On The Up

Self-publishing, self-financing indie outfit TATE bring their literary-minded indie-punk-folk-klezmer-whatever to the 100 Club on Monday.

January 29 – February 4, 2009

They’re actually already… well up. We have to admit, it’s a bit rich giving them an On The Up, given that their EP came out more than a year ago and they’ve already played two tours of the UK. But now is when it’s already played two tours of the UK. But now is when it’s already starting to happen for TATE. Radio has picked up on ‘Sometime Around Midnight’, the lead single from their forthcoming debut LP, with a vengeance. Not bad for a band who are still, technically speaking, unsigned.

‘In the States now, we’re at No 8,’ boggles frontperson Mikel Jollett. ‘We’re the only indie rock band in the chart. We don’t understand it, because it’s a song that has no chorus, that’s just a story about a bad night. It’s very sad, and there’s no little thing you can bop your head to. There’s like two choruses on the whole album. When we first finished it, we were courted by all these major labels, and they ...
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On The Up

Self-publishing, self-financing indie outfit TATE bring their literary-minded indie-punk-folk-klezmer-whatever to the 100 Club on Monday.

January 29 – February 4, 2009

They’re actually already… well up.
We have to admit, it’s a bit rich giving them an On The Up, given that their EP came out more than a year ago and they’ve already played two tours of the UK. But now is when it’s already played two tours of the UK. But now is when it’s already starting to happen for TATE. Radio has picked up on ‘Sometime Around Midnight’, the lead single from their forthcoming debut LP, with a vengeance. Not bad for a band who are still, technically speaking, unsigned.

‘In the States now, we’re at No 8,’ boggles frontperson Mikel Jollett. ‘We’re the only indie rock band in the chart. We don’t understand it, because it’s a song that has no chorus, that’s just a story about a bad night. It’s very sad, and there’s no little thing you can bop your head to. There’s like two choruses on the whole album. When we first finished it, we were courted by all these major labels, and they would actually sit us down and go: “you guys are a great band—we just wanna change the song in the following ways.” And we were like, “No, that’s our record.” And they’re like, “Oh you guys are so funny, you gotta go spend a couple hundred thousand dollars and get a pproducer that’s gonna add all that bullshit noisy stuff that you get on a major label record and compress the fuck out of everything and change the songs so they have unnatural hooks and choruses.” So we just didn’t.’

It’s surprising that the band ever got together at all.
Firstly, because frontman and songwriting chief Jollett never wanted to be in a band in the first place, and was pursuing a promising career as a novelist and been accepted at swanky writerly retreat Yaddo. Having set aside a year to write his debut novel, he suddenly saw his muse change tack.

‘You know, you hear about old ladies who suddenly decide to become marathon runners, or somebody who decides that they are gonna grow the biggest pumpkin? People do all sorts of odd things, and the amount of time that they spend on it, they sort of distort themselves in the process. Writing’s a lot like that. You’re so committed to a task, it changes the way you think. The way you imagine the world. It seems in retrospect like: Oh yeah, that all happened and we became this rock band! Of course, that makes sense! But at the time it was completely mental. People thought I was crazy.’

That said, Jollett isn’t the least likely pop star in the band.
At least Jollett had a grounding in actually liking pop music, unlike classically trained keyboardist/viola player Anna Bulbrook, who had barely heard of this strange new ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ fad before joining TATE.

‘I realised that I didn’t wanna play in an orchestra,’ says Bulbrook. ‘It’s like being a dancer, it’s a little bit masochistic. This is too, but it involves a lot more drinking and you get to wear whatever you want. I didn’t really appreciate pop music until I saw Arcade Fire live, and then played violin for Kanye West. I had this huge paradigm shift. There’s value to this! It’s a good idea, this rock music! There’s a value in bringing people together and creating, like, a cathartic party, basically.’

They think indie’s a big old load of crap.
The band have been the subject (and occasional target) of many comparisons, from Arcade Fire to Pulp via Springsteen, and for all we know, Men Without Hats. Some critics have seen this as a sneaky tactic to net the broadest possible demographic, but the band maintain it’s the product of varied interests and a low boredom threshold. That said, they’re not going to turn away any fans.

‘Everyone wants to succeed,’ says Jollett. ‘And it’s the exact opposite in indie rock. You gotta pretend you don’t want it, you have to actually pretend that you don’t care. The thing about indie is it’s the only kind of music that defines itself in relation to other genres as being not the mainstream. And what’s funny is how incredibly rigid it is in terms of its attitudes.

‘I think it’s also a class thing. We’re very much a working-class band, and indie rock is middle-class white people. And middle-class white people are generally uncomfortable with emotion. Working-class bands aren’t. We’re completely like: Fuck you, this is what we think and this is what we feel and we’re gonna have big loud backbeats and we’re gonna scream and we’re gonna jump and we’re not gonna act like we don’t care.