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Everything Everything

 

Everything Everything Bio

Imagine a band who fuse three part harmonies with scalding post-punk guitars; floor-filling bass lines with syncopated rhythms and lyrics about everything from high-school massacres to R&B lotharios musing on their lot in a post-apocalyptic wilderness.

Not easy, is it? But then Everything Everything (Jonathan: guitar/vocals, Jeremy: bass, Mike: drums, Alex: guitar) aren’t here to make life easy. They’re here to challenge every knee-jerk convention of indie rock and dance on the grave of pointless retrogression.

“We’ve never been comfortable with the indie tag” explains Jeremy.

“If it’s Girls Aloud or Slint, it doesn’t matter – if we like it we’ll listen to it and work out what makes it good. There are hundreds of years of amazing music to draw on. Why place restrictions on yourself?”

“My childhood began with the fall of the Berlin Wall” explains Jonathan. “It ended when I was sixteen when 9/11 happened. I grew up a tiny little village in rural Northumberland so I was very isolated during that period. I didn’t have a television until I was seventeen, so I listened to the radio a lot. I was making music all the time in my bedroom – my one rule was not to sound like anyone else. I’d go out of my way to avoid playing any obviously recognisable chord sequence.”

Having recruited his band-mates on the basis of shared orchestral backgrounds and divergent tastes ranging from post-rock to funk and jazz, the band set about avoiding cliché at all costs.

“It’s all to do with how you present yourselves” explains Jeremy. “An R&B cliché can sound great when it’s played by four skinny white men.”

Lyrically, influences range from Naomi Klein to Edward Lear and all stops in-between.

“We belong to a generation that was too young to buy into Britpop fully, so we’ve had no significant pop cultural movement to throw our lot in with” explains Jonathan. “So there’s no defined viewpoint. Lyrically, for me, it’s as much about the sound, rhythm and tone of a word as the meaning.”

Unsurprisingly, the band’s debut gig at Manchester’s Night & Day on Bonfire Night 2007 caused a few scratched heads.

“I think people found us a bit baffling” laughs Jonathan. “But the sound man liked us. We took that as sign of good taste.”

Debut single Suffragette Suffragette, released in 2008 on Salvia XL, combined math-rock rhythms and molten riffs. They quickly followed up with Photoshop Handsome released on Another Music Another Kitchen in 2009, that was a withering summation of Heat culture, while sublime third single My Kz, Ur Bf (Young and Lost, 2009) crossed ABC and R Kelly while being sung from the paranoid perspective of a post-traumatic R&B lothario during an air-raid. For most discerning observers, needless to say, it was the single of 2009.

En route, they have acquired fans ranging from Zane Lowe to 6Music’s Marc Riley, played two UK tours- including performances at Reading and Leeds -and notched up a top spot on MTV2’s My Space Chart.

The band released its debut album Man Alive (2010) on Geffen Records with the ground-breaking singles Suffragette Suffragette and Photoshop Handsome, while their second album was released almost immediately in 2011 called My Kz, Ur Bf after the hit track on Vinyl Junkie Recordings.

Sometimes, it seems, you really can have everything (everything).

 

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