VIB GYOR are a deviantly unstyled, anarchic bunch of ne'er-do-bads who love music and don’t much care who knows it. Basically, they couldn’t give a shit if they lose a whole hour out of a recording session to talk to W&H. That's the kind of people they are. They completely ruined all but a couple of blurry photos by smiling and I had to switch the tape recorder off because they insisted on saying suicidally honest things in clear voices. Their only concession to normality were Zane's cute goatee and a couple of woolly grunge hats. If the style police had come in, they could easily have clocked them as ordinary students. Maniacs. I swear I heard "thanks" and "cheers" when I bought a pint of Guinness and some Sangria.
But interviewing is part of the deal, and they're getting used to it. They even tried to use some of their management's favourite words. "More Product" was a good one. Ha! drummer Jonny Hooker spoilt the effect by dribbling his beer in a fit of giggles when he said it.
"What's the process" I lisped. "It’s changing all the time" (Dave Fendick , singer and co-writer) "One of us brings in an idea and, at the moment, we put that on a click track with maybe an acoustic guitar. We play that to Jonny the drummer and he puts something on. And then we start breaking it down, taking out the acoustic guitar, putting in other layers and working on the structure and the dynamics".
"We can loop a couple of bars for maybe twenty minutes, listening for the melody or a particular resonance to hang the next bit on. It can get pretty intense, we work in a lot of detail" (Zane Keenan, multi-instrumentalist and co-writer) "He (thumbing over at Jonny Mulloy) likes to put in a lot of big, very big reverb on a clean guitar sound. It can get a bit hard to manage."
Jonny Hooker (drums) describes Zane's house where they work pretty-well constantly these days. "Playing full-on five piece band stuff can just be too loud to hear the music in there. We used to do quite long improvised things for half an hour at a time, but the sound just piles up and the subtleties go to a mush. So now we do a lot of listening to playback through headphones. Zane has everything worked out so we can get the sound quality we need to show what the music has in it. The drums are permanently mic'ed up and we just go backwards and forwards getting it right. And even the jamming gets recorded."
Asked about a dream producer they seem nearly unanimous (maybe because bass player James Heggie isn’t with us tonight) that Nigel Godrich would be the man. Sonically speaking, a bigger canvas with more space is where they would want him to take them. Which is pretty rich, given the astonishingly pro-sound of their current demo-cum-EP-cum-free download (of which more later). As a self financing, ready-to-run and scarily professional unit Vib Gyor know precisely what their heroes sound like, and they have no intention of going through the indie self-financed rat run of trebletastic live versions of under-gigged tunes in a £100 a day studio session demo scene. When they take on a label they expect to have an album full of cherries ready to pick from a big repertoire and an audience who have already bought into their full-strength emotion-rich sound. It’s the obvious thing, and it isn’t bravado. They know the score.
Apart from Jonny Mulloy (guitars and effects), the band don't listen to a lot of contemporary music. Zane speaks up for Rachmaninov and Bach. "If anything moves in Bach, it's for a reason" he mutters. There's a lot of respect for the "classic bands" who have gone beyond the haircuts and found worldwide audiences for their stuff. U2, Radiohead, even Coldplay and Red Hot Chilli Peppers get them dreaming. Franz Ferdinand (stabbing out of the pub's video screens) and the Libertines don’t move them much. They fidget around at the suggestion that they should be narrowing down their sound and building their rock identity. "Yes, Dave's voice is the Vib Gyor signature if you like," concedes Jonny Hooker, "but there's so much variation in what we do. It isn’t going to settle down. We can do a lot of styles and we want to keep changing it round." Jonny Mulloy agrees "It’s no good just doing this year's 80's thing like everybody else the record companies are wanting to buy. It won’t last. We can do much more than that."
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Asked about where their audience is, two things emerge. "It’s a worldwide thing" says Dave. "There's an audience in America for our stuff, and in China and Australia and …" he trails off, waving at the pub's burger menu (representing the global marketplace) in a grand sort of way. They're well aware that their current rule-breaking approach to their local scene makes some sense. Their web site (www.vib-gyor.com) already has two EPs of free-to-download full tracks. Zane talks enthusiastically about giving thousands of CDs away to local students. No problem, they can write loads more. "Three songs in the last three weeks", says Mulloy "The one we did today was the best we've ever done" "Yes, the last one is always the best one" concedes Hooker. They're getting a pampered and concentrated set of admirers who are listening and passing the word on. A vanguard of people who can be followed by much larger numbers when the marketing and distribution people have seen the profit in doing their bit to take it wider. They're happy to be tussling with management over a drive to write more songs and produce more condensed, shorter and more approachable songs. They could never produce anaesthetic pap – not it they tried. The mission (this week, anyway) is to condense the epic into shorter bursts. To give the world a chance to latch on. It could be explosive.
If the worldwide audience is one thing, the second thing that keeps coming back is "emotion". "I sing from what I feel" says Dave. Listen to his voice on "Church Bell", says I. "The bright side of melancholy" says Zane. And he isn’t wrong. I have three of the latest tracks on my minidisc player today and I've been in that lifted euphoria that only comes from impossibly optimistic sadness. You've heard it before, from the Blues to Stax, to Radiohead – but every generation wants double doses of it’s own version. And if you have a listen, you might find yourself emoting along like a good 'un. Start with the Bella Unionish guitar clarion of "Fallen" and go on to the epic spaces of "Long way Down". But don’t get too complacent about having sussed them out. There are three more tunes about to go up on the website – and they are guaranteed to come at you from another direction.
Vib Gyor are restless and ready. They have an open-faced sureness in saying things like "when it takes off" – not "when we get signed" or "when we get our own tour bus". "Vib Gyor is an entity" says Zane. "It has a life of its own." It's like something they’re delighted to have discovered and are privileged to be with. It hardly seems to occur to them that they've created it.
So, still with me? OK then, the story is: hugely creative band with the knack of recording slabs of this generation's emotions and giving them back in monster helpings. My guilty secret is that Leeds gets it first. And for nothing. (www.vib-gyor.com/sounds.htm) But there's no need to rush. They aren’t going away just yet.
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