Touted as the future of rock, the Vaccines are playing pub backrooms and ignoring the hype. Will they survive when reality bites?
Six weeks or so ago the Vaccines played their first London gig. The 300-strong audience included Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand, Marcus Mumford, all of White Lies and the Maccabees, and a smattering of journalists. Outside were 200 people who'd been unable to get in, including some of the band's own mates and Nick Hodgson of the Kaiser Chiefs.
"We were convinced nobody was going to show up," says Freddie Cowan, the Vaccines' dandy, Marc Bolan-lookalike guitarist. The band, he says, arrived to find an empty venue, went upstairs and came back down to find it packed. It's a measure of how fast music moves that since they took to the stage that night, the venue ? the Flowerpot in north London ? has closed, and the gig has been mythologised as heralding the arrival of a very important group. "We've played much better gigs," says drummer Pete Robertson.
You get a lot of party-pooping talk from the Vaccines, four men in their early 20s who are suddenly fielding the kind of hyperbole that hits British pop once or twice a decade. Clash magazine has declared the band "a game changer, that will launch a hundred wannabees". Radio 1's Zane Lowe ? admittedly never slow to get carried away ? has announced "a band that will kickstart a new era".
The reason for the excitement is that the quartet have emerged at a point when British rock is sorely lacking in genuinely thrilling guitar bands. The Vaccines, who play catchy surf punk gift-wrapped in walls of noise, seem to fill a hole that no one realised was there. A typical gig lasts 23 minutes; their debut single Wreckin' Bar (Ra Ra Ra) ? which the NME compared to the debuts by Arctic Monkeys and Supergrass ? is just 84 seconds long. The Vaccines are indecently exciting.
"We wanted to be as direct as possible," explains singer Justin Young, the stocky, thoughtful songwriting yin to Cowan's assured yang, "because no one's really doing that. All the good guitar bands are sonically interesting, but it's very 'clever' ? put on your headphones and you'll hear something new on the 10th listen. I like music in that vein but we're the antithesis of that. It's straight-up rock'n'roll that people will either get or not within the first few seconds."
So far, everybody's getting it. "It feels a bit like when Franz Ferdinand suddenly appeared," says Alison Howe, the producer of Later ? With Jools Holland, who booked the Vaccines for the TV show without them having released anything, an honour previously granted to Adele and Corinne Bailey Rae. "They fit together like four guys who look like they're in a band. We saw them, thought they were great and wanted them on the show."
On their first tour, they're packing out small venues and generating wild enthusiasm. In Sheffield, a kid turns to his girlfriend and declares: "They're like the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Ramones, and the Beach Boys. Fucking brilliant!" A few days later in York, there are autograph hunters and even some fainting girls.
However, in the first of our two encounters ? in a Sheffield dressing room ? the Vaccines seem slightly burdened by what they call "other people's great expectations". They've banned self-Googling, and Young says the attention has made them "realise how little control you have over it, and that's scary. But life's scary isn't it?" He knows it's worse to be ignored.
The buzz around the Vaccines began when their song If You Wanna debuted on YouTube, causing a blogosphere fuss that spread to mainstream media. The tour was booked before the fuss began, before anyone had heard of them and, if nothing else, the fact that they're already too big for the gigs they are playing proves there was no fiendish masterplan of hype.
In Sheffield, they're a support act, and the poor headliners see half the audience leave once the Vaccines finish. In York, they're only being paid �70, although Young thinks such experiences will help them to stay grounded.
"It's all very well being on Jools Holland but we're gonna go wherever we can to play to people," he says. "A lot of buzzy bands leave London and there are four people at the shows. We're trying not to read the media, but none of us has ever sold out venues in advance before, and that feels real to me."
What looks like an overnight sensation is actually the product of years playing in failing bands. Young, for example, was in a powerviolence band, and then played as nu-folk hopeful Jay Jay Pistolet. Once, Young was due to support Julian Cope, who turned up wearing leather trousers and a policeman's hat. "Then we were told there'd been a double booking," Young sighs, "and we'd have to go home."
Do their many previous incarnations suggest they were casting around for the style that would bring them success? "I'd be surprised if that's an issue," Cowan says, citing the many guises David Bowie took on before success finally came along. "Pop's the ultimate arena where you can reinvent yourself."
Young was born Justin James Hayward-Young ? inheriting his surname from Walter Hayward-Young, a noted postcard painter of the late 19th century. He grew up in a farmhouse in the New Forest and was painfully shy until his teens, when a terrible fear of fading into the background pushed him to start fronting bands.
He moved to London to study history at King's College, bought a guitar and fell into the nascent new folk scene. He lived with Marcus Mumford, but points out: "I wasn't moving in with the singer of an albums-selling band. He was just another kid with a guitar." Young ? who only graduated in June ? led a double life, his lecturers unaware their absent student was off touring. But as friends Laura Marling and Noah and the Whale became successful, he found his "boxes unticking" ? a relationship ended and his record deal fell apart.
"I felt like I'd hit a brick wall," he says. "I'd always liked faster music and thought: 'Maybe I should do something completely opposite.'" While Young slaved to write better songs, Cowan ? a Glenn Branca fan who'd quit music college after three weeks because he felt it stifled creativity, and who is the brother of Horrors guitarist Tom ? brought the noise. Similar friendships led to bassist Arni Arnason, an Icelandic youth worker. The final piece of the jigsaw was Robertson. When their demos ended up with Franz Ferdinand's management, Young's band were on their way.
The singer is different from the rock'n'roll animals usually found fronting walls of noise. He is well-spoken, writes on acoustic guitar, and loves wildlife. His lyrics tend to be either gloriously dumb ("Post-break-up sex makes you forget your ex/ What else did you expect from post-break-up sex?") or unexpectedly emotional (see Wet Suit's nostalgic anticipation of a youth that will pass too quickly).
He says he's "a worrier" and fears there will be a backlash. "The downside of media attention is that people don't ask 'Are this band good?' but 'Are they as good as people say?'" he says as we discuss the example of the Drums, who began 2010 in a similar if lesser blaze of hyperbole. "But we didn't start the band to be great white hopes. We started the band to be in York tonight playing to 100 people. Y'know, we're in a room above a pub, and it's raining. It's not a 'pinch yourself' existence."
So will the Vaccines survive the current wave of hysteria? They may be the hottest new band in Britain, but the next stop for the Vaccines is a pub in Derby.
"We really haven't done much," says Young, softly but firmly dismissing any more talk of hype. "Later was different, because it was an opportunity to play the songs. But we're playing everywhere we can, and the people getting behind us are doing it because they genuinely like the band. We can't really feel guilty for that. We're doing everything the right way."
Brother: The other new saviour of rock'n'roll
Lee Newell, a shortish young man with hair swept forward and tattooed forearms, holds forth at a table in a pub in Slough, his three bandmates at his side. "We have to be the saviours of rock'n'roll," he says. "And for now, we are. There might be another band in 20 years ? but I'll be dead by then."
Newell is the lead singer of Brother, a band signed by Geffen for a rumoured quarter of a million pounds with the specific function ? it would seem ? of filling an Oasis-shaped hole. You can hear the echo of Oasis not just in their music ? which they describe as "gritpop" ? but in their urge to put a soundbite into every sentence (they were signed after telling the sparse audience at a north London pub: "Anyone who doesn't want to see the future of rock'n'roll should leave now"). Newell admits, slightly reluctantly: "I do feel I'm looked to to say these things." Then he gets back on track. "I don't pretend. I'm completely over-opinionated. I'm not scared of what people think." His bandmates sometimes are, though; at one point, when he's in a reverie about the drugs and prostitutes that await him, he's reminded: "Your dad's going to read this."
If the Vaccines represent the knowing, artful end of a British guitar pop resurgence, Brother are the band for those who want to put their arms round each other and bellow along to the jukebox. And, by dint of emerging at the same time, the two are bound to be compared. "We keep hearing the name the Vaccines," says Newell, dismissively. "Don't like them. Don't dislike them. I can see us headlining Glastonbury, but I can't see them doing that." But Frank Colucci, Brother's drummer, hopes that between them the two bands will mean more people "will want to pick up a guitar. When I was young, the first thing I thought was: 'I want to be in a band.'"
The state of pop is something they're exercised about. At their recent showcase at the Met Bar in London, Newell instructed the DJ to "turn that fucking dubstep shit off" as they took to the stage. Today, bassist Josh Ward says sternly that he didn't get into music "to lay some samples down". "At the moment, all you're hearing is two-dimensional, completely regurgitated electric pop music," Newell says. "That serves a purpose, but people want something with a bit more depth."
Their certainties ? about their greatness, about other music's rubbishness ? mean a great many people are going to write them off as musical neanderthals. They say they don't care. "At least they've got an opinion," Newell says. "But I do say it with a pinch of salt. And a pinch of sage. And a dash of turmeric."
Perhaps the oddest thing about the buzz around Brother is that it's arisen with so little music available. There's no MySpace, and they've played only a handful of gigs. It's a very old-fashioned way to generate excitement ? by rationing. "It's good to have a little bit of mystery," Newell says. "It's more of an experience."
"And when you do find it," Ward says, "it's more rewarding than just having it shoved down your throat." Michael Hann
Brother tour next month. Details: acidlove.net
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