Newcastle’s answer to Motor City.What do you know about Detroit Social Club? Other than that they’re an NME favourite band, they also happen to be one of the most prolific and unpretentious of contemporary music.
Emerging from Tyneside, their debut album Existence was released earlier this year containing singles Kiss the Sun and Northern Man. The band are currently touring the UK (occasionally dropping a date with Ian Brown), and it was in Birmingham pre-gig at the Rainbow on Digbeth Road that I caught up with singer David Burn.
They are an exceptional band for live shows. Their style may remind you of mid-seventies Manchester when alternative music turned to post-punk, and bands such as Joy Division and then later the Happy Mondays piped with industrial strength from behind keyboards and striking tinny drums. Very atmospheric indeed. Imagine a room full of pilled-up ravers thumping and jerking, very much in unison with their god-like singer-come-divinity afore the stage.
Front man David admits that it’s actually the decade of free love and revolution by which he’s most inspired; "I like more music from the 60s than any other decade, I think that’s the time that music became culturally relevant".
The band’s myspace states that they are ‘in no way inspired by Kate Nash’, which effectively leaves an entire sea of music remaining to shape in ebbs and flows the notes of their fancy. But there are certainly a few prominent comparisons within Detroit Social Club’s indie alternative genre; The Verve, Kasabian, The Doves, and Super Furry Animals to name a few.
But being fundamentally a guitar-driven band, David is concerned that there’s less and less of a place for organic rock bands at the moment. "Radio is getting a lot more picky, so therefore there are less guitar bands coming out. But that might be more of a result of a Britpop hangover, because we had the Libertines movement- then 2005 was about the Arctic Monkeys. So perhaps it’s time to take a backseat."
This would surely be a sad reality, and sadly it’s mostly true. The market seems essentially driven by synth-thetic electronica, disposable waste paper pop, and the bands of substance have a harder time making headway. "Record labels have become scared to put anything a little bit more avant-garde out and they have to go for that big hook, the pop song. New bands don’t have any platforms to exhibit their talent". A statement so observantly put by Detroit’s singer.
Fortunately for the sake of his, and every other aspiring mover and shaker’s mental state; David’s admirable attitude has ironed out the folds of fame before the big-time has become truly unavoidable. "A lot of bands think that being cool or having integrity is mutually exclusive to having commercial success, when I don’t think it is" he says. "As long as you know that you’re writing genuine music, then whether it sells records or not doesn’t matter".
