December
In the space of a year, Big Deal have gone from strumming Big Star’s Thirteen together in a bedroom in East London to having one of the most successful debut album’s of 2011, Lights Out.
We chatted to Alice Costelloe and KC Underwood (Big Deal) about the distorted heartbreak of their debut, ‘Lolita Pop’ and triumphing over techno.
When you formed the band KC was a guitar teacher and Alice you were learning guitar. How did you go from being a teacher and pupil to forming a band?
KC: I think that’s it’s slightly exaggerated it’s kind of a nice story. We were more friends and we had couple of casual lessons. She was in a band and I was in a band and we would share the music we were writing with each other, we’d share our demos, we would give each other feedback. We’d end up talking a lot about music and that coincided at the same time with both of our bands starting to fall apart, so we decided at that point that we’d try to write together. It really just started as an experiment to right the other and then the writing together went so well that we just decided to start playing those songs and next thing you knew we had a band.
What was the first song that you played together?
Alice: The first thing we did together, we sang ’13’ by Big Star together, but the first song we wrote together was ‘Homework’ and then ‘Talk’.
What were your aspirations when you first started?
Alice: I don’t think either of us knew what we were doing we just found it easy to write together.
KC: We didn’t intentionally start a band we never sat down and said: ‘ok, let’s start a band’. It was more like, ‘let’s write songs together’.
Alice: And, then we got a gig and it was like: ‘ok, we’ll have to play these live”
KC: It was accidental, purely accidental.
Where was your first gig?
Alice: The Stags Head [Dalston, London].
KC: It was really funny. The very first song we played the sound engineer pressed play on the DJ deck and started laughing and playing techno over our song. We didn’t know what to do, so we just looked at each other and kept playing and everyone just started laughing and she finally stopped it. It was nice though as it diffused the situation and made us feel that we could rise above techno!
Have you been surprised by the amount of attention you’ve got? You were on the NME Radar tour earlier this year and had a lot written about you.
Alice: Obviously, we’re really happy that some people have received the album well and we had such a great time doing the NME tour. It was really fun playing with bands you really respect and wanna hear their songs every night.
KC: Even sometimes when people don’t say what they want you to say, honestly, I don’t mind as long as it leads people to listen I’m really happy. That should be the point, the really frustrating thing is when people write and not ever about music that gets frustrating.
Do you get frustrated by the amount of attention your relationship gets that people instantly assume that you’re a couple?
KC: I think because of the nature of what we do, two people a guy and a girl, that that would happen. For me, I like to believe that people are curious about that because they like the music and want to know. I try to look at it that way as otherwise it would get quite frustrating.
You released your debut album, Lights Out. How did you go about recording it?
Alice: Our label, Mute, have studios and we were in there for over a week and it was pretty live, most of it. We didn’t really want to do too much studio trickery that we wouldn’t be able to do live, we just kept it to pretty much a couple of guitars and vocals. Most of the singing and anything sort of decent on it we did in the evenings as we’re kind of useless in the daytime. We got it done really quickly in an intense week or so.
The whole record is very stark and minimal. Why did you keep it that bare?
Alice: We just wanted the record to be a real representation of what we can achieve live.
How do you work together on songs?
Alice: Every song’s different, but it’s all collaborative. Some songs I will have written or KC will have written more of the guitar, it varies from song to song.
Lyrically the album seems to be a coming-of-age record, like on ‘Talk’ where it says “I’m just a kid, I’ll grow out of it”. Where did the inspiration come from?
Alice: A lot of the music we do like is quite honest. We were really into the album The Suburbs [Arcade Fire] and that nostalgia for growing-up and that probably influenced us.
The album itself seems like it should come out of the west coast as it’s very warm and summery whereas you were living in east London at the time.
KC: Well, I think it makes sense that it sounds that way. I was born and raised in California and a lot of the things that I grew-up with I think still influences more that music that I listen to now. The summer in England this year especially was really bad and I think a lot of it is about how you want it to be rather than how they actually are. I think we were kind of in a bit of that mindset when we were writing it.
Was there anything else you were listening to at the time? Alice mentioned Arcade Fire.
KC: That record came out when we started writing together as I recall it, but we were listening to quite a lot. I think we were listening to that record and I’m always listening to guitar bands like My Bloody Valentine, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins.
Would you ever flesh out the sound on the next record with more effects pedals, distortion?
KC: It’s a tricky situation. I mean, I think we recorded as much noise and fuzz on that album as we could. With a rhythm section the one thing they do is that they punch through and clean-out the overall sound. There were instances on the record where I started piling on lots of guitars and it honestly turned into mush. We don’t have something percussive going on, we had to use a bit of restraint. We had to take that approach where less is more and we get as much tone as we could out of a couple of guitars.
Alice usually sings the lead vocals on most tracks when you record again, KC will you take the lead vocals more?
KC: We never really think of it that way. I’ve never really thought of her as being the lead singer I think she’s probably not comfortable with that either. I think us singing together is usually what we have is mind, but I also think it gets a bit tiring to always hear that and that’s really the main reason that she’s sometimes singing and I’ll be singing along mainly for that purpose. It just depends on the songs, really.
You’ve said that you don’t like being referred to as a duo and prefer being called a band. Is there any reason for that?
KC: The reason we have, it’s not a very good reason, we often to be compared to other duos as we don’t feel like we sound like that. We think it’s a bit lazy when people see a guy and a girl and say: ‘they sound like that band and that band’ because it has a guy and a girl in them. I think we think of ourselves as a band sort of boiled down to this bare minimum this bare essence of two people, two guitars, to get the songs across. We may change that we don’t really know about the future. We don’t think of ourselves as a duo as we don’t feel like that we are like those other duos. I think in the way we write songs there are people that we do sound like, but it’s very rarely people think about that as they’re distracted by us being a boy and a girl.
Who would you say you actually sound like?
KC: I don’t know, I know the bands we both love and like. Some bands that we have listened to I think, we both really love guitar heavy bands Broken Social Scene, The Strokes, Arcade Fire, grunge bands from the nineties. We love all that kind of stuff.
In the press your music has been called ‘Lolita pop’. How do you feel about that phrase? To me that seems derogatory.
KC: We were both a little bit creeped out by it when they decided to coin that phrase. I think when people are trying to describe something ambiguous you often learn more about them…I think because we don’t really talk about things that aren’t really revelatory to the music people start to make assumptions. I think that’s a pretty creepy term, but kinda funny too.
On your Facebook you’ve described yourself as: ‘cheese cringe, post cringe, hard cheese, cheesegaze, cringe-core’ What do you like about cheese?
KC: I dunno. That’s just I guess us making fun of what you just mentioned, which is there are people making labels to make it sellable. We always listen to a lot of pop music and cringe and every time we look back we sort of cringe, but then sometimes I think the music we like the most does that, but in a nice way. I guess it’s not taking it too seriously.
When will you start working on the second album?
KC: We’re already writing, we’re always writing. I think it’s a bit early to start thinking about it as our record still hasn’t come out in America yet, it will come out in America in January. We are writing now and I think we will be ready to record an album when we need to again, which maybe as soon as next year around this time or a bit further along. I think right now we still hope that this album will keep us busy for a while.
Would you ever consider adding additional members to the band on that record?
KC: I dunno, I think it depends on how the songs are shaping up and how we feel about it. We quite like the simplicity of just having the two of us and it makes for a really tidy, easy dynamic as far as getting things done and writing. Brining people in can really make things messy sometimes; it really depends the reasons we started this band is that it really worked well with the two of us writing and if we bring people in it will be for the same reason. It could happen, but I think the odds of that happening are pretty low.
Lights Out – Out Now
www.myspace.com/weareabigdeal/
Marie Wood
