Record Collectors

The Horrors are a music geek’s dream come true.

Their earliest singles three years ago paid tribute to Joe Meek, The
Cramps and Screaming Lord Sutch, and the band has evolved to balance
musical elements borrowed from My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth,
Killing Joke, and Echo and the Bunnymen, not to mention Neu! and Brian
Eno.

On their latest American tour, The Horrors are headed to Tucson to
play Monday, April 20, at Club Congress. They’ll play on a bill that
will also feature headliner The Kills and opening act Magic Wands.

The five young Londoners in The Horrors say they play music largely
because of their mutual love for many of the same things adored by
rabid music fans like you and me. Since they were young, each of the
guys in The Horrors has loved garage, psychedelic, punk and post-punk
rock; collecting vinyl LPs and 45s; digging up obscure recordings in
out-of-the-way shops; and sharing their passion for music with the
occasional DJ gig.

“We all are big record collectors,” says bassist-keyboardist Spider
Webb (whose mother named him Rhys) a few days before leaving England
for the United States. “When you are passionate about music, and you
collect vinyl and obscure singles and stuff, you’re always into
learning what other people are listening to, and it sort of draws you
together to want to share it.”

Spurred on by their shared interests, The Horrors were formed in
2005 by three boys from Southend in Essex (Webb being one of them) and
a couple of others who grew up in London. None of them, save guitarist
Joshua Third, had much experience playing in bands.

“I had a little synthesizer and a drum machine and would make my own
recordings in my bedroom,” Webb says. “But when we got together as the
band, is when the world of making music really started opening up for
me and most of the others.”

Webb and Third are joined in The Horrors by vocalist Faris Badwan,
keyboardist/bassist Tom Furse and drummer Coffin Joe.

In the beginning, the band had few ambitions and no plan of action,
Webb says.

“We wanted to play music and play the kind of music that we loved
when we were growing up. I guess our first real goal was possibly to
record one 7-inch single, to see our names on it, and know that we did
it.

“Maybe it wasn’t really an aim, per se, but … we really couldn’t
relate to the contemporary music scene and didn’t feel any similarities
to any of the groups that were playing or were even spoken about at the
time. We were more interested in all of the last 60 years of music.
That was the reason we formed, along with the idea of initially putting
out 7-inches.”

Things took off unexpectedly, he says. The Horrors quickly became
known around London for their proto-goth look, dark and hypnotic sound,
and frenzied live shows. In 2006, the band’s debut single, “Sheena Is a
Parasite,” featured a B-side cover of Sutch’s “Jack the Ripper.”

Soon, they went into the studio to record what would become their
first album, Strange House, which was released in 2007.

“The most important thing with the first record was the adrenaline
and movement, and playing very fast and ferocious,” Webb says. “It kind
of documented our sound and attitude at the time. It was all about the
idea of punk—playing the basics and playing our instruments
speedily and furiously, and all of that changed between records.”

The Horrors’ second album, Primary Colours, will be released
by XL Recordings on May 5. It’s an amazing leap in quality beyond the
proto-garage vibe of Strange House, combining lush sonic
textures, some ambient noise, explosive psychedelia and dark
meanderings.

“We think of this record as a British psychedelic record,” says
Webb. “Our first record was more spontaneously a punk record with
primitive rhythms from that garage sound and the freak-beat sound. This
album’s more experimental, where the first one was us just trying to
become the band we wanted to be. This one, I think, shows us fucking
things up a bit. Two years of playing solidly and touring has helped us
grow up a bit and be able to experiment, I think.

“We went from doing covers, or songs that looked toward our early
musical influences, to actually sitting down and writing the songs to
reflect a mood and a vibe. We wrote in the summer and spent five months
in the studio, and then on the weekend, we would let loose and go to
all these parties, with a lot of mind-altering experiences, should I
say, and that really influenced the sound we were creating, I
think.”

Since one of The Horrors’ collective passions is the veneration of
the vinyl recording, they insist that all of their singles and albums
are released in that format, Webb says.

“Everything we release is on vinyl. When we think of the artwork on
our albums, which we like to have active involvement in, we always are
thinking of the 12-inch and 7-inch formats. And CDs barely come into
our minds. MP3s don’t at all. Everyone in the band thinks in terms of
the old formats.”

Webb recalls a recent interview in which another journalist asked
the band about the significance of MP3s and downloaded music.

“We came to the conclusion that if all the computers crashed, and
all those libraries of songs were lost, we could just stroll into our
bedrooms and living rooms and still find all our music, all the artwork
and the history that goes along with it.”

This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2009.