The Big Pink
There’s
something ultimate about The Big Pink.
It’s as though they’ve compressed everything that’s great about post-war music
into their sound. They’re as accessible as a pop group, with almost folkishly
warm melodies, the spiritual quality of soul and gospel, the rhythmic
propulsion of rave, the white noise of punk, the glitchy textures of
electronica, and the heavy drones of your favourite New York rock bands past
and present.
But above and beyond it all, they sing about love: “Love for everything,” they proclaim.
They call what they do “Armageddon love songs”, a neat way of describing their
sinister-sweet ruminations on the subject. “If there’s an underbelly of
depression,” they say, “we sugar-coat it.”
Not that they’re nihilists; they’re having too good a time to be negative.
“We're a positive band. We love each other, and we love life. It’s all very
exciting. We’re having the best time. There’s nothing bad in our lives and
we’ve got nothing to complain about.”
Some of the tracks on their highly anticipated debut album A Brief History Of
Love include ‘Dominos’, ‘Velvet’, ‘Crystal Visions,’, ‘Too Young To Love’ and
‘Love In Vain’. There’s a lot of love in what The Big Pink do. Milo Cordell,
one half of the duo, considers Lost And Lookin’ by Sam Cooke to be the best
love song ever while his other half, Robbie Furze, believes that every song
they do has “got to be as good as (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay by Otis
Redding.” He adds: “You can argue about music and styles, but if we can write
our My Girl then nothing else matters.”
They virtually have already: on ‘An Introduction To Awareness’, the B-side of
their brilliant second single ‘Velvet’, amid the swathes of synth and
wraith-like vocals, is the faltering bass-line to the classic tune Smokey
Robinson wrote for The Temptations.
Furze and Cordell were destined to make bittersweet, soulfully intense
drone-disco together. They met at a drum’n’bass rave in the middle of nowhere
on millennium eve, but they’ve only been recording as The Big Pink since 2007.
They’re quite different but a perfect match. Milo’s father, Denny Cordell, was
a record producer who worked on such legendary late-‘60s singles as Procul
Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale and Joe Cocker’s With A Little Help From My
Friends. Robbie’s family were “not particularly musical”, although his parents’
love of The Band did lead them to name him Robbie after Robbie Robertson. He
moved around a lot – including one place that happened to be next door to a
squat inhabited by none other than goth-metal overlords Killing Joke, whose
notorious frontman Jaz Coleman took a shine to Robbie’s mum, much to his dad’s
chagrin.
Not surprisingly, after being pummelled into submission by the Joke’s
apocalyptic clatter coming through the walls, Robbie first got into metal –
Metallica, Pantera, Slayer, Napalm Death – and then the proto-industrial noise
of Einsturzende Neubaten and their successors such as Ministry, Skinny Puppy
and Nine Inch Nails, followed by the propulsive Eurobeat of Front 242.
He toured with Alec Empire of Atari Teenage Riot and boss of Digital Hardcore
Recordings and became a DHR artist in his own right: Panic DHH, who released an
album described by Kerrang as “a fully-fledged vision of electronically treated
music devastating in scope and utterly visceral in execution.”
Back in England, Milo was experiencing his own version of nirvana: hearing
Klaxons for the first time, at Madame JoJo’s in December 2005. “That was the
first time a UK band played music I wanted to hear,” he says. The first wave of
Noughties punk-funkers were not, he says, “aggressive or punky enough; they
cared if they went out of time or broke a string.” Klaxons, on the other hand,
“didn't give a fuck.”
Milo liked the band so much he went out and started a label. Since then, Merok
have put out early releases by Klaxons, Crystal Castles, Teenagers, Telepathe
and Titus Andronicus. He also joined forces with Robbie for a second label
called Hatechannel. Their intention? “To be offensive and aggressive, and
harder than Digital Hardcore.”
It was inevitable, after several years behind the scenes and dabbling with
marginal, experimental noise, that the pair would decide to do something with
broader appeal. And so, in December ’07, The Big Pink were born.
“We had a conversation that went, ‘Let's start a noise band’,” says Milo. Early
sessions involved a ProTools set-up, a bunch of Marshall amps at two ends of a
rehearsal space, two guitars, some synths, a bunch of FX pedals and a lot of
“fucking around.”
“We built up walls and walls of sound,” they explain, “which we looped up and
put a beat behind, then we added the vocal melodies and the words. Eventually,
they became Big Pink songs.”
So why The Big Pink?
“Because,” says Robbie, “my parents were obsessed with The Band and my dad had
The Last Waltz documentary, which I found amazing - those guys, that's a real
rock’n’roll band. They spent 15 years on the road.”
Initially, Milo had other plans, name-wise. “I wanted to be called Big Black
but we were beaten to it. Then I got into homoerotic/gay symbolism: our first
MySpace page was full of young boys with erections and guys sucking cock... So
we went for The Big Pink, because ‘big’ suggests delusions of grandeur and
‘pink’ is gay and phallic.”
The idea for the band as a whole was quite simple at first: they wanted to be
“the digital Velvet Underground”, combining melody and noise in a way that was
“more Phil Spector than My Bloody Valentine.” Now their aim is even simpler.
“We’ve made the progression from noise and aggression towards melody and song
structure, and now we consider ourselves a soul band,” says Robbie. “That’s
soul as in Otis Redding, Joe Tex, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Solomon Burke, the
Stax label...”
Still, he and Milo recognize the dissonance in what they do; the enormous wall
of rhythm and sound that they erect around their melodies.
“Okay,” says Milo, “if Otis Redding and John Cale hung out together and fucked,
their child would be Robbie.” Acknowledging the biological impossibility of
such a coupling, he changes his mind. “Or if Aretha Franklin and Al Jourgenson
had a kid...”
Paul Lester
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