It’s an old story, like boy meets girl, like dog hates cat, but it’s a good one so we’ll tell it anyway. Four men meet. They form a rock and roll band. They call themselves Vincent Vincent And The Villains. They make a rock and roll album. But there is much more to it than that, because that record you have in your hand soon becomes those songs you have in your head and in your heart, and then all this starts to mean something.
Brought together by a lust for rock and roll and the virtues its creation extols when it’s done properly – you know, all the truly great things about being alive – the band, Vincent, singer, songwriter, lightning rod and the Villains, drummer and acrobat Alex Cox, guitarist and Judo expert Tom Bailey and bassist Will Church, master of the crude one liner. All of these gentlemen provide the marvellous backing vocals that can be heard throughout the record that help to define what it is that makes this band so special.
They may have separately chanced upon great British rock and roll, but it wasn’t until they were woven together by Vincent’s drive to twist it, modernise it and love it like it were exclusively his own that they began making music. After turbulence amongst the personnel, four years of troubled existence and a dash of “going crazy” it may never have happened, but right now that matters not because made music is what they’ve done. Oh, and more importantly they’ve done it brilliantly.
That’s how we get to ‘Gospel Bombs’, a debut unique in it’s diversity and unapologetic in it’s resistance to adhere to the prevailing trends that will disappear forgotten in the howling winds of a night very soon. This is an album that is true and bold. Twelve very different pop songs, one great rock and roll record.
“On every song I’ve tried to write the best lyrics I could write, the best music I can make” says Vincent. “We’ve made an album that can move from hard rock and roll like on ‘Telephone’, to a sweet doo-wop love song like ‘Sweet Girlfriend’, to the chain gang R’n’B of ‘Sins of Love to a theatrical song like ‘Cinema’. It’s our strength as a band, our dexterity as musicians that makes it coherent. We’re different. We’re authentic”.
This isn’t rock front man posturing. In life as in his songs, Vincent Vincent only says things he means, things that he truly believes. Listen carefully and you can hear it in each involuntary hiccup and yelp, each screaming inflection as a song builds to a glorious crescendo… be it of murderous intention or a proclamation of love. See them live and it is written all over his face. In everything, his summation of ‘Gospel Bombs’ included, is an honesty.
“The album spans about four years worth of songs. Its like a greatest hits! I feel like I drove everyone around the record insane because I wanted it to be perfect. And it isn’t, there is no such thing as a perfect album, but I’m satisfied with it because it’s a brilliant record. And believe me, it takes a lot for me to get satisfied.”
Where to put Vincent Vincent and the Villains then in the overflowing cup that is the lexicon of modern pop and rock? Well, theirs is songwriting in which people can find great enjoyment, but in the course of their four year lifespan we’ve heard their ideas watered down by lesser bands, ripped off half-cocked. They, however, remain pure, and whilst their sound pays heed to a much heralded past lest we forget this is a thoroughly modern group. And as for how they look? Well, they look amazing like a great gang should, inspiring the envious thoughts of many an aspiring bedroom rock and roller. It’s the same perfectly recognised aesthetic that seeps into the artwork for their records which they lovingly make themselves. Difficult, nay impossible to pigeonhole if holing pigeons is your game, it is again best left to Vincent Vincent to introduce the Villains and their album to you.
“We’re sincere when we say that we’re rock and rollers. We come from a long tradition of rock and roll bands that are excited to make music and in love with rock and roll and the joy that comes out of creating it. We don’t have to be afraid of putting a tough song like ‘Telephone’ alongside ‘Sweet Girlfriend’, because whether I want to sing a song with beautiful harmonies and melodies, or whether I want to scream my guts out then I should be able to. Each song represents a real emotion that I’ve experienced, and in the same way that my mood can fluctuate wildly in a short space of time, so should the mood of our album.”
These, then, are exciting times, the best of times perhaps. The uncertainty behind them, years of touring under their belts, devoted disciples and a live set which would shame bands long established (hence them being handpicked to support ace troubadour Richard Hawley on his forthcoming UK tour), this could be the day of the Villains, a band who merge the british rock’n’roll thump of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates with the poetic racket of Richard Hell and the Voidoids to incendiary effect, yet remain defiantly with a sound of their own.
“No one has shaped how we sound but us” says Vincent. “This is ours. These are our songs as we mean them, purely. The vision is the same as it started. I’ve got albums that have long outlived whoever made them and influenced shitloads of bands. Now ours can be there to do that.”
And that album, ‘Gospel Bombs’, since you ask, “is the name given to messages placed in bottles and then thrown into the sea, to wash up on shore for drunk sailors and all other lost souls to find years later”. This is a record, and a band in whom, whether you happen to be looking or not, you may find just that.
WATCH FOR THEM. ASK FOR THEM.
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