In my conversation with Dan Haggis of The Wombats for The Art of Longevity, I didn’t want to be the one to bring up the phrase landfill indie but I didn’t have to. Dan didn’t hesitate. After all, they’ve got passed all that to become one of the UK’s biggest indie-pop bands. How did they do that?
When I was reading through the reviews for The Wombats’ latest album Fix Yourself, Not the World, it was The Guardian’s Alexi Petridis who put it best:
“Scroll down the Wombats’ Spotify page and you come to the section headed “Fans also like”. It features a selection of their mid-00s contemporaries, fellow strivers in the league of what was cruelly dubbed “landfill indie”: the Pigeon Detectives, the Kooks, the Enemy, Scouting for Girls”.
In my conversation with Dan Haggis of The Wombats for The Art of Longevity, I didn’t want to be the one to bring up the phrase landfill indie but I didn’t have to. Dan didn’t hesitate:
“It’s weird how we get lumped in with this negative term that was invented by journalists, indie landfill. How did we crawl out of the trashcan of the mid-noughties?”
Indeed, taking it to extremes, the band has had vague intentions to hold the world’s first (as far as we know) ‘Landfill Festival’, an event in which the UK’s music critics have free gratis tickets in the golden circle, close enough to see the whites of the eyes of the three members of the headlining band. This so that Dan, frontman Murph and bassist Tord can give the press strong “we told you so” looks, for the festival would sprawl way beyond the boundaries of any landfill site, such is their popularity.
The Wombats have defied all UK press scepticism (and cynicism) to become one of the country’s biggest indie pop bands. Big streaming audiences, huge social media followings and a multi-generational fanbase now pretty much guarantee the Wombats will hit no. 1 on the album charts (as ‘Fix Yourself’ proved) secure headline festival slots and sell out shows and tours, not just at home but even in the USA.
Having come to know and admire the band’s songcraft on their previous record Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life In 2018, I’m fascinated by The Wombats’ story. How did the band defy the critics and cultural trends (indie has hardly been in cultural favour for the past 20 years) to become every young bands dream: independent, popular, commercially successful and on a seemingly unstoppable creative roll?
The answer is multi-faceted of course. The band is a close knit, collaborative unit of multi-instrumentalists, all trained in music and sound production at Liverpool’s LIPA. They have ridden a wave of ‘pop as the new indie’, adjusting their sound to be something way beyond their early post-punk/grunge guitars of the early 2000s. At the core of their success are those songs - catchy, bouncy, poppy earworms - some of which have topped 100 million streams.
Crucially however, “pulling the rug” from under those songs (in Dan’s words) is also part of The Wombats songcraft. What he refers to is the clever use of bridges, middle eights or sudden shifts in tone that can make the difference between a predictable pop song by numbers to something a little bit weirder. Murph’s lyrics have morphed into confessional memes (appealing to a very modern sentiment, for example check out those song titles on Fix Yourself) while the band’s production skills (aided by Dan Crew along with celebrity touches from Jacknife Lee) indicate how The Wombats have learned every trick in the book when it comes to constructing the modern pop song.
Not only that, but the band seems to have followed every secret of longevity so far uncovered by this podcast. They have a secret code or pact (to ward off Sinbad in times of doubt), create in a vacuum but understand how the market works, listen to each other, meld their influences into a sound uniquely theirs. One could almost say they are calculated, but somehow all this is done with the most genuine desire to just keep on getting better.
Murph has claimed that The Wombats “were the first band to get dropped by a major label and then get bigger” but in actual fact, they join the club of bands who went through exactly the same thing (on this podcast alone, that includes Spoon, Laura Viers, Los Lobos, Gary Numan, Turin Brakes, Suzanne Vega and others). Once again big music, revenge is with the artist!
When Murph sat down with Sir Paul McCartney at one session at LIPA in the band’s earlier days, the great man and coolest musician to walk the earth told them that their best work was always ahead of them. Another secret to longevity revealed courtesy Macca, we patiently and keenly await a masterpiece from the most unlikely of underdogs: The Wombats.
The Art of Longevity is produced by Audio Culture in partnership with Project Melody. Original music is by Andrew James Johnson.
Follow The Wombats on Instagram.