It’s Saturday morning and, for the first time in 2009, the sun is beating down on East London. Scene kids dressed in last night’s clothes are sheepishly doing the walk of shame home; crew-cut arty types are nipping out for The Guardian in bare feet, pretty girls in strap tops are sitting outside sipping coffee like it was 35 degrees and Brick Lane was the Sunset Strip.
Platform is looking through sunshine-tinted windows in a faux-American diner. Opposite us are Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell, two young men whose band The Big Pink are going to make you feel excited about music, the same way you felt the first time you heard Nirvana or Rage Against the Machine or LCD Soundsystem.
This morning we’re unlikely to discover why their first single Too Young To Love sounds like an atom bomb of innovation. It turns out The Big Pink are uncomfortable talking about their music. They clam up, unable to explain a process they find both inexplicably organic and torturously complex.
Give them an opportunity to turn the topic round to girls or love or drugs or life or death or sex, though, and conversation becomes lucid. Ask how people should feel when they’re listening to their music, for instance, and you’ll elicit this response:
‘They should want to kill people. I want to provoke a reaction in any possible way. They should want to fuck their dad and have their first homosexual experience.’
That’s the answer you want from your new favourite band.
So let’s get stuck into the questions that matter. When was the first time you fell in love?
Robbie: ‘I was five. She was called Trina Davies and she was beautiful. We used to play this game called ‘racing cars’. She’d sit on top of me and use my penis as a gear stick. She lost interest around eight or nine and I didn’t give a shit. But by the time I was twelve I wanted her back. At thirteen, I got rejected. At sixteen, I got rejected. I didn’t try again after that.’
Did you manage to maintain that level of sexual experimentation into your adolescence?
Milo: ‘Between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, I was too stoned to do anything. My friends and me would sit in my mum’s house around a big table. We were too lazy to pass the spliff between us. So we’d stick one end of a piece of string to the ceiling and tie the other end to the spliff. We’d swing it around the room so we didn’t have to get up.’
We keep going. We talk about London’s secret date spots - places that look like living rooms from the outside but are perfect restaurants to take girls once you step in. We talk about the songs they lost their virginity to (Milo: ‘I think it was something really cheesy like the Red Hot Chili Peppers). We talk about gigs that leave your gob smacked:
Milo: ‘I went to the Dockland Arena about five years ago to see Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. It was fucking amazing. If you think how ‘˜out there’ Prince was in the 80s, can you imagine how ‘˜out there’ Little Richard was in the 50s? Black, gay and singing about tutti fruits. There was just no point of reference’
The Big Pink don’t fit with 2009’s musical narrative. They’re not part of the new wave of girly electro, nor are they a traditional four-piece indie band. Musically, they’re inhabitants of both the doom rock world of bands like Sunn 0))) and the dark anti-pop of artists like La Roux. Yet neither of those scenes would accommodate The Big Pink.
There’s an element of that evening in Docklands Arena that’s fused into their ethos. Like Little Richard, they’re trying to write music from year zero without a point of reference.
That’s why they find it so difficult to talk about the creative process. Language is yet to catch up with their imagination.
WORDS: SAM WOLFSON
PHOTOS: BEN RAYNER