Great & Happening - Post War Years

We’ve been keeping tabs on Post War Years for some time now, in fact we think they’re rather good, so on a sunny day in Camden, Gigwise decided to catch up with Tom, Fred, Simon and Henry for a five-way chinwag about debut album ‘The Great And The Happenings’.

Self-recorded in the former Russian socialist club they call home and co-produced by Graeme Stewart, the album, which is the result of years spent intricately grooming a disruptive cross-over of prickly electro-pop, is as honest as they come. And the process, one experienced by four friends, in one house, with a bunch of instruments and even more ideas, must surely make for a creative idyll of anecdotal excerpts, or so you’d think.

“It was pain,” says Fred.

“It really was,” agrees Simon. “We all live and work together so you’d wake up in the morning, knock on people’s doors and say you need to put a bass part or a drum part down and its difficult to have that separation. In hindsight we took too much time and got a bit confused by what was going on and I think it sounds a bit like that… erratic and confused”

They’ve got a point. For those not familiar with Post War Years, at first listen, the album can at times sound clunky, puzzling and impenetrably obscure. But first listens are often misleading and on closer inspection ‘The Great And The Happenings’ reveals itself as a rewarding piece of work that refuses to limit their potential. 

“I’m happy with it,” concedes Fred. “But there are bits I’m unhappy with and that’s good because it means I can try again, whereas if we’d created what we thought of as perfect there’d be nowhere else to go. I think it was more like an introduction, we’ve got more in us than that to come and we all know that we can do better”

“The biggest thing about us is that we get bored quickly,” continues Simon. “That’s why it was difficult doing the album over a six month period. We’d be bored of what we were doing by the end of the week and be so critical of it that it was really hard to end up with something that we were happy with, but it was really good to do”