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If you prefer to retreat to a dark pub on a hot summer's day you may find yourself in good company with Marcel Wave, London's brightest new post-punk act. Vocalist Maike Hale Jones joins forces with members of Sauna Youth and Cold Pumas to sing of crumbling infrastructure and faded movie stars on their brilliantly gripping debut LP Something Looming (Upset The Rhythm/Feel It). Jones and guitarist Oliver Fisher were kind enough to let us raid their heads for a couple of questions, keying us in on the local histories that inspire that music and the band's future aspirations.
Paperface Zine: What have you all been up to lately? What have you been listening to, reading, or spending a lot of time doing?
Oliver Fisher: As a band we've been touring the UK a bit which has been lovely! It's always such a pleasant surprise to see how nice and welcoming people have been in different cities and venues, also meeting all these brilliant and very generous DIY promoters.
Maike Hale Jones: I've been obsessively listening to Chappel Roan's "Good Luck, Babe!" It’s amazing—I'm a sucker for a melancholic pop song! I've been reading a lot of Olivia Laing lately, I love the way she weaves together culture, history and personal stories to explore a subject.
PZ: When I Googled what a "Marcel Wave" is, what came back was a hairstyle: is that right?
MHJ: Correct! I think I just really liked the way it sounded and always thought if I had a band, that’s what it would be called.
PZ: This is your first album as a band but you've already been playing together as this band for at least a year is that right? And some of you even longer than that in other projects!
MHJ: Since 2019! But then COVID happened which threw things off for a while.
OF: Patrick and I are brothers and we've been in bands together since we were teenagers; in fact we're still technically in a band that released its debut album in 2007, and we've just finished the follow-up, about 15 years later [laughs].
PZ: What was it like to finally put all that work together into a definitive LP? You guys have a really strong sense of self throughout the entire release.
MHJ: Thanks so much! It was such an amazing feeling to finish the album, there had been quite a few bumps in the road, but we got there in the end! It also really helped that we released it with Upset the Rhythm and Feel It. Both labels have been so supportive and enthusiastic since the get-go!
PZ: Your music video for "Barrow Boys" is a lot of fun, what was it like to come up with the concept for that one and filming it?
MHJ: I'd always had an interest in the redevelopment of the London Docklands, it's such a strange and grotesque juxtaposition of this traditionally very working class area of London becoming this financial hub via an influx of yuppies and all they brought with them in the eighties. I suppose that's what we wanted to show. It was really fun to shoot, but it was the WETTEST day, it rained constantly! Lindsay did an amazing job of directing, starring-in and filming the whole thing on his iPhone. There's a point in the video where we're twirling around in the rain, that was the coldest, wettest part of the day, we had no shelter and Lindsay shouted "Spin around!"— so we did, we'd completely lost our minds by then!
PZ: Although "Barrow Boys" was the lead single, it was the third single "Peg" that really got me excited for this release. Can you tell us more about that song and how it came together?
MHJ: "Peg" was one of the first songs we wrote. I had written a few (I suppose you could call them poems?) and the band wrote the music around them. The song is about Peg Entwistle, an actress who killed herself by jumping off the Hollywood sign. I first read about her in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon— it was such a dramatic story it piqued my interest. When I read up on her I felt like I got a much more rounded sense of who she was than Anger’s salacious version and I found her story incredibly sad, and wanted to chronicle it somehow.
PZ: What about the opener "Bent Out of Shape," how did that one came about?
MHJ: I used to run a creative writing group for adults with learning disabilities. I'd used a still from Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows as inspiration, and asked the students, "if the characters could speak, what would they say to each other?" I found it scribbled in one of my (many) dog-eared notebooks when we were writing songs and used it as a starting point.
PZ: "Mudlarks" is an easy one to get stuck in your head. What were the inspirations behind this one? Sounds maddening like a Magazine cut!
MHJ: This goes back to my obsession with the Thames! Mudlarking is a practice of finding historical objects (as far back as the Neolithic period) on the shores of the Thames. Because the Thames is tidal, it periodically washes things up that would normally be lost to time. When I wrote the lyrics, I thought about all the different things people have found and listed them, like an excavation through layers of history.
PZ: "Elsie" is another one I really enjoy, coming off like a meditation that's both gorgeous, yet grim. What can you say about this one?
MHJ: "Elsie" was written about an actress called Pat Phoenix, she played Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street, the UK's first-ever soap opera. I watched an interview with the actress on a chat show, where she cheerfully described how she had tried to kill herself when her career as an actress was on the wane. She set out the whole scene, sitting in her dingy flat, putting the cat out, turning on the gas oven etc. I just found it so strange that this bleak moment in someone’s life was offered as a piece of light entertainment. It turned out a week after her suicide attempt she found out she got the part on Coronation Street and became one of the most famous women in Britain. I'm not sure why I'm preoccupied with suicidal actresses!
PZ: What's the story behind the cover art?
OF: This was inspired predominantly by a range of Watneys brewery adverts from the fifties that were compositions of various games ephemera sat around thirstily drunk pints of their stouts or ales. These presumably photographic adverts were shot and developed in a way that had a slightly "hyperreal" Technicolor look, similar to hand-painted or colorized postcards that were pretty commonplace up until the 1920-30s, which I've always been drawn to. For our composition, we wanted the ephemeral objects—or objets du pub if you will—to have more of a 1970s working men's club aesthetic, whilst including a variety of objects that I'd design and construct that linked to the album's lyrics by creating fake brands—the box of Matinee cigarettes are from "Peg" and the Limehouse matches are from "Mudlarks" for instance—which would carry across to the glass tankard's label with our name and the beer mat with the album title. After enduring a steep learning curve across a wide variety of actualities such as how photography works and how a cigarette box is constructed, and following a lot of post-production legwork, we were there!
PZ: What are your live shows like, for those of us who haven't had the pleasure to see you play yet?
OF: Hmmm, I’m not sure we've yet played regularly enough to get to the point where we're really aware of what's going on aside from just trying to play the parts correctly! Although I do like to step back and take a relaxing drink at the beginning of "Where There's Muck There's Brass" as I don't play anything for a while—that's probably the highlight of the set for me.
PZ: What's next for Marcel Wave? You haven’t played outside of the UK yet, are there any plans or aspirations to?
OF: It's definitely more of an aspiration at present, but Europe and its spectacular vistas, arts funding and cheese boards is definitely something we're looking to traverse, hopefully next year?!
Something Looming is out now on Upset The Rhythm and Feel It Records.