ow do you manage to remain successful and release seven brilliantly written albums these days? Turin Brakes have been putting out their own music, plus writing for
the likes of Take Tat, for many years, and it all started back with Olly and Gale met when they were just kids in London. After adding a couple collaborators along the way and playing hundreds of live shows, their new album Lost Property is out this month. I chatted with Olly about how seeing Transvision Vamp at Brixton Academy when they were 11 changed everything for them.
When did you and Gale decide you wanted to make music together initially? Te first ever gig we went to was at Brixton Academy, it was Transvision Vamp. We were about 11 and far too small to be watching a fairly adult gig and the security guards took pity on us and let us go up into the private balcony and watch the whole thing from there. Tat was the beginning of it all, we thought “we’ll have some of this!” Years and years we spent going there all through our teens as well as other venues and we were in awe of the live music scene really. How come you’re called Turin Brakes? Te reasons are many! It’s pretty abstract. When we first started making music seriously in our teens out music was very escapist, it sounded like it was coming from somewhere else. It wasn’t particularly London-centric or even UK-centric.
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Someone came up with Turin Brakes and we really liked it ‘cos it sounded like a different place, and interesting and intriguing. Te best part about being called Turin Brakes is if you type the name into Google it only goes to stuff to do with the band, there’s nothing else out there! We have our very own sound so we figured we needed our very own name as well. I was just looking at the sleeve for your new album, which is a futuristic abstract landscape with an alien in a deckchair. Have you maintained this feeling of wanting your music to feel like it’s from elsewhere? Yeah, something that we’ve always played around with is mixing the surreal with the domestic and making the familiar feel strange or vice versa. We’re always refining that idea. Some artists do something new every time they record something so you
wouldn’t know it’s from the same people and some people have a certain sound that they refine, and I think we’re that kind of a band. We’ve got our ways and out grand themes that we like and we’re just trying to make it better every time. Gale went to Canada to start a band and you went to art school for a while in the 90’s. What was it that made you come back together to be a full time band? Somebody randomly heard a mixtape we’d made in the back of a friend’s car and he’d just started a record label and decided he
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