Interview Mandrake Handshake: “If everyone is moving their body, it’s hard to feel like you’re doing a bad show”

Your debut album ‘Earth-Sized Worlds’ is now officially out in the world - congrats! How does it feel to have set it free? What’s the reaction to the record been like?
It feels like we’re ticking off a bucket list item. Personally, it’s something I set out to do at the start of my musical journey, and I can die happy knowing I’ve done something I really wanted to do. To cut a long story short, I feel proud. The reaction’s been overwhelmingly positive. We made an art-rocky album that took risks, and we enjoyed making it without worrying too much about what its reception might be. Knowing it has been received so well is pretty comforting - it’s good to know that there are people out there who are into the stuff we’re into.

You’ve been playing together and releasing music under the Mandrake Handshake moniker since 2018, but this is your first full-length record. Can you tell us a bit about the journey to getting to this point? Why did now feel like the right time to make your opening statement proper?
We wanted to release album after album after album after album, but it turns out that it’s expensive and hard. We hunted to find the space, time and money - the journey took us ages because at the start there was no one to tell us how to do it. We figured it out through trial and error. Now is the right time because now was the time we managed to get all the resources to make it. We would have released it earlier if we could!

As a collective with up to 10 members, we can imagine the creative process can get a little more complicated than it might be for a smaller group… How do you navigate writing sessions? Do a small number of people take the lead? Do different members pen different tracks? Give us a bit of an insight into that dynamic.
Generally, the principle is that I have the final say. Various band members have various degrees of freedom, but we’re set up so I have the last word. It sounds dictatorial, but it helps avoid complications. If there’s doubt or uncertainty, we have a system in place that helps resolve it. Maybe it’s not as sensitive or collaborative as we would all like, but it stops us getting bogged down and helps us to function as smoothly (relatively speaking) as we do.

The jumping-off point or concept around which you crafted ‘Earth-Sized Worlds’ is ‘Welcome To Space Beach’. Was this an aesthetic or feeling you set out to create from the start, or did it emerge as a throughline between songs somewhere along the way? Set the space beach scene for us - who are the characters we’d find there? How did they get there? Where are they going next?
We had collected a huge collection of songs, ideas and motifs written over many years. When it came to making an album, we found a cosmetic brief that allowed us to unify all the disparate parts within this music. We came up with ‘Space Beach’, which allowed us to draw down from this cloud of creative ideas as fit this brief. The theme fits the two main, but somewhat opposing concerns in the music, which is the heavier, psych-rock side (Space), and the more delicate avant-pop or ‘70s Brazilian MPB (Beach) that I was especially obsessed with, and still am.

As a place, it offers an oasis in the cosmic desert. There are scavengers, scrap hunters, bounty hunters, lost princesses, all there in the outer rim. It’s where the powers of home and comfort and life hit you; it’s a refuge in the distant acid horizon where you can sit down, feel safe, and experience the highs and lows of life in a singular moment.

Was there a particular track that ‘unlocked’ the album for you - one which informed the direction of the other songs, or which felt like a bit of a lightbulb moment?
The title track. It encapsulates the intimate and epic of ‘beach’ and ‘space’ in one. It shows both of our sides - the organic feel and the huge, sci-fi proportion. I wouldn’t know what to do without that song. It defined the album and was so clearly the title track.

Sonically speaking, ‘Earth-Sized Worlds’ is incredibly broad, drawing inspiration from anything from samba to krautrock to alt-pop and more. While hugely freeing, this wide scope might have also perhaps made it more challenging to capture and define your sound. As a band, how did you hone in on the identity of Mandrake Handshake? How do you ascertain whether something is ‘right’ for you or not?
It’s a resultant process. I don’t sit around pondering on feelings and turning them into art. It’s more like a laboratory experiment. At least for me, you are what you eat in music - what I listen to influences every creative decision. I’ll like an idea from one song, an idea from another song, put them together and see what comes out. The hunch for the right things to combine come through experience, or trial and error. I don’t exactly know how that then becomes a consistent identity, but it’s probably because it’s us making it. I really worried that the album wouldn’t fit together - the fact that it’s totally, just completely, us is the thing I hold on to. It wasn’t designed from the start to come together like this, but we hoped it would. And I think it did.

You’re currently on tour visiting the great and the good of UK record stores, before playing your biggest UK headline show to date! What, to you, makes for the best gigs? Have there been any particularly memorable ones so far?
Dancing, I think. If everyone is moving their body, it’s hard to feel like you’re doing a bad show. You just never worry. Then there will be shows where people aren’t dancing, but they come up to you and say ‘great set’ and clearly mean it – that’s special too, but it doesn’t have the same immediacy.

Our show at Green Man was an especially memorable show. The two things I set out to do when I started this project was to make an album and play Green Man, as that was the festival that influenced us from the start. There were multiple mosh-pits, a packed-out tent, and by far our biggest audience so far, so that was pretty special

What’s one thing you’d like listeners to take away from ‘Earth-Sized Worlds’?
To feel like you can be braver, and to take more risks in life. And maybe to smoke that joint…

‘Earth-Sized Worlds’ is out now via Tip Top Recordings. 

Tags: Features, Interviews, Mandrake Handshake