Secret Love by Dry Cleaning is an album full of blood on the screens, underground bunkers from which remote-controlled bombs are controlled, wars seen through the feed, schools and hospitals reduced to background noise, influencers who preach toxic lifestyles. The end of the world, in some ways. However, the most radical message that emerges is that of not giving up cynicism. It's a record that seems written within the daily friction between private anxiety and public violence, but with the same oblique calm that has made the band explode in recent years. The London band takes everything they have built in recent years to the extreme: an avant-garde rock that holds together the paranoia of American punk and hardcore of the early '80s, the dry and slightly crooked pace of the guitars, the stoner, the playful no wave and a pastoral fingerpicking that seems to come from a lost folk record. At the center there is always the voice of Florence Shaw, spoken rather than sung.
The songs of Secret Love they had a nice tour, first in Jeff Tweedy's Loft in Chicago, then in Dublin in the hands of Alan Duggan and Daniel Fox of the Gilla Band, finally in France, at the Black Box in the Loire Valley, with Cate Le Bon conducting the orchestra. The result is a sound that is more extreme and more tender at the same time, in which the band allows itself almost violent changes in dynamics, sudden rarefactions, horns and keyboards that open up space for confessions that have so far been withheld. In this context, Dry Cleaning sound like a group that has arrived at its third album with an already very solid identity, but with a great desire to question itself, confirming itself as one of the best news for guitar music from the post-pandemic to today. We had a chat with guitarist Tom Dowse and drummer Nick Buxton.
I know you've been working on Secret Love with a different method from previous discs.
Tom Dowse: The main difference is that we took much more time and did a more conscious job of using study as a writing tool as well. With a few exceptions – like the title track of the album, which was already complete when we brought it into the studio – we got together with some rather bare and basic demos and worked on those.
Nick Buxton: In some cases the pieces were born right in the studio, for example I Need You.
And then you worked with Cate LeBon who took care of the production.
Nick: Yes, with her we really had the feeling of being in good hands. He has an ear for technical details and involves you in technical questions that producers usually just solve by treating them as if they were witchcraft.
Tom: Besides being a great musician, she also has a huge talent in managing people emotionally. We knew there would be great harmony but we were still pleasantly surprised.
Blood it is a song that talks about Gaza, the West Bank, Ukraine, mixing them with moments of everyday life. It's a bit like what we experience every day through our screens and, although many of your pieces have that kind of sensitivity towards reality and the present, it is also one of your most political pieces.
Tom: The guitar parts in that song come from a whole other life. It's a song that we've carried with us for a long time, we also played it to John Parish when we were making the demos of Stumpworkbut he didn't like it at all. Then during the sessions Secret Love we took it back. We tried to make it like Velvet Underground or something, strip it down to the bare bones, make it sound very primitive and stripped down. And it didn't work like that either. It worked once, then we tried it again and it didn't work. Yet we didn't want to discard it because sometimes it thrilled us. We ended up taking her to Dublin to see what Dan and Alan from the Gilla Band were going to do. They decided to start from the bass drum to create a sound world in which those guitars could exist. It reminded us a little Mass Protection by Massive Attack. Flo's lyrics immediately fit together very well, the song has sudden, dramatic, quite violent changes, and this went well with what the lyrics are about.
Instead Let Me Grow and You'll See the Fruit it's a very emotional piece, quite different from the others.
Nick: Flo's lyrics often have a layer of opacity or crypticness, but in this case the audience can grasp the general feeling very well, also because the music and the lyrics go hand in hand. Sometimes we contrast them, we try to create a juxtaposition. The piece came about because Tom had this fingerpicking spin and we worked on it a lot together. The drums and guitar immediately started talking. Flo did a very instinctive vocal take, improvising some things on the spot. Usually when this is the case he then rewrites it, changes it completely or keeps only part of it, in this case we kept the first version as it was. Maybe it's that instinct that gets to people a lot.
Your music has an obsessive aura, in the sense that the drum beats, the riffs, the arpeggios stay in my head for days. I wondered if this aspect is also valid during the gestation of the pieces, that is, do they obsess you at night, burrow into your brain like little worms until you take them out completely?
Tom: Yes, I would say yes. All four of us write and with a rather similar method. When we are at home looking for ideas for the band, we wait for the so-called hooks. We don't already have them in our heads but we look for them and then when they arrive we get carried away. If you wake up the next day, play it again and it's still in your head, you take it to the rehearsal room. If everyone ignores it, that's it. If someone reacts and all four of us keep coming back to that idea, it will become a song.
The four of you, besides being a band, are also great friends. How do you preserve this friendship without it becoming just a job?
Tom: You said well, you have to preserve it and cultivate it, because there are moments, especially when we record away from home or when we are on tour, when we always live, work and socialize together. Sometimes we even sleep in the same room, or on a tour bus. There are no escape routes. So the foundation has to be pretty solid, and you have to work to understand and adapt to others. On the other hand it's also hard for us to imagine what it's like to be in a band with people who aren't your friends, or with whom you have a professional relationship.
Nick: I think one of the reasons why people like our music is because you can hear how much we like playing together and sharing the adrenaline after concerts. Then if a concert goes badly, we do a kind of group therapy. It's something that connects us a lot.
You put Dry Cleaning together when you were already in your thirties, with a past behind you and jobs and responsibilities in the present. What changes, how are risks managed?
Tom: It was difficult, because we all had jobs that we more or less liked. The idea of making the band a full-time commitment came slowly, after we convinced ourselves that it was possible. We went there rather cautiously. When you're an adult you've seen a lot of bands come and go and then you have responsibilities, you live with a partner, you have a house, dogs, things like that. You can't just give up everything. At 20, if you work in a pub and have a gig on a Saturday and they say “you can't take Saturday off”, you simply quit. Your only real financial commitment is putting gas in to go to rehearsals and work. It's much easier. And you think you still have time to make mistakes and start over. But it must also be said that at 20 years old we would all have struggled a lot to be in a band with this level of visibility, where you have to expose part of your personality. When you're young you don't yet know who you are and you risk being what others tell you to be or being put down by criticism and stuff like that.
Speaking of maturity, you have exposed yourself a lot on the question of the economic sustainability of tours.
Tom: We just moved up an entire US tour by several months. It is above all a question of accessibility and of not being able to return home in the black. The tickets are fine, but the costs are too high. It's scary. If the takings were bad, we wouldn't even think about going on tour. That's not it. People do their part. The problem is hotels, flights, tour buses, food, especially in the United States, where you spend twice as much as anywhere else. If you're away for a month with eight, nine, ten people, three meals a day… that's a lot of money. Somehow we get by, but I think more people should be aware of it.
Nick: That's not a complaint, the point is that live music is more at risk than people realize. None of us play in a band hoping to get rich. It is a question of sustainability and equity.
London is often the backdrop to your pieces. Sociocultural changes greatly influence your songs and I would also say your way of being musicians, I would like us to talk about it a little.
Tom: One of the most beautiful aspects of London was its diversity, but in recent years the city has been “sanitised”. In Peckham, developers are constantly threatening to take over places like the Bussey Building and turn them into expensive flats. And the ethnic diversity of Peckham… if that goes, Peckham High Street dies. The developers have no idea what these things are: they just see something desirable and extract the maximum possible profit from it. They don't think about how communities are built. In theory, gentrification should improve services without killing what was there. Basically it strangles everyone who was there to replace them with people who only have money. That's what happened in Shoreditch: twenty years ago it was a wild place. You'd go out on Thursdays and there would be weird little events everywhere, galleries, warehouses, raves. Now you pass through Shoreditch just to go somewhere else.
I suppose this also has a huge impact on the music scene of a city…
Nick: It's hard for a community to survive in a situation like that and it's easy to talk about gentrification as something that happens without you, but of course it happens with you in it, we're all a cog in the machine that makes you feel helpless.
Tom: Today it is almost impossible for a band to start, even we struggle to pay for the rehearsal room. I don't know how a working class band can afford to rehearse in London right now. It almost seems like you have to already be rich before you can embark on any creative path.
However, the album ends with an optimistic message against these cynical and angry times, repeating “don't give up on being sweet”.
Tom: The problem with the rise of the right everywhere is that it's very difficult not to get angry and angry, and that leads you to behave more and more like them, which is exactly what they want. They want more division, more hatred, more suspicion. In this sense, small gestures of kindness can be something very profound and subversive. Be kind, think of others.
Nick: It was our intention to finish the record like this. It seemed like the right tone to end on. It's nice to end the album on a positive note, because the negativity around us is too strong and it's very easy to get discouraged. In a way it is also our responsibility to try to show a way of dealing with this in a positive way. If people can get that by listening to our music, that's really cool. Are you still recording?
Yes.
Nick: We would like to say that we love Italy and that we are sorry to play so little in your area, also because the concerts we did in Italy were absolutely fantastic. We would like to play in Italy a lot more. So please create hype in the interview and make us big in Italy.
Tom: Use capital letters throughout the interview!
