Press by :
The Fly - Joe Shooman

BUZZ, BUZZ, buzz and heyfuck to the truth...

The Subways, according to the crashingly superficial and fuzz-brained self-appointed custodians of the popular media : 'They're garage rockers. She Wears short skirts. They were picked by Michael Eavis to play Glastonbury. She wears short skirts, again'. This is a band thrust into their 15 minutes of fame, almost despite themselves. A group plucked from obscurity, granted flavour of the month, imbued with an inbuilt obsolescence in the 'great' tradition of NewFadRockmongering. The coruscating single '1am' fizzes and rocks and sweats with distorted youthful expression. A band who...yadda fuckin' yadda to the power of several thousand.

Cause we're sitting in a bar of Liverpool's flagship new media gallery discussing the impact of worldwide travel, books, films and art on The Subways' music (or muse), on the eve of recording sessions for their debut album under the tutelage of one Ian Broudie. The Lightning Seed. The Coral collaborator. Something wrong with this picture?

Broudie's involvement is designed, perhaps, to correct some of this imbalance of perception to date, as eloquent bassist Charlotte Cooper explains : "he's worked with such a wide variety (of styles). We've got quite a lot of different songs on the album, from acoustic ones to heavier ones. There's lots of different influences going in." Frontman Billy Lunn interjects : "You've got Sigur Rós in there...we see these songs as more of a tablature of our emotions than trying to tell stories. It's all about the self, really, different sides of eachother." Sigur Rós? Emotions? Self? Eh? Doesn't sound like a could-be-anyone bunch of plod rockin' nodders, does it? Maybe the truth is that The Subways have a depth about them that allows them to go full pelt onstage one night and sit down happyily discussing Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and H.G Wells the next - interspersed with playfulness and not a little laughter.

Warners/Infectious finally won the signature of the three-piece, giving them their own City Pavement imprint, and despite the dry witted drummer Josh Morgan's insistance that was because they "Bought us a really nice Chinese meal", reality is a little more prosaic. "I have immense respect for Korda [Marshall]," insists Lunn. "All of his bands have made at least four albums." He doesn't sign flash-in-the-pans.

The Subways, of course, have already written most of their second album, and have plans for the third (and beyond). This is a band who hate inactivity, who are in it for the long haul, who are expansive in their worldview. And a band who caught the travel bug early, according to the frontman : "Me and Josh, we've been on the road our whole lives. We've been to Australia a few times - we tried to emigrate once and got chucked out. We were nine or ten, [and] we just ran out of money." As ever with the band, there's a point behind the anecdote. If travel broadens the mind, then according to Lunn it's "...just the same with music. If you're stuck in the same kind of regime...like a lot of bands, who are playing the same kind of stuff all the time. Cause they haven't left their mind; haven't left themselve's behind; haven't left where they've come from. I can't wait until the second single, I wanna shock, I wanna turn a few heads."

Because underneath the garish immediacy, below the skin burning neon of the City Pavement, there's a fizzing melange of scurrying, buzzing diversity. The truth is that The Subways have a lot more going on than meets the eye.