U.K. band Wild Beasts let its libido loose from the cage on Two Dancers, the follow-up album to last year’s playful Limbo, Panto, trapping moments of abandon in ten sweeping songs that lustfully pursue the “unpluckable flower of the moon.” We spoke to singer Hayden Thorpe, whose falsetto swirls around where “dribbling dogs howl” and “trousers and blouses make excellent sheets, down dimly lit streets,” to shine some light on the darker side of Wild Beasts.
Did Two Dancers take on the theme of unbridled indulgence and booty calls from the get-go?
Hayden Thorpe: I think it grew organically towards a theme. The way we wrote it, quite quickly. The bulk of it was written over a few months. The initial stages were spread out.—Five ideas swirled around this theme. Then we took the theme and wrote the other half around it. Using our brains instead of our bodies. The dancing theme was symbolic of what we were thinking about. We’ve been living quite a hedonistic life, quite a lot of excess going on. We wanted to capture that abandon and letting go of learned behavior. Being musicians gave us license to do that for the first time in our lives. We wanted the album to be happy but of course when you are in those states, there’s always a slight chance of doom on the horizon.
What learned behaviors are you referring to?
Learned behavior and controlled emotions are what society is built on, to suppress desires, to do what is morally correct—those human instincts to use aggression. 99 percent of the time we keep those controlled. One percent of the time we are primal and happy.
Can you be good when you let the devil out?
Half of the battle is realizing those things rather than carrying them out. I have a fascination with revealing the things that shouldn’t be revealed, romanticizing those explicit moments. Our everyday lives aren’t allowed that. The desire for the unknown and unattainable lingers.
How did you try to emphasize primal moments of creativity in the album’s recording?
We wanted to go with our instincts and because we wrote it so quickly, we had to go with our instincts. We allowed mistakes and accidents to happen and thrived on them. Those are the moments that were most exciting—accidental moments that we recorded as we were writing. We would have five hours worth of recording and listen back and find this unexplainable moment that we then tried to recreate. It wasn’t so much a physical attainment as a mental one with the album, in the effect of capturing certain moments of abandon. For example, “Hooting and Howling” took a few hours to play. At first, not much came of it, but towards the end of recording there was this twinkling riff that we then built the entire song around. It’s an example of letting loose and throwing paint at the wall and going back to see what color looks best.
The recording session lasted three weeks. We’d spend the day setting up the sounds until we were happy with the noises. Then we would sit down with some wine and capture the excitement. We finished writing the album a week before we went into recording. Some of the songs we hadn’t played more than ten times. For the first album, we did 50 or 60 takes! We wanted to avoid the black hole of the computer by recording on tape, without being able to do infinite takes.
How does the album cover tie into the romantic theme?
That was another sort of accident. I was at an exhibition in Leeds where we live. This artist Fiona Morley does intimate portraits of lovers in 3-D with wire. It’s very confrontational because they are lifelike. It’s like when you take a photo of someone not looking and you capture them, rather than with a pose. This visual informed the album, we picked it up and circulated it among us. We asked the artist to paint a canvas. One of the shots was the canvas with the sculpture taken away. There was something simplistic and emotional left behind. It did what we tried to do.
Is the term “booty call” used in England?
In pop songs, definitely. Beyonce and Destiny’s Child brought it to the U.K. We have a fascination with pop music and we allow that to creep in to our lives and words. It is mildly ridiculous in a lot of ways. It sounds ridiculous coming from my lips but it sounds hot coming from Beyonce.
What did you get out of creating this record, emotionally?
I think once you start making an album you become immersed and obsessed. You have to finish it in order to live. You build a world for yourself as the other world disintegrates. You eat a meal and you need to finish the meal and be re-energized in order to be hungry again and move on. It’s an essential part of our way of living. There’s not really a grand realization. It’s an essential component of how we’ve chosen to live. I hope we look back and say, ‘I think this is pretty cool, what we did.’ Right now, it’s still pretty raw and we are just in it and looking to see what happens next.
Two Dancers was released Sept 8, 2009, on Domino Records. It was co-produced by the band and post-rock engineer Richard Formby (Spacemen 3, Spectrum, Mogwai) in the remote rural area of Norfolk, England.
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