Weirdos. Oddballs. Eccentrics. When it comes to his band Dutch Uncles, Duncan Wallis has heard it all. It's meant in the most complimentary manner, but when it comes to scoring a number one album or headlining a major festival, being painted as "musically unconventional" has its drawbacks.
“It’s not the way I’d like to be perceived, unfortunately,” he says from his home in Manchester, the city where the band formed in 2008. “The way we see it is that we’re getting more accessible every time. It’s just a shame that so much of this industry is taken on first impression, because if a lot of the bands that we’re influenced by had been taken on first impression, it wouldn’t have worked out the same way. XTC took four albums to really establish themselves. Talking Heads wouldn’t have liked to be defined by their amazing first album. So it can be a bit frustrating.”
On first impression, it's true that the names that float around Dutch Uncles are the likes of XTC, Prince, Japan, Talk Talk and Tears for Fears. Delve a bit deeper, however, and you'll find that the band are no 1980s tribute act. Contemporary reference points include the rhythms and quirky vocal stylings of Wild Beasts, while Wallis enthuses about the influence that the offbeat indie-pop of Sunderland's Field Music has had on the band. Still, when you describe wanting your most recent album to sound like "Grace Jones fronting Talking Heads", as frontman and pianist Wallis did recently, you can expect to turn a few heads. Add his peculiar dance moves to the mix and you have quite the musical melange.
Their new album O Shudder – their fourth – centres on the theme of domesticity. Previous albums, particularly 2013's Out of Touch in the Wild, have touched upon the excesses of youth; "It was the 'drugs' album, or whatever that means," says Wallis, who is also the lyricist. Now, as their 30s loom, things are getting more personal on tracks such as Babymaking and Decided Knowledge.
“I’d just be writing in my flat at home, looking at the woodchip wallpaper, and I’d repeatedly say to myself, ‘Don’t make it personal, don’t make it personal, don’t make it personal.’ But it couldn’t be stopped; it was always going to sound like an album about a character settling into domestic life. We’d all been in long-term relationships at that point, and we were all kind of settling down. It was kind of easy to get into a nice, sleepy routine: ‘We’ll rehearse on a Tuesday, we’ll do a pub quiz on a Wednesday and rehearse again on a Friday. And in between, we’ll kind of write but we’ll always make dinner for each other every night, and it’s all very nice.’ It’s sort of changed now, but at the time it was like that.”
Spedding’s departure
Dutch Uncles were a quintet up until February, when founding member and guitarist Daniel Spedding left the band days after O Shudder was released, just as they were about to embark on a UK tour.
“We’ve had ups and downs with Sped – and he would agree with that,” says Wallis. “When it happened it was a shock; I was out DJing somewhere on the other side of town and I got a text saying that he’d left the band. Obviously the timing’s never great, but we weren’t going to pretend when someone wasn’t happy in the band. I don’t know what triggered it, but if he’s happy, then we’re happy for him.”
Rather than replace Spedding, the band are finding new ways of operating.
“Maybe that’s going to be the impetus for us to finally write a simple album. I hope it is. We’re having to rehearse a lot of these songs with a missing guitar line, and a lot of the time it still feels like there’s enough going on. I don’t know why we thought otherwise before.
“We’ve made four albums now, and our ongoing aim is to make the jerky rhythms or the complexities of our music more and more subtle every time. We realise it’s off-putting to a lot of people, and we don’t want to be indulgent and we don’t want to alienate people.”
It sounds as if Dutch Uncles are a band in flux: perceived by many as the musical eccentrics but yearning to write an album that is accepted by the masses. They’ve got the groove, the funk and the pop nous to do so. With a quieter touring schedule than usual planned for the summer, they might record an EP or indulge in solo projects before regrouping for the next album.
“Me and Robin [Richards, bass] really can’t write for a mainstream audience; we’re not going to turn around and go, ‘Hey, here’s a song for the Olympics next year,’ ” chuckles Wallis. “We can’t do that, we just can’t, so I think it’s literally going to take an instrument being taken out of the mix for us to write simple stuff.
“Speaking as a music fan, I find it a struggle to be surprised by bands these days, so it always amazes me when people find us and say, ‘Oh, I’ve never heard of you before.’ We think, Well, we’ve been around for six years, but nice to meet you – jump on board. I’m still just glad that people like it.”
O Shudder is out now. Dutch Uncles play the Limelight, Belfast, on April 24th; and the Workman’s Club, Dublin, on April 25th
