The Littl'ans

NO MORE HIDING FROM SATURDAY NIGHT


London four-piece, the Littl’ans saw their indie rock star rise with an instant hit aided by the effortlessly shambolic Pete Doherty. Now after crashing back to earth they’ve picked up the pieces and once more set the controls for the heart of the sun.

We are almost huddled together in a small corner of an even smaller bar in Shoreditch, East London, the four members of the Littl’ans and I. They are telling me about their first fledgling steps which ended up catapulting them into the limelight - something, I detect, that they now almost regret. During a period when Pete Doherty was down on his luck and perhaps spending to much time cultivating inspiration rather than producing output he met Andrew Aveling, singer of the Littl’ans through a mutual friend. Aveling had recently penned a song titled ‘Their Way’, and upon hearing it Doherty remarked it was so beautiful he’d love to sing on the release.
“It’s about trying to get something done but getting affected by others,” says Andrew over sips of tea. “You try your hardest to do something your way but through the course of being influenced by others and how you think they perceive you, you end up doing it their way. Then there’s also a bit of a sub plot of there being some sort of hope amongst that.” The other band members, Ryan Blagrove (bass), Ben Clarke (vocals, drums) and Alex Mahood (guitar) agree with small nods while they nurture pints of lager.
Strangely enough the song proved to be a self fulfilling prophecy, with the band’s profile skyrocketing, though it can be said due in a large part because of the Doherty association. The beautifully gentle pop song sounded like it could easily have come from the Babyshambles stable, and was often mistakenly credited to Doherty’s pen rather than Aveling’s.
The band confirm that this lofty beginning hasn’t perhaps been the best for them, as it didn’t take too long before they realized that they were only as good as their last release, and they could only ride for so long on the wave of a Pete Doherty guest vocal. Though along the way of their support slots on two Babyshambles tours as well as headlining a major national NME tour, they were also noticed by French fashion vanguard Hedi Slimane who picked the band to soundtrack the Dior Spring/Summer 2007 catwalk show.
Andrew is frank in his admission of what happened to their too-good-to-be-true start: “The thing is if something like that happens to you, you have to be able to move on from it and unfortunately we kind of faltered a bit. You’ve just got to move on and get something else out there. We didn’t, but have learnt that, so it’s alright. We have now come a long way since then and have a load of new material. That was just the beginning.”
The band packed themselves off to New York to explore a new city, to escape the familiarity of London and pack in as many gigs as they could along the way.
Their three months in New York saw the band enjoying highs and lows with both facets providing the inspiration needed to write new songs. It was towards the end of this trip that Andrew met Josh Sampson and his friend Elliot Glass. The two would go on to respectively produce and engineer the band’s debut album Primitive World.
“We got stoned with Josh watching Seinfeld at some mad girl’s house who had too much money for her own good and was having too much coke. She put us up in midtown in this really – she went crazy in the end – nice place and we met Josh. You know when you have that conversation with people about what you’re doing somewhere because you have this different accent? So I told him I was a singer and he came to see us play and then got really serious about producing us after that.”
“The second time we went back, even though we were only there for two weeks we were recording eight hours a day,” enthuses Ben. “And it was a great environment because although we hardly knew Josh and Elliot when we started, through those two weeks of working together we got to know them and it was a really good experience for us.”
“The album does have an American feel to the recording,” states Andrew, and it’s almost an apology. “I’m not sure about it because you know The White Stripes came to England to get that sound but if they had recorded what they did in New York it would have been totally different. I mean it’s quite slick sounding, that’s how they do stuff and how they edit. So it’s a bit of a cross because we are so English sounding, so it’s that sound that’s been Americanized a bit. So it’s a bit of a strange thing for us.”
Listening to the first single ‘Is It Wrong?’ proves Aveling’s concerns are unfounded; granted there is a passing resemblance to The Strokes but that’s more indicative of the band’s sound than any mastering process. The perfect little slice of indie pop is about as good a single as you could hope for on a debut album and will appeal to anyone who wrongly thought Pete Doherty had written ‘Their Way’. Other songs on the album like ‘Here Comes The Night’ balance out the sweet introspection with a harder rock edge, but it is the lilting, emotive and sometimes melancholy songs they do best. And having learned from their mistakes the quartet are following hot on the heels on the album’s imminent release with a four track EP of all new material. Recorded on a small island in the Thames in South West London at Stakeout Studios, the EP will be about the dissatisfaction the band have felt with the music industry in England.
“I mean I do feel like we’ve been kidnapped a bit but that’s not through want of trying to get attention from our home town,” confesses Aveling. “We felt like we had to do this because London and England had sort of closed us off a bit. Sometimes I don’t even feel like we’re accepted as an indie band. I think it’s very hard to get anywhere here unless you’ve got someone working for you making up stories about you.”
Through talking to this group of young musicians one thing becomes clear; unlike many English bands who have enjoyed some degree of success they aren’t hiding behind the comfortable embrace of a savvy press agent or manager, they’re just trying to make their way playing the music that matters to them.