The Last Significant Statement - The Indelicates

  “The Indelicates – despicable folk-rock cabaret with the mission to end all music”, so goes the description for the band’s website. Backed by Kate Newberry on bass, Jack Stone on drums and Ed Van Beinum on guitar, The Indelicates are fronted by Julia (keyboards) and Simon (guitar) who share lead vocals and song writing credits.
Simon: “There’s only one we actually wrote together – 16 – everything else is one or the other.”
Julia: “I’m really into writing pop songs – it’s a horrible term, but yeah, songs like 16. I also really like cabaret music.” Simon: “If hate is a dominant theme it’s probably by me”   “This gift is an illusion/This isn’t hard/Absolutely anyone can play ****ing the guitar” – ‘We Hate The Kids’   Julia: “We really like Art Brut, I think in ten years time people will remember them for having done something extraordinary for so many reasons” Simon: “I think it’s an incredibly brave and worthwhile statement for Eddie Argos to stand up in front of people and say ‘I want you all to be in a band’… Which is the opposite of what you get from most bands. Music is not a very hard art form, it’s not hard to write a song with three chords – I mean I love it and it’s something I’ve loved my whole life - but it’s not hard and you shouldn’t exclude people from it. And there’s so many bands that what they tell you their attitude is ‘oh what I’m doing is incredibly difficult, I worked very hard, therefore I deserve everything and nobody else deserves a thing’.”    ‘We Hate The Kids’ has the same sense of freshness as a viewpoint as that which they admire in Art Brut’s ‘Formed A Band’. It can be taken as a snapshot of an industry that has been stuck on repeat, with constant aspiration to the past and creations previously achieved.    A brief bit of context: pop culture, pop music has always been the teenager’s domain.  It’s where the teenager has expressed rebellion from the comfort area of subcultures. The music press are forever looking for new subcultures, new trends in teenagers to push certain bands to the forefront. The importance of subculture and rebellion came through in the 50’s, reaching its epoch in the 60’s and then forever trying to be repeated again. Our parents rebelled to ‘My Generation’ by The Who, a snarling retort to the elders that couldn’t understand this new rebellious class of teenagers.  It’s ironic then, that ‘My Generation’ is still an anthem adopted by new generations that look to rebel, that feel misunderstood by their elders (now those that originally created and listened to this music).  ‘We Hate The Kids’ opens fittingly with the line “Every generation gets fooled again”   Simon explains, “I think its the concept of the teenager and pop music being something which moves society in anyway forward is something which is drawing to a close, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think it’s beyond people making music to think of something else to do; I just think the idea of pop as something which is vital and crucial to a younger generation, which is very much growing up in the shadow of parents that they agree with. There’s no need to rebel against your parents because on the whole they agree with you. If you don’t agree with them then fine, but what you can’t then do is disagree with them in a medium which was invented by your parents.”  On We Hate The Kids he adds, “It’s assumed that it’s a very negative song but it’s a lot more than that, it’s going ‘ok, we’ve done that now, lets do something else’”   “Rebellion shores up the market/Rebellion keeps the nation healthy” – ‘The Last Significant Statement To Be Made In Rock And Roll’   Julia: “If you like Coldplay your parents will like Coldplay because there’s nothing wrong with Coldplay” Simon: “There’s a lot wrong with Coldplay” Julia: “Yeah, there’s a lot wrong with Coldplay but there is no rebellion there. There’s no rebellion going on at all.” Simon: “That’s not a bad thing for society to have done, that’s ok, but it’s not right yet. People kind of walk around because of this thinking ‘oh, isn’t everything wonderful’ but it isn’t, it’s not. People are by nature very, very conformist and conforming involves rebelling, everyone is rebelling but they’re not rebelling against anything that matters, they’re rebelling against things that are just irrelevant so as a result the things that do need correcting don’t get corrected.”   The band has gathered a large international following online, attracted by the free demos posted on their site. (The tracks have received an ever-growing 6, 000 downloads). Following the Arctic Monkeys rocketing to fame there has been a lot of attention given to how the internet is becoming a revolutionary force in the music industry, and it’s something the band are excited about. Julia: “If you’re a reasonable person it’s the nicest thing in the world to know someone in New York plays your song and likes it. Even if you don’t get a record deal, you’ve given all that music away, and people love it. That means so much more than anything else, than any cash thing. I’m not a big fan of Arctic Monkeys but I absolutely appreciate that that thing that happened is an extraordinary thing to happen. [People in the music industry] don’t understand, and they don’t understand it because they’re old” Simon: “So we hate the kids and the old…” Julia “…they’re not prepared to learn this new form of communication and they don’t understand the lingo, so whenever people say there’s nothing new happing, your like ‘well, I think it is, this is a new thing, the technology that they are using, that they are developing really, really fast is a new thing and you can’t keep up with it’” Simon: “If you want to be in a band you can do anything. I think it’s changing in probably the same way it did in the 70’s, there is this kind of you can do it yourself [attitude]. It changes where the power is.” Julia: “What it’s doing to a lot of major labels, which they don’t think it is because they think it doesn’t touch them, is it’s making them obsolete.” Adding the example “iForward, Russia! have just said we’re sick of waiting, we’re doing it ourselves.”