The Keyboard Choir
Words by Holly Wallis
Screw the Chemical Brothers with their line-ups and backing tracks – playing off the cuff just got hot. The Keyboard Choir is all about spontaneous entertainment. Churning out tracks from an electronic landscape of noise, they know how to turn it up and crank it out with a twist. Electronica experiments with a lot of soul. And punk is for losers – ‘we’re so tired of traditional rock and roll guitar bands, like I’m absolutely sick of all bands sounding like The Clash, basically. It’s just really conservative and boring and why bother - why would you want to play your Dad’s music? Punk- what does that word mean anymore?’
But who knows who these guys really are? Even they’re not quite sure. With a history of band members coming and going the team currently stands at ‘five and a half’. Frequenting festivals and causing trouble dressed as cardboard robots, The Keyboard Choir aren’t exactly style gurus. They’re dorks. Big dorks with keyboards. Seb laughs in the face of skinny jeans. ‘I think it’s more our lack of image and style that makes us.’ Whatever. Playing in a band means you can look like a Rice Krispies box and get away with it.
So who do they compare themselves to? Any band, anytime. ‘Beethoven. Well he’s pretty good isn’t he. He’s like the greatest composer to have ever lived.’ Ok, so their album is good and it definitely does what it says on the packet. But the Key to the Choir’s success is just a little bit more exciting. Play the CD to your gran or listen to it on the toilet – whatever you do – SEE THEM LIVE. ‘I’m really proud of our record, but there are cases where people hear it and are kind of like, yeah, that’s quite interesting. Then they come and see us live and we blow their heads off.’
And these guys are not without a decent pinch of crazy. Whoever thought watching nerds playing keyboards could be so fun? When former member Freddy left, he kept it simple. Just good, clean carnage. ‘At the end of the last song he pulled out a lump hammer and just fucking smashed his keyboard up, literally just completely totalled it, with this lump hammer on stage, it was still plugged in, you could smell burning and there was just keys and shit everywhere and he was like jumping on it and smashing it.’
At the end of the day, a bit of improv goes a long way. It’s like adding freaky techno to an electrical storm. Mixing ambient waves with a little bit of sublime rock, the guys make up a truly warped string quartet with real energy. Beethoven would be proud. If he wasn’t mental. Or dead.
http://www.myspace.com/thekeyboardchoir
Posted Thu, December 04, 2008