Photography: Emily Graham

“If you have a barrier, look past it, fuck the barrier, deal with it.” Words to live by there from Shaun Hencher, frontman of Nottingham-based kerblammo rock princes Lovvers. It’s not a metaphor for anything, he’s talking about an actual barrier, as in one Lovvers might find between them and the audience. The fucking is probably a figure of speech too, but if you’ve seen these guys – Hencher, bassist Michael Drake, guitarist Henry Withers and drummer Stephen Rose – cranking it live, you might wonder.

The roots of Lovvers lie in two bands. Kamikazee were a short-lived wall of thrashing hardcore noise which featured Hencher and Drake; before them, and subject to rather wider exposure, were The Murder Of Rosa Luxemburg, who featured Hencher plus Drake “on every tour as merch man – he was always around and very much part of our setup”. Equipped with both the giddy naivety of teenagers set free from the provinces (Worcester, in this case) for the first time, and the throbbing brains of people trying to assimilate their influences (roughly: the grotesque carnival art of someone like Truman’s Water, post-Mogwai guitar tinkling and the chaotic emotional force of assorted Gravity Records bands) onto plastic, before splitting in early 2005, they were genuinely exciting, and looked like they might even get quite big.

“When we were playing we never stopped for a minute to think what people thought,” Shaun says. “As a band we annoyed a lot of people. We took a lot of shit at shows and really never fitted in, but we didn’t care. We wanted to operate in our own way and we did everything ourselves.”

The Murder Of Rosa Luxemburg and Lovvers share, if nothing else, the common thread of intangibility: it won’t be a riff or a chorus that sticks with you, but a kind of all-encompassing cloud of sound; moments of clarity coexisting with realms of chaos. ‘Laughing Man’, their most recent side, and its predecessor ‘Near Enough For Jazz’ encapsulate this idea. They lurch, sounding haunted by something, perhaps a relic from the late 80s boom times of noisy independent rock, or a studio engineer looking fearfully at his levels. The ability of four men to sound like a lot of bands featuring a lot more men, without the result coming off like lads-together aggression rawk, is also an achievement. One showcased, thus far, via three seven-inch singles – all released on the fine Jonson Family label – and about a hundred live shows.

“I get satisfaction from playing,” is Shaun’s equivocal summary. “We frequently end up on bills where we sound little like the rest of the bands because we want to play as much as possible. Sometimes we can be the worst band you ever saw, but at least we aren’t about wearing the right band shirt or having the most merchandise.”

Lovvers aren’t just a very good band, the sort that crystallises why you find the pursuit of bliss through volume and distortion so exciting – they’re a wise band too. If you wish to be answerable to no one in your career, that includes internet hardmen and drunken merch-table backbiters. ‘Ambition’ has many permutations, and you’d have to be pretty thick to think it a dirty word by definition. “Without ambition in life what would you hope to achieve? If you were happy to deal with what you have in the first place you probably wouldn’t do much. Are we playing in a band to get rich? If that’s the case then I think we started the wrong type of band.”
www.myspace.com/letscommunicate
Noel Gardner