Jack and George Barnett arrange to meet me at the Hope Hotel, an 18th-century pub in their native Southend. With Talking Heads on the jukebox and pints already flowing at midday, it feels like we’ve stepped back into the good-time Essex seaside town of old. The twins arrive, Jack in a dark grey tweed and black fleece, George in knitwear and leather jacket. They suggest going outside so we don’t have to shout over 1980s hits, but if anything the sonic interference of Southend – all amusement arcades and revving motors – is worse.
It turns out this chimes with the creation of Crooked Wing, the fifth album from their band These New Puritans. Jack was living on an industrial estate in Tottenham, London, between factories and evangelical churches. “I think some of the loudness,” he says, “comes from trying to compete with all the machinery and religious ecstasy.”
With its melancholy, exultation and occasional blasts of menacing drums, Crooked Wing is instantly recognisable as a These New Puritans record, but the band are now going to places they have never been before in their two-decade avant-pop career.
The album begins with a 10-year-old member of Southend Boys’ Choir singing “I am buried / I am deep underground”, over the sound of the organ in St Mary’s and All Saints Church in Stambridge, a village outside Southend where the Barnetts’ grandfather was once organist. The locale soon shifts to the Peloponnese on Bells, the first song Jack wrote for the album, which stemmed from a particularly fruitful field recording of a Greek orthodox church.
Pop singer Caroline Polachek – a fan of the band – is on Industrial Love Song, a duet imagining two cranes serenading each other on a building site, which launched last week with a surreal video directed by Harley Weir with creative direction from George: the protagonist is a middle ages knight covered in a translucent goo reminiscent of Thames mud. Other tracks were recorded across the estuary in Ramsgate, where co-producer Graham Sutton lives. “It’s sleepier than Southend, and probably a bit less edgy,” says Jack. “But it does have the largest Wetherspoon’s in the world.”
George was born two minutes before Jack and has the slightly frustrated air of an older brother who is aware of the thinness of his seniority. During the interview, the 37-year-olds put on a united front, constantly checking with one another if what they say is OK to put on the record. But occasionally there is a scrap over who gets to tell a story. George to Jack: “It doesn’t matter. That’s irrelevant.” Jack to George: “Just wait a second. Let me fucking talk.”
Jack is the singer, multi-instrumentalist and principal songwriter, George is the drummer and percussionist, but also in charge of visuals, artwork and stage direction. While Jack takes after their organist grandfather, George is more like their steelworking amateur boxer grandad on the other side, and on the face of it their lifestyles could not be more different.
George is a successful model for clients including Gucci, and has lived in east London for years with his wife, Pixie Geldof. The couple have a child but, given his partner’s experiences growing up in the world of celebrity, he is reluctant to go into detail. Geldof is “amazing,” he simply says. “I adore her.”
Jack is now back in Southend and has a regime for writing songs, but is also restless. While working on Crooked Wing, he broke off to travel with a Brazilian circus, accompanying his then-girlfriend, an accomplished aerialist who sings on the record. He also spent time living in Athens.
I first saw These New Puritans playing upstairs at the Grand Hotel in 2005, a large, now defunct pub in Leigh-on-Sea, close to Southend, where the band (and I) grew up. By then they were already steeped in local musical lore. Their father, a quick-witted builder born in London, would sink pints at the Grand with Lee Brilleaux, singer with Dr Feelgood, whose guitarist Wilko Johnson taught their mum to play. She even stitched together Dr Feelgood’s white suits – though, George says, “the sweat took the pink lining through the suit and turned them pink, and so their manager refused to pay”.
After years playing in various bands, the brothers enlisted their friend Thomas Hein, and later their cousin Sophie Sleigh-Johnson. A Fall song inspired their name and their scratchy sound fitted with the 00s post-punk revival, so they were quickly subsumed into a vibrant Southend scene that also included the Horrors. Their dad drove them to gigs in his work van. “All his tools were still in the back,” says Jack. “It almost felt like doing a heist.”
In 2008 they recorded Beat Pyramid, a frenetic album bristling with electronics and ideas. But instead of riding the wave of a period now known as “indie sleaze”, the band recoiled from being “subtly channelled into areas that aren’t the most interesting”, Jack says. “And so from that point on, I decided that, whatever the cost, we would just pursue the music to the bitter end.”
The result was 2010’s acclaimed album Hidden, which provided the blueprint for future These New Puritans records, fusing the propulsive battle-rap-meets-Beefheart rhythms of Beat Pyramid with the pointillism of Steve Reich and choral arrangements of Benjamin Britten, who loved the east of England coastline as much as Jack.
Jack learned to write stave notation at the age of 21 for Hidden and the band later performed the album live with the Britten Sinfonia, London Children’s Choir – and their mate Rory smashing melons with a hammer. To a UK music press still searching for the next Liam and Noel, it was a befuddling about-turn, but to the brothers it made perfect sense. “It was closer to what it was like when me and George were making music when we were seven or eight,” says Jack, “on an old four-track in the loft with one microphone and a pair of bongos and an acoustic guitar.”
Hidden set in motion an astonishing – though slowly gestated – run of records whose fans included Elton John, Björk and Massive Attack. With its wide-eyed Edenic feeling, Crooked Wing nestles back into the same territory as the band’s masterpiece, 2013’s Field of Reeds – an album that riffed on the intensity of Jack’s internal world as well as Essex’s beguiling islands – rather than the slick, propulsive, Berlin-penned Inside the Rose, which came out in 2019. There’s more space between the notes again, and the organ influence is greater, while Jack’s piano playing sounds more accomplished and natural.
Since Hidden, the way of working has been set: music written by Jack is then sent to George, a process George describes as “finding a diamond in the rough”. Once the shape of the music has been agreed, Jack writes out the notation like a film score. The Barnetts are now the only constant Puritans after Sleigh-Johnson left to become a writer and artist and Hein retrained as a neuroscientist (though he returned for a percussion cameo for this record). The band expand to make each album, with additional musicians sought, booked and recorded as quickly as possible so as not to run up too large a bill. Jack lays down vocals outside the studio, improvising in a trancelike state, sometimes in hotel rooms.
“All of life was sent into the mincer” for the lyrics this time around, he says. The Ukraine war was a background influence: “Maybe in the back of my mind, it makes you realise life can be harsh and brutal, but you do your best to build a little edifice of beauty around it.”
How have they steered this ambitious artistic project through the turbulent economic headwinds of the 21st century? “It’s always a battle,” Jack says. “It’s just the way it is for musicians now.” When making the album Inside the Rose, he was existing on one euro a day: his top tips are to live on tinned food and “get fruit at the end of the day at the market”. He also composes music for adverts: clothes, cars, perfume, food. “It makes a nice change from working on stuff that is yours. A palate cleanser.”
George says the modelling industry isn’t what it once was, but his earnings have contributed to projects such as We Want War’s music video in 2009, with its slo-mo aquatic acrobatics.
Part of the reason it has taken six years for Crooked Wing to appear is because the Barnetts wanted to make the full album before securing a label to release it. “So sometimes we have to stop,” says Jack. “Oh, we want to do this session. Well, we have to wait until we have enough money to do it. So you have to be prepared to take a massive financial hit.” Luckily Domino, home to Arctic Monkeys and Wet Leg, snapped up the finished album: a series of songs that seemingly sit outside of time, sounding like both the future and the past.
While Jack’s songwriting prowess is obvious, the band is a complete collaboration. Jack gives the example of album opener Waiting, with George paring it back to just an organ and that choirboy’s voice. “That completely transformed it,” Jack says. “It’s almost like I’m up close looking at all the cells and the bacteria – and George is looking at the whole body.”
Source: theguardian.com
