Skip To The Start - The Futureheads

They went to a cold, barren and bleak farm in North Yorkshire to record second album ‘News and Tributes’. “All the people that we appreciate as songwriters are all of these fearlessly driven, eccentric and very progressive songwriters” Ross says. “Tom Waits, Kate Bush, Frank Black. Pretty cerebral and fantastical at the same time, in our own way we were aiming for that on the second album and got lost in our own dystopia, as it turned out to be. It is quite a vast and ambient record for The Futureheads but we went over the top and paid the price”

I remember leaving Ross’s house one night around that time with a shoebox full of borrowed vinyl (for some reason it had a home made Ludo board drawn on the back) and I subsequently started listening to ‘Rumours’ by Fleetwood Mac and lots of Red House Painters and Cocteau Twins. Again, they were taking me on an entirely different journey that was as equally inspiring, just a little darker and less playful.  

Ross elaborates on this: “We felt like we could have got something out of that record, in that the songs weren’t huge radio hits but could appeal to a cult following, like Mercury Rev or Bossanova by the Pixies, something with more of a sonic palette. Warners failed to engage in our vision”
  
The next sequence of events has seen them defiantly making their most punk rock statement yet, coming full circle, kicking against the pricks and taking a battering ram to the decaying fortresses of major label Dickensian practice and paranoia by releasing it on their own imprint ‘Nul Records’ It is underpinned by a straightforward yet articulate and muscular Buzzcocks meets Elvis Costello melodic punk rock sensibility that is an increasingly elusive entity in this musical climate of dull careerism. I thought that an early instrumental demo of ‘The Beginning of the Twist’ sounded like the famous snooker theme tune played by Mission of Burma. No bad thing but perhaps not the perfect ingredients for the radio smash and urgent statement of creative rejuvenation that it actually became.  

Says Ross: “The songs we’ve written for this one, if you analyse them you realise that we’re telling ourselves ‘No-one is going to be a better boss for you than yourselves’ We’re not a dumb rock band, we come from a scene that has a massive emphasis placed on ethics. It is an epiphany; we’ve made a very raw and rock n roll record. Our label is a means to an end, purely to display to our peers and contemporaries that it can be done. I’m sure that when Bloc Party are through with Wichita or Foals are done with Warners or whatever then those bands will at least have a conversation about it. The Futureheads were exploited quite severely but this has really worked” 

So, what is next for The Futuremen?

“The next one will certainly be self-issued but stylistically it could go anywhere. It is braver to be simple at the moment but the next one will have a different colour to it. You have to think about it as a reinvention every time”

I, for one can’t wait to see where this goes. Like I said earlier, this is my subjective story of a band who have chronicled and sound tracked my personal trajectory of the last few years as a music promoter and indeed as a human being, every little triumph and tragedy contained within the records and live shows. They are totally inspirational, permanently imprinted on my heart as any life-changing band truly should be.