How Wild Beasts Took A Stand Against 'Bland' Music

The title, Present Tense, of the fourth album for English art-rockers Wild Beasts symbolises, according to Hayden Thorpe, the LP’s themes.

“It’s about the difficulty and the beauty of living-in-the-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’.”

This thought proved even more timely when Thorpe – in Australia on a Christmas holiday – was confronted with his past, the singer visiting Maylands, Perth for the first time since he left as a six-year-old. “It was really quite moving,” he admits, even if Perth’s “endless skies” are far from the “consolatory grey skies and dour weather” he associates with the Lake District, where his family relocated.

"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."

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 a beer and smokin’ with your mates became the new football”.

A self-confessed “child of the mini-disc-and-Napster era”, he started recording songs with schoolfriend Ben Little as a 16-year-old, inspired by the “romanticism and audacity” of Jeff Buckley. “For kids who’d grown up in the Britpop era and were used to tolerating a level of machismo,” he says, “he really introduced us to, well, sexuality.”

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 made their debut LP, 2008’s Limbo, Panto, filled with grandiloquence, idiosyncrasy and complexity. The quartet has “never struggled for attention”, with 2009’s Two Dancers nominated for the Mercury Music Prize and 2011’s Smother cracking the UK top 20.

After a decade together, however, Present Tense forced Wild Beasts to “justify [their] continued existence”. The song-title, A Simple Beautiful Truth, served as the album’s “working manifesto”, Thorpe writing his most sincere, unguarded, optimistic lyrics; the band chasing “the holy grail” of “something that is both art and pop at once”.