To My Boy Are The Beautiful Machine

Imagine if you will that Professor Stephen Hawking is a bit bored one afternoon and invites his friends New Order around for a game on his new Nintendo and to eat some Skittles (We did say imagine). Now they have completed Super Mario and are high on E numbers, feeling a bit giddy. Peter Hook suggests they go and record some music. The results would not sound unlike To My Boy. Pounding beats, spiky guitars, fragmented staccato vocals and an overriding sense of euphoria. Technically they could be classed as electro but in reality they are far removed from the cold sonic landscapes of yore. Instead To My Boy feed their songs through a computer until they are twisted, metronomic blasts of joy. All clocking in at under 3 minutes, phew!

Sam White, guitarist and 50% of To My Boy sets the scene “Basically me and Jack (White Vocals/ guitar) were in a four piece indie band at Uni, it was the typical thing of responding to a 'Band mates Wanted' poster so we formed and started playing some music. After a while me and Sam started to demo the songs just on a computer without our other band mates. Originally it was to show the drummer and the bassist what we wanted but eventually we decided that we liked them more than what we were producing with the band.”

So how does a To My Boy song come to fruition? Is it as we expect, done in a haunted mansion on top of a hill with 100,000 volts of electricity pumped through a guitar whilst lightning flashes outside? “Basically we write the songs on guitar or piano then we take them to the computer and try to instrument them electronically. A lot of the material starts as an acoustic guitar song or a computer riff or synth riff so it’s quite organic then we take it to the computer. Jack writes the main body of the lyrics but then we sit together and have a look at them, I suggest changes or ideas of my own so we work together on that. There is probably not one song that I haven’t come up with a line on." And what was the last song To My Boy wrote? “We’ve been writing quite a lot recently because we are going to London to record the album so we had a last big push at writing songs for the album just before Christmas so we wrote about four or five new ones. One is called ‘I Was A Cloud’ it’s pastoral in its imagery and it’s about Jack imagining himself as a cloud, it’s quite Blake like.”

To date To My Boy have only released two singles proper, ‘I Am X-Ray’ and ‘The Grid’. ‘I Am X-Ray’ picked up the attention of many people including NME who duly put it in their top 50 tracks of the year, an accolade Sam modestly describes as “Pretty nice”. Gigwise asked Sam to describe the most recent single ‘The Grid’, “It’s basically about the internet, Jack said he was shocked that nobody has ever tried to write a song about the internet or tried to address it through music because it’s a pretty important thing in the modern age. We wanted to write a song about the power of the internet and the significance of it. We tried to poeticise it because although the internet is a beautiful thing it’s also a potential menace so you can make drama about it.”

The first time you see To My Boy live it’s quite an alien concept. Two people, a drum machine and a bag full of tunes is all that they posses but Tardis like once you peek into To My Boys world it all appears much bigger and more wondrous with every listen. The live experience, a heady mixture of autonomy, passion and floor filling tunes are a must see and where To My Boy truly come to life and make sense. We asked Sam about the To My Boy live experience, “Some of the best gigs we have done have been in clubs in London. We played Frog and that was one of our biggest gigs and then we did NagNagNag which is like a freaky electro, fetish tranny club. We’re not really playing the music in the traditional sense because we use a backing track with the drum machine and we spend a lot of time pressing play but we like to put on a good show."