Poetic, morbid beauty by way of the glockenspiel and musical saw. Yes, we’re serious.

Orphans and Vandals are a Velvet Underground-ish set of folk musicians who use both a violinist and a viola player in their lineup. Right now we’re in conversation with their lead vocalist and drummer, and they seem to do things a little differently.

“I’m just not into any current bands, really,” says singer/songwriter Al Joshua. Gabi Woo, the drummer, agrees: “Yeah, there’s nothing new at the moment. No one is doing anything groundbreaking right now.”

“Certainly nothing that I can relate to.” Adds Joshua.
Woo: “Except we’ve got a mate called Florian, he’s really good.” (She means F. Lunaire, who used to play keys for Kid Harpoon. As you might have gathered, their conversation is a bit like their music; not entirely explicable on the first go-around.) 

Woo brushes off the generally patronising reception she gets from males at sound checks and during set ups, when she’s sitting behind her drum kit. A small crowd once formed but she just laughs it off; they soon shut up as she started playing. “I’ve always done music but I only started drums about four years ago,” she says. “I did classical training on the piano but would never want to go up on stage, it just freaked me out!”

The group is a bit of a ragtag bunch. They’ve all been in other bands before. With Orphans and Vandals, Joshua and bassist Raven (of the five members, only Joshua uses his real name – even Woo is a stage name, and their label is cagey about their real ones) hooked up first, and after a gruelling several months of auditioning found members Quinta, Francesca and Woo. “It took about eight months of auditions to form the band,” says Joshua, “because we had to get exactly the right people. Gabi seemed to smile a lot when she came in.”

“I was in another band,” explains Woo, “and we’d split up so I was meeting up with other bands but either didn’t like them as people or their music was shit and I was really thinking it’s just not going to happen. But when I met Raven it was just instant.”

“We were talking the other day and everybody said that when they first met me I seemed incredibly shifty.” Laughs Joshua. He puts it down to his having been under the weather at the time, though he says for him there really wasn’t another option for a career path.

Orphans and Vandals have just released debut album I Am Alive And You Are Dead, to pretty decent reviews. The album is part spoken-word and part sung vocals, and is incredibly graphic and haunting. They’ve even got an endorsement from BBC6’s Tom Robinson. To quote: “they are the single most exciting band I’ve encountered in a long time.” Which is, you know, good. They just did another live recording for Robinson’s show, and are set to play his stage at the Wychwood Festival in June. Playing with him in Belgium was probably one of their best moments, says Woo, even if there was the time when a punter yelled ‘I want to lick your face’. How flattering.

Back to the album. “We didn’t even know we were recording an album when we started,” explains Joshua. “It was just in a living room, and all live demos initially with drums and equipment set up, and the whole album was recorded like that. It wasn’t that big a space at all!”

Woo interjects. “Amps in the toilets to fit everything in and then just, bang, everyone playing at the same time.”
“We just did that whenever we had the chance for everyone to be playing together and about a year later we had an album,” adds Joshua. “It’s all based on intuition, I wouldn’t have done the recording any differently had I known it was going to be an album except that I would have done everything quicker. It’s really important to me that we record everything live, together where everyone can see other all singing at the same time.”

Joshua is convinced that when someone listens to the album, they hear what he calls a snapshot of Orphans and Vandals playing that day (you can even hear cars passing on the street if you listen closely enough) and hence, what someone would see on stage is likely to be very different, with altered lyrics and arrangements. This makes them an exciting prospect live, as when they played Nick Knight’s SHOWStudio@Abbey Road - where the free food was great, apparently. As was getting to play the legendary building, even though Joshua didn’t actually know who Nick Knight was. And possibly still doesn’t.

They don’t like to get too hung up on routine or set lists, feeling it’s much more important to play whatever the occasion requires. When the band played Koko a little while ago, say Joshua and Woo, they were discussing what to start the set with and decided that, since the band was probably going to get a cold reception anyway, why not start with the ultra mad track ‘Mysterious Skin’? They did. To boos halfway through. Bizarrely, they say it was “kind of fun, the highlight for us, or rather more of a breakthrough was to get to the point as a band where you can play so intuitively together. Where nothing has to be the same.”

Er, what? They started booing you…and that’s a good thing? He explains – sort of: “A lot of musicians find themselves in the situation where if something goes wrong on stage during a song they’re completely lost but I very rarely feel like I’m imitating music on stage or that we’re repeating ourselves.”

“I never know what will be our next song!” says Woo. “Some nights we draw up a set list maybe half an hour before but sometimes we won’t bother. You have to know how to read it for each gig.”

She goes on to say that the songs the group is currently working on will be recorded the same way as before – so expect cars, taps turning on and off and no doubt the odd truck rolling past. “You need to be instinctive, letting in outside forces you know sometimes can be awful. Sometimes songs really collapse. But maybe one time out of ten, something really special happens and I’d rather do nine crap things with something that is really special than to just always be OK.”