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That great love sound
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“I’m really drunk,” says Big Pink singer Milo Cordell. “This is gonna be fun.” In a tour bus traversing the Rockies en route to Denver, Cordell had been up since the previous night’s show in San Diego when the Mirror called (at 1 p.m. PST). Three gigs into a 15-date tour, Cordell, Robbie Furze and their live rhythm section had played to full houses in California, where British buzz about their anthemic, emotive and unabashedly noisy debut album, A Brief History of Love, preceded them. “Our record is a celebration of love, even the bad things about love,” says Cordell, calling their epic single “Dominos” a celebratory song “about the weakness of man.” Named after that album by the Band, with whom they share next to nothing musically, the Big Pink is built mainly on Furze’s industrial past—aside from leading his own band Panic DHH, he toured for several years as a guitarist for Alec Empire, post-Atari Teenage Riot. “He learned sonics from one of the best people in the world, so he understands the force that music can deliver, and that noise can have a lot of soul,” says Cordell, 29, who’d been “a virgin to making music” prior to instigating this project. However, his father Denny Cordell had been a producer since the ’60s, working with the Moody Blues, Procol Harum and Joe Cocker, and later formed a record label, Shelter. Cordell followed in his father’s footsteps by founding his own label, Merok, which released early material by the Klaxons and Crystal Castles. Music and history aside, the Big Pink’s notoriety has been helped along by tales of debauchery, comments like “Lily Allen is a mouthy bitch” and photos of Cordell and Furze kissing and cupping. “It basically stems from a joke,” Cordell explains. “Me and Robbie spend so much time together, we’re pretty much one person—we feel the same, we drink the same, we eat the same—and everyone was like, ‘You two are so in love with each other, you two are so gay.’ And we were bored by rubbish photographers who wanted to take our picture up against a brick wall, so we thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s do something funny.’ “But we are in love with each other.” WITH CRYSTAL ANTLERS AT LA SALA |
