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Off the record
Evening Standard 29.08.08
Streetwise: Portico Quartet’s self-released CD has attracted offers from record labels. The drum-like instrument is called a hang
Still sounding sharp: Kele Okereke
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Mercury's mystery band
A month ago, Portico Quartet were busking on the South Bank. Now they are waiting to hear if their DIY debut, Knee-Deep in the North Sea, will win them 2008's Mercury Prize for album of the year when it is announced on 9 September.
Their sound — all instrumental — is exhilarating, with catchy tunes that could get a crowd going at Glastonbury while still being experimental enough to fit in on late-night Radio 3.
Since being shortlisted for the Mercury in June, the four friends, who all graduated from London universities last summer, have been invited to record new material at Peter Gabriel's state-of-the-art Real World studios near Bath, and they've been talking to record labels and music publishers.
Their style, described by double bass player Milo Fitzpatrick as “instrumental music that is really fun to listen to”, may be jazzy, but Portico Quartet consider themselves more of an indie band.
They first came to notice playing guerrilla gigs on the South Bank. “We made all our CDs, we did our own artwork, and the busking, bringing it right to the people, was just quite a natural process,” Fitzpatrick tells me. “We thought: this is fun and we might make some money from it.”
They claim to have sold 10,000 five-track CDs at £5 each while busking in London as well as France and Spain over the past three years. But didn't the South Bank security guards move them on? “We've kind of just managed to keep playing,” says Fitzpatrick. “We've had this tenuous verbal agreement.”
Portico Quartet do play regular gigs, too, including a free 6pm show at Zavvi in Piccadilly on Monday. They are also at the Hoxton Bar & Kitchen on Sunday and they're braving jazz territory with a Ronnie Scott's date on 7 September.
They're a wonderfully vibrant band, including Jack Wyllie on sax, but perhaps the real talking point is the “hang”, an instrument both Duncan Bellamy and Nick Mulvey play. It looks like something from a well kitted-out kitchen and sounds like a more hypnotic, ethereal steel drum.
“It's technically not a drum,” Mulvey corrects me. “Drums have to have a membrane.” He describes it as a “bizarrely beautiful new percussion instrument” which they discovered at the Womad festival a few years ago. Bellamy took one home for £400 but now prospective buyers have to join a waiting list to make an appointment with the manufacturers in Berne.
For their next album, Portico Quartet promise to add some marimba and glockenspiel to the mix. Would they consider a vocalist, too?
“We've always talked about it,” says Fitzpatrick. “We might aspire to a female vocalist who uses their voice a slightly different way, like Björk, Joanna Newsom or Roisin Murphy.”
Of more pressing concern is their impending move east from their shared Clapham house to another in Clapton close to their spiritual home, the Vortex Club, which helped them release their debut album. “We've been hanging out there more and more because it's just a really nice vibe,” Fitzpatrick says. “There's more of a creative, cultural scene happening in that part of London.”
They face stiff competition for the Mercury Prize but say they wouldn't mind if Radiohead or Burial beat them to it. They are certainly the shortlist outsiders but if they do win they plan to carry on busking outside the National Theatre.
“A Saturday or Sunday whenever we're free and the sun is shining,” says Fitzpatrick. “That's when you'll find us down there.”
Surprise Party on the web
It's not enough for bands to release albums on the internet any more — they have to take people by surprise. Radiohead gave fans just over a week's notice of the In Rainbows download last October, but Bloc Party's web chat announcement of their third album, Intimacy, revealed it would be out less than three days later.
“We finished it a few months ago and thought why do we need to sit on it for six months?” singer Kele Okereke tells me.
He denies the rush-released £5 download from blocparty.com was a way of preventing the music critics having their say before it reached fans. Their second album, A Weekend in the City, had some bad reviews, not least because of Okereke's lyrics.
The new track, Trojan Horse, opens with a stinker: “You used to take your watch off before we made love/You didn't want to share our time with anyone.” But overall Bloc Party sound sharp on this collection of bracing art-rock and distorted dance rhythms. “That's us,” says Okereke. “It's not just about songs that have spiky guitars and disco beats.”
The more controlled Biko and Signs show signs of songwriting maturity, suggesting the band have finally delivered after the hype surrounding them.
The only downside for Bloc Party is that this download isn't chart eligible. The CD version is released on 27 October.
David Smyth is away.
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