Interview: Various Cruelties

After being together less than a year, VARIOUS CRUELTIES have made an album in LA, performed on Jools Holland, supported Kasabian on an arena tour and headlined shows up and down the country. Not bad for a lad from Leeds who moved to London not knowing what to do. Frontman Liam O’Donnell tells Chris Moriarty about his “total buzz” of a year.

“Jools Holland was pretty weird,” admits songwriter and Various Cruelties main man Liam O’Donnell. “You sort of grow up watching Jools Holland and you can think off the top of your head of lots of great performances on there so to end up being on it and doing a show with Lou Reed and Metallica is crazy. When you are at home watching it you never really think you’ll end up doing it.”

For the Leeds-born musician, it is just one of a long list of unexpected experiences he has enjoyed since relocating to London and forming Various Cruelties, something that appeared to come about as much by accident as design.

“I’m from Leeds originally and I’ve been in London for two years. It wasn’t primarily a music move, I came down from Leeds be- cause I didn’t really know what I was going to do. I’d always been involved in music but I moved down thinking about getting a job and was going to do that for a bit and I was writing music on the side,” he continues.

“I knew I had some decent songs and then it was just a case of working with a few people. I was writing these songs and playing them acoustically but I didn’t want to be an acoustic artist so it was a case of finding the right people. I met the guitar player and the bass player and they used to be in a band so were used to working with each other. A lot of the songs were already written so it was about getting the right ar- rangements and turning them into Various Cruelties.”

If the first year has been hectic, then the second is set to take things up another notch, with a headline tour and new sin- gle Great Unknown out this month ahead

of the release of their debut album in April, which was recorded in Los Angeles under the tutelage of renowned producer Tony Hoffer (Beck, Air, Goldfrapp, Foster the People).

“It’s all finished, we did it in LA so that was pretty amazing as well,” recalls Liam. “We spent a month out there. Tony Hoffer has a lot of experience and has worked on some great records, so he definitely had a big influence on things. We hadn’t even been together a year at the time we were mak- ing the record so in terms of going into the studio, we had the demos and things recorded already, but in terms of putting it altogether into a cohesive piece of work I would say that Tony’s brought a lot to it, in a lot of ways he was instrumental in linking it all together so we have a lot to be grateful to him for.”

There has already been plenty written about the Motown influences and Northern Soul roots of Various Cruelties’ music, but Liam is conscious that they don’t want to be pigeon-holed as some kind of retro pas- tiche act and is confident they bring some- thing new to the table.

“In any band you’re going to have your own individual influences and I guess that you have to be careful that you don’t make a backward looking record but you’ve got to have confidence in your own songs and make something fresh and hopefully make the record you’ve gone in to make. “Linking all these things together, it’s defi- nitely a pop record but hopefully it’s inter- esting and different and modern as well.”

Liam and co certainly seemed to be de- livering something interesting when single Chemicals was unveiled in October, with the record winning widespread acclaim and earning significant airplay on Radio 1 and 6 Music in particular, bringing a certain freshness to the airwaves.

“If that’s the case then that’s great,” says Liam, “I was excited about that song after I wrote it. It’s a pop record and that’s the way it was intended but I definitely think the sounds in the studio and the little added bits in there are quite fresh sounding, that was Tony’s vision for it.”

After 2011 saw his band catapulted from virtual unknowns to mainstream radio play- lists, Liam admits he is excited about what 2012 may have in store.

“It’s not all mapped out,” he says. “We’ll do some shows and hopefully people will like the record, obviously the last year has been a total buzz and hopefully it will get even better. At the start of the [last] year we weren’t signed and we got one of our demos played on Radio 1. Huw Stevens was standing in for someone during the day and we had two daytime plays and that was the first thing that made us think that there might be something in this. All we did was send it out to a few internet blogs to be reviewed but I didn’t think there was any chance that someone like Huw Stevens would come across it. I still to this day have no idea how or why that happened.”

Various Cruelties are live at The Rainbow, Birmingham, on January 18. For ticket details click here. New single Great Unknown is out now.