White Rose Movement
- Location: London,
- Websites:
- Bio: A restaurant with submarine décor, waitresses dressed as sailors, flights near destined for death with the foreboding stink of fuel and vodka; rich oligarchs in their fat, shiny cars ... (more)
- Bio: A restaurant with submarine décor, waitresses dressed as sailors, flights near destined for death with the foreboding stink of fuel and vodka; rich oligarchs in their fat, shiny cars, we were driven around the cities like Bratva compatriots’ White Rose Movement reminisce about their recent visit to Russia. In 2008, the band: Finn Vine (vocals/guitar) Jasper Milton (guitar) Owen Dyke (bass) Ed Harper (drums) Poppy Corby-Tuech (keys) made their foray into Eastern Europe territory with gigs in Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Ukraine where they headlined a festival in front of 33,000 people. Despite the fact that their first album was never released outside the UK, with the help the internet, WRM have amassed a huge fan base and toured extensively through out the world. Their USA tours have included gigs at Coachella, South X South West and the Bowery Ballroom, selling out the NY club before they had even arrived in the States. Tours have also led them through most of Europe, including France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belgium and recent visits to Eastern Europe and South Korea have marked WRM as standard bearers, bridging new frontiers for others to follow.
Their debut album ‘KICK’, produced by Paul Epworth, and its defining single ‘Love is a Number’, hailed by many as the soundtrack of the year (including Conor McNicholas editor of the NME and Kele from Bloc Party who described it as ‘the song I wished I’d written’) - an eclectic fusion of electronics and bass driven guitars, divided the critics, both impressing and confusing them. The band presented a visual standard and revelled in the flak it brought them. “People treat you like you’re selling cheap sex when you make a song like ‘Love is A Number’… they can’t handle it when its loaded. They get a style morality when something’s not chaste.” (Finn)
WRM’s unique sound has earned them support acts with NIN (Australia), Placebo, Bloc Party, The Strokes, Gary Numan, Soulwax, The Kills, and in 2007 they last played London at their own self-styled ‘Dazzle Club’, followed by DJ sets from The Kills and Jesus and Mary Chain. Since then, WRM have been buried deep in recording a second album. As work began they said farewell to Taxxi (keys) and embraced Poppy into the fold, a distant relative of Finn’s, whose presence has provided the final unifying link for the band, all brought together by friendship or family connections.
Having landed a publishing deal with Domino, the band return with an as yet untitled, self financed second album, scheduled for an early 2010 release. After nearly driving two producers to mental illness and early alopecia, the band finally clicked with teutonic studio stoic Robert Harder (of Whitey and Acoustic Lady Land production) and along with mixes from Alan Moulder have created an army of tracks, flipping between the lascivious castrato of ‘Bones’ (conjuring ‘emotional rescue’ era Rolling Stones) to ‘Cigarette Machine’, in which only WRM could have the audacity to cross Neu and Generation X in a song that sounds like heartbroken Americana at 4 a.m. As with their first album ‘Kick’ you can still detect the band’s love of Depeche Mode, but along with the marching burrundi and crooning of ‘Fever’ to the industrial art- raga ballad ‘Advent’, diversity and resourcefulness still seem central to WRM’s satisfaction.
“We closed ourselves off, to gestate and make something stronger and more concise… Something with more heart”. Once again it would be an uneasy and irrelevant task to try and place WRM in a pigeonhole that wasn’t grafted implicitly to their own gilded design. (less)
