Coming to us via the none-more eclectic Pronoia Records (also responsible for the heaviosity of Red Star Line, young indie guns White Lies and the inventiveness of Viarosa), Manchester/London alliance EXIT 52 are making enigmatic and seductive noises with their debut "Dandelion" EP.
The siamese brainchild of brothers DAVID and PETER GLENNIE, EXIT 52 are a duopoly who gradually whittled their way through members during the 1990s until only the two of them remained. The fact that Peter is now based up in Manchester and David in London suggests a Liam'n'Noel-style set-up of mutual loathing, but in reality the brothers are on harmonious terms, they just prefer to live and operate as they are, as we'll discover when we place a call to David in London. He's happy to fill in the blanks about the past and divulge his hopes for Exit 52's future.
David, tell us a little about EXIT 52'S early years. I believe you spent most of the 1990s trying to kickstart bands and ultimately failing to get them off the ground in both Birmingham and London before finally relocating to Manchester around the turn of the Millennium? Am I getting warm?
"Yeah, it was a kind of distillation process," replies Dave, who's prone to take a dramatic pause to collect his thoughts before he answers.
"I've been making music with my brother for the past 16 years and that involved a lot of bands and making music for short films and radio. It got serious when we finished university in the early 1990s and decided to get into music as a more permanent thing. It was a toss up whether we'd gravitate towards Manchester or London, but our drummer at the time influenced us in going to Manchester as he was sure there was loads going on there."
I could understand that if you'd made that move during the Madchester explosion or even during Oasis' halcyon days, but at the turn of the Millennium, Manchester was a tad quiet, wasn't it?
"Yeah, well it was really," David confesses.
"We got a big break in that James saw us play and likes us a lot. We ended up doing their last two tours with them and that culminated with us playing a huge show at Brixton Academy," he remembers fondly.
But then the treadmill beckoned again, right?
"Yeah, that's right, we then ended up playing small clubs in Manchester again," replies Dave, slightly ruefully.
"It got really frustrating, I can't deny that. Eventually that line-up of the band with the old drummer I mentioned split up. I moved to London and Peter stayed on in Manchester. We sacked everyone else and kept working ourselves."
I know a few other bands, such as Clayhill for example, who have made it work when the core members are based in different places and they send tapes around. Is this how it works with you guys then?
"Yeah, it's a relationship that works well," Dave enthuses.
"I'll write a song on guitar, record it and send it to Peter to arrange or whatever. It's a creative backwards and forwards working relationship via computer, so we have huge amount of flexibility in terms of working on material. We can work when we want to and there's no need for Transit vans and all that crap. Nowadays both of us only have to convince one other person, there's no committee meetings anymore and trying to get other people into what we're doing."
Sounds liberating in itself, but what about your relationship with your sibling? It's not a Liam'n'Noel or Ray and Dave Davies thing where you hate each other's guts most of the time and it fuels your creativity as a result?
"No, we've never had a rivalry or clash of personality problem," replies Dave, scotching that one in a single blow.
"The thing is, we're both polite and nice, so we just go along with things. The songs that get finished tend to be hybrids of ideas that might have started out as bad ideas, but then get buggered around with and improve as we work them through our filtration process. The ones that get dropped are usually because we get bored with them and we just gradually go around them and forget them...."
....Politely ignoring the fact they ever existed?
"Yeah, sort of," Dave laughs. "There's no confrontation and ugly scenes with people shouting the odds and saying "I'm not playing that shit" and all that."
Sounds ideal in many ways. But before we leave your Manchester adventures behind, I wanted to ask if you felt isolated with what was happening in the city at the time? Was there any scene to speak of around the time of the Millennium? I'm struggling to remember much press attention focussed on the city back then?
"No, it wasn't great when we got there in 1998/ 99," admits David.
"It's totally ironic because we'd assumed there would be a great scene and we'd automatically end up hanging round with all the other bands and supporting each other at gigs and so on."
But you got a reality check?
"Yeah, because after that whole Madchester time a load of the established venues had been closed down and there were only two or three places and lots of disillusioned bands who were trying to get out of the city, not be a part of it. Even Haven, who you may remember were being touted for greatness were just desperate to leave and go to London."
"There weren't any happening venues on a Friday night either," he continues after a pause.
"It was all small bars with expensive beer, ripping people off. It was the antithesis of the whole Madchester thing. Talk about right place, wrong time."
OK, well it's best to leave all that in the past then, and fast forward to the new Exit 52 who have a tasty Ep out called "Dandelion". I would honestly use the term 'filmic' in the most positive sense in describing the EP. There's a really spooky, film noir-ish quality to the four songs. Is the cinema world especially inspiring for you as a creative artist?
"Oh yes, absolutely," gushes David. "It's such a big deal with us. How can I explain this? Have you ever had food poisoning?"
Er yeah, once....when I had some undercooked chicken at a restaurant. Um, where is this going exactly?
"I'll explain," says David. "It's because I did once too...from seafood, and because of that I couldn't eat any seafood for over six months. It was like that with music for me, actually specifically Dido, she was the cause of my ailments."
Come again?
"You see my girlfriend bought Dido's album and it literally put me off music, I hated it so much...."
...Aaah, I think I'm picking up the trail again....
"Good!" enthuses Dave, "so you'll understand when I say that due to Dido I totally stopped listening to music. I got totally into film instead, especially classic sci-fi, things like "The Day The Earth Stood Still" and light horror like "Let's Kill Uncle"....they were crucial in influencing the way "Dandelion" turned out. I mean with the title song, I'd written the words first and it was written like a film script. I freely admit I went to (film site) Babelfish online and pulled out odd lines from that. All four of the songs are bound up in film."
Vocally, you're pretty intriguing too. You go from deep'n'gravelly like Alabama 3 on the title song through to the keening, near-falsetto delivery (dare we say Thom Yorke-ish?) of "Meow" and make it sound easy. How did your vocal style evolve?
"Well, when I started I couldn't sing, simple as that," says David baldly.
"I just didn't try for a long time and when I finally did take it a bit more seriously I ended up singing in this weird full-on high voice like mid-period Bono or Michael Stipe on the crappier REM albums. I kept losing my voice as a result, but then I tried it half an octave lower and found that worked much better."
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"It's been mostly trial and error and happy accident the way it's evolved. Partly I had to do something to compensate because when you're trying to sing in a cheap rehearsal room you have to sing high because you can't hear a thing in those places. It's like the way Peter Hook stumbled on his style of playing because he couldn't hear himself when Joy Division rehearsed at the beginning. He got into the high end stuff because he couldn't hear himself otherwise."
"But I didn;t want to entirely lose the lower register," he continues, "because I was hugely into The Sisters Of Mercy back in the 1980s and I wanted to be able to sing like Andrew Eldritch and Nick Cave as well, y'know? I can do the Thom Yorke thing, sure, but with the likes of people such as Chris Martin and the guy from Keane the idea of singing falsetto all the time has become ridiculous, so I don't want to be trapped with all that."
Understandable enough. But you mentioned the notorious Sisters Of Mercy. Does your obsession with them inform your song "1983"?
"Yeah, in a way, though that was originally just a working title. I wrote the guitar part - not the "Fistful Of Dollars" bit, the regular part - and it sounded like The Sisters Of Mercy circa 1983. I said that to Peter and he brought in the flanged synth drums to make it sound like it WAS the Sisters Of Mercy in 1983. It's funny really as we've attracted a Goth revival tag as a result...."
You're not serious?
"Yeah, really, a number of people have picked up on it. We don't care. It's a laugh."
David is pretty cavalier about this. I'm not sure I would be, but that's a discussion for another day. Let's get down to the nitty gritty of how this Exit 52 thing works live. There's only the two of you, you've sacked everyone else....how the hell do you reproduce all the weird electronica of the record live if you don't have other musicians, unless you have it all on DAT or whatever?
"Easy....we present it as Videoke."
Pardon me?
"There's only the two of us, and we make a film for each of our songs." David explains patiently.
"When we present it live, we bring a film screen, my brother plays guitar and I sing. We play the requisite film on DVD and project it onto a while screen, and aside from the vocals and my brother's guitar, all the music is already contained on the DVD. Easy..."
But that's not strictly live performance, is it?
"Yeah, but it's like the way you used to have pianolas in the old days, isn't it?" David continues, unrepentant.
"In those days the pianola played along to the silent films. Ours is just an updated form of that entertainment. Hey, it's television, right? People want television more than anything. And I'm telling you...people come from the back of the hall up the front to see us. It never fails to draw them in. Plus there's no humping ridiculous amounts of gear in white transit vans with us," he finishes proudly.
Very smart. But what about more material from Exit 52. You made a reference to an album in the works earlier on when we started chatting. Is that completed yet?
"Ha! No, it's not at all," David replies, with the euphoria of Sherlock Holmes when he's discovered a vital clue.
"We've still got loads to do, because we've got about 30-odd songs approaching final demo form and 10 are nearly finished. Half a dozen more are still to finish off. It's always last minute with us, mate. Pronoia have a delivery date of 1st April, but they'll be bloody lucky!"
David says this with a curious relish, but enthuses about Pronoia's modus operandi when I question him further about how they linked up with this most eclectic of new labels. They're run by Red Star Line's bassist, aren't they?
"Yeah, our involvement was originally very loose," says David.
"We met Colin, (label boss and RSL bassist) at a couple of gigs, he was friendly with our old drummer," he recalls.
"It was all pretty random. He got talking and said he'd float his label and would we join. We nonchalently said yeah and sort've forgot about it. Then, out of the blue, he got back to us six months later and it was all up and running. Amazing."
He's certainly open-minded, judging by the roster at present, what with White Lies, Red Star Line and Viarosa, plus you guys...
"It's probably the only true independent label left actually," says David firmly.
"They're not owned by Sony, y'know what I mean?" he continues, with just a tinge of vitriol.
"Their artistic policy is based entirely around bands Colin likes, and he ensures the artistic control remains entirely with the bands themselves. He's not a svengali, he just loves music. It's a really great set-up, without the usual strings attached."
Sounds virtually unheard of in this day and age, but let's look to the future for Exit 52 before we take our leave. Should this unprecedented artistic control propel you forward as you wish, what would you most like to achieve with Exit 52?
"I think our 3rd album will be a culmination of everything we want to achieve," says David, swelling with pride.
"It'll be a culmination of 20 years groundwork for me. Everything is leading to that for us. I really don't care if no-one buys it either....only 9 people can like it for all I care, but more than anything I want to make something that's incredible and will be around for years afterwards. Whether we get to play Shea Stadium or not isn't important to me, but to achieve that perfect album is my aim. Our legend can grow with time. That'll do me."
Well, you never know. On the basis of "Dandelion" it might just become reality. Stranger things truly have happened and prematurely writing off such iron-willed determination is often a foolish move. The jury might be out for now, but it's certainly not ignoring the case for the defence.
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