Playlouder - Music is the Network

Everybody's talking about The Indelicates right now, if by everybody I mean thesvenhunter, Eddie Argos and Akira The Don. (And I do. They are everybody to me.)

So I took it upon myself to find out just what's so god-damn special about these so-called Indelicates, with their non-tight trousers, meaningful lyrics and normal hair.

Simon Indelicate was kind enough to answer my stupid questions with answers sometimes stupid, sometimes clever, and sometimes downright fucking sarcastic. 

Look and you shall see:

• Music / Entertainment 

1. The album's coming out. It's too late to change it now. Is it all you hoped it would be? 

Well, no. Like everything you naively expect to be the final transformative proof of your self-worth after decades of navel gazing and doubt – it is immensely disappointing to realise that it was always just ‘next’.  

2. Have you been given the opportunity to sell your soul yet, and if not, when that opportunity arises, what's it worth? 

I already sold out the day that I picked up a guitar for no better reason than because setting things to music makes them more readily saleable to a youth demographic. On our current standing, that makes my soul worth about £2,000 + some Germans being nice to me. 

3. Is 'twee' a derogatory adjective?

Hmm. You see, I have no idea what that word means now. I was always under the impression that it referred to pinky and perky and Laura Ashley furniture and, at a push (if you were in a bad mood), bands like Bis or The Softies. And yet, I’ve seen people on the internet saying ‘Love this band! So twee! LOL OMGWTF!!!! I can has ch33zburger’ or whatever it is the young people are texting nowadays. So god knows. It will probably mean something different by the time I finish this interview; it is probably wise not to speculate.

4. Are you fed up of explaining your lyrics to people?

No, because of the rich seam of answers one can open up by the simple expedient of lying. It does annoy me when people get things outright wrong though. Someone called me ‘far left’ on a blog this week. He called me lots of other things, but it was ‘far left’ that hurt. I don’t think any of our lyrics are particularly obscure, the only even vaguely confusing things we use are sarcasm and narrative voices that belong to characters instead of us. Even then, it doesn’t take more than year 9 English to decode. I sound fed up don’t I? Shit, you’ve caught me out. 

5. Whose opinion matters more to you, honestly – The New Statesman's or The NME's? 

Their opinion on what? If it’s left-leaning politics, the NME’s would matter more because it would be such a surprise to see anything more sophisticated than them not liking racists in their editorial bias. On music, neither because music doesn’t matter. On me, the New Statesman’s because I’m not a fucking child. 

• History / Geography 

1. If you could have the sixties without The Vietnam War, would you even want the sixties? 

I don’t want the sixties. See previous answer re sarcasm and narrative voices. People who do want to revive the surface ephemera of the sixties in order to indulge in escapist self-regarding art-fun insult history and its dead by their over-privileged academic prattle. I don’t want them to have the sixties without the Vietnam war. I want them to be quiet. 

2. Is the music of The Indelicates too English to thrive internationally?

Well it isn’t thriving in England, so hey – let’s hope not. I feel no attachment to England, and find the sub-romantic mythologising of it that’s been going on in recent years to be stupid and dangerously nationalist. I’m also not sure how sneering over some stolen Bruce Springsteen riffs counts as English, but I’m sure you could tell me. 

Besides, the British empire thrived internationally for ages, so the precedents are inconclusive. 

3. If you could play a private gig for any one figure from history, who would it be and why? 

Tricky. When Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring was first performed it was considered so outrageously, inconceivably modern that the audience started a riot – it sounds perfectly alright to me, but apparently there was a slight discord in the bassoons that sent everybody mental. Given that, I imagine any historical figure we might play to would be so nonplussed as to the godawful, dumbed-down, atonal and distorted nature of our (I think fairly tuneful) performance that they would get little out of it. I’d be embarrassed, they’d be embarrassed and I might end up pissing them off so much that they behaved differently, altered the spacetime continuinuinuum, and it would all end up with me marrying my mum. Dangerous business.  

That said, I think me and Swift might get on – or, at least, grumpily ignore one another with a touch of grudging respect. 

4. Have you listened to any music since 1998?

No, not if I can help it. Nothing that has been brought to my attention has had anything of relevance to say about anything. I’m only really interested in music as a setting for ideas and, with a few exceptions, I haven’t heard of any good ideas being set to it for a long while. Also, I’ve already got a clash album, so what would be the point? 

5. Is the average German's music taste better than or just different to the average Briton's? 

I haven’t met the average German, and so don’t know his predilections. If he’s anything like the Germans I have met then he likes more of the same music as me than the average Briton (who I have met, and who is a wanker). It is my conviction, having seen hundreds of bands over the last few years that British music is the new French food. Everyone knows its great so no one has to try. This is not a golden age. 

• Nature / Nurture 

1. Which one of you is the cleverest?

Well, objectively speaking, we both have Masters degrees but Julia’s is in things that happened in the last hundred years and mine is in things that happened during the renaissance. Renaissance stuff is harder to read because the spelling is unstandardised, therefore it is I who am the cleverest and you shall all fear my dominion over this earth, you sarcastic fuck.  

2. What are Grey Dagger, Forester and Dingy Footman species of? (No cheating!) 

I think foresters are moths, which I have had a slight phobia of since childhood. I surmise ergo that they are either all moths, all things that would scare me in the right circumstances or all winged insect type things. Maybe it’s a trick and they are all caterpillars, or shoreditch based trainer brands. 

[They are moths - well done! JJ]

3. Freud or Jung? 

Synchronicity, whoo! Misogyny, boo. So Jung, obviously. 

4. When struggling to make ends meet 10 years down the line do you buy young Chardonnay Indelicate a Jazzmaster or the complete works of Thomas Hardy?

Following the information revolution which will finally eradicate nonsensical notions of copyright and institute the global and unrestricted distribution of all human generated data, she will be able to download Thomas Hardy for free and read it on her hi-res tablet PC. I will be slightly disappointed that she’s gotten into leaden Victorian dullardry at such an early age and encourage her to rebel and get into cool eighteenth century satirists by buying her said jazzmaster. She - horrified at following the same path that left her mother the gibbering psychological wreck she has become - will reject rock’n’roll and become the third flautist in the newly formed Birmingham Symphony orchestra. She will also change her name to something sensible like ‘Judith’. 

5. What is your opinion of swans?

They’re cunts. Coming over here, taking our jobs.
 

• Food / Politics 

1. If The Indelicates were a type of soup, what would the ingredients be?

I dunno. Which type of vegetable can’t be bothered answering questions like this? Because whichever one it is: that one. 

2. Mixing pop and politics: what's the use?

I have nothing to offer but embarrassment, and the usual excuse. 

3. If a politician came around to your house while you were eating breakfast and started singing pop songs at you, how would you react? 

Depends. If it was a bland politician who’d been to the Brighton Institute of Modern Politics and whose politics were characterised by their similarity to the politics most likely to get votes from young people and journalists and he/she started singing the most obvious pop songs they could manage – the thinking up of which would have taken no more than a cursory glance at a manual describing what pop songs are like these days – I would tell him/her to fuck off. Otherwise, I’d be interested and a lot moreso than I would be if most bands tried the same thing. Metaphor extended far enough?

4. What product will you be endorsing when they film your biopic?

The same one I am now, the Indelicates’ marketing concern and its attractively priced range of lifestyle enhancement products. 

5. If The Indelicates were a loaf of bread, what would be their shelf life?

If we were a loaf of bread, we would have the same shelf-life as every other loaf of bread. Doesn’t really work, that one, does it?