Music

The Boy Least Likely To
We say Twinkly duo, meddling with all the best bits of ’80s pop – Aztec Camera, Prefab Sprout and Scritti Politti – and busy building a cult fanbase faster than you can say ‘the new Magic Numbers’. Banjos are involved.
They say Jof Owen (vocals): ‘We’ve known each other for ten years; since school, though we went to different schools. We were always in bands.

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Pete’s [Hobbs] was a bit heavier – well, just rubbish, really – and I was writing all these lyrics for songs that never got made; poetry, I guess you’d call it, but happy poetry. So we kind of rescued each other.

‘Our whole album was recorded on a laptop in a bedroom. Rather than making dance music, we were miking up real instruments so you can hear doors slamming, radiators gurgling and all sorts. We’d just layer another glockenspiel over there – a wall of glockenspiel! I like the purity of ’80s synth sounds. If you put a violin on something it sounds earnest, so we’ll put a nice, squelchy synth noise on there too which stops it from going too much in that folky singer-songwriter direction.

‘We’ve built it up really slowly over a couple of years. I met a guy at one of our gigs who’d waited a year for us to bring another single out! But we were reviewed by Pitchfork one day last year, and got back from work to find hundreds of emails from people in New York. I’ve got a mate who works in imports and exports. Obviously he’d never had to ship anything by us before, but I got our album into the shops out there through him.

‘Since then, every gig’s just been mad. I found out today that we’ve sold out the [350-capacity] Bush Hall. Because we don’t play so often, it’s more special, like a little club night. We were signed at Christmas by [Simon Fuller’s pop empire] 19, which is an odd one; it always raises people’s eyebrows. But everyone else was wanting us to do loads of touring, while they just got us immediately. They’re very traditional about wanting to make proper pop.’

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