The Leeds Guide Feature Interview

Camille Ainsworth discovers the history behind the eight-piece Leeds pop band
No one likes to think they’re stuck in a mould, least of all a band. That said, a lot of bands do follow the classic line-up of one singer, two guitars and one drummer - and many achieve awesome results with it.

But Milk White White Teeth are a long way from this standard four piece, made up, as they are, of so many different instruments it’s hard to keep count - trumpets, accordions, glockenspiels, flutes, multiple vocalists and loads more. They roll out a deeply layered sound that screams out with the strength of a choir combating the trap of tweeness that comes from their style of scrapbook pop song writing. It seems to evolve like a little life form in itself.

The seeds of Milk White White Teeth were planted when Barrie Wilson (vocals, gutar, keyboard) and Jon Crabbe (lead guitar) met at school, the project developed rapidly when they moved to Leeds and joined forces with James Hare (drums) and Michael Gill (bass). “The songs that they’d recorded were layered with instruments,” says Crabbe, “so the main reason for having so many people in the band was trying to fit all of their melodic ideas into the songs they’d written”.

“We like the idea of recordings documenting the song at a period in time, but it isn’t the definitive article, kind of like the Fiery Furnaces and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds,” continues Wilson. “We like to mix things up and songs will often sound quite different live.”Crabbe admits, “the lyrics are chosen for the aesthetics and the moods they create, as opposed to direct story-telling. Barrie is trying to write the perfect pop song for people who don’t like pop music and at the moment I’m into using quite mundane and everyday phrases and placing them in a more emotional context so they come to mean something more.”

In the last 10 months, the full eight piece Milk White White Teeth have really emerged in the Leeds music scene. Having won the opportunity to play at Leeds and Reading Festivals through the Futuresound competition, they are now working on recordings alongside musician and producer Lee Smith from popular local bands Middleman and Mi Mye.

How’s it feel to be so quickly integrated into the Leeds music scene? “It’s great that there are so many different scenes in Leeds and aside from the great garage rock and grunge scenes there is a wealth of bands who don’t adhere to a specific sound,” they say. “We sometimes feel a little pigeonholed by there being so many of us and people think of us in the same vein as Arcade Fire, when really we’d say we were more diverse in our sound.”

Following in the steps of Leeds favourites Pulled Apart By Horses and Wonderswan, Milk White White Teeth have a track on an upcoming Dance To The Radio Split EP. Keep your ears peeled.