The Zine UK

Picture this: a dimly lit pub in Crouch End, rain hitting the window glass like long fingernails rapping, thunder and lightening strikes casting silhouettes onto the walls, and I- eternally tired goth - sitting down talking music, psychology and Dostoyevsky with two of Dead Writers, a band whose music would make a perfect soundtrack for the experience.

I first heard of Dead Writers when #Zeenager IT girl or 'Robin Hood in Fishnets', Ruby Blue excitingly messaged me one evening after catching them play at The Black Heart in Camden. Sending me videos of their set, she told me I HAD to listen to them. And she was right.

So here I am, in The Railway Tavern, sitting down and talking with Paul and Filippo, two members of the band our mates at Louder than War exclaimed recently were going to need bigger stages...

So talking of which, we start off talking about the gig where our Ruby locked eyes and ears on them.

P- The Black Heart was a great gig, ti was our second one with the new line-up. We feel like the band is sounding better and looking more together than ever. There's a really good energy at the moment. It was a brilliant night. We also had a bunch of people from the Nick

Cave Fan Club, The Vortex, who came down. They were here for another show, but they stayed to come and see us, and we met for the first time. They are like carrier pigeons of the good word of whatever it is we're doing.

F- The energy was insane, so sweaty. When the energy is there and people are enjoying themselves, that's what makes a good gig. I caught a little of the other bands' sets and there was such great showmanship - Showpersonship? Show....'

P- Showthemship!

New line-up? What's going on there?

P- We've really been evolving as a band, and people have come and gone as we've grown. We were joined by our new bassist Não earlier in the year. We've been playing with session musicians for a while- friends, good people that we know, who have helped us as we develop our sound. One of them is Alex Anthony, who is the sound engineer at The Victoria in Dalston, a very talented musician. Also Nik Sheva on drums; he got in touch last year after a set we did at The George Tavern, and when we needed someone for a show, I asked him if he would like to play with us. They've both joined the band now. It's just really working.

Everyone gets the music. We've gone through so many mutations. I started the project around 2017 but when Filippo joined in 2019, that really felt like the beginning of the band for me. That's when the songs, the aesthetics and the vision began to materialise more clearly.

So, what's the story behind being called Dead Writers?

P - I was having a little crisis about starting this new band and not having a name for it. I'm quite a reader and my songwriting is influenced by literature. I had just finished a book, and I was thinking about what to pick up next from my home collection, looking at my options. As it happens, I read quite a lot of classic literature- and I had this thought that most of what I read had been written by dead people - Dead Writers... It just sort of clicked. Born of a sporadic thought.

So just who are your favourite dead writers?

P- Oh, I have many. No real favourites, I don't have any favourites in life - I tend to swing from one side to the other but the most impactful? I like Herman Hesse a lot, Oscar Wilde, Anais Nin - oh, and the Russians - Dostoyevsky; | like Hemingway. The Romantics, the French symbolists - Baudelaire, Rimbaud... (OH, my little bookworm heart! - Ed)

(Cue almost ten minutes of chatter between us about Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, Rimbaud and Notes from Underground which I won't bore you with here.)

P- The writers Ilike are people who live very intensely, so they can go through great sadness but also be an extremely joyful person. They are people of extremes. I feel like that too. Not all the time I guess, but that's the price you pay for a special sensitivity and the ability to express it. Writing is a big exposure of the soul which I think can bring a slight imbalance within somebody.

We've got very, very deep for a Monday morning....

Back to the music - Dead Writers covered 'Are You) The One That I've Been Waiting For' as part of Nick Cave's Bad Seed TeeVee Covers Weekend during lockdown.

F- It was great. To me, the thing that was most pleasurable was that someone like him took the time to listen to his fans. Even though we're also musicians, but he's taking time to listen. It was such a great thing. Lockdown was a very exposed period of time emotionally for everyone, and I think that showed in our cover. We really expressed that.

P - It happened the same way it often does for us, what I call the 'knock-on-that-door' technique. 'Knock on that door at least thrice', is the mantra - that's how you get to places. It was lockdown, we were at home, not rehearsing, and we saw the social media post on Nick Cave's page where he welcomed fans from all over the world to cover his songs. Filippo and I were living together at the time so we kitted out my room, shot the video and submitted it. Twice, because I wasn't sure the first one had been received (the good ol' knock.) We didn't hear anything back about it. A few weeks later, I was just getting on with life, when my friend Laura texted me saying 'I've just seen you on Bad Seed TeeVee!!'. And that's how we found out. Then Nick Cave wrote about us on the Red Hand Files. He wrote only one word, but you know - it's one word from Nick Cave!

To be fair, dear readers, that word was 'astonishing'...

We then started seeing that we were gaining new followers on our social media and we came to find out that it was from this group of people called The Vortex, who follow Nick Cave around everywhere he goes. They checked us out and seemed to really like us.

So you're recording an album next year? Tell us about it.

P- It's still growing. I've got a bunch of new songs. I usually make pretty advanced demos and then we work on them as a band. I've been so busy lately, but it's the right time to do ti now. We have an EP coming out very soon, and then we're starting pre-production sessions at the end of the year. We're already rehearsing and playing the new material live. I have loads of songs that are knocking on the cage to take flight. I feel like it's going to be received well. But in the meantime, we have some news.

Oh?

F - We will be opening for Hannah Wicklund at her London and Manchester shows this month. She is opening for Greta Van Fleet on a UK & Europe arena tour in between. That seemed to come together as a really organic thing. They approached us and asked if we would do it, and of course, we said yes.

P - The dates are the 21st of November at Camden Assembly and the 22nd at The Deaf Institute in Manchester.

In terms of other gigs, are there any in the pipeline?

P- Nothing else for now. We've just played a festival called Hard Rock Hell, which has more of a traditional rock vibe. Our mission is to shock a little, where we can. I remember we played this festival last year, Call of the Wild, which is very hard rock-oriented. We turned up thinking we were going to be the fancy band from London with makeup on, a piano and clean guitars - god forbid! But we have grown a bit of an audience from those shows as well. You learn that the music does its job, there is magic to it.

So, our Ruby seemed pretty blown away by the stage presence you have. Would you say you're like your stage personas in real life?

P- She imagined everything! (laughs) We were only a figment of her imagination... Jokes aside, I feel I'm rather different as a person. But I am not exactly in control of myself onstage, the situation and the music just filters through me. I define it as a very pure state. There's a primal energy that takes over, which I think is what people like; there's a sensitivity behind it. It's a wonderful way of expressing yourself. I do have a preconceived idea of how to present our band's music as a frontman, but a lot of what I do happens unconsciously. I'm not so 'in-your-face' of the stage - but I'm an actor. An actor's role is to perform, and to perform is to make shapes. That's exactly what we do.

F - I would say that onstage I feel a kind of hyperfocus - even though it doesn't look like that. Everything is about responding to everything around me. I like to know everything we're saying song-wise so I can connect with that song from my life. But it is mostly unconscious. I was an obsessive rock teenager, I loved bands like Guns N' Roses - and I think you absorb the aesthetics, but it's still something that kind of comes up naturally.

Honestly, chatting with Dead Writers could have gone on forever and I probably had enough for 2 articles- but I have to bring it to an end somewhere...

Do you have any bands you know, or have played with that you feel people need to know about?

F- Yes, actually very good friends of ours- Rival Karma, a power duo, brilliant musicians and very good friends. They've released an EP very recently.

P - I can recommend our friends who have recently shared stages with us - Just Kids. Another strong power duo. Rachel and Maxie are brilliant. My friend Bandini, who is also a songwriter and piano player - the bastard child of Cab Calloway and Tom Waits! He plays smokey piano bar jazz/blues music. Also, Suzie Stapleton, who has just been involved in a project with Nick Cave, Debbie Harry and some other really famous people. She's really good.

F- I really like Minimal Schlager, they're synth/electronic dream pop. As you can see we like a lot of things. We listen to everything.

P- Gabi Garbutt too. We met through spoken word events and we've played some music gigs together now. A good friend. She's fantastic.

Ah, another thread, we're good friends of Gabi here at TheZineUK. It's all weaving together....

You can find more on the # Zeenager-recommended Dead Writers here.