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Words: Pil and Galia Kollectiv
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Photography: Simon Fernandez
Remember the old Monty Python sketch about
the bravest man on earth? A very ordinary English
gentlemen who stands in a street corner in
Seventies Harlem and shouts, “Nigger”? Today,
the bravest man on earth would stand in a coffee
shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and shout, “Hipster!”
Before a recent trip to New York, we weren’t aware
of the cultural significance of the ‘H’ word, which
sounded dated to us, like ‘daddio’ or something.
But a mere mention of it to Brooklyn-based Grizzly
Bear got us off to a bad start.
We didn’t immediately like Grizzly Bear’s
music. But the name kept surfacing. We saw Tyler
Coburn’s delicately beautiful video for the band’s
fragile ballad ‘Deep Sea Diver’, and then a casual
Myspace acquaintance turned out to be the band’s
French manager. By the time we finally gave the
band a proper listen, ‘Deep Sea Diver’ sounded
so familiar, both heart-rending and cosy, that we
thought it was surely used in some super-dramatic
ending sequence on The OC, even though we could
find no proof of this. We got our hands the Grizzlies’
2004 debut album, Horn Of Plenty, and devoured it
over a late-winter weekend in Devon, where the old
woods acted as a perfect stage for their trippy lo-fi
and cracked, cocoa-bitter and honey-sweet folk.
Coming up to the release of their second proper
album, Yellow House (a remix album, featuring
Simon Bookish and Soft Pink Truth among others,
followed the debut), the band have been receiving
a lot of media attention. We meet them after a long
day of interviews, and when they complain about
boring journalists, we decide to arm ourselves by
finding out what they least want to be asked and
swiftly deleting it from our little notepad.
So what has been the most boring question
that you’ve been asked?
A unanimous grizzly roar: “‘What are your
influences?’, ‘How did the band form?’ We don’t
really have a very good story. We’ve thought of
inventing one cause there’re always bands making
up these outlandish stories.”
How important is truth for you? Is your music
related to a kind of search for authenticity?
Ed: “I kinda like it to be truthful, yeah. We have
plenty of amusing anecdotes that are for real so
we don’t have the need to come up with fake ones.
I am so sick of all these freaky people talking about
being raised by dwarves or whatever.”
We’ve just come back from New York and
we’ve been told there are three ethnic minorities
in Brooklyn, the three ‘H’s: hasidic, hispanic and
hipster. Everybody kept saying how much they
hated all the hipsters coming in…
“Who said that? Hipsters say that. It’s so
retarded – it’s like saying, ‘I hate that I see a lot of
myself all of a sudden.’ It’s bullshit, it’s like when
someone sees a place he where they want to live,
if it’s somewhat beneficial to them, they have the
same motivation as everybody else. It’s just a matter
of who is able to pay for the property.”
Ed: “I wouldn’t self-advertise, but if anything,
being gay, I’d say I’m a gipster. We constantly get
called a gay band, even though it’s just me, but
people assume since I wrote all the songs for the
first album that we all are.”
Admittedly, if only because of our own sick
Dennis Cooper associations, we did think of Horn
Of Plenty as coming from a place of secret, dark,
same-sex desire, though the band are quick to
distance themselves from our fantasies, claiming to
have never read Cooper. Yellow House is far shinier
and sparklier, more outdoors-joyous than bedroomintroverted,
if only because of the vocal harmonies,
shared writing duties, extra electronic and analogue
instrumentation and lavish production contributed
by Dan and the two Chrises. The result is rich as
a cream-filled cake, more Flaming Lips and Mercury
Rev than Patrick Wolf and Guided by Voices.
The interview is cut short by a Vashti Bunyan
gig, which is overwhelming – too pretty, too
dreamy, too delicate, like it belongs to a totally
different era, before folk could freak or lie or do
anything remotely dark or sinister. We step out
into a warm summer evening. The band are sat
on the pavement next to Owen Final Fantasy,
to whom we’re courteously introduced.
Owen: “So you’re Pil and Galia, huh? When
I read the magazine, I imagined you as old and ugly,
but you’re cute.”
Thanks, we think…
Owen: “I was really excited about doing
the interview with Plan B, because I thought the
magazine was serious and passionate about music.
Then the interview was all about dishing the dirt.”
Ed: “Is that what you do? Oh dear…”
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