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Art punk faves Les Savy Fav return with their triumphant album ‘OUI, LSF’ after a 14-year hiatus, as frontman Tim Harrington reflects on the band’s journey through chaos, creativity, and sincerity. Check out our latest Upset cover story.
Words: Rob Mair.
By his own admission, Tim Harrington is “a waffler”. But the frontman of art punk faves Les Savy Fav is also a gregarious storyteller and engaging company as he fills in the gaps about the band’s extended hiatus and overdue return.
We’ve got a great day for it, too; Harrington starts out in his loft conversion studio for our Zoom chat, but the weather’s so lovely in New York that it’s the ideal opportunity to get onto the roof, meaning we’re treated to some quite spectacular views of the city. It’s quite the uplift with Old Blighty stuck in a perpetually damp spring.
And then there’s Harrington. Often described as larger-than-life – mainly due to the band’s legendary live shows – he’s a raconteur extraordinaire, throwing tangents on tangents and peppering answers with anecdotes and asides. This will come as little surprise to folk who’ve witnessed Les Savy Fav in the flesh, where chaotic doesn’t come close to describing the orchestrated (and often not-so-orchestrated) carnage. But it means – in the best possible way – that any notion of asking rehearsed questions soon gets jettisoned. This is Tim’s world, and we’re just living in it.
And a lot has happened in Tim’s world since Les Savy Fav last graced our stereos. ‘Root For Ruin’, the band’s fifth album, dropped in 2010. Since then, the group – completed by Syd Butler, Harrison Haynes, Andrew Reuland and Seth Jabour – found themselves doing a lot of living. Families have grown, and careers have taken off. Butler and Jabour have found themselves working as members of Seth Meyers’ 8G Band; Reuland has focused on his editing and writing work, including for Adult Swim’s Ballmastrz: 9009, while Haynes left his career in teaching to focus on fine art. All creative and noble pursuits, but all of which took time and attention away from the band.
For his part, Harrington got busy building his studio and got big into modular synths. But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. A bipolar diagnosis meant Harrington had to work on his mental health, meaning the band became less of a going concern. But all these stories add up to ensure the group’s long over-due return, ‘OUI, LSF,’ is a monumental triumph.
“The band’s never been a money-making thing,” considers Harrington. “In that time between the two records [‘Root For Ruin’ and ‘OUI, LSF’], there was a time when we didn’t even play and I went through some shit. I had my ‘come to Jesus’ moment. I have a family I love, I have kids I love, and I love my life. But there’s me the artist, and the me that has an electric bill, and these things collided. It was a tough period where I was trying to square these things that didn’t go together very well, like managing my relationship with myself, with my partner and my kids, with my bandmates.
“It took four years to get a grip on that pendulum I’d been riding back and forth for 45 years. I’d spent so much time just trying to hold my shit together that I got to the other side and had this weird feeling of, ‘How do you get those parts back?’ So, there was a large part spent leading up to this record where I was thinking about ‘Where’s my authority? What am I talking about? What do I know?
“Oh, and then I got fired,” he says, slipping into a tangent that somehow ties the narrative together. “It was a job that I worked really hard to get and had to work really hard to hold down. You’ve seen us live; you know what I’m like on stage. I mean, I’m not like that, but it’s the heart of the matter. Suddenly, I had this extra space to process things, and a lot of the record is about the topics that go across these 14 years.”
At its poles lie openers ‘Guzzle Blood’ and ‘World Got Great’. The former is a figurative journey through hell filled with pain and anguish, while the latter is an ode to the joy of finding your place in the world and recognising your impact, no matter how slight.
In between, ‘OUI, LSF’ ruminates heavily on relationships and the different forms they can take. At turns, it’s the most vulnerable they’ve ever been (‘Don’t Mind Me); at others, it’s their most hedonistic (‘Legendary Tippers’) or nihilistic (appropriately enough, ‘Nihilistic’). It all hangs together beautifully – 14 fractured tracks that reflect 14 tumultuous years – even though the reflective numbers are just a happy accident.
Part of this is seen in the journey the songs take – the narrative that weaves its way through ‘OUI, LSF’ – from abject despair to the acknowledgement of joy – but also in the process of the album. Fourteen years is a long time to wait, but with such a gap, you have a firm handle on what you want – and don’t want – when you finally get to writing and recording.
“Thinking back to ‘Root For Ruin’, I was like, ‘I can’t write like that again’. I didn’t want to write like we’d always written. We’d historically been a band where we’d get into the practice space, and we’d keep playing and playing and playing until we had a song. But the amount of time we had to do that changed. We’d speed up that process and go to the studio to write and record. After ‘Root For Ruin’, I said if we want to record stuff again, I want to write songs for it versus playing until there are songs left. I wanted to do something that was more intentional.
“Before, it was like finding a song, and this was like making a song. It was like animals wandering, and this was knowing how to channel it.”
Of course, the beauty of letting animals wander is that they’re not tethered to a post. There’s no idea to which they’re wedded. They can go off and explore and find new ground to graze. Wandering animals leads to interesting results, and when there’s a sea of bands vying for your attention, being interesting is a boon.
Harrington recalls the process for recording the ‘Emor: Rome Upside Down’ EP, which was lost to contract hell for a time and has only recently been restored to streaming services. He says it was the perfect embodiment of intentionality and creativity and the blueprint from which Les Savy Fav attacked ‘OUI, LSF’. At its core is the question, ‘How could you harness that energy with the 20 years’ of maturity and know-how the band has since acquired?’
“If I’m the dumbest person in the room, then no one else has to be the dumbest person in the room”
Tim Harrington
“I listen to it [‘Emor’] now, and it’s like ‘What the fuck were we thinking?’ Harrington laughs. “But we did it because it sounded cool. On ‘Let’s Stay Friends’ or ‘Root For Ruin’, it was more focused or more crafted. I love ‘Let’s Stay Friends’. I wanted everyone to come and sing on it. I wanted this big, enormous thing. And on ‘Root For Ruin’, I wanted to strip it all back. But what’s in between all that is fucking around. And that’s what’s interesting.
An example of this can be found on one of the standouts, ‘Oi! Division’, where the band channelled their inner B-52s to create a fun and engaging throwback of throbbing post-punk and unhinged choral vocals. The results are, as Harrington says, ‘interesting’.
“Interesting at 50 is so fucking hard,” he laughs, before illustrating the point with a trademark tangent. “I love new bands, and I have a stack of records as tall as me that are iconic and amazing… it’s like the t-shirt drawer. The drawer’s not getting any bigger, so if you want to replace one of the t-shirts in my t-shirt drawer, you have to be fucking amazing.
“And interesting is the hardest thing in the world at the moment. We’re inundated with stuff, and things are designed to serve you. It’s transactional. It’s about serving the thirsty algorithm. What we didn’t want is to create just another record that was lost to that.”
Of course, for all of the faults of the commodification of music, easy access does open up new avenues for bands – especially semi-dormant ones like Les Savy Fav.
For example, the band’s recent Electric Ballroom show had a wide range of fans in attendance. Sure, the majority were people old enough to have witnessed their brand of carnage first-hand before – even though their last UK headline show was more than a decade ago – but there was also a healthy contingent of people young enough to be witnessing the unfolding chaos for the first time.
And chaos it is. Harrington spends more time in the crowd than he does on stage. At one point, he finds himself trying to catch the microphone while suspended upside down from the balcony. “I hope you guys are better catchers than you are throwers,” he quips, before descending the more traditional stairs route. Numerous costume changes occur, with discarded garments strewn over the Electric Ballroom. He even has time to raid support band Ditz’s merch desk during set closer ‘The Sweat Descends’.
In short, they’re electric, and while Harrington is a dervish, the remaining band members hold it down in spectacular fashion.
But, just as the algorithm has changed music consumption, such a daring and confrontational show – even if Les Savy Fav’s set is undeniably good-natured – is now a much trickier landscape to navigate. The opportunity for Harrington to get semi-naked and ride on the back of audience members during ‘The Equestrian’ is something that probably doesn’t pass muster in a post-MeToo world.
Equally, the dawn of the smartphone has meant the ability to broadcast the chaos to an audience outside of the venue’s walls, removing the mystique of watching a band live for the first time.
“We toured so much that when we went to a new place, we just knew we were gonna kill it,” considers Harrington. “When we first went to Europe, it was so fun to walk into a room in, say, Germany, and they would have no idea what I was like. We were much more aligned with the DC/Dischord scene musically, and that’s what they were expecting.
“And it’s sad not to have that anymore, but in a way, it doesn’t matter. It’s better to be there in real life. People resonate with that. I think we’re very sincere. I’m a very sincere person, so when we’re performing, it feels safe. When I’m interacting with a person, I’m interacting with them, not the people watching that person. It’s weird; even though it’s performative, it also, in a way, doesn’t feel performative.
“There’s a lack of calculation to it, and I think people respond to that. I like to think of it like this: If I’m the dumbest person in the room, then no one else has to be the dumbest person in the room.”
It may be a self-deprecating take on their captivating live show, but make no mistake, Les Savy Fav are shrewd and switched-on operators. ‘OUI, LSF’ might just be the best return of the year, and it’s a testament to the human spirit, creativity, and sincerity. It’s a record that finds the sweet spot between their playful chaos and sharp lyricism, finding room to dissect the human condition amongst colourful imagery and lively language. They may play dumb, but these stylish nihilists are anything but. ■
Les Savy Fav’s album ‘OUI, LSF’ is out now. Follow Upset’s Spotify playlist here.
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