Birds of play take flight
Piano Lesson
Guillemots frontman Fyfe Dangerfield dreamed of a pan-generational, multinational pop group. Then he had to make it a reality, finds Johnny Dee
We're not cool. But maybe being uncool is the new cool." The 25-year-old man pondering this is sat in a cafe spilling onto the pavement of Camden Lock, London's tacky epicentre of Euro alt-lifestyle, scratching his bouncy non-hairstyle and looking at his feet. Caught amid the milieu of hash pipe dealers, Swedish punks and noodle sellers, the pierced lips and tattooed navels, he cuts a very square figure indeed. His name is Fyfe Dangerfield - the first name is real, the second intended to give him the air of a 1920s spy - and he is the lead singer and master beard behind Britain's brightest and most exciting new proponents of off-kilter wonder pop, Guillemots. They are about to release an album, Through The Window Pane, the reviews of which seem to be worrying Dangerfield unnecessarily. "If people listen to it just once they won't get it, you need to live with it, go to sleep listening to it." In brief, Fyfe is a genius and musical maverick. But to the kids that surround us he must look like a librarian or junior employee of Birmingham Midshires.
Rock'n'roll's a state of mind, isn't that right? "I'm actually quite boring," says Fyfe. "I'm always the first to bed."
Guillemots make an intoxicating mix of folky mood music, 1960s MOR, experimental jazz, orchestral movie scores and timeless piano pop that will at first grab you with its Coldplay-shaped melodies before tugging you into a dreamlike world of multi-layered strangeness. Their target is to make music that "captures the feeling of lying on a beach at midnight looking up at the stars". Lately, as their popularity has grown, Fyfe has found himself indulging in the odd bout of wild behaviour, imbibing a small bottle of brandy throughout their live set in order to perk himself up. He has also taken to wearing a red suit together with red shoes and successfully pulled off a gentlemanly pimp look. However, such abandon is offset by the fact that he has also taken to timing a wee break with a particularly long drum solo. Rock stars don't wee in the middle of songs surely, unless it's over an American flag or a Westlife album obviously. Further cool points are deducted for the band's name.
"I went bird-watching with my mum and dad a lot as a kid and I have these really good memories of colonies of sea birds along the cliff edges," he says. "There's a band called Kittiwakes already, razorbills sounds like a heavy metal band and puffins are shit. So Guillemots it is."
So much for sex and drugs. Yes, if uncool is the new cool, Fyfe Dangerfield is the coolest popstar on Earth.
Fyfe is in Camden not as a tourist but for practical reasons. Shortly he will meet his bandmates for an appearance on Channel 4's Album Chart Show, filmed down the road at the Koko club. All of them are no less eccentric or talented and all collided with Fyfe in somewhat bizarre circumstances. He met Canadian double bassist Aristazabal Hawkes when they were both asked to contribute to the soundtrack of a film promoting a utopian community in Cheltenham - "it was shaped like a doughnut". They both ducked out of the project but kept in touch, even when she turned her back on serious music and performed in the band of a cruise-ship crooner called Johnnie Favourite. Next came a 36-year-old Scottish drummer, Grieg Stewart, who Fyfe first saw at a bus stop outside Carlton TV studio. "He was wearing a pork pie hat, Hawaiian shirt and shorts and he scared the shit out of me." The final piece of the jigsaw is a Brazilian death-metal guitarist who enjoys the ridiculous name MC Lord Magrao, who answered a personal ad asking for people who could play unusual instruments - considering that he has spent a great deal of time in South America performing with the help of a giant clothes peg, he fitted the bill perfectly.
"I liked the idea of having a guitarist in the band, but not a guitarist who plays the guitar," says Fyfe enigmatically. "Someone who's like a sound magician, and that's exactly what he is."
Both Fyfe and Aristazabel are classically trained but are attempting to "unlearn".
"We know too much about music, we know all the rules," he says. "The other two are self-taught and have these skewed approaches to doing things."
Music has always been around Mr Dangerfield. From the age of three his brother - 10 years his senior - was attempting to get him into the Velvet Underground. His parents meanwhile steered him in a more highbrow direction and he could play piano at four. He insists he was no child prodigy and has learned more from looking at scores in the library ("that's what Miles Davis did") than anything he was taught. Prior to Guillemots his unlearning also included an indie-pop period, a year spent scratching metal objects in an experimental band and a dalliance with free jazz. His influences he says were all the Bs - Beach Boys, Bacharach, the Beatles and birdsong.
In his early 20s, Fyfe returned home to his parents in Bromsgrove in the West Midlands and "went a bit mad", spending months writing a piece of music for string orchestra and solo double bass called Music On The Moon ("I've got a thing about the moon, a lot of musicians have") which has never been performed. Then he had a dream to form a multinational, multi-talented, pan-generational pop group and his dream came true.
"We are all psychic," he claims, talking about the 11-minute track, Sao Paulo, that closes Through The Window Pane. "We made it up in rehearsal. I wrote the lyrics but it didn't feel like I was writing it. Later Magrao said the lyrics were like all the thoughts he had in his head when he was living in Sao Paolo."
Live the band's psychic energy results in a show that's a freewheeling extravaganza involving biscuit-tin percussion, typewriter solos and the band marching through the audience. The album is equally unique and will, hopes Fyfe, lead to people "drifting off as they listen to it. Our album wouldn't sound good in a car or as background music."
"Music should be about the unexplainable. If you're just making music that's easy to talk about there's no point really."
My brother used to play me records. This was the first thing I liked.
Matchstalk Men And Matchstalk Cats And Dogs Brian and Michael
My earliest musical memory. I like the children's choir on it.
Whatever You Want Status Quo
I had a bit of an obsession with Status Quo. I'm a sucker for shuffle beats. Anything with that beat, I love.
The Wild Ones Suede
I had a Britpop phase that I'm a bit embarrassed about now.
Yes Manic Street Preachers
I was obsessed by the Manics when I was little. There's something about this track that's still really strange - but still melodic.
Venus As A Boy Bj?rk
It just sounded like no one else around, totally unique but really poppy. To me the best experimental music doesn't even sound experimental.
Piano Concerto No 1 Rachmaninov
I played the slow movement at school. It's the lushest thing possible, ridiculously so.
Lilac Wine Jeff Buckley
I didn't get him at first, but then the album Grace became one of my favourite albums ever.
Ascension John Coltrane
It was the first experience I had of free jazz and there's something insanely wild about it. When it's done well it's great.
At Home (White Sauce Without For Those Who Don't) Adam Bohman
An example of how you can get art out of nothing. Half his tracks are him playing bits of glass, the other half is him walking around London mumbling into his Dictaphone and making observations about things.
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