As one of the vital cogs in Kasabian’s arena thumping juggernaut, Serge Pizzorno has conquered the planet. Now he's launching something altogether new.
Let's do a quick poll. Are you allowed to call a song ‘Gary'? Or is it too weird, like naming your dog ‘David'? It's a big issue, but never fear: on his self-titled solo record under the moniker The S.L.P., our mate Serge Pizzorno has answered this age-old question. It turns out you can. After a friend told him about the viral satirical news story claiming there had been no babies named Gary born in Britain after 1992, Serge was inspired. The resulting track ‘Youngest Gary' is a buzzing, darkly comic weirdo anthem, drawn from the same musical well that Serge pulled ‘Vlad the Impaler'.
The pop-culture element is crucial. When Serge filtered the plight of the Garys with his film fandom and some David Bowie glam, a narrative began to form.
Camden Town of the Damned can be bad enough without being the very last of your kind, but ‘Youngest Gary' doesn't stray too far into bleak territory. Serge is a benevolent god. Before all of this band malarkey, did he ever think about going into comedy writing?
Those three provided the impetus for the album as a whole, a series of James Bond-style cinematic theme tunes that set Serge off on a natural path to fill in the blanks around them.
"It was just pure experimentation, following the art and seeing where that would take me. Down the rabbit hole. Like, what's down here and what can I bring up back to the surface?" He laughs.
The ‘Meanwhile…' tracks tie the album together in a natural way, cycling in and out with a repeated orchestral refrain.
The drifting, dreamlike ‘Meanwhile… at the Welcome Break' also features Slowthai in one of the album's two heavy-hitting collaborations. Serge says it was important to him to have artists who he believes are ‘at the forefront' of the next wave of British music. ‘... the Welcome Break' is, Serge says, "a kind of Scott Walker, Morricone, huge cinematic piece. But then having is like psychedelic poetry, there's a real twist."
The other big collaboration on ‘The S.L.P.' comes on lead single ‘Favourites', perhaps the most traditionally Kasabian-esque track on the album and which alternates between the perspectives of both parties in a failed relationship. It features a - to put it mildly - absolutely cracking sharp-tongued verse from Little Simz. She and Slowthai were, Serge says, "the number one choices" for the album. The very top-tier.
"I think now this world exists I can . That's really exciting for me. I just needed to make it happen, I needed to start it somewhere," he says.
Speaking of the future, if all of this was meant to be Serge's downtime, a summer off from working with Kasabian before they kicked back into gear, then where does that leave him? Thankfully, becoming The S.L.P. has cleared his head just as well as a month on the beach - if not more so.
Even now that he's got it all figured out, it doesn't sound like he's about to take that time off. After all, with the album done and dusted there's the small matter of the live show to consider.
The heart of it, it seems, is trying to make people feel that sense of wonder that guides so much of the record.
It's about community, he says.
"When we started all those years ago, we just wanted to connect with as many people . Everyone is welcome, and everyone can hear each other's stories and figure out how we're going to move forward.
Taken from the September issue of Dork. The S.L.P.'s self-titled debut album is out 30th August.
Words: Liam Konemann
For Serge, managing to swing his two dream feature artists on his first solo album opened up a world of possibility. Having originally planned for the record to have a more Jazz-directed sound, he found that bringing MCs onboard pushed ‘The S.L.P.' as both an album and a project to another level.
"I think now this world exists I can . That's really exciting for me. I just needed to make it happen, I needed to start it somewhere," he says.
Speaking of the future, if all of this was meant to be Serge's downtime, a summer off from working with Kasabian before they kicked back into gear, then where does that leave him? Thankfully, becoming The S.L.P. has cleared his head just as well as a month on the beach - if not more so.
Even now that he's got it all figured out, it doesn't sound like he's about to take that time off. After all, with the album done and dusted there's the small matter of the live show to consider.
The heart of it, it seems, is trying to make people feel that sense of wonder that guides so much of the record.
It's about community, he says.
"When we started all those years ago, we just wanted to connect with as many people . Everyone is welcome, and everyone can hear each other's stories and figure out how we're going to move forward.
Taken from the September issue of Dork. The S.L.P.'s self-titled debut album is out 30th August.
