Urbane Outfitters

In just a few short weeks’ time, the much-celebrated English art punk/blues rock trio The Archie Bronson Outfit make their way to Ireland to perform at the Kilkenny Arts Festival. The urban event marks a welcome break from the studio (where the London-based renegades of sound are currently writing songs for their as yet untitled fourth record) and when we catch up with drummer Mark Cleveland, he tells Hot Press he’s excited about his first trip to the town.

“No, we’ve never been to Kilkenny,” he begins. “This will be our first visit. We’re not on tour at the moment so we’re purposely coming in the night before and we’ll have most of the day to pop around and see what’s what. It’ll be good to soak up the Kilkenny vibe, then have the show.”
Currently beavering away in a barn in Newbury working on the follow up to 2010’s highly-regarded Coconut alongside bandmates Sam Windett (vocals, guitar) and Dorian Hobday (bass, guitar) Mark also tells us that those planning to make the journey to see them will be some of the first people in the world to hear their new material.
“We’ll definitely be playing some new songs,” he informs us. “We’ll have a mixture. We’ll play the favourites, if I can call them that, and then the new songs. It should be a great gig.”
Pencilled for a release in 2013, the band begin recording this autumn and Mark exclusively reveals to us that not only are they intending on returning to their roots, but they’re also considering self-producing the up-coming slab of wax too.
“Some songs have been around for a while, some appeared last week,” begins the affable musician. “So yeah, it’s a mixture. Normally the ones that take three minutes to write are the goodies and we focus on them. I would say some of them are pretty tough and rocking and some of them are pretty mellow. I think we’ve tried to do some more ‘classic-sounding songwriting,’ with some weird and wonderful sounds on top, if that makes senses. I think the new stuff is easier to get your head round. Basically we’re trying to get back in touch with our roots.
“I’m literally just making the demo CD right now in fact that I’m going drop off to the label actually,” he continues. “We’ve been having a lot of talks about it and we’re quite keen to self-produce this one. We’ve worked with quite a few people in the past and normally the things we like the most are when we shove one mic in the room and just record straight to a cassette tape and just capture that moment. Producers can be brilliant, but I think it’s time we did our own one.”
A band that regularly figuratively (and sometimes metaphorically) spill their blood onstage every night in order to perform the best possible show, Mark informs us that the band never write new material whilst on the road and prefer to keep their attention on the job at hand - decapitation by guitar. Well, if a job’s worth doing…
“We don’t write anything on the road,” he says finally. “We’re just focused on making it to the next show and getting set up and focusing on the night. Normally there’s so much driving involved, you can’t do anything else. You know, I think it’s funny when you read that people say they write on the road. I don’t know how they do it. I sometimes write some lyrics here and there, but normally you’re so hungover and tired and you’ve eight hours ahead of you, you just lock in and get on with it. So yeah, watch out Kilkenny!”

The Archie Bronson Outfit play the Set Theatre (August 12) as part of the Kilkenny Arts festival (10 to 19).