the WILD honey pie: What’s up guys? Can you describe the perfect gig to me?
Chapel Club: All I need to enjoy a gig is good sound, good shoes and not enough idle time beforehand that I drink too much. Oh and I guess a good crowd, but we’ve been lucky with crowds so far. Other than that, I don’t ask much.
the WILD honey pie: Where’s the strangest place you’ve played a gig?
Chapel Club: The Shacklewell shows we did last September and October were cool but it’s not like a pub is the weirdest of places to play. I guess the Shacklewell Arms is quite a strange pub though. There’s a mural of Bob Marley’s head rising out of the ocean and pink clouds made of MDF hanging from the ceiling. We did a gig in a guy’s flat recently, that was an odd one. He’d built his own bar and a stage at one end of the living room. The toilet was reserved for ladies only and just outside it, screened off from prying eyes by a couple of strips of fabric hung on a washing line, were three buckets cut in half with funnels attached to holes in the bottom. The funnels led to tubes which led to a length of pipe which led God knows where. These were the urinals. They were also a talking point of sorts.
the WILD honey pie: If you could have any band open up for you, who would it be?
Chapel Club: Hmmm, not sure really. It’s not something I’ve ever thought about. We’ve been putting on our own shows and we haven’t considered getting support bands in yet: it feels like it could distract from the directness of what we’re trying to do. Maybe we’ll have to rethink that soon, now that more people are coming to the gigs. It’s just that the songs we play are intended to have some kind of emotional impact, arsey as that sounds, and we want to make sure they’re heard in the right context.
the WILD honey pie: We named this site after a song by The Beatles. What album of theirs is your favorite? Why?
Chapel Club: I kinda wanna pick The Beatles, because I’ve been listening to Good Night and Julia a lot recently, and because it’s a double album: I don’t think a Beatles album can be too long. But despite that, I think I have to go for Abbey Road. The songs are obviously amazing, the sound is so British and of its time – and it still sounds like nothing any other band has ever done. The medley is insane. And to finish with The End and Her Majesty is unsurpassable. For me, it’s the greatest album ever made. It’s beyond music.
the WILD honey pie: If you could remake the theme song for any TV show, which would it be?
Chapel Club: I don’t know many… All I can think of is the theme from The Raccoons, which I think I played when I was DJing at a club night once. I don’t know why I did that. I guess I wouldn’t mind messing around with the song that plays over the opening credits of True Blood, just because I like all the imagery of river baptisms and strip bars. I don’t know what the song’s called or who performs it, and I don’t think it’s very good. I just think that someone should fuck it up and intensify it. At the moment, when the dude sings ‘I wanna do bad things to you’ it sounds like he wants to get a bit naughty then go home to his wife. I think it should sound like his wife and him are in it together, and she’s waiting outside in the truck with gloves and rope and one tooth in her head. But then I guess the show is quite tongue-in-cheek, so maybe our version would be a bit too much for them.
the WILD honey pie: What’s the best movie you’ve seen recently?
Chapel Club: I saw Where the Wild Things Are the other day, which I thought was beautifully filmed. The Karen O soundtrack is great too, and I like how scary and violent it gets for a kids’ movie, because the life of a kid can be pretty brutal and they probably have a purer understanding of brutality than most adults. I thought it was a very wise adaptation. Plus the little kid has a cool woolly jumper on at the beginning.
the WILD honey pie: What’s the best joke you’ve heard recently?
Chapel Club: I can’t repeat it, I’d be lynched. And fair enough, because it is sick.
the WILD honey pie: What unconventional musical instrument would you most want to use in one of your songs?
Chapel Club: The dolceola, it’s a miniature piano/zither hybrid. Someone recently introduced me to a record by this amazing gospel folk singer from the 1920s called Washington Phillips. He plays the dolceola as accompaniment to these beautiful devotional (in the religious sense) songs – it sounds like waves of stardust rising and falling in the background. So I thought, we should have a bit of that. One of the other guys would have to play it though.
the WILD honey pie: I read that you enjoy poetry, specifically Frank O’Hara and Ernest Hemingway. What are your favorite poems by them?
Chapel Club: I prefer O’Hara’s more instantly expressive, spontaneous-sounding stuff (I realise I sound like a dick, I don’t mean to – just trying to be honest), poems like Autobiographia Literaria or Animals or Today. I think they give you a better sense of O’Hara as a poet in the purest sense, rather than as a poet-intellectual or a poet/art expert or a gay poet or whatever. But none of his stuff is dull. Hemingway… I’ve never read any poetry by him, just novels and short stories etc. I think my favourite thing of his is a story called My Old Man. The ending is Hemingway at his best, it’s pretty devastating.
the WILD honey pie: What car epitomizes the sound of your music?
Chapel Club: I know next to nothing about cars, so I’ll stay vague here. I’d hope we’d be represented by something sleek and beautiful and classic, a vintage Jag or something. But I can imagine a shitty British bloke band wanting to be an old Jag too, so maybe not.
the WILD honey pie: You’re playing an encore at a gig, and have no original material left to perform (somehow). What song do you cover? Why?
Chapel Club: Nite Flights by The Walker Brothers, because I’m listening to it about thirty times a day at the moment so I wouldn’t forget the lyric. It sounds like Jeff Buckley wrote the vocal melody and Roxy Music supplied the backing. But it’s all Scott really: stupendous, sublime, spectacular Scott.
the WILD honey pie: 2010 seems like it’s going to be a big year for you guys. What are you most excited about?
Chapel Club: More live shows, writing new songs, recording the album… there’s so much stuff coming up. We’re releasing O Maybe I mid-February, so it’ll be good to see how people react to it. It’s very different to Surfacing, I’m hoping it’ll put an end to some of the lazy comparisons people have been making to other bands.
