Talk It Up: Delphic

Friendly Fires have dropped off the radar, Does It Offend You, Yeah? have lost themselves in the delayed the release of their second album, it’s taken Klaxons three years to come up with a decent follow-up to Myths Of The Near Future – it seems the world has had enough of the indie-rave genre. Or at least that was until Delphic came along. Singer James Cook chats to Rip It Up ahead of Delphic’s first Adelaide gig next Monday.

In what’s otherwise been a hectic 2010, Cook is relaxing in his Manchester pad enjoying some downtime when he receives my call. Having just completed his first two interviews for day, Cook insists I'm “in for a treat”. He doesn’t disappoint as he talks me through Delphic’s glittering live show, the rich musical heritage of his hometown and his parents’ fondness for explorers.

So James, I'm sure you’ve been told this already this morning, but are you aware that a certain James Cook was responsible for founding Australia?

“To be honest, they haven’t picked up on it. I've been a bit disappointed. I think my parents had some sort of fascination with explorers. My middle name is Scott, as in Scott of the Antarctic. So I think there’s kind of some explorer fantasy going on there. But it’s quite strange going to Australia and seeing all these James Cook-related things. There’s a James Cook University, there’s statues all over the place. It’s quite odd.”

You could get your picture taken next a lot of statues.

“I think my band mates wouldn’t like it. They want Matt Cocksedge and Richard Boardman statues at the same time. They just haven’t got as common a name as I have.”

You must be in pretty fine form by the time you get to Australia coming from the European summer. Do you think your live show has developed much this year?

“Yeah, we’ve got quite a strange live show where we do mixes between every song. So it’s kind of a non-stop DJ set. When we started the band we were watching a lot of DJs and seeing how they worked with the crowd and that’s something we really wanted to get a piece of. And I suppose what we’ve done throughout playing more is being able to break down our barriers and realise we can do anything that we really want because ultimately we’re in control of it onstage and we can do whatever set we like. So some of the mixes we do are like 10 minutes long but we can extend that or shorten it if we like now. But it’s quite cool, we’ve got to the stage where we know the songs so inside and out that we could probably play them in our sleep and we can just play any set and we can just enjoy it and have a good time onstage.”

Matt Cocksedge (guitarist) recently described Delphic’s sound as “a dance aesthetic with proper songs”, which is a pretty accurate description really. Does Delphic belong more in the dance world or rock world, or is it something you don’t worry about that much?

“Someone said to me recently that we were the ultimate dance-rock bastard. I'm gonna take that as a compliment.I think it’s so hard to describe our sound, especially when you’re trying to describe it to like parents or people that don’t really understand. You know, you kind of say, ‘Well we use synthesizers but we also use guitars’.

“The best way we’ve tried to explain it is that we’ve always been inspired by bands and we’ve always been inspired by real, organic artists and trying to put that in the electronic world is hard so we’ve always tried to describe ourselves as electronic music with soul. That’s something we’ve cottoned onto, we’ve always tried to keep that soul within our songs and not let it become too rigid and too dance-orientated.

The dance element to your sound often gets attributed to Manchester and the rave and acid house traditions of your home city. But I imagine the Manchester you grew up with was a lot more about Oasis and The Verve. Where did that dance influence come from?

“Manchester is a strange place to me because I didn’t grow up here, I moved up here about seven years ago. I moved up knowing bands like Joy Division, bands like The Smiths, bands like Oasis, bands like New Order had all come from here. I was aware of that and I knew I wanted to involved with that. I didn’t know what the scenes were like, I didn’t know who was in there, but I knew I wanted to be up here and I wanted to meet like-minded people. And when I met Matt and Rick, one of the things that we all had in common was that we weren’t inspired by all those bands of old. You know, I wasn’t an Oasis fan whatsoever, nor were Matt and Rick. I moved up to Manchester hoping to be part of its legendary scene and found myself amongst a group of people who weren’t inspired by it whatsoever.

“Then when we delved into each other’s minds a little bit more, we kind of realised we had a love for dance music from the ‘90s. We were rediscovering our old record collections and delving into those, and it there was nothing really Manchester in there. Yeah we listened to some New Order and yeah, we listened to a lot of things from Manchester when we were growing up, but those bands become so much a part of you. You know Smiths songs inside-out when you live in Manchester, but it’s nothing you kind of dig inspiration from. So yeah, it was mainly from rediscovering old record collections, really.”

Is it easy to pigeon-holed as an artist when you come from Manchester? When you started out, it was like all everyone was talking about was you were from Manchester and you sounded a bit like New Order. Do you think it’s easy for people to latch onto?

“Yeah, definitely. We were three white guys from Manchester, which was what New Order were, so we were the next New Order. And we used synthesizers and we combine it with dance music so I suppose there’s a bit more there. But I kind of wonder if there was a singer-songwriter from Iceland that sounded like Britney, whether she’d be compared to Bjork or not just because of the country. It is a pigeon-holing industry because people want to know immediately what you’re like. In a song like Doubt for example, there’s a big synth in the chorus of that song and we were trying to rip off Nelly Furtado but in other people’s heads we’re ripping off New Order.”

What’s next for Delphic?

“At the moment we’re kind of trying to bring this campaign to an end. We’re stuck in the middle of writing for the next album and we’re trying hard to get that out over the next couple of years. So we’re really knuckling down with that. Every spare moment we’ve got we’re in the studio or by the piano or the guitar writing and hopefully we’ll have another album out in 2011 and then some more touring.

Delphic play at the Adelaide UniBar on Mon Aug 2 with The Swiss and Cosmo Black. Acolyte is out now through Modular/UMA.

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