Famous
Sisi Savidge and Jack Merrett of Famous try to figure out what it is to be a person while making up words and imagining how it is to be the governor of Texas. They reminisce on singing Pet Shop Boys karaoke duets across sticky floors in London pubs and plan a bullshit tour that begins inside the channel tunnel. Famous’ new EP, The Valley, is out now.
Jack ! It’s so good to hear you, we have had years between us since we last spoke. I was so hyped to hear The Valley that my enthusiasm now even sounds false because I really can’t shut up about it. The first track of yours I ever heard was I Want To Crawl Inside of You which came out some years ago…
It’s a little surreal, us talking right now. I’m really glad you like the record. We recorded I Want To Crawl Inside of You in 2016 but didn’t release it for years, for some reason. Our friend, Jocelyn, who you also interviewed, played with us back then in our older formation when there were about six of us. We have always had a solid core of us three (vocalist Jack, bassist George and drummer Danny) and we now use pre-recordings and pedals, triggers, etc when we play live. It means we can work with whoever we like; it gives us a much freer way of recording and playing because we don’t have to count on six or ten musicians to all be able to rehearse, record and play at once. There’s a pretty strong correlation between people who are really good and people who are really busy.
Of course. So, you kind of end up sampling yourselves ?
Yeah, that’s pretty much the vibe now. It’s essentially band music, I guess, but gives us more of an unusual approach, we’re rethinking from the ground up. We don’t have as many rules or some inherent, instant cohesion where it feels like everyone has to fill a role. We can really write and slot in; building new parts and finding out how we want to layer from this more stripped-back starting point.
You just called it ‘band music’, I don’t know if I’d call it that… I’m so engaged in your music because I’m in a constant state of total surprise and discomfort. You know, you put a fucking disco beat in there and suddenly I’m thinking “what is happening now, who’s driving the car ?”
I’m glad that you experience it positively. Our difficulty is that we really want to do a bit of everything, so we feel that we always have to pull things together. We’re not completely sure what we are wanting to do, but it means we have a lot of freedom to try things out. Our process is really collaborative, I tend to write the lyrics and build a skeleton on piano or whatever. I’ll bring it to the band and this is where everything that feels really interesting starts to come out. We made a lot of this record during lockdown, so we booked recording time without the liberty of multiple rehearsals, and it forced us to relax a lot and make decisions together in the room. It’s all led by conversation; what we find funny or what we are listening to at the moment.
Were you all writing and living physically separately these past months ? So you had to come back and sort of collage yourselves back into each other again…
Exactly, that mismatching jigsaw piece feeling is reflected in how the record has come out. There’s a lot of conflicting impulses sitting in this quite small space of time together. It’s a product of this really weird experience we have all shared.
For sure, you also haven’t been able to play live (until two recent sold out 100 Club shows 29th and 30th May) aside from your rooftop ‘gig’ last year. It was so funny, I don’t know if you read it, but someone wrote that all three of you looked like you’d just bumped into each other up there; like you’d never met before.
People have been saying that about us since we started playing together. It’s so weird, because of course we’re best friends. You know, you and I went to school with George when we were really young kids. Our manners on stage are quite different, though. George has this super classic energy, Danny is so neutral and I’m sort of doing my own thing up there. We’re operating on different levels, sometimes, on stage. But the vision is always shared.
Yeah, how did the concept of this whole thing start ? If you recorded that track in 2016, it feels so crazy even, but this has been germinating within all of you for years.
I’ve been writing songs since I was a child, but the Famous project evolved from a desire to find somewhere to put the songs which comes from my very old-fashioned and romantic way of setting words to music. The whole Famous endeavour is an extended attempt to locate a place to hang that thing that I love to do, in a way that could speak to something that’s perhaps more contemporary. Not that it is by any means cutting edge or whatever.
Oh, it’s very Modern, the whole thing. There’s a feeling of very tight training somewhere in the project. Which I don’t want to sound like an insult, but that’s usually what people say right before or after they’ve said something extremely and personally offensive. It’s true, though, if you also believe in the theory that from the purest understanding of fact can come the greatest possibility for abstraction.
This is why collaboration is so important, because I completely agree and yet don’t have any of these skills. Maybe it’s a slightly conservative view of art…but I love skill, and people with talent and craft. This bleeds a little bit into my relationship with writing, but it still isn’t so rigorous. It’s more true with Danny and George, who are jazz-trained. They have a very high level of rigour and a really profound relationship with their instruments.
Jack and I, at this point and for whatever reason dissolve into dusty and tobacco-laced giggles before finally and mutually confessing the depths of our personal hangovers. A litre and a half of Coke Zero rears its head next to my laptop screen as Jack pauses to express that the presence of a Red Doctor often makes him feel as if he’s going mad. We swap words about scary chemicals and come to the conclusion that hangovers make for eternally better conversation as everyone involved has lost their desire for structure (along with their egos) on a curb at some point the night/morning previously.
Had you played the 100 Club before ?
No, never, and even in these strange times it’s pretty exciting to have two nights there. It’s seated, with tables, which adds some level of decorum. It makes it feel like we’re in a jazz band or a bunch of stand-up comedians. There’s something unmanageable and quite full on about a crowd of people staring up at you and drinking. But, people at tables…
Tables have glamour. No one’s getting a black eye sitting at a table.
I mean, at this point…who knows. It would be nice to get back to the position of really being able to do anything, though. You know, like those days at university trying anything out and not giving a shit and having a lot of fun. Most of the time at The Windmill (in Brixton) which will always be such an important venue for us and our friends. From that freedom, so much good music has come out and developed.
This is also something I really think is innately installed in the UK music scene. You know, a lot people are prepared to drop a fiver and see what is going on, regardless of whether it could be good or otherwise. I’m really crusading for this to be resurrected in Berlin at the moment. Alex (of untitled records) and I are trying to build a ‘culture corridor’, or something with a less terrible name, between our respective cities to bring elements of these scenes together. I don’t know which of us came up with the name but we probably need to change it…but I want to find a way to harness those very random pub night memories I hold super close to me that makes me feel very English and very obsessed with bands.
That would be cool; it sounds like a weird Franglish creation or an EU initiative that the pair of you have come up with. I have a kind of complex about being in a band because I think I’m perhaps overly fixated on how deeply irrelevant it is as a medium. Which, in a way, makes us a bit more willing to push the boundaries of what we are comfortable with a little further. I struggle to take bands seriously.
I struggle to take anything seriously. It’s probably the only thing I learnt at university, really, that everything is a complete load of nonsense and it’s only about the confidence with which you can disseminate your crap. It’s something that a lot of people our age are grappling with, while we’re sitting smoking in our studios.
Absolutely, it feels quite bizarre. I’d be lying if I said I had any answer to that. I’ve always gravitated towards putting myself out there, in even the most stupid ways.
Finding the ways to push yourself so much further beyond what is even considered acceptable.
Yeah, fuck the big questions, but at least trying to make this a positive project. It’s obviously quite autobiographical. So, lionising the toxic bullshit can be problematic, and writing the music can be a good way to reconcile the issues and come to terms with the shit in your life without fucking with everyone else somehow. It’s very easy for it not to be like that and for it to come across as wallowing. I hate it when people sing about how fucking awesome they are, without irony.
I think humour is a great tool for manifesting this deeper connexion. It brings people in and enables us to feel the humanity in all of it and in ourselves. There’s a line in Modern Times (the fourth track on the record) that had me laughing so much, << I’m thinking about shooting heroin, or spending better times with my parents >> these two things next to each other, on a kind of knife edge.
Yeah, who do you really wanna be? That’s the thing. I hope people come away with…yeah, you have to do these things with as much tact and kindness as you can muster when you’re talking about friends, family, people you’ve been romantically involved with.
Oh, there’s nothing worse than reading a poem someone’s written about you and knowing it’s about you, in the most severe way.
A lot of people who are referenced in the EP are people in my life and they’ll know that they have been. I’m sure it fucking sucks. I had the experience before when someone wrote a song about me and it was fucking weird! I have sympathy for them. I hope it comes across that if anyone’s the villain or the fool in these stories, it’s me.
Yeah, do you think about that…I wonder about what the people think who don’t know you and the stories at all.
I’m completely against writers, lyricists, whatever, who pretend to understand what anyone else’s experience is like. I made a sort of abstract rule with myself, that probably no one else will notice, that I never use a collective pronoun throughout the EP. We can only understand our own experiences, so the more honestly we come into ourselves, the more universal it can become. That’s the music I love, where they go into almost crazy specificity into their own lives.
Who are you excited to listen to at the moment ?
I’ve been studying this year. So, I’ve been falling back on my old listening habits. I listen to a lot of country music; I’m also kind of obsessed with Frank Sinatra. The last couple of years, I’ve developed a sort of hero-obsession with him. I’ve got a tattoo and everything. I listen to a lot of pop music, I love Justin Bieber’s new album.
I wasn’t even aware that he had one !
I’m not sure it’s your kind of thing, but that was probably my favourite album that’s come out this year.
That’s almost enough to get me to listen to it…almost.
It’s all pretty random. I get really obsessed with specific things, or artists. I’m not a big listen of guitar music, I think it’s a bit too close to home. But, Jerskin [Fendrix], Jockstrap, Black Midi, Black Country, New Road, Death Crash, lots of them are my mates and they’re all doing some sick stuff. I feel like a very peripheral member of this burgeoning scene, it’s a weird thing. It’s like that Groucho Marx quote: “I refuse to join any club who’d have me as a member”, it makes me very sceptical. I read an article in NPR about this scene, they called it a ‘post-Brexit explosion of angst’…is that what this is?!
Haha, oh no ! Everyone’s fallen into step and made a scene by mistake.
The music’s all very different, but we’re all the same in that we are just kids who love music and kind of went to school together. I’ve always been terrified of becoming an idiot, so I’m studying Theology now.
Oh, I feel you, I had about 200 of these moments while at art school. Yelling all day about how I had become a total moron.
I’d hate to become someone who always gets caught telling everyone about how smart they used to be. It’s like you were saying earlier, you have to learn the language of bullshit. So, I’ve somehow found myself doing an MA in Theology purely to make myself feel like I’m not stupid. It’s hard work.
It all ends up bleeding into itself anyway, in the end. It’s good to read and know that you can’t understand more than 20% of the content. I bought a Simon Critchley book called Infinitely Demanding once basically to prove that exact point and remind myself that I have no idea what’s going on and I’m far too stupid for the book.
On some level, left to my own devices, I’d be reading James Bond, while getting pissed and watching cooking programs.
There’s something humbling about trying your hand in every intellectual field and then returning to the thing you’re actually good at. It tests the boundaries of one’s own psyche in a way that is a little insane, and makes you more mad, but can grow really incredible creative shit there.
Do you have any venue that you really want to get into? Like your ‘pilgrimage venue’.
There are loads. We really want to do a show in a restaurant in the Shard. It would be really cool. I don’t even know if there’s a venue in there. I’m so basic, I’d even love to play the O2 or a stadium in Dubai or something. Why not. I’m obsessed with Texas, I’d love to play there.
I’m talking to the imagined reader now, listen to the record (if you feel like it). If you don’t want to listen to ours, listen to Justin Bieber’s record. I should drop a disclaimer that there’s a dubious use of some Martin Luther King speeches (that he apparently got permission to use) but it’s pretty controversial so I should mention that.
I have to check it out now, my brain is writing music now that I can’t even conceive. Jack, thank you so much. This has been hilarious and mad and wonderful. I’ll see you in London this August.
interview SISI SAVIDGE
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