath, fail to redeem the track from a heavy sense of didactic artifice that comes as no surprise. Simon tries to make amends with a far drier passage, the handbrake-on voice-and-piano of "Not Alone", in which the band seems to admire its own reflection, not without a touch of self-satisfaction. It lacks a bit of bite. And things don't improve at the close with the strongly British-flavoured folk of "Dovahkiin", which aims for a sing-along but gets lost in a didactic, self-indulgent puddle. The marked late slump ultimately limits the potential of an album that is nonetheless, true to the Brighton band's tradition, interesting and full of thoughtful ideas.

The Indelicates remain a gem worth cherishing closely, one it's hard not to feel genuine affection for. This time, though, there's no hiding a certain pang of disappointment, as our heroes have once again missed their date with the breakthrough record they seemed capable of making. Betting on them, from here on, might mean taking on rather bigger risks.

Contributions by Lorenzo Righetto (“Songs For Swinging Lovers”, “David Koresh Superstar”)

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