Public Servant Lifestyle

Be Patient EP by Dear Eskiimo

Take three very different individuals - a foxy pop chanteuse, a hip hop head and an indie kid who share a slight obsession with musicals – and what you get is possibly Britain’s best new pop band. And not just any old pop at that…rather a more subversive strain of the genre – shiny, happy melodies counteracted by dark lyrical twists – making it a much more intriguing proposition.

Based in the north-west of England (Manchester that is, where else?) Dear Eskiimo are Katie (vocals), Jules (guitar and vocals) and Simon (decks and samplers). Their first tantalising release – the above mentioned EP - gives a sneak preview of the somewhat surreal world that Dear Eskiimo inhabit.

Imagine Scissor Sisters strapping on Gorillaz’ animal suits, roping in the vocal flourishes of Alisha’s Attic then belting out the Jungle Book soundtrack and you’re still only halfway there. Dear Eskiimo’s music is catchy as hell, combining classic pop values with unique contemporary beats and captivating call-and-response boy/girl chants crashing into hip-hop, funk and the melodramatic traditions of the Broadway musical. This music is, very simply, impossible to ignore.

First track Patience is a suitably grandiose opener and an obvious signifier that the band are as much influenced by the Sound Of Music as hip hop, while Jack‘n Jill is a catchy little ditty of love gone wrong and ensuing bitterness. Next up is Don’t Wanna Feel, which is been aptly described as what you might get if you threw Outkast’s Hey Ya in a pot with Stealers Wheel Stuck In The Middle With You and mixed it up with a bit of Betty Boo just for good measure.

The EP closes with Traffic Light, a clap-happy swing time tune, like the B52s singing you a lullaby in Hicksville – its fine tale of playful teenage love. Be Patient was written and produced by the band themselves.

So where did this strange mix start? Well - deliciously - this new take on pop has roots in singer Katie White’s previous band:
“I was basically dancing around with a bit of singing on the side,” she laughs, “and what had begun as a laugh with a couple of friends and got rather out of hand, while at the same time going absolutely nowhere.” Katie had grown up between Warrington and Manchester, “where men drink ten pints then head butt each other”, on a farm. At 14, as a self-proclaimed “right scruffy trog”, she discovered booze; by 18 she was over it and while all her mates were out on the town, Katie was ballroom dancing. A straightforward pop career was clearly never a serious option. Looking for a new direction, she chanced upon Jules de Martino.

Dear Eskiimo’s resident southerner, Jules grew up in the East End – “the real Albert Square” – and as London sprawled outwards he himself moved, towards Essex, and then finally to Manchester in 2001. “Katie seemed so much more talented than what was going on in her music that I almost felt frustrated on her behalf,” Jules recalls. Sparks flew, but a major hurdle soon appeared in what was imagined as being a solo career. “I don’t like being on my own,” Katie laughs. Perhaps, it was suggested, she and Jules should form a proper band together, and when a friend pointed the pair in the direction of a local lad called Simon Templeman, they called him in for a chat.

Simon turned up to meet Jules and Katie with a pair of decks; two weeks later was in the band. He’d grown up listening to and devouring his parents’ Top Of The Pops compilation albums, before moving on to Dinosaur Jr. and The Dead Kennedys and electro hip-hop as he spread his own musical wings. These days he virtually lives at car boot sales, buying and selling tat on eBay (with a positive feedback rating of over 7000). While the wheeling and dealing of knackered ghetto blasters has been easy, second hand record dealing never took off because Simon simply cannot bear to part with music.

“I spend fortunes on music,” Simon explains. “Simon is a kleptomaniac,” Katie clarifies. “With ten Cliff Richard albums,” Jules concludes.

In The City

The plan, initially, was for the trio to ‘do a Portishead’. It seemed to make sense, what with Simon’s passion for Bristol beats, Katie’s occasion vocal nods to Beth Gibbons and a then-popular penchant on the part of the music industry for studio-based bands. The plan involved soundscapes, sonic textures, and all the rest.“Unfortunately,” Katie says, “we kept writing catchy tunes.” “We started playing the toilet scene in Manchester,” Jules recalls. “For our first gig we were chucked in between two rock bands. We were setting up the decks thinking the whole thing would go down like a lead balloon, but people went nuts.”

Encouraged, the band continued refining their uniquely melodramatic stage presence. They signed to Mercury at the end of 2004, after storming one of the buzz nights at last year’s In The City industry showcase. It seems a traditional path to success for a band with such a totally unusual approach to making music, but this contradiction is typical of a band whose sound is both undeniably cool and effortlessly commercial. “It’s just the sort of band we are,” Katie shrugs.

This assortment of ideas runs through each of the tunes on Dear Eskiimo’s debut album - due for release next year. At times the album sounds like a greatest hits compilation, a collection of musical snapshots from a lengthy career. Bound by a common spirit, the band’s body of work is nonetheless all clearly the work of one group.

One of the band’s first songs was ‘Pretty’ – completely melodic and lightly danceable, and on first listen all rather pleasant. But The Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys taught us never to take pop music at face value, and Dear Eskiimo continue that tradition. Behind the clever wordplay (“daddy was a hitman, he used to take me out on Sundays”) is a darkly emotional song about abusive relationships. As the lyric goes: “Pretty; I used to be”.

“Pretty I Used To Be”

“We knew a woman who’d been through a hell of a lot and we based the song on stories we heard about her experiences” says Jules, who writes the majority of the band’s lyrics. “It’s a pretty sound about an ugly subject. We do that a lot – only when you dig into things does it become apparent that there’s something more going on.”

Another song, ‘Jo’, which always gets Katie marching around the stage, sounds like ‘Trisha! – The Musical’. Katie explains: “The Jo in question is my old best friend. She ran off with the local bouncer when she was 18, got married and moved to Greece. She was never heard of again.” Then there’s Jack & Jill, which is about leaving behind your mundane life as an average Jack or an average Jill (but has been interpreted by one video director as a sex-change anthem), and Take It All, which the band dedicate to a would-be rock ‘n’ roll swindler whose path they crossed in the early stages of Dear Eskiimo.

As for the band’s name? “Realising that we crossed so many genres,” Jules explains, “we wanted our name to be as nomadic, as tribal and as independent as possible. Of course there were already several bands called Eskimo, but some of our songs told such good stories that it felt as if we were writing it all down in a letter. As a beginning, ‘Dear Eskiimo’ just fitted.” And the strange spelling of ‘Eskimo’? “It’s two ‘I’s,” Simon explains. “Like on your face.”

Jules concludes: “We really love pop music. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. We love (Britney Spears' single) Toxic, and Cry Me A River, and Some Girls. But the people behind those songs, not the people who sing them, make them interesting. Too often, performers don’t even perform. We’re ignoring that trend, and with Dear Eskimo we are the people behind our songs. We’re the complete package.”

For more information on Dear Eskiimo’s, follow this link: www.deareskiimo.com

The Be Patient EP is out now, on my dad recordings.

More information available in Music