Neu Torches: ‘You Can’t Practice What Charlie Does On Stage, Even He Can’t’

A couple of weeks back, Torches threw a launch party at Kingsland Road’s Power Lunches for their new split covers single with Crushed Beaks. Like all great parties, there was good music, good people, good beer and it was very, very sweaty.

As one review remarked, a joint-headline set with a significantly larger act could be seen as quite a cunning ploy by Torches; a clever leg-up into the buzzosphere. Crushed Beaks and Torches are quite good friends, a fact that is easily noticeable when half of the latter band take to the stage during the former’s set to help their pals out on a track.

But make no mistake, this is no act of tokenism. It’s not like they’re sharing out the pennies earned from Google Ad hits on their new single’s embeds. Musical world’s apart from their noisy chums, Torches compliment their singlemates’ youthful exuberance with exalted grandeur. And damn right are we glad now we’ve been introduced.

We spoke to the band shortly after the gig, as they told DIY a little about themselves.

How long have you guys been making music for?
We’ve existed since mid-2011.

Yeah because I first caught you at the Binnacle “micro-fest” late last year. That must have been one of your first shows, right?
Yeah that’s true, the Binnacle festival was one of only a handful of shows that we played last year. Being asked to play on the same bill as some of the most interesting and inventive artists of 2011 (Patten, Sun Glitters, Active Child), especially so early on in the development of the band, was exciting.

How did this split single with Crushed Beaks come about then?
One night in January, Matt from Crushed Beaks ecstatically brought a rough cover of VTOO to the house, that he had constructed with a single repeating chord. We thought it would be fun to cover one of theirs as well and it pretty much went from there. It was only later on that we realised it would be an interesting and original way for each of us to put something new out into Internet-land.

Did you know those guys well beforehand, personally or musically?
We’re age-old friends with Matt, we grew up in the same town, went to the same school, and played in various bands as prog-rock obsessive teenagers.Alex we know from our misspent youth as well, but we’d never had the pleasure of playing with him (that is until the formation of the supergroup we put together in order to play the ‘VTOO’ cover at our split release show).

Did both bands record the songs together at the same place and during the same session?
The tracks were recorded completely separately, one in a shed, one in a basement, over a period of a couple of weeks. Whilst it would have been nice to have recorded everything together, it was probably more exciting to produce these covers in isolation from one another, hearing little snippets of the tracks as they went along and seeing what new ideas were introduced. Nic then helped mix the Crushed Beaks cover of ‘VTOO’ with Matt as we thought, whilst we would still each go for our individual definitive sounds, in order to have some continuity in the production of final tracks we would come together for the final stage.

How did you approach covering ‘Close-ups’? How do you think your rendition differs from the original?
The unrelenting intensity of the original was so great we thought it best to take it in a completely different direction. We stripped it back to the fundamentals of the melody then started to build it up with our own sounds again. The original track seems to have a (excuse the pun) ‘closeness’ that kind of gets up in your face and punches you around, and we really tried hard to preserve the essence of this. To follow on from the idea of Matt’s single chord in the Crushed Beaks VTOO cover, we laid down a drone and an electronic drum groove that proved fundamental throughout track’s progression, then started to play around with layering samples of Charlie’s voice. After these were in place it all kind of came together pretty quickly.

What did you think of Crushed Beaks’ take on ‘VTOO’?
Guitars that sound like bagpipes totally and utterly rule.

I managed to squeeze into the launch show at Powerlunches, was that a good night for you? It was a pretty good turn-out.
That show was hot, sweaty and ‘whites-of-the-eyes’ cramped; it was probably the best gig we’ve ever played. Power Lunches is an amazing little venue, emphasis on little. It was a pretty special night due to the fact that, despite being mates with Crushed Beaks, we’d never properly played a show together.

Charlie does a bit of an Ian Curtis-esque dance during your sets and your bio describes the band as a “frontman-led performance”. Can you explain the importance of this?
The live performance and its visual impact is something that we really care about. Bands should have some kind of visual anchor, too many bands lack any sort of engagement with their audiences. You show passion on stage and the audience will show it back. You can’t practice what Charlie does on stage, even he can’t. In the same way that many people latch onto the idea that Mark E Smith’s trick of turning amps on stage off or up is a performance gimmick, he would undoubtedly argue it is purely something that comes out in the energy of a show; it needs to be done with and for the music, unrehearsed.

You have only a handful of tracks up on Soundcloud, are you holding others back for an EP release? What’s next…etc for Torches?
For the most part we’ve been releasing tracks that best fit our live sound and energy. We’ve been hidden away for a couple of months now writing, recording, and plotting so we should be unleashing some of our own new material very soon.



Torches’ split single with Crushed Beaks is out now. They play Manchester, York and Liverpool during March and April.