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Frankie & The Heartstrings: Do It Yourself

"If anyone in my band steps out of line, I just give them a slapping and put them back in their place."

Posted 7th April 2011, 11:00am in Interviews, by Harriet Jennings
Dressed to the nines and oozing northern charm, Sunderland’s own Frankie & The Heartstrings are ready to hit the big time. Having already attracted the attention of radio DJs nationwide, and with both Glastonbury and Reading & Leeds slots under their collective belts, they’ve just released their eagerly awaited debut album ‘Hunger’. Harriet Jennings catches up with frontman Frankie and guitarist Michael to talk Orange Juice, biscuits and Pot Noodle sandwiches.

You’ve just released your debut album. How was recording with Edwyn Collins?
Frankie: He was a dick, wasn’t he?
Michael: Yeah, we hate him. He shouted at us.
F: Threw biscuits at us.
M: [Laughs] It was amazing, really cool. We love Orange Juice; they’re pretty much our favourite band, so it was just nice to meet him first off. For him to produce our album was even better. To see him in his underpants was the best bit.
F: He would go to physiotherapy [Collins suffered a stroke in 2005] on a morning and come straight from there to the studio. He’d be all sweaty so he’d come into the reception room and strip off. Once that happened, we were best friends.
M: It’s weird, seeing someone you really admire in his pants.
F: I don’t think you’re friends with someone until you’ve seen them in their pants.

Are there any themes running through that we should look out for?
M: It’s quite conceptual really, isn’t it? Love, lust and heartbreak. All the songs are about girls.
F: We took a step back and thought about how we would make this record. We thought about the start, the middle, the end, how the songs ran out... We put a lot of time into all that and we hope people notice when they listen to it.

As a band, especially when you’re recording or touring, you have to spend a lot of time together. Do you ever fall out?
F: No more than you would your brother or sister.
M: It usually has me at the centre of it.
F: If you spend too much time with anyone you fall out with them. If you fall out with your partner it happens because you’re working with them as well as living with them or something, and it’s not good.
M: When you wake up in the same bed as someone everyday, you’re bound to get sick of the sight of them a little bit.
F: But then every day is a new adventure when you’re on tour because every day brings a new city or a new town.
We don’t take ourselves too seriously. The thing is that, if anyone’s ego ever starts to get too big, there are four other people to knock it back down.
M: You’re totally right, if anyone in my band steps out of line, I just give them a slapping and put them back in their place.

Who has the worst habits?
F: Dennis.
M: He plays bass in the band, and when we were recording the album - which took four weeks of staying in West London because we all still live in Sunderland - every day he had a Pot Noodle sandwich. You can imagine the smells.

A Pot Noodle sandwich?
F: Oh! You get three pieces of bread, ok? You get the first bit and use it as a dunker to get the majority of the juices out, and then eat half of the noodles, and then put the rest of the noodles in a sandwich and eat it. Delicious sandwich, actually.

You always look very dapper. Is your appearance important to you?
M: We don’t do it consciously, do we?
F: It’s the way we’ve always been. We don’t dress to cause attention, we just cause attention by the way we dress. It’s not premeditated or anything. It’s good to be individual, I think.

How do you think being from Sunderland has influenced your music?
F: It’s influenced the way that we approach music. One of the reasons that we started the band was because there was nothing that we wanted to see locally.
M: “Wouldn’t it be great if there were more bands like Orange Juice or Dexy’s Midnight Runners?” “Why don’t we start one?”
That’s one of the things that I like about the album. I like listening to it because I just made an album that we wanted to hear.
F: I think Sunderland was responsible for that. It’s not like London where there’s something happening every night.
M: So what inspired us is a lack of bands, it sounds like!
F: But it did! If you want to do something, you’ve got to get up off your arse and do it yourself.

You encourage fans to get in touch via Twitter and email. Is it important to feel connected to your audience?
F: I think we are the way we are because if we ever liked a band, and we had personal contact with them, it became a lot more endearing - you remember them forever. We always thought that if we were in a band, we’d want to be that band for other people. If we’re sent a message, we ‘ll personally respond to it. If people join the fan club, we’ll send them a Christmas card, that sort of thing. It’s nice. I’d put it on my mantelpiece, if I was in a fan club and the band sent me a Christmas card.
M: I remember meeting Julian Cope from the Teardrop Explodes, and I’ll always love him because he was amazing. Even though he was dressed as a member of the Gestapo at the time. We like to think that if you’re nice to people and you meet as many as you can, not that it’s like a fickle way of getting people to buy your record, it’s just nice.

What’s the strangest message you’ve ever had?
F: It’s normally because we’ve asked people to send them. If we get bored in the van, we’ll say “Right, let’s play a game. Tell us what to do and we’ll do it. We’ll send you a picture.”
We did this once on the way to a festival. This woman was like, “Tape Frankie up with duct tape.”
M: They were really perverted. Like, “Have sex with each other.”
F: We definitely didn’t.

Do fans ever cross the line?
M: We got one guy who was like, “I heard your band, I don’t really like it but if you send us the album, I’ll listen to it, and if I like it, I might buy something else as well.” We were like, “Thanks, that’s really nice of you.”

You have your own label Pop Sex Ltd. Can you tell us about that?
F: It’s just a way of being able to express ourselves creatively, and I think that it’s only [parent label] Wichita that would let you do that. Basically, they just said “There’s your label, do what you want with it”, and we’ve released music on it and fanzines, one off pictures and catalogues of people we’ve met. We just try to do interesting things. And why not? We’re doing this job 24/7, and most of the time you’re just sitting around watching Jeremy Kyle, so why not spend an hour thinking of something creative that you can do for Pop Sex Ltd?

If you had to sum up the band in one word, what would it be?
M: Boombastic. I have to go with
boombastic.
F: You got the best one. I’m going to sound crap.
M: Can you not think of any cool jazz words off of that documentary we watched? They had loads of cool words on there.
F: Jellyroll. Jellyroll and boombastic. 

Frankie & The Heartstrings’ debut album ‘Hunger’ is out now via Pop Sex Ltd / Wichita Recordings. Single 'That Postcard' will be released on 9th May, watch the video here.
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