John Calvert from The Quietus talks to Teeth Of The Sea about sex, violence and D.I.S.C.O.
In the back-room lounge of The Old Blue Last boozer sit ¾ of London four-piece, Teeth Of The Sea. And even if this is a fellowship of intrepid futurists - the enemies of nostalgia - and even if Jimmy Martin, with his bleach blonde hair and piercings has the aqualine look of a utopian android, there is something undeniably olde worlde about these musicians.
Teeth Of The Sea are part of a lineage of transgressive London eccentrics stretching back to Wilmot (John, not Gary). As I sit listening from across the table, conversation topics range from the lewd to the ever so lovely, from Lady Bumticklers Revels to the art of fine tea-making, with the repartee intimidating in erudition and exchanged in units of supersyllabic chicanery. These are what I'd like to call gentleman beasts; the kind of men who've loitered around the undercarriage of British culture since records began; the kind of men who'd give you first dibs on the clean-up towel then maybe read you a little Byron.
No mean feat in this day and age of endless reproduction, 2010's universally acclaimed Your Mercury offered a take on psychedelia unlike any other that proceeded it - a uniquely British, uniquely anxious form of psychedelia which, in a review of the album in 2010, this writer described like so: “Epileptic, infinite and disturbance-vexed, the Londoner's second LP sooner calls to mind the altered states of mental ill-heath: the band's sublime delusions ferrying you to constructed worlds of the mind - touched, tasted and played in from the comfort of a hospital bed. In this way Your Mercury is less psychedelic so much as it is psychological. What use is a clear night sky for stargazing when the amber pollution is amplifying the voices in your head?”...
Read the full and revealing interview here: The Quietus
Drawing by Michael DeLucia
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