TMC interviews Don’t Wait Animate: Strumstep Power Rangers

Don’t Wait Animate are a south London band making dubby grime-pop and getting some influential people excited, Anna Leach met them for a brief but memorable session. This is what happened:

Don’t Wait Animate aren’t waiting, they are talking: about two at a time, at about 50 miles an hour – they’re making jokes, more jokes, then shaking their indie hair-dos around with laughter at the jokes. It’s a bit crazy.

With their multi-coloured checks and youthful enthusiasm they remind me of the Power Rangers – Power Rangers who make electronic music instead of battle machines.  Err… it’s been a fun photo shoot and there’s left-over photo shoot bling, plaid, caps and lipstick everywhere. Well the lipstick is only in one place – on Bex (below), the electronics player, one of the band-founders and only girl in a line-up of boys. She’s also a familiar scene face which is what brought this lively little whippersnapper of a indie-dub-strumstep band to our attention.

Bex, Tak and Joe met in film school in South East London, Nathanael is Joe’s half-brother and Edd, the bass player, they met in a pub. Edd is a Christian. The other band members think it’s hilarious.

“Edd is our theology teacher.”

- “He’s a priest.”

- “Edd used to be in a Christian band.”

- “What would Jesus do Edd?”

Edd rolls his eyes. This touches on a deeper issue for the band: “We’ve all got a stigma of some sort” he says.

“He’s got stigmata. Ha ha ha ha.” Someone sets off and once again there’s a blizzard of laughter and back chat and sarky comments.

Click here to see the larger version of this photo.

These guys are bright and fun, baffling but driven. But the drive and optimism come from darker places: the band started out of post-university depression, Joe tells me: “We spent the last of our student loan on a drum kit and started the band.”

Set up to counteract depression, Don’t Wait Animate is about joy and noise and dancing.  “There’s a lot of misery and miserable music out there – but this is life get on with it! Be happy” says Joe, who does vocals and guitar for the band.

Nathanael gets a little more serious, “there was a lot of stuff that we wanted to say.” Tak drops in: “We started off doing films but found we could express ourselves a bit more with the music.” Some of that darkness works its way out in the lyrics,Tak says, “that comes from the stuff we’re going through.” Though the emphasis is always on the bright dance sound – “we’d never make a tune you couldn’t dance to.”

Dazed credited them with creating a new kind of music, a hybrid they termed strumstep, picking up on what Bex and Tak call the  playful and experimental nature of the band. The process of making songs usually starts with a riff or a beat, sometimes with tiny segments of sound that they’ve picked from elsewhere,  from other tracks or film scores or computer games. Lyrics come last. As for the name ‘Don’t Wait Animate’ – Joe just made it up. It just sounded right.

And how’s working together? “It’s a bundle of laughs!” Bex says.

- “She’s being sarcastic!”

- “It’s 80% banter, 20% work.”

- “We take the piss.”

- “We talk about girlfriends.. and mercilessly probe each others’ weaknesses..”

Someone moans about how his weakness got probed and it was really sore.

[Piece of Don’t Wait Animate Trivia: One of their early songs was about two dead goldfish. Bex had two goldfish called Mary-Kate and Ashley: they both died, Mary-Kate first, and that’s what DWA song ‘Mary-Kate’ is about.]

And what cakes do they like?

Edd and Bex go for some combination of carrot cake, cheesecake and coffee cake. Someone asks for a definition of a cake. ie – are cinnamon swirls cakes? No! As someone else points out, clearly cinnamon swirls belong in the pastry family. Nathanael asks Joe what that oriental cake is – apparently it’s Pandam and someone else says they like hash brownies. This finishes up with a discussion about nutmeg. Tak had a really bad time on it, ‘cause you can get high on it if you eat loads, but actually it makes you feel really sick. “Don’t do it at home kids.” That’s the takeaway message from this interview.

They rush off to a gig. If their live performances are anything like their interviews, you should definitely go see them.

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Don’t Wait Animate on MySpace:  www.myspace.com/dontwaitanimate

Bex is also one of the girls behind Koochooloo, a new night launching on October 24th. Go here for more information.

Photographs by Holly Falconer, Styled by Elliott James Sainsbury, Photography Assistant: Lewis Smith