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TAKEN FROM THE OFFICIAL SITE:
For Hunter S Thompson it was a wild freefall into the dark jaws of Vegas on a trunkful of bad drugs. For Jack Keroack it was the endless quest to reach the highway’s vanishing point way off on the horizon. For Robbie Williams it was an eighteen-month mission to be ignored by as many millions of people as possible. The American Adventure can be anything from an epiphany in the Arizona dustbowl to a gun in the face in a Harlem crack den. But The Electric Soft Parade’s American Adventure, oh man, now that was really something else.
"It’s a theme park in the East Midlands," says Alex White, singer, guitarist and elder sibling in the torrid brotherly duo that constitutes ESP. "We drove past a sign for it and Tom wrote it down."
"It’s probably a subconscious reference to me wanting to go to America," adds drumming younger brother Tom. "The theme of the record, if there is one, is probably a feeling of going away from a place and feeling like you have control over who you are and the person you’re turning into, and then you come back and you realise that it’s all changed - either the place has changed or you’ve changed - and you don’t quite fit in the way you thought you did. I don’t know if that’s a personal thing. I kinda felt like that when we came off touring, I felt a bit vacuous and fucked by the whole experience, but that’s kinda gone now."
A dream, a statement of intent or a place to ride a mechanical bull dressed as Abraham Lincoln, ‘The American Adventure’ became the title of The Electric Soft Parade’s peerless second album and the song that marks their pivotal musical adolescence. A seven-minute post-pop opus, poised at the centre of nine of 2003’s best songs, that elevates The Electric Soft Parade into the highest league of British rock royalty. Really, there are bands that can move you to tears; this is a band that can move you to epiphany.
They always had the marrow for it though, even back at the dawn of the Millennium when, as a Britpop-obsessed Brighton cottage industry band called Feltro Media, Tom and Alex were recording their own four-track albums in their poster-smothered bedrooms and selling them at local parties and gigs. On being snapped up by a feverish DB Records in 2001, enthused by their FOURTH self-funded album, they became The Soft Parade (the ‘Electric’ was added later, after wrangles with a Doors tribute band claiming the name) and began bothering charts and pundits alike with their awesome freak-country debut single ‘Silent To The Dark’. But even after such a startling introduction, their debut album ‘Holes In The Wall’ was a steel toecap up the jacksie of the UK’s slumbering post-Britpop alternative scene; sumptuous, eclectic, experimental and as tuneful as a barrel of Brian Wilson’s
The road to success, however, had its potholes. Over the months that TESP spent touring ‘Holes In The Wall’ across Europe and Japan, including shows in the UK with The Who, Oasis and Ash, relations within the band weren’t exactly Chris’n’Gwynnie.
"It does drag you down and completely wear you out emotionally. There’s no other way about it. You’re with the same four people for a year and a half, it does your head in. You don’t realise it and then you just go ‘fuck! I’ve changed into this whole different person!’."
The pressure valves needed loosening. Alex moved out of the flat the brothers shared together; Tom moonlighted as stand-in guitarist with The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster. "That was pure liberation," he says, "not just because their music’s mental and it’s an excuse to go wild but because it’s playing with another band and you don’t have that attachment to what you are doing and care about every nuance of what you do. It was just totally throwaway and fun and more about getting out there and giving people a show and being manic onstage. It wasn’t ‘let’s get the harmonies perfect!’."
Reconvening in Brighton’s Metway Studios in September 2002, they started recording to reel rather than new-fangled, soul-dissolving computer programmes, they pieced together the glorious 34 minutes of ‘The American Adventure’.
"It’s really great to get totally our own slant on the material," says Alex. "We wanted to do a record that was realistic, that sounded like a real band. The first album, the whole thing was on Pro Tools. Tom would go in and play thirty seconds of drumming and we’d take a bar of it and loop it. That’s alright, but you get a record that sounds like it’s been in a computer. The new one, the songs are a lot better, it’s all the things that we did on the first record that we didn’t like, corrected."
"I wanted to make a record where we didn’t have to think about it," Tom adds. "The problem with our first album was that we thought about it too much and everything was given too many chances. If something was shit we thought we’d fix it up later on. This time round if something wasn’t working we just ditched it from the record and as a result it’s a lot more concise. Maybe people will miss the dossing about from the first album but I felt like getting to the point on this record."
It’s impossible to over-hype ‘The American Adventure’. Easily the best album of 2003, it runs the gamut of 90s guitar pop from Pavement to REM to the mighty Super Furry Animals and back, splashing fresh dollops of imagination at each step. It opens with the serrated party-blues guitar slices and slowed-down house beat of first single ‘Things I’ve Done Before’, floats beautifically into the Stipean arpeggio fantasia of ‘Bruxellisation’ (a process of architectural homogenisation in Brussels, apparently) and then catapults into the Beatledelic spite-rock of ‘Lights Out’ and ‘Lose Yr Frown’ on the way to their very own ‘Paranoid Android’. Written two and a half years ago and recorded almost entirely by a solo Tom (it was originally planned to appear on an EP by his side-project band Mo Pager), the album’s title track is a true epic in the classic prog tradition (song ‘segments’? Zither codas? Monks? Right this way) while remaining at all times utterly, utterly pop. Oh, and it’s not one of those cases of some gormless rock thickos watching America murder a couple of hundred thousand Iraqis on the news and suddenly catching politics.
As recording drew to a close, BMG acquired the band and bundled them off to Abbey Road to complete this swaggering sensation of an album. It was a new dawn, a fresh chapter, and we find TESP today not just at the height of their melodic powers but utterly at one with their uniqueness.
"I can’t really see the place that this new record fits into in the grand scheme of things," says Tom. "I don’t think it does at all. I think it’s a cool record and that’s it, end of story. This time round I don’t really have much of an emotional tie to it at all, which I feel much happier with. I feel happier just putting it out and not deliberating, just having it done."
Calling all sonic adventurers. Your gate is now boarding.
OLD BIOGRAPHY:
They're young. Let's get that out of the way, right now. Tom, the drummer and main songwriter of The Electric Soft Parade, is a scarcely credible 17, while Alex, singer and guitarist, weighs in on the age scales at a mere 19. They have, though, already recorded four albums in various band guises; the latest of these is Holes In The Wall, the official Electric Soft Parade debut, to be released in February 2002.
It's not just the brothers' prodigious musical gifts that fly in the face of their tender years - the duo's collective manner is one of relaxed confidence. There is none of the cocksure swagger that famously once announced the arrival of another notable band of brothers. Instead, the White brothers have an air of deep-seated certainty that what they're doing is right. Fate, destiny, call it what you like, there seems a certain inevitability about their chosen career path.
It wasn't always serious, though. "My dad played the clarinet and he plays the piano now," says Alex, the more talkative of the pair and thus the band's natural spokesman. "He is very into music, classical music, so we were taught classical music and listened to classical music, as well as the 'classics' of rock and pop, like the Beatles".
When they eventually found a way of channelling their youthful exuberance into something worthwhile, it was, initially at least, little more than an excuse to indulge in a spot of teenage drinking out of reach of the elements. Alex reckons, "it just kind of evolved, as most things do, I guess. It was all very much a mate's thing, just hanging out, and we'd play music as well. We'd set it up like a gig and get our mates along and have a party.
"It was a good excuse to get bottles of White Lightning or Strongbow and, rather than sitting in the cold park to drink it, sit in the cricket pavilion. We'd play a mixture of songs we'd written, which started off as two and then it was three and then four, and stuff we were listening to at the time. Stuff like the first Ash album and Everything Must Go by the Manics"
Three self-funded albums - under the name Feltro Media - followed. The last one brought them to the attention of Xfm and, more significantly, the fledgling independent label db Records, to which they signed in early 2001.
As with many things, including, those things that seem destined to be successful, it wasn't all smooth running. Ongoing disagreements forced them into a name change to The Soft Parade. Though this was also destined to be a short-term moniker. The threat of legal action from a bunch of aggrieved Americans - a Doors tribute band - forced another change, this time to The Electric Soft Parade. Alex and Tom also lost their bass player who decided to carry on with school rather than the path of rock 'n' roll, thus leaving Alex and Tom to record everything on the album themselves.
All these initial problems were quickly forgotten, however, once Silent to the Dark, was released to a hugely enthusiastic response in April 2001.
In any case, Alex has a characteristically pragmatic approach to any bad times that may be encountered. "The thing is," he says matter-of-factly, "all the arguments and all the shit, you tend to just forget. You just remember the good times."
All in all they feel the whole experience has been beneficial. "We've had to do a lot of growing up fast in the last year. We've had to make it clear to people about our opinions and our beliefs it isn't easy but it does make you a stronger person. During the making of the album we had to speak out for ourselves if we hadn't the album would not have sounded so experimental. It certainly wouldn't have sounded so honest."
Honest it certainly is. In fact, it's a debut of quite astonishing, sure-footed certainty. One comes back to their ages again and can't help but be amazed.
Moreover, they're happy with it, and with the band line-up now established by the inclusion of Matt on bass on and Steve on keyboards, they are ready to take on the future. "I'm honest enough and don't bullshit people," says Alex, for the first time displaying the confident side that makes him such an engaging frontman. "I say what I think, especially about what we're doing. You can make whatever music you want, but by my reckoning the only reason to do it is to make exactly the kind of music you want to hear, exactly the music that you think is the definition of good. If you're not going to stand by that, then what's the point?"
Stand by it they certainly can.
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