Leaving Certs

The Departure are four terse young men from backwater England who demand to be adored. Brash and superior, they carry themselves like stars in waiting. You shudder to imagine what they’d be like if they ever sell a million records.

Their music is rather more charming, a cathartic new-wave paean couched in melody and steeped in darkness. Arriving late to the ‘80s revival, they compensate with songs that, for all their suspicious familiarity, transmit an irresistibly steely vision. Of course they deny there is anything of the ‘80s about them. Rather, they claim to be inheritors of the Brit pop legacy – a point that frontman David Jones emphasises by arriving for our interview dressed as Jarvis Cocker.
“All this ‘80s stuff keeps cropping up in our press, but to be honest we’ve never heard half of the bands we were supposed to be inspired by,” he says, waving dismissively. “Brit pop is the basis of my musical education. I grew on groups such as Blur and Pulp. They were my first meaningful musical experiences. I do like some ‘80s bands. But I don’t see them as a massive influence.”
Jones, skinny and aloof, reminds you of a young Woody Allen, if he’d come from Camden instead of Manhattan. The singer, like the rest the band in his early 20s and Northampton-born, was raised in a religious commune until a teenager. For the entirety of his childhood, popular culture was something other people experienced (“we weren’t allowed television or radio or even newspapers – I suppose it was strange, though at the time it seemed completely normal.”).
He remained closed off from the world until he was 14, when the full weight of modernity struck him with the force of a freight train.
“I got the whole thing in one dose. I discovered film, TV and music all at once. Initially, it came as quite a shock. That’s a lot for a kid to have to take in.”
The outsider sensibility remains with him, leeching into the songs of The Departure. On their stark, sinuous debut, Dirty Words, clanging synths conjure up a chilling detachment, howling riffs suggest industrial equipment malfunctioning. The result is a record evocative of a specific time and place – (Joy Division producer Martin Hannett’s studio, February 1981).
“Okay, that whole ‘us against the world’ thing is such a cliché," Jones concedes. "But we do feel we’ve got something to prove. Ever since we were signed, we’ve had people writing us off as just another band with a retro sound. We know we’re better than that and we’re going to prove it.”
Though disinclined to be lumped in with the neo-‘80s scene, The Departure ultimately cannot mask their passion for the grimy angst of post-punk. As our conversation ebbs to a close, Jones, finally, is out of the closet.
“There was a lot of glib, knowing music in the ‘90s – bands were very tongue in cheek. The ‘80s was totally the opposite of that. Everyone was extremely serious and intense. It doesn’t surprise me at all that musicians should be attracted to that.”

Dirty Words is out now on Parlaphone.