Wild Palms
Location: London
Websites:
Bio: For Wild Palms, mutability has been their closest ally. Through the curmudgeonly stomp of Helen’s Exile, the track that first got them noticed as their ... (more)
previous incarnation, Ex Lion Tamers, to the stuttering growl of their 2009 debut Over Time and the melancholic washes of this year’s Deep Dive, they’ve defined themselves as an act that refuse to stand still.
Wild Palms’ journey begins when Hill – then a teenage garage MC occasionally performing “at this horrible basement in Tottenham” – was handed a beer one night after school by Gareth Jones. “I started hanging around with him and he played me Joy Division,” remembers Hill, “from the bass lines and the drums I could see a connection with garage.” The pair fell in with a small-ish group of like-minded music fans in Southgate, North London, including demon drummer James Parish. Bands were formed, disbanded, but nothing permanent ever seemed to gel.
Enter Darrel Hawkins, a Chatham resident enthused by the visceral amateurism of local hero Billy Childish. Neglecting an art degree to play guitar obsessively, Hawkins began amassing a self-taught arsenal of dazzlingly inventive sounds and techniques. “What I learnt at university was that you can pick up paints, you don’t need to know anything technical about painting but you can build your own language from it, adapt it and do what you want to do with it,” says Hawkins, “and that’s what I did with the guitar.”
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