Don’t nod

>>England’s These New Puritans ponder
lies, magic, slumber and the blue
ghost-cat that started it all

2 SLEEP PERCHANCE 2 DREAM: These New Puritans

By LORRAINE CARPENTER

“It’s impossible to tell the truth in interviews, really,” admits Jack Barnett, lead singer of These New Puritans. “It’s all lies, to an extent, just ’cause it’s a very artificial kind of thing. I don’t know, maybe that’s not true.”

Fair enough, although being honest about lying is more believable when the confessor isn’t faking being awake. Barnett’s exhaustion/hangover/stoneage was audible when the Mirror reached him at home last weekend, as he and his bandmates had just returned from playing in Portugal on Saturday night. And These New Puritans tend to expend all the energy their 19- to 21-year-old bodies can muster when they play live, as they did nine times at this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, one of their only North American gigs to date. According to Rolling Stone, they “tore up the stage,” getting reckless with their fresh fusion of post-punk, hip hop, electro and magic.

“When we make music, there’s something else that comes into it, it’s more than the sum of its parts,” Barnett explains. “We use the word ‘magic’ to mean anything that’s not just the beats and the physical stuff. It started off with numerology ’cause that was something I was really, really into last year, then we decided to make an album that was circular, an infinite loop, and those things combined and there were just more and more ideas to do with that.”

Numbers, colours, palindromes and mystical touchstones such as pyramids, doppelgangers and Elvis are the focus of the lyrics on These New Puritans’ LP, Beat Pyramid, recently released in North America on Domino Records. The album begins exactly as it ends, creating a seamless segue when played on repeat.

But Barnett’s appreciation of mystery and the paranormal isn’t confined to musical influences or lyrical references, or “spitting the code” as he likes to say, quoting the Wu-Tang Clan. The magic may have begun during his childhood, with a sighting of a glowing blue ghost cat.

“Oh God, yeah,” he says, slightly traumatized (or nauseated) by the memory. “It’s a weird half-memory from when I was seven or eight, around the same time I started writing music.”

In their parents’ shed, Jack and his brother George (These New Puritans’ drummer) acquired a guitar and made a drum kit out of cardboard, eventually graduating to a loft space and adding a cello when Jack was 13. It was a steep climb from there to the critical acclaim and underground supremacy they’re enjoying now, and Barnett has, in the past, expressed a desire to farm out some of his rock ’n’ roll duties to willing workers while he directs from the sidelines. Like playing shows.

“Yeah, I’d love that—if we had enough money, we could just pay other people to do it,” he says facetiously. “No, I said that after I slept on stage in Spain. That was a bit of performance art, it was really funny. They were trying to get us to play for, like, two hours, so we did this 40-minute version of ‘Doppelganger’ and I fell asleep in the middle of the song. I was really asleep! I woke up when the song ended, though. Good timing, I suppose.”

With guests at Club Lambi on
Wednesday, June 11, 9 p.m., $15