Why Delphic are music’s Next Big Thing

On the day we meet the bespectacled Cocksedge, Delphic’s handsome-if-quiet singer/guitarist James Cook and black-clad multi-instrumentalist Rick Boardman, it’s even blazingly sunny. Manchester has changed, and yet Delphic’s seemingly effortless rise to something approximating pop stardom — their debut album Acolyte looks set to land in the top five this Sunday — is partly predicated on a peculiar sense of d?jà vu. In blind taste tests, eight out of ten people would surely hear the crisp chemical funk of early singles like This Momentary and Doubt and guess their provenance from the off. Hence Cocksedge’s earlier detour: “People tell us we sound like a Manchester band. We don’t feel we have the perspective to agree or disagree. But it goes back to the green tea. Maybe there’s something in the altitude/rainfall/sunshine equation that determines it.”

If certain aspects of Delphic’s sound can be explained by geographical happenstance, experience has told the trio — all aged 24 — that there’s also a lot to be said for a rigorous, almost military degree of planning. All had served time in “bands where you just turn up and rehearse with no real idea of where you’re going or what you want to do”, Boardman says. He didn’t want Delphic to be that kind of group.

Having played with Cocksedge in the unpromisingly named Snow Fight In The City Centre, the two of them lured Cook from his “vague involvement in different bands” — not a difficult manoeuvre, given that Cook and Boardman were studying music at the University of Salford and the former was lodging with the latter’s family.

Unusually, they had a band before they had played a note of music. Decamping to an isolated cottage in Grasmere, Cumbria, they would go out walking every day, armed with three matching Dictaphones. “We would walk and sing ideas,” Boardman says. “Then, in the evening, we would try to make sounds . . .”

“... and keep a fire going,” Cook interjects.

“It was only about 18 months ago,” Boardman continues. “But pretty much everything that has happened since then flowed from that time together. We had this idea that what we wanted to do was a genre that didn’t have a name yet.”

“We called it ‘ambi-dance’,” Cocksedge says. “But it was your dad, wasn’t it, who said that was a rubbish name? So then we started saying we were ‘post-dance’. Then, when people started writing about us, we realised we didn’t have to call it anything. It could be someone else’s problem.”

While it would be fanciful to suggest that the generation gap no longer exists, it certainly seems to have narrowed in many middle-class families, where veterans of pop’s post-punk years have been more likely to bond with their children over the reassuringly familiar racket made by the likes of Bloc Party and Friendly Fires. Boardman speaks in glowing terms about his father — a lawyer who, in his spare time, built synthesizers. Similar inter-generational bonding seems to characterise the relationship between Cocksedge and his parents. “My dad’s a doctor and my mum’s a music teacher,” the guitarist says. “She does a module on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, for which I’m proud to say she had to borrow my copy.”

Boardman turns to Cook, who is now slumped in a mock-dejected heap. “Your turn to tell us how cool your parents are,” he says. Half-heartedly gathering himself, Cook responds: “My dad was actually a train salesman. If you listen hard, you can hear that influence on our album too. You know on the lyric of Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express where they go back to D?sseldorf to meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie? That’s one of the trains my dad sold.”

He jests, of course — although Delphic need no encouragement to rhapsodise about the impact that Kraftwerk had on their own lives. “I was able to play The Model on synthesizer by the age of 6,” Boardman says. “According to my dad I was inconsolable when they played Manchester Apollo in 1991 and he and my mum didn’t take me along.”

By the time Kraftwerk returned to play the same venue in 2004 Boardman says he already had an idea of how his own ideal band would sound. Delphic’s stated objective — to create “electronic music with a soul” — was dramatically realised with their debut single. Picked up by the Belgian techno label R&S, the finger-shredding Ecstasy funk of Counterpoint — distinguished by Cook’s “tell me nothing’s wrong” refrain — made for one of the most magnificent debut singles of recent years. Released on the French label Kitsun? Maison, the life-affirming follow-up This Momentary triggered a landslide of major-label interest.

For Boardman and Cook, respectively teaching keyboards and guitar to children at a local music store, memories of the period centre on trying to do their job to a basic standard while fielding a barrage of calls from interested parties. “Within a day it seemed like the whole music industry had my mobile number,” Boardman says, before — somewhat surreally — adding: “Then Chris Martin phoned me.”

Chris Martin from Coldplay? “Funnily enough, that’s how he introduced himself. He said, ‘This is Chris Martin from a band called Coldplay.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds familiar.’ He said: ‘I’ve heard your band.’ He was trying to get us to sign to one of his mates’ labels. His own label? No, that’s the funny thing. It wasn’t Parlophone. It was Island. By that stage, though, we had already decided to set up our own little label and put it through Polydor. Once that was cleared up, I was like, ‘Shit! I’m on the phone to Chris Martin. I’d better say something. I said, ‘How’s the band?’ ”

The other two thirds of Delphic helpfully cringe on Boardman’s behalf. “He was likeable though.”

“He didn’t block his number,” Cocksedge adds, “which suggests a certain humility. So now we’ve got him on speed dial. He’ll rue the day.”

Released this week, Acolyte vindicates their decision, barely a year ago, to leave their jobs and move in together. Over the sinuous electronic sprawl of Submission, Cook’s soulful performance suggests that he’s only just beginning to come into his own as a truly arresting frontman, while the bold, modernist funk of the instrumental title track will only sound better as Delphic dispense it at venues of ever-increasing sizes.

However, slower to benefit from the new living arrangements have been the group’s interpersonal relationships. “There’s been the odd fight,” Boardman says. “James dislocated my finger.”

“That might have something to do with the black eye you gave me,” comes Cook’s dry retort. Both seem reticent to be drawn on details of the fight. Girls? Apparently not. Only Cocksedge is in a relationship. “Being in this band is far too intense to even think about seeing someone.” Food? As long as Cook is prepared to dish up his “signature dish”, jacket potato with bacon and avocado, that isn’t a problem. “Actually,” pipes up the frontman, “it was to do with the washing-up. He wipes to the right, while I wipe to the left.”

Beyond the domestic distractions of communal living, the only detectable tension is the impatience common to all new bands at this point in their careers. Supporting Bloc Party last year, they remember the reluctance with which their hosts took on the air of older brothers around them. “They didn’t want to be the wise hands,” Cocksedge says. “There’s a point, perhaps just before your first album, when you’re gazing out over a precipice. You’re there in your little microlight aircraft that you built in your shed and it could go up or straight across — or it could plummet all the way to the bottom.”

“Blimey,” Cook says. “Thanks for that. I wasn’t scared before but now I’m bricking it.”

Acolyte is released by Chimeric/Polydor