From Playing To No One To Playing Glastonbury

"To begin with,” London’s Wolf Alice guitarist Joff Oddie explains, “literally we picked (the band’s name) for semantic reasons because we thought it looked nice and it sounded nice. But that kind of meaning and those kinds of Jekyll and Hyde side to that name if you know what I mean, the music is something that’s come later.”

A relatively new band, Wolf Alice began life as a duo, with Oddie and singer Ellie Rowsell playing what they’ve described as London’s ‘toilet circuit’ back in 2011. “Me and Ellie were playing kind of acoustic-y, duo-y kind of stuff, and it’s pretty hard to get listened to doing that kind of thing. So after about two years of playing to no one in local pubs and things like that, we kind of went, ‘Fuck this, we need to make it loud, really fast!’” 

"After about two years of playing to no one in local pubs and things like that, we kind of went, ‘Fuck this, we need to make it loud, really fast!’” 

They enlisted drummer Joel Amey and bass player Theo Ellis and in 2012 released their first single, Leaving You, a gently gorgeous country-tinged folk song. Then Wolf Alice exploded in the UK. “There was a period to begin with where we had a bit of buzz in the industry and we played shows to more A&R men to more normal fans and things like that, and that was kind of weird.” Far from being overwhelmed by the attention, the band, says Oddie, were just “super happy” that people were starting to notice them. “I think we kind of thought, like most bands do in that situation, you know, ‘We’re rock stars! Yeah, yeah, yeah!’ All that crap, all that absolute bollocks.”

Their second single, Fluffy, was a much fatter, grungier proposition, and Wolf Alice continue to prove that rampant variety is the way they roll. “We have no interest in making the same song 12 times and putting it on a record,” Oddie emphasises. The band has two EPs under its belt — Blush, released in 2013, and Creature Songs, released last year — and their debut album, My Love Is Cool, is out now. Their sonic diversity, says Oddie, is a symptom both of having broad tastes within the band and that “we kind of grew up digesting music on the internet and being able to listen to whatever we want when we want without the restraints of having to go out and buy a CD, and dedicate yourself to one genre because you could only buy one CD a week or whatever. So I think it’s down to that really.”

Last year the band played the Glastonbury festival, the biggest crowd they’d played to that point. Probably not their best gig, Oddie admits, because the band was shitting it with nerves, completely overwhelmed by the enormity of the experience; playing the John Peel stage at Glastonbury is “the kind of stuff dreams are made of.” Most of the time, says Oddie, Wolf Alice gigs are “high energy, a lot of fun hopefully. We like to play hard, fast and jump around for as long as we can.”