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Also this issue: Trance Encounter thesuitespot Short Cut Earth Irish Music and Dance Festival Lefty's Deceiver/Caterpillar (International) Noise Conspiracy Kay Hanley |
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September 12-18, 2002
music
 Manchester united: The Doves escaped their early one-hit wonder status to make more complete, sampler-free rock records. |
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The Doves rise from the ashes.
Their first album (as the one-hit-wonder club band Sub Sub) bombed, their studio burned down, and their longtime mentor Rob Gretton -- portrayed as the burly man chasing Tony Wilson around the boardroom table in the film 24 Hour Party People -- died suddenly. No wonder, then, that The Doves’ debut album, 2000’s Lost Souls, was a study in musical melancholia, complete with elegiac melodies and lyrics that politely advised against getting your hopes up too high.
By contrast, The Doves’ Mercury Award-nominated follow-up, The Last Broadcast, is a portrait in optimism, with soaring songs that suggest the dark times are over -- at least for now. The Last Broadcast entered the British charts in the No. 1 spot, turning an intensely bright spotlight on childhood friends Jimi Goodwin and twin brothers Jez and Andy Williams.“The comparisons to Oasis and Radiohead are a bit much sometimes,” Goodwin said in a recent phone interview from London. “I don’t see the similarities other than we’re as musically ambitious as them. So you just learn to not pay it any mind.”The Doves came together in their original incarnation more than a decade ago in the wake of the acid house craze sweeping through Manchester. Goodwin hadn’t seen the Williams twins in years until they ran into each other on the chaotic dance floor of acid-house central, the legendary Hacienda Club.Fans of “Madchester”’s late ’80s mainstays New Order and The Smiths, Goodwin and the Williams brothers got inspired by dance/trance music and began recording as Sub Sub. By late 1993, the band’s strident house track, “Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)” was huge; its subsequent debut album, Full Fathom Five, was not.
“The record was a bit of a disappointment. We’re proud of about half the songs on it -- but the rest didn’t come together because we were just finding our feet,” Goodwin says. Shortly after, the band’s studio burned down, taking with it most of their tapes and equipment. (“Luckily we had insurance, but it was not a happy time.”) Then, in 1999, Gretton died of a stroke (“He was really an amazing bloke; bankrolled us for, like, 10 years.”). Still, the three had plenty of support in their hometown -- “people there knew we were more than just a disco band” -- and, eschewing sequencers and samplers, transitioned into The Doves.
The sonic, thrilling darkness of Lost Souls tapped into the Mancunian tradition of rain-splattered rock wistfulness. Its standout track, “The Cedar Room,” set the tone for the whole record, in fact, opening with a symbolic sigh of defeat in the half-hearted harmonica solo. The soundtrack for a dismal day, no doubt, but there was true beauty in all that longing, and the album picked up steam by word-of-mouth, something The Doves found “utterly inspiring.”
“We felt we’d done something decent and we could just build from that,” Goodwin said. The Last Broadcast has upped the stakes. Just as atmospheric as Lost Souls, the new album is set apart by its intoxicating diversity. If the first record was, as some critics claimed, more about mood than actual music, the second is decidedly purposeful in its sonic grandeur. And it’s a heck of a lot more chipper, too.
“If there’s a thread running through the record, it’s about escape, but not in a blind-panic kind of way,” Goodwin says. “It’s about being in a place where you feel happy and strong. It’s about letting [go] of the failure, letting [go] of the past.”
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Goodwin knows plenty about letting go but he also understands the value of holding on: “We hung there because we believed. We know that our music is always from the heart -- and ultimately, you can’t go wrong with that.” More than two years after they stepped into the studio to create The Last Broadcast, The Doves are “desperate to get in the studio again.” In the meantime, they’re content to hit the road in small spurts; being onstage is “actually the most hands-on thing we can do with our music,” Goodwin says.
“We don’t like being on the bus more than a month; we go crazy.… Seven months on the road and you’re doomed,” he says. “But short tours we love. It puts us in the most amazing state of mind.”
The Doves play with My Morning Jacket, Sun., Sept. 15, 7 p.m., $20, The Trocadero, 10th and Arch sts., 215-922-LIVE.
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