Features

The Indelicates - 2008 with The Indelicates

Miss Fliss 23/12/2008

The Indelicates’debut album American Demo features in GIITTV’s top ten readers’ favourite Albums of 2008, with its lyrical masterfulness, slick indie pop sensibility, and wry stabs at mass pop culture. Miss Fliss caught up with protagonists Julia and Simon after their energetic Cambridge gig, which took in a Christmas cover of The Pogues‘ Fairytale of New York. As we huddled around a doorway in the icy December climate, we dissected 2008.

What’s your album of the year?

Julia: We’ve been asked this loads, and we’re really struggling.
Simon: Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong, ‘cos it doesn’t exist.
J: Probably my favourite band of the year, who have been around for a while, are a band called The Flesh Happening. I love them. I absolutely love them.
S: They’re amazing.
J: Unbelievable live. It’s like, when you read a description that Tony Wilson has written about seeing the Sex Pistols for the first time. They’re really beautiful descriptions. I don’t think it happens much anymore. It’s just like that. It’s like watching something that absolutely stuns, terrifies, it’s disgusting as well, really filthy. But in a brilliant way. It’s like if David Bowie had a child and it was gay and got AIDS and gave his AIDS to other people. The band have got this song called Waste - I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s sung as if it’s true - about getting HIV and passing it on, it’s revolting but absolutely beautiful. We got them in the studio recently to do stuff with us, and the scream in one of the bits - you know how they’ve got a little window in the studio, he just started screaming and disappeared. It sounds unbelievably difficult. Very,very good band. They’re the only thing I’d recommend to anyone this year.

What’s been your favourite film or TV this year?
J: [without hesitation] Batman! I think it had a really good last line. He basically describes at the end how the world doesn’t need a hero, it needs a dark knight. It goes to your heart.
S: I watched The Wire this year.
J: Proper good. It’s a bit hard work to begin with. But after about the third episode you really get what it’s doing, it’s very good. The fourth series is heartbreaking.
S: Film-wise, Itty Bitty Titty Committee, which was a portrait of the radical lesbian underground.

Do you have any reading highlights of the year?
J: I’m reading a book at the moment by a Muslim woman called Ayaan Hirsi Ali, called The Caged Virgin. it’s very interesting, although the writing‘s translated from Dutch so it‘s more the content than the way it‘s written. It identifies that it’s not just women that are caged virgins in Islam, but everyone is subordinate. And I really like Harry Potter. Alan Moore. I like reading Harper’s magazine.
S: It’s an old American magazine. They publish essays. They find things that are interesting from around the world.

What have been your personal highlights of the year?
J: I liked releasing an album, that was good. I think going to New York was really good. It was very expensive, but it was definitely worth it, I really enjoyed it. New York’s an amazing city. It’s like going to a city for the first time. We’d probably quite like to live in New York. It feels fresher than the UK. It feels like you can do something new, however difficult. And the way that journalists listen more, there’s just so much more interest and faith in ideas and stuff. It feels like there’s more potential.
S: And we headlined one of the stages at a festival in Austria called Frequency. and that was the first time we’d played to well over a thousand people who were there for us, instead of someone else. When they’re actually there for us that’s really nice.