Features A Date With… Fixers

Sometimes circumstances just don’t go your way. Life is such a fluctuating place that it’s often hard to predict what is going to happen one step in front of you, whether you’re going to trip over your laces creating a too-painful-to-even-tweet-about awkward situation, let alone be able to arrange things for weeks in advance. Arranging dates can be quite tricky anyway; to ponder what suits your two separate personalities best, what mutual interests you have, where’s the best place to avoid any mutual friends - all that essentially teenage stuff. It’s like a crazy golf course set upon a minefield.

Waking up at the end of what had been a glorious week to find the sight out your window to be blighted by London fog on the specific day you’ve organised an outdoor activity with a band is not the best of feelings. Add to it that the print deadline looming like the grey cloud currently covering the sky and you resign yourself to the fact that you’re going to endure a bit of a rubbish date, both pretending to have fun like mid-table football fans when they doggedly sing about being “the greatest team the world has ever seen.” I guess if all else fails, you can just make small talk about the weather. It would be like having a date with your barber.

But sometimes things turn out alright just at the nick of time, as the clouds part as swiftly as in a biblical retelling. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves and speculate that this proves the presence of a higher being. No, let’s just enjoy this little miracle for ourselves. With Fixers being from Oxford, we thought we’d celebrate this glorious day by taking them for a picnic at Shoreditch Park. It must be tedious for the band having to commute back and forth the M4 corridor endlessly. And what if traffic is really bad on this Friday afternoon, we wouldn’t want them to get homesick now would we? So we bring a little bit of Old Oxfordian tradition to East London, kind of like taking Glasvegas for a deep-fried banquet along Brick Lane followed by dessert at a cardiac arrest clinic.

“I actually was intending on going on a diet today,” lead singer Jack informs me as I pass him a flaccid paper plate wilting under the carb-heavy weight and pressure of an array of meat-based produce. “And I haven’t touched alcohol for two months,” he adds just as I open a bottle of wine. Seeing as it is 11am in the morning, we substitute the wine for lemonade but as he picks up a handful of sausage rolls, the damage has already been done. I already know that this, if continued, is going to be a toxic relationship. Six months down the line our lives will probably end up like the accompanying video to ‘We Found Love’, only a bit more meta, each of us bickering over which gets to be Rihanna. Not a healthy way to live any lives.

I tell Jack about my love-hate relationship with pork pies. By rule I just don’t really think anyone should eat a meat product almost the size of a human head in a single sitting. It just seems a bit too much like cannibalism to me. Halfway through the conversation about “needing a good lie-down after a whole pork pie,” I realise how much of a come-on it sounds and how phallic all the picnic foods are, thus we end the date in the midst of meat sweats and pork regret.

A message comes on my Twitter feed later that day. “Had a lovely picnic with DIY earlier.” It’s like we’ve become one of the couples that flood news streams with identical photos of themselves in varying mundane backdrops. To stop this from ever happening, I restrain myself from tweeting back. And with it, goes the chance of a second date. My plight to find love in the hopeless place that is this music industry continues.

Taken from the May 2012 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.