“We met at a party in South London,” he said. “I thought she was a total babe so I told her I could record music and that if she had some tracks I would help produce them for her.”
“Christian told me had a recording studio,” she said. “So I was eager...

“We met at a party in South London,” he said. “I thought she was a total babe so I told her I could record music and that if she had some tracks I would help produce them for her.”

“Christian told me had a recording studio,” she said. “So I was eager to record my songs. When I turned up to his student flat, his studio was actually a laptop. Sweet little lies.”

“I basically had to teach myself Logic in a few days,” he confessed. “Amelia turned up with some £10 Casio she bought from a charity shop in France and the whole demo EP was made on that. It was five years ago now. And my memory of those days is pretty hazy anyway…”

They would work through the night, “locked up in our room on a shitload of drugs,” he said, “writing a bunch of tracks in a night and then listening back as the sun was coming up and we were coming down.” At the end of one of those long nights they decided to call themselves Elephant for reasons that seem obscure now. “It must have been nine in the morning and we were pretty out of it,” he explained. Within a few hours they had sent their tape to Memphis Industries. Fingers crossed.

That was in 2010. They met in the spring. By autumn they had sent off their demo tape. The first record was out by the end of the year. There is something of the fairground about ‘Ants’, this first 7” single, or of Herk Harvey’s strange early ’60s horror film Carnival of Souls. Oom-pah keyboard rhythms contend with a carillon-like tremolo guitar. A tambourine sits on the kick drum, as in a one-man-band. “I just can’t remember before,” she sings in an oneiric haze, “Take me away to the shore / Show me how it was before.”

Read the rest of my interview with Elephant at FACT.

11/11/13 at 10:42am
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