World’s End Press
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World’s End Press

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“We’d often skip class to go back to my house and make music,” Richards says of those early days. “The day we finished high school, we went right to my bedroom with some recording gear that we borrowed from John’s sister’s ex-boyfriend or someone like that, with the aim of recording an album in three weeks. That didn’t quite work out,” he continues, “but our main aim was always to play in a band together, and now here we are.”

 

World’s End Press have supported some huge names over the last few years, touring with the likes of Hot Chip and Bloc Party, and these live shows helped them hone their own signature style.

 

“It’s really beneficial to see how bands with more resources than you, big bands, how they operate,” Richards says. “When we played with Hot Chip, we snuck around the stage and had a stickybeak at the gear they were using, to see how a big band like that manages to operate. It’s been a great opportunity to see how other bands put on a great show. I mean, headline bands have lasers and strobes and things like that, a really big setup, and when you play with them you have to work around that stuff – you’re stuck in a small space somewhere on the stage, so it makes you work to put on the best show you can.”

 

The eagerly anticipated, self-titled debut album from World’s End Press arrived earlier this month. It’s packed with the band’s signature glassy-eyed house bangers and indie dance excursions, and was produced by none other than legendary beat-maker Tim Goldsworthy.

 

“Tim is somebody whose work we’d always really admired,” Richards explains. “We love everything from DFA – The Rapture’s Echoes, which he worked on, was a big influence on us, and we love his work with Massive Attack. We sent him a bag of stuff, which he liked, and then we had a meeting, and from there we very quickly ended up working together. We found ourselves working with Tim, and we were pinching ourselves thinking about how we got there.”

 

The recoding process began at the legendary Rockfield Studios in Wales, a residential studio with a great deal of history – everyone from Queen to Black Sabbath recorded there in the ‘70s, while in the ‘90s,The Stone Roses lived there for a period of some months while working on their second album. Rockfield is set in the Welsh countryside, and the isolation there forced World’s End Press to work.

 

“The recording process was very isolated, and we didn’t really leave the studio until we were done with the record,” Richards says. “The town of Monmouth was about a two-mile walk, so we’d occasionally clop down for a beer on a Saturday night. We’d go out and have some drinks with the locals. There wasn’t a lot to do other than make music, though.”

 

The studio itself proved inspiring on the music – as did Goldsworthy’s own legendary collection of gear. “We arrived at the farm a day before Tim,” Richards says, “and we were standing out in the courtyard when a big truck rolled up full of vintage synths and organs and all kinds of odds and ends. That was a big part of the sound of the record, using a lot of those instruments.”

 

The band arrived at the studio with their songs fully written, but Goldsworthy encouraged them to break the music down and reimagine it from scratch. “Tim wanted us to play together as a group, rather than each taking turns and recording our parts separately,” he explains. “The studio was designed with that approach in mind, and so we worked very hard to get it sounding perfect. The studio really did shape the album in that sense.”

 

One of the album’s finest tracks is its closer, Out, a sprawling, psychedelic ten-minute track recorded spontaneously on the band’s last night in the studio. “We were working on Natural Curiosity”, Richards says, “and after we’d done a take, we left it rolling, and John and I were playing around on an organ and piano when we looked up and saw Tim waving at us through the window saying, ‘Don’t stop!’” Everyone began jumping in, taking up synths and drum machines, and they made music together until 3.30 in the morning. “We just made a cacophonous noise as we drank tequila,” Richards continues. “Even Tim and his assistant were playing. It’s a very happy memory because it was a very impulsive thing – just a party on our last night in the studio. You can hear people having a good time.”

Now back at home in Australia, World’s End Press are all set to embark on a national tour and a run of summer festivals. After that, they have their sights set on overseas. “Hopefully by the end of the summer, we’ll be going to the US or the UK,” he says. “We have so much momentum right now, we just want to keep that going.”

 

BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN