The Summer Traffic
My Dad’s greatest bugbear in life is The Strawbs’ 1973 hit, Part Of The Union, which to his distaste was used on the Norwich Union advert before the marginally less bearable slogan “quote me happy” set up camp in our cochleas.
“They completely sold out,” he says, “they were a great band but everybody knows them for that one song.”
As great a danger as it is to mention “that” song when my Dad’s around is the risk of a band getting pigeonholed in the premature stages of their career.
“You have been compared a lot to the La’s,” I said tentatively to The Delays backstage prior to their York Fibber’s gig.
“Everyone mentions that!” replied Aaron Gilbert, eyes rolling. “The first two singles we released were of that sort of ilk, but that’s not really what out music’s like at all.”
In truth all I had heard by the band before the interview was their second single Hey Girl, a lush, summery pop song that bore a passing resemblance to There She Goes.
“That was the most straight forward pop tune,” said Greg Gilbert, “and it wasn’t our choice for the singe but Long Time Coming [the new single] is more the direction we are going.” The band were keen to distance themselves from any possible link to a project involving John Power, as would anybody. “People will listen out for the slightest “La’s-y” element and that might colour their judgments. I hope people listen to it without prejudice,” said Colin Fox.
The band met at school in Southampton, formed around the brothers Gilbert, Greg and Aaron but you could well imagine that they had been bundled together for a “No Sweat”-esque television series, the personalities of the 4-piece seem so different. There’s Greg Gilbert on lead vocals and guitar, the resident philosopher, on keys its Aaron Gilbert, the lovable prankster, bassist Colin Fox is the shy one and drummer Rowly (just Rowly) likes girl’s clothes.
As I was to find out at the gig later on that evening, the band were right, the rest of their set sounds little like the La’s despite ploughing a similar furrow of finely crafted sunny pop. Perhaps one of The Delay’s main points of protrusion from the swamp of summery bands is their apt use of programming and synthesizers as they reject the traditional trappings of mainstream indie and the responsibility for making such “unusual sounds and noises” falls to Aaron.
“We don’t want to have these big orchestras and just sound like Starsailor,” said Rowly with a curling lip, “If you’re going to use synthetic strings, then make them sound false.”
“One of our songs has got a synthetic steel drum on it, which is pretty fucking cool; like Prince in the mid 80’s with wicked synth strings.”
The band draw influence from a very wide spectrum of artists. They grudgingly admitted that The La’s had made an impression upon them but there is much more to it than that. On their list of artists to send thankyou cards to are Prince, The Cocteau Twins, Daft Punk, Dave Clarke (nb: not of The Dave Clarke 5 fame), Bjork, assorted film soundtracks, a little worryingly Abba, and even more worryingly Gary Glitter.
“The first gig I ever went to was a Gary Glitter gig and he didn’t even look at me in an odd way and I was seven,” said Aaron, before brother Greg cut in:
“Trouble is since Gary Glitter’s been convicted you can’t hear that song [Rock N’ Roll Part 2] without thinking about what he did when it’s an amazing piece of music.”
Despite their slightly unorthodox muse, the band still entrust the Gilbert brothers with a dominant role in the songwriting.
“At the moment Greg and Aaron bring the main ideas in and then we’ll sort of jam them around and they’ll gradually form songs,” said Collin.
“We’ve got a little garage that we basically live in and we spend every day in there just jamming with tunes,” Rowly added, “We fall asleep hugging our instruments…”
Of course, you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the press; Rowly is a drummer and it is unlikely that he would be found in the land of nod clutching a bass drum. However it seems the bit about self imposed confinement in a garage must be true. The Delays’ live set was slick and well rehearsed and Aaron’s keyboards were put to particularly good use as they interacted with the guitars to create a very full sound. There was a zest, a passion as they played as if it was all coming together for the first time. It seems that after just one album The Delays have scratched their names on the cairn atop 3-minute Pop Gem Mountain and it can’t be long before they are sharing festival Portaloos with Travis and The Thrills. Lets just hope they don’t run into The La’s.
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