Jamal has a chat with Essex band Dead Models about a 50s rock 'n' roll revival.
The music business loves a renaissance. We've had '50s jazz and '60s soul courtesy of Amy Winehouse and the '80s synth revival brought to you by almost everyone in Shoreditch. Madonna has managed to make here 58th comeback this century and renamed herself Lady Gaga. At the moment, making waves across the pond is the resurgence of '50s and '60s garage rock. Bands like Smith Westerns and Harlem have gone back to the days of the Fonz. Jukeboxes beware, over here a band set to harness the pre-Beatles rock 'n' roll era are Dead Models.
They haven't gone the way of fancy dress Mafia, slicked back hair, or Elvis-style warbling and uncomfortable gyrating. The Essex foursome make the kind of music your parents might have listened to. Not your real parents – your real parents hit the universally agreed age of being officially uncool and started listening to Simply Red. That age if anyone's worried, concerned or just a bit nervous is 35. These parents were like Mick Jagger and Janis Joplin. They borrowed the first video recorder from the Hendrix's next door and on New Year's Eve in 1959 they rolled the biggest joint you've ever seen in preparation for the decade that was to come.
They are the kind of sweet, summery tunes you could set to images of a '50s high school dance. I'd compare them to the San Francisco duo Girls but can these guys spark a swathe of British bands moulded in the '50s image? I'm not expecting people to start walking around as if they're on the set of A Streetcar Named Desire but these guys seem good enough to get plenty of people on this side of the Atlantic interested.
So what got you guys got started? Has it been a long hard slog to get a bit of attention?
It happened really quickly! We just used to meet up on a Wednesday night, sit down and play the guitar and then one day we just wrote three songs, recorded them that night and then sent them to a few music blogs. It got put up on the Monday and then the record label called White Noise contacted us by the Thursday.
That's pretty awesome! What sort of stuff have White Noise done for you so far?
They put out an EP and they've offered to do an album with us so that will be early next year.
You've got this whole '50s rock 'n' roll vibe going on – how did that come about?
Yeah it just seemed to come out that way really, the first three songs came out that way anyway. We were listening to bands like Girls, Smith Westerns, Best Coast, all those sort of LA American bands. So the first three songs just came out like that .
Can we expect more of the same on the album then?
Oh yeah. We've got a set of about nine songs that we play at the moment and we've got about another ten songs that we're recording on top of that. They were all written since about April and they're all sort of similar.
You haven't done many gigs yet – has it been hard to get a rhythm going?
We've had about seven or eight gigs. We were all in bands before so we've been doing it for ages but as this band, yes, it's starting to work now, we're starting to get it together.
As a quick round up, why should people keep an ear out for you?
I think we're doing something a little bit different you know. There's a lot of bands like that in America but none in England. We're really proud of what we've done so far.
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