You may not have heard of Tvål yet, or even be able to pronounce their name, but the Northampton duo produced one of the years standout debut albums (reviewed here) and promise to do even more if they keep going along those lines. OUTSIDELEFT supports lesser known up and coming bands as well as rubbing shoulders with the famous and already there, so we caught up with Dean and Tom at their studio to find out just what makes Tvål tick.
OUTSIDELEFT: Let's start off with a
little bit of band history. Your previous band was a Psych band, The Telepaths?
Thomas Wright: Yes, we were in that band from about
2013 through to just before we started Tvål, which was probably 2022. We
started out very much in a garage band mode, but evolved as we went into doing
these longer, psychedelic pieces. We met through school. Not AT school, but our
kids were at school together. I moved
from London to Kettering in 2012. Dean moved here a long time before that time,
about early 2000s and our wives met, introduced us to each other, and we just
talked a lot about music. The Psyche band started really, really quickly. The
bass player was also a big garage fan, and we kind of moved into that thing
too, but we weren’t ever exclusively Psyche or Garage. It was just something
that we were enjoying doing for a few years.
Dean Cumming: There was a stage at the beginning, which was mainly
covers, but as Tom pointed out, with more a sort of 60s garage music feel, and
that led into us doing our own material in the early days of The Telepaths.
There was a second wave of The Telepaths after that, so we were doing that for
a good 10 years or so in total.
OL: So what made you change your mind
about the style of music and move on to synths?
Thomas Wright: We were always interested in
electronic music anyway. When we recorded the last Telepaths album, the only
full studio album we did, we brought in a lot of extra things. We extended our
use of the Vox Continental sound in the Telepaths into Mellotrons and Moogs and
things like that. That album's got that stuff all over it. I think that what
we're doing is still quite psychedelic, but with synthesisers in place of
guitars.
OL: Was it a hard break. or did you
start doing stuff as Tvål while still doing Telepaths?
Dean Cumming: That hard break actually came because of the Covid
lockdown. I think if I remember the timeline right, we hadn't really disbanded
as a band, but like Tom said, there was elements of Tvål bubbling
under in the newer songs that we were doing.
Thomas Wright: We couldn't play as a band anymore, but I had started
messing around with Garage Band for ideas for the second Telepath album and
some of the stuff we were sending back and forth to each other were obviously
not Telepath stuff, but more like Fad Gadget and other stuff we were much more
into and were listening to.
OL: I have to ask you about your name. All
I could find looking it up online was that in Swedish, Tvål means ‘soap’! Was
there a reason for choosing that name, or was it just a random thing?
Dean Cumming: We really wanted a
band name with just one word, and you’d be surprised how difficult that was.
Thomas Wright: We talked about a few things. We went through, like, a
lot of words, and you can try too hard on some of these things. I lived in
Sweden in the 2000s for a bit, and I learned the language. I worked for a
Swedish company, got extensive tutoring in it, and it always appealed to me the
Swedish language. And the A with the small O on the top is actually the 29th
letter of the Swedish alphabet. It's the letter ‘or’ and we were originally
talking about the word ‘Två’ because it means ‘two’ in in Swedish, and we're
thinking, well, there's two of us, and it's our second band together, and, you
know, it has some sort of resonance, and nobody's going to know what it means. We
just thought it scans really nicely, you know?
Dean Cumming: The way you pronounced it a minute ago is like even an
extension of what we've experienced so far. We love the fact everyone
pronounces it or interprets it in a different kind of way. I even get it wrong
on stage sometimes.
Thomas Wright: And we never correct people on it. It wasn't deliberately intended as a talking
point, but it has become one.
OL: Anything that gets people talking
about you has to be a good thing, right? Tell us the story of the album cover
picture. it looks architectural. You know, like an artist’s impression of
places like Milton Keynes where they portray the idyllic existence they imagine
people will have in these concrete wastelands.
Thomas Wright: That's Corby in 1973, which is where
Dean and I grew up. So we live in Kettering now and we've both had long periods
living in London in the interim, but, but Corby is where we were born and
raised, and it's from the period when we were really young kids. It's a version
of the town that doesn't exist anymore. It's a bit like looking through a
window pane into the past, you know. The whole idea was of making music with
old sounds but that isn't necessarily like old music. The only thing is still
there now is the building that you're looking at in the distance.
OL: Talking
about ancient and modern, you are using a lot of vintage synth sounds but
modern synths are largely just emulating old sounds. There are very few new
sounds now. So, in terms of modern versus vintage, do you think there really is any distinction now at all, or is it just about whether you
can afford to get the old gear or the new gear?
Thomas Wright: We've got a couple of bits of old gear, but I think that the
difference for me is less to do with old gear and new gear, but more about the
experience for playing them. Some of the
more modern synths, I actually don't really like that much. Dean and myself tend
to favour things which sound like older synthesisers, but then we focus less on
sound design and more on tunes
OL: You
have had a reasonable amount of success in terms of reviews and reactions to
the first album, but it's hard to make an impression now, isn't it? You are
still playing quite small venues, and it's probably a bit of a battle, as it is
for most bands. What's your game plan for taking it forward from here? Are you
thinking of it as a full time thing or will it always be something that you do
in addition to your day jobs?
Dean Cumming: I think we have to be
realistic. We have gained relative success of late, in terms of airplay, especially on BBC Radio 6, and that gives us a
basis to hopefully get better gigs, as our CV now is a little bit stronger than
it was before. We are a bit hamstrung round here, though, in that we're down to
one or two venues locally. Live, we want to kind of project ourselves in a way
that doesn’t make us just look like a band on stage, and what I mean by that, is
that although I am the singer, I don't stand in the middle of the stage, we're
side by side. I don't do the crazy stuff
now that I used to do when I was in Telepaths, it's a lot more refined in that
respect, but it's still essentially song based and about putting on a show.
OL:
Is that big part of your thing, building up a live following?
Thomas Wright. Absolutely. Before
the album, we'd been playing live for three years, and you'd be amazed how many
people were surprised by how much they liked us live. They thought they'd see
two guys that were virtually DJing live, and that would be it, and that electronic
music wouldn't be very much fun to watch live. But no, live there's no computer
playing it. There might be an iPad that's projecting the visuals, because we
are big on the visual bit, but we play as much as we can live and we're always
doing something on stage when we play. People have been saying these guys are
really good live, you should go and see them, so it's getting a little bit a
little bit easier to get gigs. The plan, though, is about getting another
record out. We’re about to re-press the first record as well, and we are
building a live following now, which is really, really good. I think the last
few gigs we played have been my favourite gigs.
OL: Do
you think there's a disadvantage, though, in being based in Northampton? Is
there prejudice still about bands from ‘the sticks’, as opposed to those
from London, Liverpool, New York, Berlin, all the big centres that tend to get
a lot of attention. Northampton has always suffered from being seen as provincial.
Thomas Wright: I sort of think a little bit
differently about that. I spent a lot of years in London trying to do stuff and
it was really hard, because you are in a really big place, and even getting a
drummer in London was a real nightmare. Whereas when I came up here, I met Dean
really quickly, somebody and we've been writing together for what, 13 years! It's
been a long partnership, and long may it go on! It was a lot easier to get things done in
Northampton than in London, so I think there are advantages as well as
disadvantages to being in somewhere like Northampton. Actually, there's a lot of really good people
there who have really put a lot into the local scene.
Dean Cumming: We need to get out and do more stuff in Europe. I think things
have changed a little bit as well in that we are now most people can only afford to
see a band a month and they love going to watch tribute bands. That's the
competition we're up against now!
OL:
That is understandable. The venues
are up against it as well, so they do go for safe bets, giving people what they
want and what will draw them in, which is tribute bands, 80s nights, all that
kind of stuff. People tend to go for what they know. They are reluctant to take
a chance on putting on a bill with all new bands that are not playing covers and
hoping that people will turn up. Just to finish off, do you
think politics has got any kind of part to play in in your music, because some
bands try to make political points, but I couldn't see any of that in Tvål?
Thomas Wright: We've stayed away
from it. We both have opinions on what goes on in the world, definitely. I won't not say what I think, just in case
somebody then doesn't like my music, but at the same time, we don't really want
to bring that into Tvål
OL: Thanks for talking to Outsideleft today!
Essential Information:
Tvål's self titled debut album is available from Cracked Plastic here
Main image: David Jackson
Other images: Simon Palmer, Jo Selby-Green
