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Artist Interviews
Q&A: Little Comets
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 22 February 2011
Formed in 2008, precocious grad-rock quartet Little Comets first earned plaudits and droves of devotees through a serious of audacious guerrilla gigs at university lecture halls and local supermarkets. Their debut single, ‘One Night In October’, was released in 2009 via Lucky Number, the considerable success of which led to the band signing to Sony/Columbia for the second, ‘Adultery’.
Having recorded and self-produced their debut LP ‘In Search Of Elusive Comets’, they parted company with Columbia in 2010, citing that they “didn’t sound enough like Ke$ha” as grounds for the split. Forging on through all the fuss and nonsense, Little Comets penned a new deal with indie label Dirty Hit the same year, going on to release their album last month.
Anthemic new single ‘Joanna’ is out now, a fantastically-catchy statement of intent and independence from an intelligent young band. As Little Comets reach the end of a headline UK tour, we caught up with frontman Robert Coles to get his thoughts on our Same Six.
Q1 How did you start out making music.
Mickey and I started writing songs in our house when we were twelve and thirteen. We would record them on an old tape player and send them to local radio stations as playlist suggestions… it wasn’t actually as offensive as that sounds.
Q2 What inspired your latest album?
Hopefully our music is as authentic as the original intention was supposed to be. If that’s true then I think we get inspired quietly by everything: conversation and allegory, people and places, incidents and accidents, hints and allegations.
Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
I think that depends on the song. Mickey and I will often write in the house with very basic instrumentation. From there we’ll rehearse with Matt and Mark to finalise structure before recording. At that point we’ll focus on the detail of the parts and sections and I’ll write the lyrics. We try to experiment with as many different ideas and add a multitude of layers to the track, then we go home while Mickey peels everything back and the song is hopefully complete.
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
We’ve hopefully adopted a little bit of Bowie, Milan Kundera, Joan Miro, Paul Simon, Debussy, Camus, Roald Dahl, Jonathan Safran Foer, Carol Anne Duffy, Elgar, Brian Eno and Mickey’s perseverance.
Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
“Hopefully you’ll like it”. If they don’t then Mark plays bad cop.
Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
We don’t have any specific ambitions, to be honest. For the future, I think Mark wants to give being a male model a shot (he’s too commercial at the minute), Matt is a skilled yachtsman so has one eye on the 2016 Olympics, Mickey seems to be about two years behind MIT in inventing things so he needs to work out how to bridge the gap and I’d like to be a milkman (glass bottles only though please).
MORE>> www.littlecomets.com
