The BOILEROOM

There is nothing quite usual about Chew Lips. Not their way of making music, or their live shows, or indeed, their inception. After doing the Indie Band Shuffle in previous bands, in the spring of this year vocalist Tigs and multi-instrumentalists James Watkins and Will Sanderson eventually decided to start making musi...c together, with only one edict: not to sound like Just Another Guitar Band.

With only that in mind, the trio subsequently decamped to a friend’s studio to test the waters of the Chew Lips sound. “We had no idea what we wanted to sound like, only what we didn’t want to sound like”, says Tigs. “And I think that helped us. We didn’t know what we wanted to do, so we just did everything”. The result was the organic and purely accidental evolution of their current, electronically enhanced sound. Experimenting and improvising, they wrote 10 songs that first day.

Before long, the newly hatched Chew Lips had booked themselves their first gig: they took over a friend’s heaving house party in New Cross, with Tigs standing on a washing machine improvising the forgotten lyrics while punters hung from the rafters and sweat dripping off the ceilings. But even through the chaos, a blueprint for the band was formed, with Will and James facing each other, swapping between keyboards, guitars and bass, while Tigs had the run of the stage. Since then, they have racked up coverage in everything from Dazed and Confused to Jalouse, been the subject of A & R brawls and even had a champion in the legendary form of Steve Lamacq, who unequivocally declared them his favourite band of 2008 (and the best unsigned band in the country) after hearing their demos, landing them a coveted slot at the BBC Electric Proms in the process.

A lot of this, of course, has to do with Tigs. As front woman and therefore, default focal point of the band, she has a considerable burden to shoulder. And she does not disappoint: live, she is a force of nature, prowling the stage, crawling on the floor, drawing the audience in with every word, and challenging them not to enjoy themselves. “If I’m having fun, the audience will have fun”, she reasons. “I’m not going to stand there pretending I’m too cool to look at the audience, I don’t know what the f*ck that’s about”.

Even more unusually for a female front woman in this day and age of laconic, ironic detachment – Tigs sings. Her voice soars, swoops, and haunts, it dips precipitously and smoulders beautifully. Think before you mention Karen O – to whom she bears a very fleeting resemblance in stage presence – as other journalists have been prone to do. “Yes, she’s amazing”, she says, “but what it comes down to ultimately is that if you’re a female singer, you’re either going to be compared to Blondie, Chrissie Hynde, or Karen O…. – the pool of possible comparisons is considerably smaller than for front men”. Instead, she says it was Stevie Nicks, Pat Benatar, and Jonathan Richman who inspired her, and Patti Smith who influenced her decision to be a musician. And then there’s Karen Carpenter, her favourite front woman. A cursory listen to their songs bears this out. Whether she’s crying for salvation like a young Aretha Franklin in the gospel-tinged slow-burner “Gold Key”, or crooning,“(I) don’t want nothing but the carelessness I had” in “Salt Air”, it’s clear she’s that rare breed indeed – a modern singer unafraid to explore the full range of her voice.

Of course, none of this would be of any consequence without fantastic songs to back it up, and this is something Chew Lips have in spades. Every song sounds like it could be a planet-bestriding, galaxy swallowing pop smash, with Will and James’ gorgeously whirling and mutating Casiotone/guitar/bass/drum machine attack providing the perfect backdrop. So “Twin Galaxies” hums and throbs along on waves of barely contained frustration and burbling, almost LCD-esque blips and bleeps, while the harder edged “CLVR1” comes packed with enough simmering attitude to knock you out with the flick of a wrist. And on the imminent first single “Solo” – due for release in March on revered Parisian label Kitsune – Chew Lips alternately capture the yearning, impatience, beauty, confusion and impermanence of youth, with Tigs summing up the hopes and dreams of a whole generation with the fist-pumping battle cry of “we don’t want to wait, there’s no time, no time”. This is pop music alright, but pop with a gloriously vivid, almost cinematic sweep; as well as a human heart, filled with a very real sense of longing and desire, in amidst the shiny, clattering electronica.

But then again, this has always been a band with their sights firmly set on infiltrating the public consciousness at large.

“Our music should resonate with the listener. We want it to sneak in and become the soundtrack to your life”.
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“Forward-thinking young guitar-slingers...turbo-charged, noisy and downright promising” - NME

"…a breathless, deathless rush of possibilities, Ritilan rock exploding with ideas and imagination." - Kerrang!

“Vicious, hotly-tipped and sonically huge... the smarts of Pavement, the groove of Pretty Girls Make Graves, the dri...ve of Fugazi and the detached shoutiness of Gareth Campesinos! Johnny Foreigner are worth their hype in gold” – Clash

"The interplay between the dual male and female lead vocalists is as excitingly fresh noise as this reviewer has heard all year." - Rock Sound

“Some of the most exciting indie-pop sounds put to record by a British band in a long while… domestic debut release of the year – hands down.” - Drowned In Sound


In 2007 Johnny Foreigner burst out of Britain’s second city amongst a hurricane of thrilling New-Wave Fight-Pop, armed with a blistering array of melodious, discordant rackets that leave an immediate, indelible mark on the brain.

In the words of the band themselves: “Our album came out, the music press decided we were HOT STUFF and loads of people bought it or robbed it off the internet and said yay this is good and started singing songs back at us. Some singles fell off the album, they got played on Teh Radio and Teh Television enough to make people think we’d Made It and now took helicopters everywhere. We got very flattered indeed and spent most of the summer playing in fields or to people marginally more drunk than ourselves. It was pretty spesh.”

Now, in 2009, with literally hundreds of shows under their belts alongside the likes of Idlewild, Los Campesinos, Young Knives, Blood Red Shoes, The Subways, Hundred Reasons, Dananananaykroyd, Forward Russia and many more Johnny Foreigner are back with their Alex Newport (At The Drive-In, Meet Me In St. Louis) produced sophomore album “Grace And The Bigger Picture”. A relentless blast of inventive, exciting, angular art-pop, it’s an album that will ensure Johnny Foreigner won't be strangers to you for long.

Doors: 7:30pm Entry: £7 ADV/£8 Admittance: 16 +
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