Interview with Hope and Social: ‘We’re quite keen to take elements of Jigsaw into the next record’

Rambunctious Leeds-based six piece soul/funk band Hope and Social are bringing pop elements into the mix, as they take their sound in a new direction.

Hilariously, they describe themselves as ‘a bit like a Yorkshire E-Street Band…meets Arcade Fire…meets The Faces…meets Dexys Midnight Runners…meets Prefab Sprout…at a party…in an argument about who gets to have sex with David Bowie’.

The band comprises Simon Wainwright (vocals, guitar and piano), Rich Huxley (guitar, banjo, piano and vocals), Ed Waring (organ), Gary Stewart (drums, vocals, piano and backing vocals), James Hamilton (brass, piano and backing vocals) and Simon Fletcher (bass, sousaphone and backing vocals). ‘Si and I met on the first day at Lancaster University in 1995,’ Huxley said. ‘Within a week and a half, we’d started a band with Ed, called Captain Rhino and The Big Horns, and after uni, four of that band moved to Leeds to become Four Day Hombre (laughs), we’ve been cursed with terrible names! We were doing 100 gigs a year and ended up forming what we think was the first fan-funded label in 2006. At the end of our contract with the label, we felt that we shouldn’t go on any more as Four Day Hombre but now our name sounds like a pub! It comes from Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, which is one of our favourite places, and we’re very social beings. Our first rehearsal was in the Hope Valley, so that’s where that part comes from.’

‘We made an album like a game of musical consequences’

Their latest album Jigsaw, which they released in September, marks something of a departure for them. Made from demo recordings re-hashed in lockdown and edited live recordings, it has a poppier vibe than their earlier work. Pumped full of hooks and five part harmonies, it is performed with the infectious energy that has become their calling card: ‘For the other albums, we’ve got together in a pub and been like “I’m listening to this, I’d like to bring some of X in”,’ Huxley said. ‘This time, we started recording before lockdown and we said we wouldn’t prescribe what it had to be beforehand, we’d just play. We occasionally get to work in Harewood House (a National Trust property), in their old bookshop, we do some brass workshops for them. We had about a month before the first lockdown, we just went in and recorded. The first lockdown was the best, like the first Rocky (laughs). That album sat virtually untouched for a year – we made an album like a game of musical consequences. When it comes to gig these songs, it was so long ago, no-one remembers what they’re supposed to play! We called it ‘Jigsaw’ because that’s how it was made, piece by piece. There wasn’t a particular song that was an inspiration for the others.’

The opening track ‘A New Home’ sets the scene for what’s to follow, opening with a fuzzy bassline, synths and layers that give it a slight BritPop vibe. It has an incredibly hooky chorus that gets you cranking it up and singing along. ‘We’ve gigged this one, it’s quite strutty, isn’t it?!,’ Huxley said. ‘There was a day when Gary wasn’t there but we picked one of his drum loops and jammed to it. With this song – and the others – you get a snapshot as to where Si is emotionally, although he’s speaking with the voice of the band. He wrote this when he’d been moving house, it’s about his new home, the new life and the hope that brings. It’s a recurring theme but maybe that’s just my inference. Me and Si love early Counting Crows stuff and songs like ‘Anna Begins’ (1993), the idea of push and pull relationships, the idea of getting away, of escaping from things.’

As the track kicks off: ‘I’ve been thinking about a place we can go/ I’ve been wondering about a new home/ I’ve been thinking about a place we can go/ I’ve been wondering about a new home.’

Huxley’s favourite track on the album is ‘This Time’, with its cinematic, drawn out intro: ‘It’s the one that makes us fall silent. I feel I can listen to it as if it’s not ours,’ he said. ‘I don’t notice ourselves individually. Actually, I’m not even sure if I’m on it (laughs). It’s massive and spacey. We still haven’t had a chance to play it live but I’ve imagined what that would be like in my head. The song feels to me that it’s fairly standard Hope and Social fare. I think it’s about trying to keep hold of something and not to let the moments fade away. It’s a bit nostalgic.’

As the chorus goes: ‘Photographs won’t hold this time in/ Seeping out with colours fading/ How can we record how we feel this time?/ Polaroids won’t trap this moment/ Fleeing through a door left open/ How can we keep hold of something this time?’

‘We’re quite keen to take elements of Jigsaw into the next record’

Jigsaw marks their eighth album in the past 10 years and I ask Huxley how their songwriting process has changed: ‘Si will write the lyrics, generally speaking,’ he said. We don’t talk about it, I don’t know all the lyrics (laughs). I only know the lyrics I need to sing! Sorry, Simon, I do like your lyrics! What tends to happen is we’ll get in a room and play and the other stuff will come on top. Sometimes, someone might have a fuller idea as to what a song should sound like. The dynamics in the room have changed, we’ve had different band members, we had a DJ back in the day. In 2014, we went round Yorkshire along the route of the Tour de France teaching people how to play. We’re quite keen to take elements of Jigsaw into the next record.’

We get chatting about The Beatles: Get Back, the recent highly-acclaimed documentary series directed and produced by Peter Jackson, which covers the making of The Beatles‘ 1970 album Let It Be. Huxley has seen it but I still haven’t and he tells me how brilliant it is: ‘There’s something very familiar about it,’ he said. ‘When they’re on good form, you can see them coming through the space. It motivated me to be a better band member. You see them writing ‘Get Back’ but it’s different to the version we know, I wanted to say to Ringo “Hey, mate, you’re playing the wrong part!” (laughs). Their creative process really is laid out bare and you can tell that despite everything, they really loved each other. I felt a bit sorry for George at times, he’s a bit left out.’

Another track on Jigsaw, ‘Geronimo’, references their early days of playing together: ‘The working title was “Super Furries” after Super Furry Animals, we love them. This song came out of a jam, it will have been a chord structure that someone threw out. I love driving guitars. It’s a window into what it was like in Four Day Hombres and wanting to be played on the radio. The music that’s important to you when you’re 17-24 will always be important to you. Then you can cruise through those last few torrid years (laughs) and have a drink – the apocalypse is coming! The whole song is saying “This is how you get played on the radio, lads and we’re going to nick it off you”. The whole star system is predicated on the idea that some people are stars and some aren’t, which is daft.’

As the track kicks off: ‘There a place where I long to go/ Deep in the bowels of the radio/ Oh the radio/ Waiting for Geronimo/ We paid a man to make it right/ Paid a man with a cocaine smile/ And a late night show/ To play us on the radio.’

As a band, they’re fans of bluesey Liverpudlian rockers The Heavy North, a feeling that is reciprocated by them: ‘I mainly know Stevie Penn (their keys player), he’s a lovely man, he’s always so polite. We know each other through former bands. I got put onto them by my cousin Jill, who’s now the operations manager at Brudenell Social Club. Steve Pannwas in The Jacs, one of the first bands I recorded in The Crypt, with another lad called Micheal Jones, who is very funny in the band. The lovely Stevie Penn and Jones came back from somewhere with Jill in the car. She loves rabbits and one runs under the car, she’s devastated. Stevie Penn, he’s so gentlemanly, he doesn’t want her to know it’s dead but Jones, he says: “Yeah, you got him, he’s dead”. We still say that in our house when something goes wrong!’

‘I’ve been playing the guitar for 32 years, I’ve got all the pedals’

Huxley turns out to be a pedal head: ‘I’ve been playing the guitar for 32 years, I’ve got all the pedals,’ he says, laughing, as he shows me. ‘I’ve got this Hudson Electronics Broadcast one, I haven’t installed it yet, would you like to hear what it sounds like?’ He sings a fuzzy note into the mic and we both laugh. I ask him in a band of multi-instrumentalists if there’s any instrument he would particularly like to add into their mix? ‘Oooooh, that’s a tricky one. Do I have to think about getting it to the gig?! This might be a cheating answer but I’d like a full-sized church organ at every gig (laughs), we’ll go with that! Being serious, I’d quite like a modular synth that you have to plug cables into, the ones that have cables coming out everywhere.’

I ask him who he would put in his dream line up, dead or alive. ‘Can I have them alive?,’ he asked. ‘That’d be better for me. Can we have Lizzo? I’m really into Sampa the Great (a Zambian-born Australia-based rapper and songwriter), she’s super uplifting and heavily beat-laden, it feels a lot like James Brown, the way the songs weave into each other. I’d have Deus from Belgium, I went to see them before lockdown, it was just the best. They were doing a 20 year anniversary tour of The Ideal Crash one our favourite record of theirs. The gig was perfect, other than about 8 seconds of it where the bass came in and was a fraction too quiet (laughs). We went for a drink afterwards and Tom from Deus (their frontman) was there, we bought him a drink and he hung out with us for half an hour. He invited us to go on with them afterwards but we blew him off, I feel bad about that now but we were just enjoying hanging out together, it had been a while. Oooh, I’ll have The Frames and Glen Hansard, he’s a very skilled man.’ I say I’m a big fan of his. ‘He’s so nice, we’ve shared the bill with him, he fixed Simon’s broken guitar string. It’d be good to have Aretha singing ‘Say A Little Prayer For You’, it”s recorded on a three-track. If you have separate speakers that you can turn off, you can really hear it, you can only pan the signal to the left, right or both speakers. What a voice she had!’

They’ve had some hilarious moments as a band and I ask him what the funniest one has been: ‘I’m going to have to invoke “Story Number 5” from Storymen, the time when Ed caught fire at 6 a.m. at a festival,’ he said. ‘It was all very serious, until you look at it from the perspective of the families waking up to find a man on the horizon dancing around with his trousers around his ankles, shrieking and aflame as they’re trying to get their morning bacon sarnie!’

(Photo from left to right: Gary, Simon Fletcher, Simon Wainwright, Ed, James and Rich.)

hopeandsocial.bandcamp.com
Insta and Twitter: @hopeandsocial

https://www.youtube.com/user/HopeAndSocial