From Cubist Castle 04.03.09: Instant Coffee Baby

Posted by Jon Kinsey on 04.03.2009

This week, in a change to the advertised bradcast, we take a brief look at another unsigned British band - The Wave Pictures.

First things first, I've been seconded to London for the weekend, so it's going to be a short column this week. After the modicum of success from the Hot Puppies expose a few weeks back, I've decided to write up another unsigned band from the UK indie scene (and I mean that in the proper sense of the word). They've been ploughing their own furrow on the underground circuit in the UK for over ten years, yet seem resigned to a fate that denies them a major breakthrough. Their music has been described by Nick Lowe as "take no prisoners" and they have won support from as diverse a bunch as the late John Peel and John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats

Ladies and gentlemen, they are The Wave Pictures

The embryo of the today's featured band came together in a small village outside the Midlands University town of Loughborough the latter part of 1998 when singer/guitarist/chief songwriter David Tattersall and bassist Franic Rozycki started playing music together as Blind Summit. The guys rotated through a revolving door of drummers, until they finally settled on Johnny Helm and the band, now christened The Wave Pictures, began their intrepid voyage.

As is often the case for me, I discovered the band completely by accident. Some of my regular readers will probably have seen me write about Gordon McIntyre the Scottish songwriter behind the bands ballboy and Money Can't Buy Music. He's one of my favorite lyricists, having seemingly drunk from the same watering hole as neighboring wordsmiths Stuart Murdoch (Belle and Sebastian) and Moffat and Middleton (Arab Strap). He is also a charming warm and gregarious sort of fellow who, for a couple of years, regaled anyone who was willing to listen with his monthly podcast (as a side note, these podcast are exceptionally entertaining even if you have no interest in McIntyre's music. They are still floating about on iTunes and I would highly recommend having a listen). At the end of every episode, he would showcase an unsigned band that he had worked with, toured with, or just plain enjoyed. Some I liked, some I didn't get. Then, one week, he played this song



It was called "Strange Fruit For David" and I was intrigued. As someone who is always driven to curiosity by a crooked singing voice and an odd lyric, I listened again and the more I played that song, the more curious I became. Musically, it reminded me of an old favorite of mine, Hefner who, in a lot of ways, charted a similar path creatively – wonky lyrics sung (if that is the right word) over a skiffle like backing by a man who sounds as if his vocal cords had been shredded by a band saw. It was off the back of this song that I tracked some more material down and, slowly but surely, became a fan.

Now, three years after that podcast and over a decade since they formed, The Wave Pictures have released six full length albums, with a seventh due to follow later this year, sold almost exclusively through iTunes and their website www.thewavepictures.com, where you can also find several cuts of records made by Tattersall in his many and various side projects. While the quality of the recordings is very often poor (this is, after all, a band who ship their albums in cardboard sleeves to keep the costs down), the standard of the songwriting leaps through the mush and the crackle. Tattersall has a lyrical flair that has been compared variously to Morrissey and Jonathan Richman, and owes a significant debt to his mentor, the darling of British underground songwriting and Hefner frontman, Darren Hayman with whom he has recorded voluminously. He has the knack of picking mundane, almost trivial subject matter and, by juxtaposition, rendering them essential. This is never more apparent than in my favorite Wave Pictures song – "Instant Coffee Baby", of which two thirds is a list of places frequented by the narrator and his now ex-lover.



By taking a lyrical road less frequented and paying attention to the trivialities of romance, Tattersall somehow makes the loss of his love all the more troubling. It is, more often than not, the small things that happen during a relationship that make the courtship memorable and this song, along with so many other Wave Pictures tracks, captures the essence of the minutiae perfectly. I absolutely love the last verse of this song,

There are lights in any one of these tunnels
Spurting up the stained funnel
Of your Italian ex boyfriends coffee machine
That I stole when he left for Bologna

And when I burned my finger on it
It was like he came back and bit me for it
And you got Cystitis didn't you

Tattersall's delivery of that final line channels all of the hurt and emotion, set off and burnished by the combination of the sublime and the mundane.

The other type of song that the band does incredibly well is the observational song. They seem to be at ease with picking up on the things around them that most would be inclined to ignore – the greatness comes in the way that they are able to repackage it and feed it back to the audience in a way that they can relate to and recognize. We all know what happens on a Friday night out in a down-market university town, but how many of us would have the eye for detail required to catalog it or the lightness of touch to convey it.



"Friday Night in Loughborough" has both of those qualities. It is the sort of observational songwriting that made the Arctic Monkeys into an overnight phenomenon.

And that brings me round, I suppose to the point that I always hawk on about. We need to stand up and push bands that we love, because other people have neither the forum to express their view nor, oftentimes, the inclination. If The Wave Pictures, like the Arctic Monkeys, had an internet campaign, been cheekily good looking and found a record company willing to break all sorts of records for first album expenditure, then I probably wouldn't need to write this column. But I did, and I do, because publicity is the only way that small outfits have a chance to become big bands. By rights, The Wave Pictures should be a very big band by now. But there again, I learned a long time ago that fairness is a trait that this world sadly lacks.