Between Beauty and Chaos: In Conversation with These New Puritans

Unbound by genre and always defying the gravity of expectation, These New Puritans’ career spans across two decades and has traversed an indefinable number of sonic landscapes.

With roots in the guitar-driven indie-rock scene of the 2000s, twin brothers Jack and George Barnett have branched into avant-garde realms, opposing convention with experimentation in every project – an art of balance that has resulted in the constant evolution of their mystifying creative vision. 

Ahead of their return to Dublin with their show at The Workman’s Club on Monday November 10th, Vanessa Roulston Mooney caught up with vocalist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Jack Barnett for a discussion on crafting simplicity, embracing beauty in brutality, and the music and wider world of their latest album, Crooked Wing. 

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Vanessa: You’ve just kicked off your tour in the last few days, you’ve been around Italy, and you’re in Bologna tonight.

Jack: Yeah, we’ve been to Luxembourg, of all places, and then Rome and Milan, and then tonight – yeah, it’s Bologna.

Vanessa: A friend told me that Bologna has the nickname “La dotta, la grassa, la rosa”, which I believe means, or resembles, their ancient university, their food and the colour of their buildings. 

Jack: Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, it’s great, the venue is – we played here a few times before, actually. A poster was on the wall, actually, from years ago.

Vanessa: What year was that?

Jack: Well it was Field of Reeds so – I don’t know, 2014? Something like that. Millions of years ago.

Vanessa: Wow. Talking about time passing, I think the last time you guys played here in Dublin was in February 2008, so it’ll be your first time playing here in 17 years.

Jack: Was it really? Oh my god.

Vanessa: Yeah, it’s long overdue. The venue you played in was called Crawdaddy, and I think it’s a Pret A Manger now. A lot has changed.

Jack: Is it? Yeah, that sounds about right.

Vanessa: I wanted to start by asking you about Crooked Wing. The album has been out for six months now. Have you had any time to reflect on it in the last few months, or has it been all go?

Jack: I haven’t had a lot of time to think really. Yeah, there’s always something else to do. Like, it’s quite a DIY operation, really. I think in some ways, maybe the output doesn’t seem like it, but, you know, it’s like all hands to the pump, and there’s a lot to be done, so you don’t have too much time to reflect.

Really, just the way of being a musician these days is you have to be really self reliant. I think that actually suits us, really, we’re quite happy with that, but it just means that you have to work hard.

It’s not like, you know, I don’t know… Britpop or something. 

Vanessa: Britpop had its moment this summer again, though, didn’t it?

Jack: Oh, did it? I wasn’t paying enough attention. Yeah, I had some sort of a dim notion that was going on.

Vanessa: Probably better off missing out on some of it, to be honest.

Jack: I mean, I loved it when I was kid, you know, I loved it. I thought Oasis were great when I was about seven or whatever, when it came out. And ‘Wonderwall’. And Manchester guitars.

Vanessa: Charli XCX kind of had her moment last summer, and she offered that up to you guys on stage at Coachella. She donned it “These New Puritans summer”. 

These New Puritans Summer

Jack: Yeah, I saw that, yeah. The summer no one was waiting for.

Vanessa: Maybe less Britpop summer, maybe more These New Puritans summer is the way we need to go.

Jack: Maybe, yeah. Storm clouds gathering.

Vanessa: You were talking about the DIY approach. There were six years between Crooked Wing and Inside The Rose, and a lot has accompanied the album too. I was really drawn in by the artwork that you put out – the album art, but also the accompanying art pieces that you made as well. I was really curious to know how they came about with the record. Did they emerge alongside the music, or did some of it shape the music? 

Jack: Well, the image on the cover is something that kept coming into my head as we were working on the music, and I had no real way of communicating it, aside from painting, which I hadn’t done for years.

When I was a kid, I would paint all the time. I used to paint clowns all the time when I was really little.

At a certain point, I just stopped. I think I felt almost like I had to choose between music and art.

You know, there’s only so many hours in the day. This time around, I just had like a week to learn how to paint again, and then, like another week to do the final painting. It was really enjoyable. It was enjoyable just to get, you know, outside of music, sort of use a different part of yourself.

I also really enjoyed listening to music as I was doing it, because obviously, when you’re writing music, you can’t listen to music at the same time. 

Vanessa: What were you listening to?

Jack: I listened to some Miles Davis, some Stravinsky stuff that I love. I forget now.  It was just an image that kept coming back, and I couldn’t ignore it, so then I just thought, I’ve got to get it down.

Vanessa: I noticed that within the images, there’s repetition of horses a lot, and in the work that you created for the album playthrough at the ICA, trees repeat in that too. These were different components that kept emerging for you, then, were they?

Jack: Yeah, well, there’s this image in the song ‘Bells’. There’s a bit where it sort of says something like, ‘across the fields, across the snow, they led the horses all in a row, led them into the house of God, out of the forest, all in a row’, and just the sort of sad image of these horses being led out of the paradise into who knows what; the world of, you know… a kind of more differentiated world of gods and, I don’t know… 

Vanessa: Chaos?

Jack: Yeah, or maybe they’re coming from a kind of more perfect, chaotic world into a sort of, somehow, a kind of fallen world, almost like the Gods have left us, or something like that, and we’re just left to our own devices to figure out what to do. I don’t know, that’s pretty incoherent, but that’s kind of the fuzzy ideas that were flowing into it. 

Vanessa: It makes sense. I think from even looking at them, and from listening to Crooked Wing and your work in general, it always feels like it does resemble art of the past. I know you’ve mentioned William Blake in the past as an inspiration. I pick up on Albrecht Dürer and other artists who used to etch – sort of medieval art, or Northern Renaissance.

Jack: Yeah. Today, we went to [Giovanni Battista] Piranesi’s house in Rome. This morning – me and George just decided. Nikolai Gogol – who’s one of my favourite writers – and Piranesi, they lived on the same street at different times, and Hans Christian Andersen lived just a few doors down as well.

Vanessa: Italy kind of fits your vibe, then.

Jack: Yeah.

Vanessa: I know we mentioned chaos there. Crooked Wing feels like it meshes that chaos of the man made with the stillness of the natural world and what we have around us every day. Yet the music itself feels quite minimalist, but in a good way. There’s air for everything to breathe and connect with itself and with the world around it. Through the art, then, you’re kind of able to build into that wider world?

Jack: Yeah. To me, it’s like you’re almost carving out your own little bit of peace amongst everything. I think, to me, the music is really simple. I think the best music is simple. And I think the hardest thing is to make something that is simple.

Someone said to me, it’s complex. I mean, anyone can make something complex. That’s really easy, actually. To actually make something really, really pure and toned down, that’s a hard thing to do. That’s what I tried to do.

Vanessa: Is it a process of elimination, then, or how do you reach that point of equilibrium?

Jack: It’s like making lots and lots and lots of stuff, like generating all this material. I mean, a lot of songs in their original forms were maybe 20 minutes long, without all that much repetition. They would just be like self generating organisms, and then you have to sort of dismember them and put them back in a way that sort of gets the point across in as few elements as possible. That’s what I try to do anyway. 

Vanessa: That kind of brings in the DIY element. There’s a level of perfectionism to the work. I think it was Graham Sutton that said that it’s “a sheer rigour and sort of discipline” that you guys have as a process. I think what you said there reiterates that.

Jack: Yeah, I think it is. I remember Graham looking at my notebook where I had a diagram of a song. It had the beginning of a song. It had all of these arrows veering off to all of these possibilities of where it would go in the middle and then coming back to this definite point at the end. I think it is a bit of a weird way of working. I always think if you’re running your own race, then you’re guaranteed to win.

Vanessa: Yeah, that’s a good way of looking at it. That’s a very positive way of looking at it. On that too, you’ve mentioned notebooks and sketching out songs; I know you carry a field recorder with you – that’s how ‘Bells’ started; it was a recording of a Greek Bell. You’ve previously described field recordings as letting you put the chaos of the world into music. You bring in the natural or the historical into the present day, into a present sound.

Jack: Yeah, exactly. It’s like you get all the specificity of life, you know, like the texture of it.  You can get – especially if you’re working with computers and electronics, which I do some of – it can just become very sort of bland and like, kind of globalized and sort of anonymous sounding, whereas the actual process of recording a sound yourself – you just find out all of these strange things, and you end up going somewhere you never expected, and you’re always being surprised, you know? So I think that’s a really good thing. For me, anyway, when I’m writing music, I don’t like to be too sure of where I’m going to end up.

Vanessa: Do you have an archive built up now over the years, of little bits that you’ve picked up whenever you’ve been out? Do you ever dig into those and see if there’s anything in them for the future? Or do they just rest?

Jack: Well, I do have a very extensive archive, you know, where I’ve got hours and hours of recordings of anything you could get to name – birds, wings, waves crashing against rocks, chains being dragged underwater. I do use bits of them for, often, sound design stuff, because I think, actually, it’s like we’re saying, it’s all very specific sounding. So you get these interesting sounds out of them.

But usually it’s like – there’ll be a particular sound that we will need, and then we go and record it and figure it out, and you end up getting these peculiar sort of incredibly specific areas of knowledge – like what kind of chain makes the best sound. And it turns out, what you never want is a galvanised chain. That’s a nightmare. That’ll make a very dull sound. So you want ungalvanised, and you want a kind of medium link. Too big, and it’s a bit dull sounding. Too small and, well, it’s too small. And then somewhere in between, you know, you get all the resonance. And the other thing – the best thing we always do – if you have some kind of resonant object to sort of fight them against. So – like, buckets, actually – a bucket with the chain. So anyway, you end up doing this sort of stuff. It’s just really fun, because what you could do – or could have done – is to have gone on to, you know, samples.com and download something someone else had done, but that just seems incredibly boring to me.

Vanessa: Yeah – there’s an element of fun to it, then, like you’re going back to being a child in a way and picking up random things and throwing them about. 

Jack: Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Vanessa: I started carrying a notebook with me again this year, which I haven’t done in a really long time, to write down little bits if I’m sitting on the bus or something. Mainly to stop me from pulling out my phone, but also to keep those ideas or those moments alive. Even if you don’t realise it, you can make something more out of the fleeting, even if it could be 10 years down the line, whenever you pick up the notebook again, or open the sound file.

Jack: Definitely, it’s like one thing leads to another. We need momentum. That’s the most important thing. Like, if you just keep going, then you never know what might come around the corner.

Vanessa: Within the music, it feels like you explore landscapes. You guys are from Southend-on-Sea; Field of Reeds especially feels like it takes in that marshy, natural landscape, whereas Crooked Wing ties into the more revolutionised or man-made aspect of modern cities and towns. Is that something you’re aware of when you’re writing, or is it on a subconscious level?

Jack: It’s pretty much subconscious. But I think, like, when we started out, we imagined that we could make what we made anywhere; if we’d been from anywhere or grown up anywhere. But the more you go away, you realize, like, what that particular place we’re from is – like, how it’s fed into things, and you know, it’s, it’s a particular kind of… let’s say it’s not a picture postcard image of England, or Britain or something. And it has the marshes, and then you have the concrete and the other sort of symphony of gray – of the mud and the grey sky and the grey sea. I do love it.

Vanessa: You can sense the appreciation coming out through it. It’s like yin and yang. You seem to be able to balance the good and the bad, or the negative aspects of the world around us with the more positive.

Jack: Yeah – and one can enhance the other, can’t it? It’s like, let’s say if you see a portrait, and it’s in a gallery, like, some kind of magnificent gallery. Well, that’s one kind of thing. If you just saw it in a skip by the side of the road, you know, it becomes something else, and maybe a better experience. So I think you always need a bit of, like, grit, to keep things a bit sharp and not just smooth. 

Vanessa: It’s a good way to look at the world, too. There’s beauty in everything, really.

Jack: Definitely. I think beauty in unexpected places is, you know… you can’t beat that.

Vanessa: I wanted to touch on the live show a little bit. This is your first tour in about six years and you’re playing a range of venues. You mentioned you’ve been in Luxembourg; you’ve done a couple of festival appearances. You’ll be playing the Workman’s Club here on the 10th of November. A few weeks ago, you played a show in Sheffield at the Cathedral. That must have felt quite significant, or like it was on a different level. How was it?

Jack: It was, yeah, a real thrill. Particularly to use the organ there. It’s the first time we’ve played the music live with a church organ. And, you know, it’s just such a powerful thing. We got it sounding suitably demonic for ‘A Season in Hell’ and songs from Crooked Wing. We did the song ‘Organ Eternal’ which is a song from Field of Reeds.

With the church organ, that took on another life. It was just a blast. We had so much fun. It’s fun. It’s a bit like doing a heist or something. You go in there and you have the rough floor plan, and you know approximately what sort of sounds you want, but you’re kind of winging it a little bit. I think Otto, who plays the organ parts with us, did an incredible job at it. It sounded great. 

Vanessa: Is it a constant reinvention, then, of the sound and of the music? I mean, a cathedral is on a whole different level than, say, the Workman’s here. They’re very different rooms.

Jack: Yeah, it always is. It’s a strange band to be in, really, because it is always changing. Always, but by necessity, because there isn’t a fixed band. Me and George, it’s us. But apart from that, everything changes. So it’s not like we have a band where we’re like, ‘Okay, well, let’s go and rehearse for this tour.’ It’s like, okay, let’s construct the band, or instruments, or what’s involved this time. We got some bells, some aluminum tubular bells made for us by an inventor called Henry Daag.

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Vanessa: I saw that!

Jack: Oh, you did? Yeah, I’m looking at them right now. They’re looking absolutely… They’re such beautiful things. And yeah, Henry is a really good friend of ours, and just a really special bloke, really.

Vanessa: I was actually going to ask you about that, because you posted that on Instagram a few days ago, and they look amazing. How do you find that – having them onstage, working with a visionary like that, when he’s not actually on stage, but his craft is?

Jack: Yeah, I mean, it adds to it. Just looking now, we have the chains, we have the tubular bells…it’s a good feeling to have those instruments on stage with you. It’s like having another musician, you know. 

Vanessa: You’ve done a lot of collaboration – does that help you expand your vision a bit more? Henry Daag’s bells, the musicians you’ve shared the stage with in the past, those that you’ve had on albums with you…does it all expand that vision?

Jack: Yeah, definitely. You always have a particular idea in your head, by necessity. A lot of the time we will have very, very specific written out parts for people in the studio. But then I love the process of, like, making that come alive, and like, being animated, you know? And this little idea that you had, this little, you know, preconception, and then that being swept aside by it taking on a whole life with a musician.

And like you figure out together what works, what doesn’t. You maybe throw it completely out the window, and you find something else that’s much better. I think going off on tangents is like such an important thing.

So often the tangent is the real thing. The thing you thought was the real thing – the idea –  it isn’t at all. If you just let yourself follow the tangent, then it’ll lead you somewhere much more interesting. Maybe that’s why we take so bloody long to make these albums. Certainly, for me, I think a lot of the time, that’s a good sort of maximum to try and hold. 

Vanessa: I think it’s a good thing to always keep digging and keep exploring and keep learning, and, like you said, going off on tangents, because I think you reveal so much about yourself, to yourself, even if to nobody else. You learn a lot more sometimes by what you say.

Jack: Absolutely. I mean, you know, the danger is you might become a jazz fusion band, but you’ve got to follow up with that danger.

Vanessa: Is that the direction you’ll head for the next album then?

Jack: Who knows? Who knows. I won’t rule it out.

Vanessa: Before we finish up, I wanted to touch on the fact that, while you and George have been creating music together since you were children, you are approaching 20 years of doing it under These New Puritans. Do you have any plans to mark that?

Jack: I thought you were going to say ‘any plans to retire’! 

Yeah, we should. We should mark it. We should mark it. Yeah, I guess like 2008 was our first album, so maybe, yeah, it probably would make sense to do that. It was kind of a fuzzy start. We were just 16,17 – going up to London in our Dad’s work van, with all these building materials in the back and we’d get out covered in concrete and bits of plaster and then, you know, play gigs. So yeah, I guess we will mark it in some kind of way. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

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These New Puritans play Dublin’s The Workman’s Club on Monday November 10th, with support from Stella And The Dreaming.