Capturing Now

"The internet catalogues and codes our past, and almost supersedes memory, [but] at the same time as we have our personal history recorded for posterity, we're forever thinking about the future, about what's next, what's the goal. In between those two things, there's a very small sliver of time which is actually the 'now'.”

It's a timely idea to discuss with Hayden Thorpe, not simply because of Present Tense's imminent release, but because, in Australia on a Christmas holiday, he's confronted with his past. Thorpe's just taken his first trip back to Maylands, the Perth suburb he lived in until he was six. “It was really quite moving,” he says, even if Perth's “endless skies” are far from the “consolatory grey skies and dour weather” of his home in the Lake District.

After the “culture shock” of trading WA for Northern England, Thorpe settled into the local mindset: first wanting to be a footballer, before “listening to records, drinking beer and smokin' with your mates became the new football”. A self-confessed “child of the MiniDisc-and-Napster era,” he started recording songs with school friend Ben Little as a 16-year-old, inspired by the “romanticism and audacity” of Jeff Buckley. At first they called themselves Fauve. “We were allured by the opium-smoking romance of that era of French art,” Thorpe recalls. “I wanted us to be fearless, audacious. We wanted to protest the blandness of music at the time. We weren't a fan of that post-Strokes era, that tidal-wave of men-in-leather-jackets, Libertines nonsense. It just wasn't good enough.

“We wanted to make reactionary work, call everything into question: 'Are they masculine? Are they homoerotic? Are they joking? Are they serious?' We didn't want to be just alright, and we weren't trying to please. We wanted to really divide people, force them to pick a side.”

After changing their name to Wild Beasts (the English plural of their French name), they endeavoured to make their debut LP, 2008's Limbo, Panto filled with idiosyncrasy and complexity. Since then, the quartet's “never struggled for attention,” with 2009's Two Dancers nominated for the Mercury Music Prize.

After a decade together, Present Tense forced Wild Beasts to “justify [their] continued existence”.

“For something to defy gravity, for it to sound effortless, that's actually a huge amount of work,” Thorpe offers. “Building things up, stripping them back, it was full of challenges, and we were riddled with doubts. We constantly felt like we were bordering on disaster, and, ultimately, I think that's the best place to be working from.”