Ask Fyfe Dangerfield, the 6ft 5in lead singer and principal songwriter of that band, Guillemots, what he thinks of the praise lavished on him and he gurgles coyly, like a tongue-tied schoolboy. Asked to explain a restless, musically nomadic songwriting style, whose sudden, eccentric detours have perplexed as well as seduced critics and fans, he shakes his shaggy mane and says: “There are thousands of bands more edgy and experimental than we are. We’re a pop band. Seriously.”
For clarity, you need to go back to 2000, when, as Fyfe Hutchins (the more resonant Dangerfield is his mother’s maiden name), the singer described his setting of a Christina Rossetti poem thus: “It’s got a lot of everything and has both gentle and impassioned parts.” Remember that phrase when newcomers ask you to describe, and sceptics challenge you to defend, Guillemots’ music.
Through the Windowpane, the band’s Mercury-nominated debut album, came out in July and from the first bars made its intentions crystal clear. A string orchestra engulfs the listener, and throughout its 12 tracks, Dangerfield melds hushed, heart-on-sleeve romanticism with flurries of noise, massed harmonies and falsetto whooping. It is true that the often brutal switches between the album’s “gentle and impassioned parts”, and the fraughtness and fragility of its song structures, mean that sitting through it can be a hair-raising as well as spine-tingling experience. But it’s precisely that electricity, that unpredictability, that sets it apart from all the in-and-out, short, sharp guitar music being made at the moment.
“Passion’s not fashionable, is it?” Dangerfield says, squeezed into the top floor of a tour bus shortly after ravishing a crowd at last month’s Reading festival. “It’s very passé at the moment. We’re living in a time when being ironic or removed from stuff is more acceptable. And sometimes I think, are we being a bit cringeworthy? But I don’t want to do things in a clever or ironic way. I’d rather just sing, ‘I love you.’”
Long before the album was released, a few facts and a small army of fictions were crowding around Guillemots and threatening to define them as, first and foremost, wacky eccentrics. Dangerfield says his biggest fear is that they’re seen as “a gimmick, that we come across as a novelty act”. The fact that MC Lord Magrao, the band’s Brazilian guitarist, answered the ad Dangerfield had placed in a music mag with the assertion that he could play both the typewriter and the matchbox hasn’t exactly hindered the forming of such perceptions. Nor does the singer’s emergence from their bus, minutes before the Reading set, in a vivid check ensemble topped with a trilby and tailed with scarlet crocodile-skin winkle- pickers — what he calls his “wistful, existential tramp/bookie” look.
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“I wouldn’t try to compare us with Björk,” Dangerfield says later. “But her album Homogenic completely changed my perception of music: these beats firing everywhere, these gorgeous harmonies. I used to run my fingers along the bottom of the bath, and you’d get that scraping noise... I can remember sitting there, thinking, ‘Yes, this is almost a reference to John Cage’s music.’ But then I’d listen to the Top 40 in the bath as well. It was all the same to me.”
Dangerfield does this a lot: hopping, like the sea bird after which the band are named, from one subject to the next, a slave to his impulses and to a body that spasms as wildly as some of his songs. The way the band came about is as gloriously haphazard as their names: Magrao hails from Sao Paulo; the double-bassist, Aristazabal Hawkes, is Canadian; the Scottish drummer, Greig Stewart, briefly called himself Rican Caol.
Dangerfield, who was born in Birmingham and moved to Bromsgrove aged eight, formed his first band, Senseless Prayer, in his teens. “Terrible name,” he marvels now. “You can imagine us at Donington Monsters of Rock. And we were a little jangly guitar band.” In tandem with that, having studied piano and oboe since early childhood, he was moving into classical composition. His second piece, A Stray Dog for Celebrations, provoked the Housman comparison. Shortly afterwards, Senseless Prayer split up, and Dangerfield immersed himself in the jazz-improvisation scene in Cheltenham, where he met Hawkes, then 19. “I was fairly stunned by her,” he recalls. “She seemed much older than she was.” They played together a couple of times, “jazzy stuff, and I bought her a copy of (Van Morrison’ s) Astral Weeks, which I thought she should hear, being a double-bass player”. When the singer moved to London, the pair lost touch.
Dangerfield recruited Stewart when they were introduced at a comedy show; and Magrao answered his ad. “It was,” Dangerfield says, “like being back in the playground, when you catch someone’s eye and think, ‘We’re going to be friends.’” But they still lacked a bassist. Then Hawkes phoned him out of the blue: “She said she was sitting under this tree in Africa and suddenly thought, ‘I’ve got to go back to London and do music with Fyfe.’”
The whimsicality suggested by that anecdote is allied to a streak of ruthlessness. When Guillemots’ record label tentatively suggested the album might be a little on the lengthy side, the band did, their singer says, “bear that in mind — there were a few bits that were unnecessary — but we took great pleasure in making it 59:59”. And that duality imforms their new single, Trains to Brazil, a song partly inspired by 9/11. It is released tomorrow, the fifth anniversary of the Twin Towers attack.
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When Dangerfield wrote it, he imagined, he says, “someone who gets the call in the middle of the night, telling them their childhood sweetheart has been killed in that (attack)”. His imagination then led him back to the idea of first love, when it was “so perfect and innocent”, and forward to the fragility, as he sees it, of life at the moment. Magrao suggested the title after the shooting by police of his countryman Jean Charles de Menezes last year. But the song is also an attack on people who, instead of seizing life, carp at it. “To those of you,” sings Dangerfield “who moan your lives through one day to the next/Well, let them take you next/Can’t you live and be thankful you’re here?/See, it could be you, tomorrow or next year.”
The song opens portentously, with thumping drums, a wailing theremin, a summoning playground whistle and the line: “It’s one o’clock on a Friday morning.” Yes, everything is chucked at it, but nobody in the audience at Reading, singing along full- throatedly, looked as if they had to work hard to unearth its euphoria, passion and rapture. When the brass entered at the two-minute mark, eyes all around me glittered with tears. An English classical composer, a Brazilian death-metal guitarist, a Canadian jazz fanatic, a Scottish folk musician: there could be no other band so perfect to launch this new weekly music section, or offering such a true reflection of where music — mongrel, colliding, international, spontaneous, thrilling — is in 2006.
I’m not sure that “interesting artistic talents” suffices. Guillemots and the songs they write are more than merely interesting. They’re devastating. To paraphrase Bromsgrove’s other famous son, Dangerfield’s heart is not given in vain.
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Trains to Brazil is released tomorrow; Guillemots’ tour begins in Birmingham on October 16