Music, Style & Culture

Dutch Uncles: Sounds Like Pop

We catch up with vocalist Duncan Wallis and drummer Andy Proudfoot.

Dutch Uncles have been battling through the crowded Manchester scene for quite some time. With their second album (and UK debut) pending, we catch up with vocalist Duncan Wallis and drummer Andy Proudfoot to talk recording abroad, concept albums and playing in London.

Your new single, ‘Face In’ is out soon - but it’s not on the album, is that right?
Duncan: ‘Face In’ is a catch up song, really. It’s from our first album [‘Dutch Uncles’] that we released on a German label about two years ago; it’s always been a live favourite. Now that we’re a bit higher profile and have a UK label we thought we’d make it a quick release before there’s any chance of it getting too late. We’ll move on to album stuff after it because there’s only so much time left before that comes out and we definitely want to give a taste of the album.

You just mentioned about your German album and label, was that very different to your experience this time around in the UK?
D: Very different.
Andy: Yeah, hugely different. In the songs and in the production. We had a couple of producers and some of the stuff was stripped right back to the bare bones - thinking about what the song should be and what it should sound like. Whereas the first album was kind of ‘get in, bash it out, do it and it’s finished’.
D: The first album, it was done in Hamburg. We recorded in a concentrated two week block in a really nice, big millionaires studio-type-thing. I don’t know how we got it for so cheap! When we made the second album, it started out actually as sort of a DIY project. We were doing it while at university in Salford but then the label came along, Memphis Industries, and they started to help fund it.
A: The first one took two weeks, versus this one which is like six months.

Have you got any gossip for us about the new album?
A: There’s a fully a cappella track on it.
D: Well, it’s not strictly fully a cappella. There are some instruments involved.
A: It’s completely different to anything we’ve ever done. And we’ll never be able to play it live.
D: We’ve worked out ways of making tracks go into tracks at times. Obviously, not the whole album - that would be nauseating.
A: Make it a bit like a concept album. That’s something we’ve always wanted to do.
D: It was really strange, our tracklisting came at the last minute. Literally, the last minute! It was really odd because I had a vision for what it should be that was completely different. But in this different one, there was a concept. So it’s kind of become a bit of a concept album. There’s definitely a story there.
Are there any tracks that stand out for you as favourites?
A: There’s one song called ‘XO’ where we’ve done a rejig of something by a composer called Steve Reich - an instrumental guitar piece. It’s one of our favourite pieces of his and we were like, ‘that sounds like pop’. So we mowed it all together and Duncan piled some lyrics on top of it. I’m really pleased with the way that turned out.

You’ve sold out two London dates. How does that feel?
A: It’s good. London is, on the whole, very good I think. When we did our first headline show here, in October, we sold 50 tickets and we were like, how has that happened? We’ve never sold anything in London.
D: It came at the right time, that gig. We were starting to think London is such a big place.
A: It’s really encouraging. It takes the pressure off. Sometimes certain members of our band do feel nervous and just a bit sick if they’re going to play to no one. It’s nice to know that there are going to be people there.

Dutch Uncles’ debut album ‘Cadenza’ will be released on 25th April via Memphis Industries.

Taken from the April 2011 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.