Mixtape features the best new tracks and biggest stories, updated regularly by the Dork team.
Chris Bailey has made an album he actually likes. Getting there, though, involved a discarded month of painting, an unsettling encounter with a 1950s teen idol and considerably less suffering than last time around.
"I previously had an attitude of, 'I have no idea whether stuff I make is good', but it turns out that just meant it wasn't good," Bailey says, discussing his band's previous output, which seems a touch reckless while there are still copies for sale. "Or at least not as good as this record is." The Do Nothing singer has made an album he's proud of, and he isn't being diplomatic about the discovery. Anyone fond of the Nottingham band's debut is entitled to disagree, but their latest full-length 'Friend World' has pleased its author no end.
The Nottingham band's 2023 debut, 'Snake Sideways', had cost him a miserable amount of effort. Their earlier EPs, 'Zero Dollar Bill' and 'Glueland', had already brought them attention. In interviews around its release, Bailey described creeping back into a rehearsal space they had vacated for renovation, trying to write in the basement. He became withdrawn, his self-worth dependent on the work, his ability to enjoy it deteriorating accordingly. You can spend an awfully long time down there, waiting for a song good enough to authorise your return to society.
'Friend World' was recorded in Nottingham with Louis Milburn of Folly Group, who had previously toured with Do Nothing. Their studio, JT Soar, occupies a former fruit and vegetable warehouse near Sneinton Market. It also hosts gigs (There's a rotten tomatoes gag here just waiting to be written - Ed). "As a band, I think we learnt that we don't necessarily need to go away to a big fancy studio to make a record that we love," Bailey admits, forgoing any future flashy trips to swish set-ups once the label hears the news. Still, you can see the appeal. Nobody needed to relocate for a month; their partners and pets remained conveniently local. "I think I benefit from routine, and having a consistent schedule of going to the studio early and working all day helped my brain work good."
Bailey's enthusiasm for these arrangements has produced no corresponding obligation to become cheerful in song. The album, out in November, begins with 'Misery'. Its title owes something to Fabian, the Philadelphia teen idol who recorded 'This Friendly World' in 1959, back when a young man could apparently sing those words without sounding as though he was withholding something dark beneath the veneer. Bailey found the song while watching a documentary about Andy Kaufman, the American comedian whose performances made sincerity unusually difficult to identify. He had been drinking, which may have complicated his investigation into whether said world was friendly.
"It's just a nice innocent positive message, but because the world is such a hideous place right now, it almost felt controversial to me," he explains. An assurance of general loveliness sounds dodgy when you are used to bad news. Someone must be selling something. Bailey took his objection rather further than most listeners would. "I was definitely being dramatic and drunk, but I just found it sort of sinister and super sad."
His response required a little fiddling with Fabian. "I ripped the audio from YouTube, pitch shifted it down, and put it at the beginning of a song called Friend World, which, funnily enough, never made the album." Eleven other tracks have instead ended up inhabiting a place named after a rejected idea, but the (quite possibly empty) promise of a friendly world remains on the sleeve, above songs about people who find the company of other people difficult.
He is less forthcoming about exactly when the work began ("Ages ago, I don't wanna stamp a date on it cause it'll bug me out"). His account of assembling an album organically is pleasingly unfit for a major-label project plan. "For a good while, it was just a pile of songs, until maybe half of the album was done. Maybe less, a third? There always seems to come a point where it all locks together for whatever reason, and you know what it's all about. After that, you finish the album with the general concept in mind, and it makes sense out of the first half. If that makes any sense."
“I was definitely being dramatic and drunk”
'Stars', the first single from 'Friend World', began with a cheap Roland drum machine and an attempt to write a pop song without immediately reaching for aggressive guitars. "I think I just connected with it all better," he says. "I had a period where I got on a bit of a roll and wrote some of the key songs in relatively quick succession. I think I sent demos of 'Stars' and 'These People Want Blood' to the band on the same evening."
'Stars' considers ambition and the disappointing evidence supplied by famous people that getting what you want will make you happy. In his account accompanying its release, Bailey described finding a person whose company makes those previous ambitions less interesting. That is quite an admission to put in a single intended to persuade more people to pay attention to your band. The idea that something you thought you needed can become dispensable when someone better turns up is a challenging one in a scene where there's so much fetishism of 'the next big thing'.
On 'Act Natural', a song concerned with the disconcerting business of going through your days on automatic, the band found themselves laughing at a drum fill. Bailey has also identified its main keyboard sound as, he thinks, the Clavinet instrument bundled with Logic. Across his accounts of these songs, he remembers the enjoyment of particular decisions, right down to a fill that amused the people in the room. The unpleasant subject matter appears to have done very little to spoil their day.
"It's sort of about God, and my own feelings about myself"
New single, 'The Nail', involves a grievance against the management. Not band business, but the big lad (or lass) upstairs. "It's sort of about God, and my own feelings about myself, and how tedious it is that you can be alive for like thirty years and not really have any idea who you are," he muses. "I guess it's me loudly being annoyed about that, and suggesting that it's probably the same for everyone, no matter how together you claim to have it."
"It also references Tim Heidecker's song 'Hot Piss'." Heidecker is the American comedian whose Yellow River Boys project devoted a 2013 album to the consumption of urine. The record is called 'Urinal St. Station', should you wish to investigate further. Between Kaufman and Heidecker, Bailey's comedy interests are making themselves felt in some unusual places. A song about God and the inadequacy of self-knowledge has found room for a drinking song with absolutely the wrong drink in it. This is quite some company for a prospective pop single to keep.
"I'd say if any of them were commercially viable, it'd be that one," Bailey reasons. "It contains a healthy amount of rocky guitar stuff, for the people who think that's what we're good at." A tiny distance separates that description from outright agreement. An audience develops an idea of what a band supplies and, quite reasonably, wants more; meanwhile, the people supplying it have been listening to other things. The debut had involved a conscious effort to move away from their post-punk beginnings; this time, he has said, they felt no pressure to demonstrate a departure.
Bailey's own recommendation takes us to another part of 'The Nail'. "It also has quite a pop-sounding pre-chorus bit, which is one of my favourite parts of the whole record - this is largely thanks to the pretty backing vocals provided by the wonderful Asha Virk, who pops up a few times on the album."
“I actually spent the best part of a month doing some paintings that we ended up scrapping”
The cover was a bastard. The hardest part of the whole undertaking, according to Bailey: "[It] might seem odd when you look at it, cause it's pretty minimal," he admits, but anyone who has ever fired up a copy of an Adobe project will relate hard. Elaborate sleeves at least advertise their capacity to cause trouble. This one, credited to him and Howarth, conceals the discarded labour behind it. "We went through a bunch of different ideas; I actually spent the best part of a month doing some paintings that we ended up scrapping."
"A lot of the visual brainstorming we did early on is now being repurposed as artwork for the singles, so whatever," he reveals, making sure that month of arts and crafts earns a fairly economical obituary. Bailey's pleasure in the album has survived his saying no to quite a lot of it. "Personally, I learned that I'm aware whether something I make is good or not, because I actually like it." He doesn't need to explain his entire personality before deciding a song is finished. For all the irritation in 'The Nail', he can answer one question about himself without much trouble.
Finishing the songs, unfortunately, creates a long list of everything else still to do to get it released. This year has involved videos with Bristol friends Clump Collective, releasing singles, and doing all the other exhausting stuff (oi, we're lovely - Ed) that comes alongside making the world aware you're back. Bailey categorises much of it as admin. There is an awkward delay built into the job: by the time everybody wants to discuss your exciting new record, you have spent so long with it that their excitement concerns a period of your life you have already left. "I sometimes struggle with promoting a record," he admits, "because the music was actually made ages ago and I just wanna do new stuff."
The video for 'The Nail' took them to the Forest of Dean. "We ate fish and chips, had a big pub dinner, and drove all the way back to Nottingham the next day in a car with no working air con," Bailey recalls. "It was so hot that our phones would shut down if we put them on the windscreen thingy to navigate. Anyway, we'll look back on filming it fondly when we're older."
The band has already played shows with Everything Everything this year, with Yard Act dates to come, including a European run in October. "I think I'm gonna make an effort to sit around nice cafes on the Europe shows, and think about what a fun life I've got," he says, though on the evidence of this record, we'd not count on that being the outcome. The record-shop dates begin at Rough Trade East in London on 6th November, the same day that Submarine Cat releases the album. "Some of these will be normal shows, and some will be more stripped-back things," Bailey says. "Then we'll tour the record for real early next year."
"I am very, very excited for that bit," he admits, "because we really dig playing the new songs, and I think the live show itself is better than ever." Even if Bailey has been reassessing some of the band's old records, a roomful of people who love them are unlikely to revise their judgement out of politeness, but while new songs usually arrive at gigs with a small disadvantage, these ones are more than good enough to earn their place at the top of the setlist pile. "It's nice to see people enjoying it," he reveals. "We played one of the newer songs at an all-day festival thing recently, and the crowd reacted to it as if it were an old, known song, and it made me happy."
It could be a friendly world after all.
Do Nothing's single 'The Nail' is out now; album 'Friend World' is out 6th November.
