New Music
Interview
Moreish Idols: “There’s an intimate camaraderie to singing in unison”
Speedy Wunderground's most exciting export in recent years on the creation of their debut album All In The Game
“Sometimes when you’re playing hard and fast music it feels like a bit of a cheat code,” explains Moreish Idols’s Jude Lilley. The Falmouth formed, London based five piece signed to the revered tastemaker record label Speedy Wunderground with their debut EP Float in 2022, which had the exact kind of frenetic post punk energy and cobra-taming saxophones you’d expect from a signing by Dan Carey, the label’s producer and co-founder, at that time.
But as with some of their peers, in successive years Moreish Idols began to feel like there was more to offer beyond the easy short term win of hard hitting post punk. Carey was eager to let the band experiment: “There was very rarely a no,” say Lilley, “it was always a yes. That went such a long way, because you could see Dan was enjoying it, and obviously we were like kids in a sweet shop.”
The culmination of the band’s development – which is still in process, Lilley maintains – is Moreish Idols’ debut album All In The Game, released today. Gently heady and unpredictable while punctuated with pleasing rhythmic passages and self-referential production quirks, the step up in just a few years is remarkable. As the band hit the road to take their debut on a UK tour, Lilley talks us through the record’s creation and the band’s progression along the way.
Listening to the trajectory of the Moreish Idols releases, it seems that the centrality of the acoustic guitar, however simple a move, has helped serve as a base for a new expansion of sounds; is that something you noticed?
Ironically, Tom’s guitar is so heavy, it’s easily the heaviest instrument in the band. And that’s the acoustic. I remember when he bought it, and what’s so cool about it is that the neck is almost like a strap. It kind of feels like an electric guitar and almost sounds like one, because he’s got a big fat humbucker pickup in it. He’s got this big old pedal board – the two of us have been working on both of our pedal boards for a couple of years – he just built this really, really cool sound that was super heavy. What we noticed pretty quickly when we played live, from more of a visual point of view, is it did something different to the audience. It felt like it made people perceive the band slightly differently. So going back to what you’re saying, I think when you see a band and you see an acoustic guitar, it kind of does something in the way that it changes your expectations a little bit. We speak to Dan [Carey] a lot about all this kind of stuff because even the live set is a work in progress. It sounds a bit wanky when I say it, but writing songs that are pretty diverse, plus having two singers and everyone’s different influences, it’s a bit of a wonky project to put into a package anyway, and its all about how to present it. So actually, having the acoustic guitar there visually kind of helps to suggest something other than just an electric guitar, which is more “this what you’re gonna get, hard hitting post punk.” It almost gives us that little gateway.
You mentioned The Windmill scene, and that hard-hitting post punk that was peaking in that scene a few years ago, but that isn’t really what the sound is anymore; it’s like a lot of the bands have taken the time to expand. Look at Black Country, New Road, who are going down a super folky route, or newer bands on the scene like Ugly, for example, and yourselves too, it’s all very eclectic and unpredictable but in the middle of this Venn diagram is a meeting of this creaky, folky sound and a heavier, jagged chaos that borders on math rock or something. I think that plays into a wider question I wanted to ask: it’s almost like you see a band now with the Speedy Wonderland tag on a press release and you have an idea about them and their sound. You guys clearly have a fruitful creative partnership with Dan Carey, but is there ever a defensive feeling of being your own band and not wanting to be pigeonholed by that scene?
Ah man, I think Dan Carey, the name, casts a pretty big shadow, and I think prior to signing it’s quite an intimidating idea, because so much of the band scene at the time was, was Speedy Wunderground, it was The Windmill, it was Black MIDI, Black Country, New Road and Squid at the top. So there was element of okay, if we’re going to do this, we are kind of committing; people are going to automatically associate us with this scene. And I’ve got to say, it’s a scene that we weren’t ever a part of, by any means. I would almost call it an insecurity, but that’s purely just from wanting do the best for the project. Going with Speedy was by far the best thing we did, because working with Dan and the process… I mean, it’s like you’re in the most expensive bedroom you could possibly imagine, in terms of the recording. All he wants to do is prioritise the wax and the music. That’s all he cares about, fundamentally, and it’s just so, so satisfying because a record could never be heard, but you know that you’ve made something genuinely authentic and something that you really did care about at the time. You had a lot of fun doing it, didn’t cut any corners, didn’t try and cater to anybody else. So I think despite the fact that there was this kind of idea that perhaps you could get pigeonholed into this scene, especially by going onto a label that so heavily affiliated with it, it was like a compromise we were willing to take. And actually, The Windmill core thing, I don’t know it, I was gonna say it’s kind of simmering down a little bit, so I guess those pigeonhole walls are slightly broken down.
I read an interview from a couple years ago where you said that you “were reassured that not being sure about what we’re trying to do feels like the right direction.” It sounds like, maybe a couple of years on, you were looking for at least a kind of unifying force in the different sounds that you have, and it sounds like Dan’s helped do that well. I heard he helped dramatically refine lead single ‘Pale Blue Dot’, for example, which had many different iterations previously. Was that why it was an important that that song was the first taste of the album?
No, the reason why was because we made the record and we had a listening party, which Dan always does every time you make one. You usually do it on the last day, like ‘look at what we made’ and get f*cked up and have a party. But we decided to do it the day before the last day, with all of our partners. All of our girlfriends came, because obviously they’ve been through the journey, from before signing to Speedy, and it’s a very family environment at Dan’s as well, with Jane and and Sadie and Orla. Everyone came round and we listened to the record, and ‘Pale Blue Dot’ [stood out]. It’s the oldest song on the album and we respected that song a lot because it’s been around. It felt like an older sibling and we treated it as the centrepiece of the record. In our live set it was really heavy, and it was just quite funny, me and Tom do quite a stupid guitar battle and just wile out. That was right in the centre, and after listening to the record, Dan was like, “Yeah, I’ve got some thoughts. I’ll tell you tomorrow.” Then he looked at me like, “Can I tell you now?” He said we need to re-do ‘Pale Blue Dot’, and all of us as a band went into this, really funny and heated, long old discussion about how to redo it.
Dan was like, “I did say I’ll tell you tomorrow!” Then the next day, we recorded the song in a much more stripped back way, both me and Tom on acoustics, Sol playing a really ‘Hallogallo’ NEU, krautrock drum sound. We recorded it in about four hours and just before I was about to do my vocal take, the penny dropped. I looked at Dan and Tom, and I was like, hang on, this could easily be a Speedy single, because we’re doing it based on the manifesto of Speedy Wunderground, which is what it was based off of, which is recording a song in a day with no break, and Dan and Tom looked to me like they were thinking exactly the same thing. So it just happened purely by coincidence. It was so serendipitous, then it turns out that the the slot that was left for this single was going to be the 50th one anyway. So we ended up doing the 50th Speedy Wunderground single. And it ended up being this kind of funny little extra song that we re-recorded for our album. It worked out perfectly.
At some point in the process you and Tom realised that you should both start singing together, rather than individually. When was that and what has that kind of unlocked for you since?
Once we got the recording aspects down with Speedy, we were really comfortable with that, and we were happy, but I think the one thing that was never really hitting was our live set, purely just because mine and Tom’s vocal styles are so different. But I think from Dan’s perspective, and from others’ perspective I think, it became kind of hard to focus on one thing. Being a front man is like having a direct channel, something to channel the music through. Dan and Tom had a pint at the pub and were chatting about it, and I think Dan was talking about Grian from Fontaines, and how he is the perfect standpoint that the music can channel through, and you can focus on just that one thing, like the final piece of the puzzle. We didn’t really have that, because it was just two songwriters – I mean us two piecing together all these ideas that the five of us came up with in very different ways – so it kind of made it quite difficult to focus. So one of the things was the acoustic; that kind of dealt with the sonic dynamics. And then it was vocals: over this drink they thought, Okay, why don’t you guys try and sing all of the vocals in unison. When it came to recording the album, I think there’s only really two songs off the top of my head that have us individually singing, and that’s because it just didn’t make sense to double it, and it would have felt contrived and forced. Because they’re now in the minority, it becomes a really cool moment, a special moment; it’s a breather.
It was such a good decision to make. I loved it. It’s something I’ve said quite a few times, but it’s so lovely hearing your mate singing your lyrics, but with the same conviction that you do. And also, it’s so nice doing the same thing for them. It’s really nice being able to sing Tom’s lyrics and properly go for it. It’s quite a funny word to use, but it’s quite intimate. There’s a really nice sense of camaraderie attached to it, and I think the sound is really interesting; a lot of people double track their vocals anyway in production, so why not try and master doing it live? To be fair, there is still work to be done, but we are getting better and better every day, and we are definitely going to carry on doing it. And it’s quite interesting because we want to start playing with that now, start doing the unison thing, but then slipping in and out of the harmonies, then maybe even singing different lyrics, then coming back, and, yeah, it’s opened up a whole other style of songwriting, I think.
On the topic of lyrics, the main themes on the album surround time and dreams and existence and are quite abstract, loose feelings. But at the same time, there’s some real physical moments, mainly ‘Slouch’, where there’s the imagery of cracking bones as you deal with your spinal condition. Tell me a bit about that balance of these abstracts and concrete themes. Was that two lyricists at play, or something else?
I think ‘two lyricists at play’ is a is a really good way of putting it, because I think Tom is far more abstract and I’m so literal. I don’t want to speak too much on his behalf, but I feel like sometimes we can both lean too much in our lanes. I certainly can be too literal with my songwriting. I like to try and actually make it slightly more abstract, or slightly less spoon-fed, or just leave it slightly more ambiguous so it leaves a bit of room for the listener to come up with their own interpretation or whatever it is I’m talking about. But I have always been so interested in the crossover between reality and fiction. Since I was a teenager, me and my friends from home were always just really excited by this idea of living life as a comic book, of life being a kind of cartoon, and it makes you really appreciate funny characters, even if it’s a guy sat next to you in a restaurant and you hear him say something funny to someone, or something really overly romantic. All that stuff was like crack. I used to love that so much and really sap out all the energy and really savor it. So I felt like that was always something that I was going to just romanticise a lot in my songwriting. It was always going to be this kind of celebration of reality and fiction, and how they can cross over. It’s so liberating. It makes me feel really happy knowing that you can make something so mundane seem so entertaining, and draw meaning out of everything.
‘Slouch’ is a really good example, because I’m singing about something that’s genuinely happened, and it was really, really tough and intimidating and scary and it f*cking hurt. The song had this kind of feel to it, so turning it into this kind of evil villain character – but a villain that you wanted to get behind and support – and the idea of projecting these kind of characters through real things was quite liberating I think.
As you’ve referenced, there’s a big brooding and building sense of atmosphere on the record, and I imagine there’s only so much that can be unlocked in a rehearsal room that you must be absolutely gagging to get on the road to let that loose.
Yeah, we’re getting so much better at playing together, we finally have that luxury of having a bit of a pick ‘n’ mix with the songs, and also being able to improvise a lot, which is just such a dream for a band. That’s always been the goal, to be able to not worry too much about where something’s going to go, especially with certain outros or transitions from one song to another. We’ve always wanted to be a band where you don’t know what’s going to come or what’s going to happen and everything’s improvised. It kind of gives that really unique feel to a show, because then you’re like, oh, wow, this is the only time I’m going to be able to hear this. Yeah. So now we’re finally in a position where we can do that. So that’s going to be really fun.
All In The Game is out now via Speedy Wunderground.
Find tickets to see Moreish Idol on tour in March 2025 here
