Ex-UK band Frankie Teardrop Dead first visited Cambodia as travellers in 2017, then came back to play music in 2018 as a four-piece and 2019 as a five-piece. Last year the band reverted to a duo and relocated from Manchester to Kampot (via Koh Rong Samloen), where they are now beginning to road test their new sound. In the midst of a series of Phnom Penh gigs (The Deck last Sunday, Back Street Bar tonight Wednesday, and Oscar’s on the Corner on Friday) arranged around a visa run, LengPleng sat down with Ben and Carling to try and figure out just what the band is all about and how to describe it.
Ben: When I first started the band this was my goal – an electro-rock/pop sort of thing. Many, many people wanted to join the project and I said, yes, let’s have a drummer, let’s have a bassist, let’s have another guitarist. We even had three guitars at one point – I’m pretty sure we’ve even had four guitars on stage. We have four albums out, and the last one, Tais-Toi, is a mixture – electro-rock with French influences (I wanted to do French songs because I’m French), also there’s a massive psychedelic rock influence as well. And in the past year we’ve been working on re-creating our sound, to go more futuristic, more dancey.
Photo: supplied
Carling: We want to be able to be more dancey on stage, rather than it just being a completely-still shoegaze show, to have a bit more of a party.
Ben: We’ve been living in Manchester for four and a half years, so we’ve got that influence as well – Happy Mondays, Joy Division, New Order, so a Madchester vibe mixed with rock’n’roll.
Carling: It’s hard to place us, to figure out what is our genre. We hear so many different comparisons, people trying to describe what we sound like. Some bands that we’ve never even heard of, where we had to go to go look them up.
Ben: “You sound like that band.”
Carling: “Who?” And then we listen to it and usually we think yeah, fair enough.
Ben: Since we got to Cambodia last year I’ve been writing lots of new stuff – I brought all my recording gear. I love being in the studio so much that I tend to delay going to play live. We could have played last year but I wanted to be more ready, because venues here in Cambodia want two hours of playing. In the UK it’s all 30 minute showcasing. We know bands there that are out touring with only four songs.
Carling: We have got around 20 songs ready, but whether we do them all live is another thing. Some are a bit slow, we want to be more upbeat.
Ben: When we played on Sunday at The Deck someone said it’s like a sound exploration, there’s so many ups and downs.
Carling: That’s kind of what we want.
Ben: Layers of music and sounds – synths, drum machines, guitar, tambourines, shakers, singing. I’m more excited about what we do now than what we used to do, because sometimes having a band can limit you. Now you can make music with so many machines, and you can give them almost soul and spirit. It has changed the game completely.
Photo: supplied
Carling: I like the build-ups and the breaks. We’ve always had problems with drummers doing too much, because a lot of the time I’m doing percussion, so if they use too much metal on the drums then what I’m doing is pointless. Sometimes at band practice we would to take all the metal off the kit, so all they’ve got are the toms.
Ben: I’ve always been in a band, but when COVID hit we were reduced to staying at home, so I was working on my own – I’m a producer, really. The last album, a mix of electro and psychedelic rock, was the first time that we found our unique sound. Before it was a blend of 60s influence, 90s Britpop influence and all that.
Carling: A lot of the time Ben’s got a clear vision of what he wants each song to sound like. We have a brand new song that we will attempt to do maybe on Wednesday, or maybe save it for Friday – Ben had all the different elements but he didn’t know the order to put it all in. So we just kept practicing and practicing it. Now we have Ben singing and me singing a reply and so on, we worked out the order together. It’s finalised for now but it could change again. It is predominantly Ben that has the melodies and the lyric ideas, but when he gets stuck or at a dead end then he’ll take advice. That’s how a lot of it works. With the old albums it would be a melody that would be the start.
Ben: I always wanted to write a perfect pop song.
Carling: That one hit wonder.
Ben: And if I was to do that it would be classified as underground straight away – no! I’ve written songs that are melody-driven, I’ve written songs that are beat-driven, which is the modern way of making music, and sometimes lyric driven. There’s a track called Hardmachine, which I think it’s the best thing I’ve even written.
Carling: I think it’s one of the best examples of the cross-over from our old sound to where it’s going now, very beat-driven, quite electronic but with a hint of the psychedelic.
Ben: Go check it out on YouTube, Spotify, Bandcamp…
Carling: We’re so rubbish at selling ourselves. I think that’s one of our problems as a band – we would try and push the promotion onto another band member because Ben and I are so bad at it. Whereas Geography of the Moon are great at it. Whenever we get asked for a press package or a blurb on the band we always get a friend to write it.
Ben: We want to thank Geography of the Moon for helping us out.
Carling: We’re not scared to slow everything down and do a slow song. We don’t anymore, but we used to end our sets with our slowest and most dramatic song, Plane Eclipse. Now we end on a party.
Ben: Plane Eclipse is really emotional – it reminds you of the rhythm of the sea. Some friends did a remix, the Kill Your Boyfriend remix, and we listened to it and said okay, how can we perform that? We rewrote it and now we perform that remix version, like covering ourselves.
Carling: There’s someone doing a remix of Hardmachine in England at the moment, maybe we’ll end up doing that as well.
Frankie Teardrop Dead play tonight, Wednesday, at Back Street Bar, and then Oscar’s on the Corner on Friday night, after Green Leaf Motif and before the Oscar Band.
