But by 2012 they felt as if things were going nowhere, and decided to recruit friends-of-friends Amey and Ellis to form a proper band. Oddie and Rowsell started playing open-mic nights, and spending their time “listening to Johnny Flynn and being very twee”. “You’d definitely end up with the wrong band if you put an advert in the post office,” deadpans Ellis. “Why put an advert on the post office wall when you could do it online?” says Oddie. “Kim Deal and Frank Black met that way,” volunteers Rowsell, in reference to the Pixies’ origins. He admits he used to be embarrassed to have met Rowsell via the musical equivalent of a lonely hearts ad, “but so many bands back in the day put an advert in the NME,” he says. He was at teacher-training college in south-west London, and apparently just as far from the nearest likeminded person. There they found a video of Oddie playing guitar. She continues: “I didn’t have any friends who were in bands or even many who were into indie music.” (“Her group of friends all just went to Reggae Roast,” adds Ellis, pointedly.) So Rowsell and her dad, eager to help out, started scouring internet forums where musicians showcase their skills to potential bandmates. Rowsell and Oddie met in 2010, when she “wanted to try playing live but I didn’t really have the confidence to do it on my own”. Photograph: REXĪnd that is kind of what happened in reality. Lupine howls: Ellie onstage in Cambridge, April 2015. The four join forces, everyone goes electric, and it all ends with Rowsell ceremonially smashing up a computer with a hammer. It’s witnessed by soon-to-be bandmates Amey and Ellis, who are doing rebellious things like lighting matches and drinking milk straight from the bottle. In it, Rowsell and guitarist Joff Oddie play a naive folky duo, who upload a breathy acoustic number dedicated to their cat on to the internet. Their loud/quiet tendencies have earned them a reputation as grunge revivalists, but a truer explanation of their sound is provided by the band’s video for early single Fluffy. Over the past few years, Wolf Alice have established a sizeable fanbase thanks to a near-constant stream of singles and EP releases, in which softly-spoken melodies erupt into a clamour of hammering percussion, crashing guitars and siren-like riffs. In fact, the band’s reach goes beyond the headbanging teenagers of the front five rows. There may be no local scene for Wolf Alice to be part of, but it’s clear that they can still generate a fair amount of feverish excitement by themselves. Later in the month, at a tiny homecoming show at The Monarch pub in Camden Town, the combination of overzealous security and being three minutes late leaves me stranded outside with some schoolgirls, who tell me with desperate looks that they can’t get in either and, yes, it is really unfair. At the sold-out Shepherd’s Bush Empire, the moshpit heaves with teenagers screaming the lyrics to as-yet unreleased album tracks memorised from fan YouTube videos. Guitar music was exhilarating then (though I was a teenager too, so not a particularly reliable witness), and I’m reminded of those days when I go to a Wolf Alice show. Ellis and drummer Joel Amey, meanwhile, first befriended each other at an all-ages gig at Camden’s Purple Turtle. “I grew up walking past Nambucca and praying to it,” frontwoman Ellie Rowsell says wistfully. It also spawned a small teen culture in London, centred around underage gigs, with bands on the bills who were often teenagers themselves. Indie might be a bit of a dirty word nowadays, an alarmingly tragic spectre playing a scratchy guitar and wearing “three different belts and one white winklepicker and a black one” (which is how bassist Theo Ellis envisages it), but back then it was exciting and aspirational. The band have already spent three years being touted as the next big thing but, far from people losing interest, nowadays they’re more hyped than ever.Īll of us spent our formative years amid the mid-2000s indie rock explosion, MySpace being part of that experience (“I used to judge people based on what was on their little player!” “You could see what internet gang you were part of!”). Yet, in a funny way, it does all fit with Wolf Alice’s kind of cool: one that clearly doesn’t entail being in the right place at the right time.
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