Where were you on the evening of Friday 27th July last year?
Chances are, you were one of the 900 million people sat square-eyed and open-mouthed in front of their television sets as James Bond and the Queen parachuted into the Olympic Stadium and Kenneth Branagh marched round in a stovepipe hat pointing at bits of iron.
And if you were one of those people (and seeing as you’re reading this very website), your mouth may have dropped even further when it became clear that the visceral noise emanating from the stadium’s gargantuan PA system was ‘Surf Solar’, the mighty 10-minute opener to Fuck Buttons’ last album, Tarot Sport. The ceremony’s musical directors, dance veterans Underworld, also chucked in album track ‘Olympians’ and ‘Sundowner’, a number by band member Benjamin John Power’s solo project Blanck Mass.
The word epic gets bandied about a lot these days, usually inappropriately, but for once it seemed pretty apt – not only for the ceremony itself, which was £27 million-worth of epic, but for the sheer awesomeness of hearing a band as uncompromising and chart-unfriendly as Fuck Buttons being broadcast to nearly a billion eager ears. Not that the experience seems to have had much of an impact on the unassuming pair. “I don’t feel like there was any added pressure from that,” says Power. But whether or not the Olympics raised the bar for Fuck Buttons, their new album has certainly risen to the challenge – and then some.
Titled Slow Focus, it offers nearly an hour’s worth of densely saturated, extravagantly embellished noisegaze in just seven tracks, opening with the eight-minute apocalyptic firestorm of ‘Brainfreeze’ and basically just ramping it up from there. Lead single ‘The Red Wing’ is particularly filthy, combining junkyard percussion, angle-grinder guitars and whomp-ing drums to devastating effect. Obviously, it would sound phenomenal blasted through the tiers of the Olympic Stadium.
Still, courteous and affable as they are, Power and bandmate Andrew Hung hardly come across as athletic types, with the former chain-smoking his way through this pub garden interview. The pair told FACT about Soft Focus, its bling cover art, being on the road and why one of them is terrified of playing live.
Aside from your surprise appearance in the Olympics opening ceremony, it seems like you’ve been away a long time – Tarot Sport came out in 2009. In that gap you’ve been working on two side projects, Blanck Mass and Dawn Hunger.
Benjamin John Power: They’re the kind of things that we do in our spare time when we’re not doing Fuck Buttons, but saying that, we haven’t really stopped working since the last record came out. We toured for a long time. We have our own studio space and we started to write this record and do it in our own time, so we weren’t working to somebody else’s hours.
Blanck Mass is an exploration of the noisier, dronier end of your sound, whereas Dawn Hunger is more of a traditional band, with a singer even. It’s as if you’ve ended up moving towards each other’s early influences – Ben growing up listening to punk, while Andrew was interested in Warp-style electronica.
BJP: That would be fair to say.
Andrew Hung: I don’t play in Dawn Hunger though. I actually still hate playing live, I’m not good at it still. Ben plays live with Blanck Mass, but I have no intention of playing live. The thing that I find difficult is the anxiety that comes with it. I only started playing instruments in my early 20s, so I’m not very good at ad libbing yet, whereas if Ben was to do something wrong, he’d make it right, if you know what I mean.
It sounds like there’s a good bit of jeopardy in the live performance.
AH: For sure.
BJP: That’s exciting. And it adds a human element, which you can smell a mile away I think.
The way you’ve gravitated towards those two side projects perhaps shows a link between punk rock and certain types of electronic and noise music – they’re can both be a quest for extremes.
BJP: We definitely like to push the instrumentation we’re using to its limit and get as much as we possibly we can out of it, before disregarding it and moving onto the next thing.
And that comes across in the live show as well.
BJP: Well, we write in a live capacity anyway. We’re not sat around in front of a computer screen when we write, we actually set up as we do live, across the table from each other, with the gadgets in the middle. So it’s written to be played live in the first instance.
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When you’re writing together, at what point do you realise you’ve got something you want to keep? How do communicate that?
BJP: I think we almost know what the other person is thinking without even saying anything. You know, when you’ve been working with someone for nearly 10 years, if somebody just stops and sits back you don’t really need to say anything else. If it continues and a certain texture gets embellished, then you know that you’re on the right track. You don’t really need to communicate verbally, you just get a feeling for it.
This album seems even bigger than the previous two, almost saturated, as if there’s no space left in it.
AH: It’s weightier, isn’t it? So if there’s any space, it’s normally at the top I guess.
Is any of that down to new instruments or tools you’ve been using to make music?
BJP: I don’t think it’s necessarily down to that, I don’t think it’s down to any particular instrumentation, we just like to keep things moving. Even down to where we were writing a lot of the tracks. We weren’t working to someone else’s diary, so we actually had time to really hone in on certain sounds and pay a lot of attention to the space in between.
During the Olympics, were you already making this album?
BJP: We were already writing it. I don’t think it really had any impact at all on what was going on with the writing process, because those were older tracks that were being used anyway.
Did you get to go to the opening ceremony?
BJP: We went to the practice, the dress rehearsal.
It must have been bizarre to hear your music played through stadium-sized speakers.
BJP: Yeah, that’s always interesting actually. Recently we’ve been playing a couple of new tracks live, and from only hearing them in our practice space, to the recorded versions, and then to hear them in a live capacity through bigger PAs and proper production and stage equipment, it’s different again. So it’s always a very interesting thing to experience.
Is it true you come up with visual ideas to inspire your tracks while you’re working on them?
BJP: That happens afterwards really.
And the same with the titles? Where did the title ‘The Red Wing’ come from?
BJP: ‘The Red Wing’ came about because it almost felt like you were walking round a deserted city, like a collapsed, deserted city. The Red Wing felt like some kind of building that you might not understand what it had been operational as before. So the Red Wing is the wing of this building that we felt like you could be in.
AH: It’s difficult because I would presume that the music would evoke different imagery for people. I wouldn’t want to impose that, even though those images are strong.
The record sounds even more apocalyptic than the previous two.
BJP: Maybe because there’s a different sentiment that runs through the whole record, which is something that we might not have explored before, and it’s definitely a more aggressive, malevolent sound. It’s a more literal take on the apocalyptic idea.
Is that an expression of how you feel about the world at present?
BJP: No, not at all.
AH: That’s the fun thing about music though, isn’t it? It can conjure images in your head that you don’t necessarily want, like sadness, death. They’re not things I want, but it’s fun [laughs].
Tell me about the cover art – it’s a bit bling, but Victorian bling.
BJP: It’s actually a piece of jewellery I found in Spitalfields Market and it jumped out at me. Obviously with the bling aspect, I think there’s definitely an element of that on the new record when it comes to the crispness and the decoration of the sound, so that drew me towards it. And I like the fact that this thing has a story but we’re never going to know what it is, I like that idea. I don’t think that thing would’ve cost much more than £30.
AH: Don’t say that! It’s very expensive. We’re a very expensive band.
BJP: Well, it’s obviously tripled in value now.
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I spoke to James Holden recently about the idea of trance – not as a genre, but almost as an intent for a piece of music, to alter the listener’s mind. Is that something you try to do with Fuck Buttons?
BJP: I think it’s quite an interesting thing when repetition is considered. If something’s played out for longer than perhaps it ought to be, you start to notice intricacies within the sound that you might not have picked up on if the part was played for two minutes.
Do you notice what the listeners are doing out there in the audience? Sometimes a Fuck Buttons crowd seem almost catatonic – just standing still, receiving the noise.
Both: Yeah.
AH: The live stage as a delivery system is different to the recording, and there’s a lot of power behind the live experience – because it’s loud. You can turn down the album if you don’t like it, but if you’re watching the live show… It’s very exciting for us to play live. You’re projecting onto people and you get all sorts of reactions to that.
BJP: I glance over from time to time. I don’t know if it would be a complete lie to say we don’t feed off what the audience do, but it definitely doesn’t feel like we are. It almost feels like we’re in our own little bubble. We’re not facing the audience, we’re facing each other.
Have you always done that?
BJP: Yeah. Even when we first used to write tracks together in our living rooms, that was the way we’d communicate. We’d even write loud through practice amps. Even in that sense we liked it to be loud, just in a small room. So the easiest mode of communication would be to signal to each other and to nod to each other when we thought it was time for certain things to happen, and that’s just a thread that’s continued throughout the whole thing.
Do you both enjoy being on the road?
BJP: I enjoy it, yeah.
AH: We haven’t toured for a long time, and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a slight apprehension to it. But in the past I’ve really enjoyed it. Playing live brings about a lot of… [long, long pause] unpredictable factors. So that’s where the anxiety comes from.
Touring is probably the worst thing you could choose to do if you don’t like unpredictable factors.
Both: Yeah.
AH: I remember coming back off tour and not remembering how to shop in a supermarket, how to live, you know? But when you’re on tour, you’re drinking bottled water all the time and then you chuck them away, you buy your food from service stations, that’s how you eat, you don’t really cook. And then you come back and it’s unsettling. But once we’re in that rhythm, yeah, it’ll be good. It’s hard to picture because I’ve been at home for a while.
Ben, are you more comfortable with the service station breakfasts?
BJP: It’s harder for me because I’m a vegan.
Oh god, what can you even have from a service station?
BJP: Oh, fucking, bread. You just have to plan ahead a little bit better.
AH: This is the first time on tour where Ben has been a vegan though.
But now, what with being Olympic heroes, you’re famous enough that you can have a really demanding rider.
BJP: You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?
