STACK #126 Apr 2016

MUSIC

Emoticons Listen to this on headphones. Then play it on a road trip. Then listen on headphones again. If you don’t get The Wombats after that, you never will. The guitars twist their way around your mind, the lyrics poke us in all the right places. A bulletproof offer you can’t accept? Not this song, baby.

the legendary R. Kelly – ‘My mind’s telling me no, but my body’s telling me yes.' The emoji or emoticon references are just a quick way of spraying cold water on a potentially hot situation. I just thought Emoticons was a cool title for a song, way before even writing that song. So, I don’t know if I’m making this definitive statement about social media in 2015 or whatever. It should have been called Emojis , because emoticons are different to emojis – which someone wonderfully pointed out to me.” At the end of the day, pop music and life intersect in weird ways. For Murph, the whole experience of making and touring Glitterbug is partially about everything coming full circle. "The creepiest thing was, I’m twisting my life up to get these songs out. I’d stay in LA and – there was a point where everything kind of went full circle and became real, and now I’m in a relationship, we’re touring in LA, and in the UK,” he reflects. ”I was never expecting that, because everything was so solid back home for me, hence why I found the need to create something that was slightly more tumultuous or just a bit weirder than the reality of my life.“

a very bizarre town," he says. "A town where A-list actors can become down- and-out actors who have ‘lost their way' a bit, living in a wing of their homes. There is still a lot of love in the air. It’s going to eat and swallow you up... yeah, there’s a lot of broken dreams there.“ Listening to Glitterbug , it could be the audio equivalent of an Instagram account – just darker, funnier, and with audio accompaniment. Songs like Your Body’s aWeapon and This is Not a Party give us all an inside view of the snapshots behind the songs; a mad night out here, a surreal scene in a strange place there. And not all of them are based on Murphy’s LA experiences either – Your Body’s aWeapon being one case in point. “I went to a Brit Awards afterparty and Harry Styles was there, and I was walking out – in the days when I was still smoking. I was walking out behind him to go have a cigarette, and some kind of suicidal-looking paparazzi took a picture of him, and that’s where the idea spawned. Like a first person narrative of a creepy paparazzi guy, following someone around.” The album’s other ‘big’ song after GreekTragedy is Emoticons . But Murph is using social media as a metaphor, rather than explicitly singing about the tiny symbols that substitute words for emotions on all manner of social media. “That song is about – to quote

Your Body is a Weapon An uptown tale of flashy people flashing around, the song’s underlying pulse and pithy lyrics, later hoodwinked by synth and guitar, make it a highlight. It’s 1980-something and your DeLorean is driving an endless freeway to nowhere. This is probably playing.

This is Not a Party If a synth can kill you, it’s here. It’s that night. You know that night: your friend really shouldn’t do that – he does. That shouldn’t happen… oh dear, it did. Not a party, a hurricane. You’ve been there, and if you haven’t, you'll be there shortly.

Glitterbug by The Wombats is out on April 17 through Warner Music.

keyed in to the history and character of his hometown. “In the UK there has always been a north/south divide," he says. "The south contains the wealth, and the north contains the struggle and the resistance – and therefore the good bands. But, I don’t really see the divide anymore. And Liverpool – compared to when I was growing up – has changed so much. It won the European Capital of Culture [in 2008], and just had millions of pounds thrown at it. It’s just a great party city, the food is really good now and there’s parts which feel like East Village New York, or East London.”

Liverpool is one of the UK’s port cities. In the 1950s and 1960s, American sailors would alight from their ships carrying US rock’n’roll records, and inevitably these found their way to the hungry ears of the young Beatles and the like. But there’s loads more to Liverpool than the musical legacy of The Fabs – the brilliant Echo and the Bunnymen for a start – and Murph is very

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