I suppose, with so much new music constantly being released, being late to discover a band can happen. Though, the two decades since this album’s release might be starting to be unfashionably late to the party. However, when it comes to discovering hidden gems that deserve wider attention, as is the raison d’être of Unspun Heroes, time doesn’t really matter. It’s much more about that moment where you hear something and want to share it with the world. This was the case the first time I heard an album that came out in 2003.
Ten Songs by Assistant.
Almost exactly 21 years ago, a young band from Brighton put out their first album. And while the name may not win awards for inventiveness, they made music that would have broken through had it been recorded 10-15 years previously. In 2003, the world was listening to indie rock, with Muse, The White Stripes, Radiohead and their ilk, as well as the likes of Jay-Z and Outkast. It wasn’t listening to jangly indie pop that draws influences from Stereolab, Felt, and Galaxie 500. Certainly not en masse.
A real shame, for us and for Assistant.
Fast forward to 2024, however, and things are about to change (as you’ll see).
I heard of the band only a few months ago, via social media. I’d seen a Tweet about jangly pop and, because listening to lots of music is good to do, particularly when it’s new to you, I gave their debut LP a spin on Bandcamp. Now, I am a fan of the writer, John Wyndham, so the opening song has the right title for me. However, it was the second track, Freaks, that absolutely caught my ear. That catchy bass hook! The noisy guitar that comes to the front of the mix! The vocalist who doesn’t try too hard to ‘sing’ the song. It felt like I was in the best years of my youth rather than the later years of middle age. It’s right up my rue, as they say en France.
Yes, it’s jangly indie, but it has an edge to it that, to my mind, puts it in that sort of early nineties musical neighbourhood. There’s that DIY element to the songs, which gives them a real personality that polished production might rub away. No-one need ever know, is a straight up pop hit, despite its rather downcast lyrics. In fact, all the songs have that sort of pop feel to them, like a lot of songs by The Smiths always did. And while I don’t think there is any more of a comparison here, the songwriting definitely feels like it owes a tip of the hat to Stephen Morrissey, as well as Damon Albarn, and Crispin Hunt.
The album has many surprises hidden in plain sight. I’ve already mentioned the bass hooks that are given a lot of room to shine on every track, as they should be. But I wasn’t prepared for the boogie-woogie piano riff halfway through Bomber, for example, yet it feels like the song simply wouldn’t work without it. Because of that, this has quickly become one of my favourite tracks.
Across Ten Songs, you’re left with the feeling you’ve heard a band’s sound mature across an album rather than a career. As the album winds into its closing numbers, so the vibe becomes much more chilled. This definitely gives you an idea of where the band ultimately headed, especially with songs they recorded in 2020. You’ll get more introspective jangle pop on closing song, Reasoned,than edgy indie, although Get Away has that Hot Hot Heat vibe, and Losing My Mind soundslike it’s been made in some NYC-Manchester hybrid rather than a British seaside resort.
Brighton has always delivered musically. The scene in the city of Brighton and Hove is hot right now – my (current and ever-changing) picks are Porridge Radio, Opus Kink, KEG, DITZ and Dream Wife, but let’s not forget Blood Red Shoes, Electrelane, 14 Iced Bears… (Oh, the list is too long I’ll have to make a playlist.) Whatever. The point is, I think Assistant deserves a spot on that list.
Ten Songs is the perfect place to start.
The following has been written by Jonathan, the vocalist for Assistant. We met in a Brighton coffee shop to chat about life, music, the late 90s… and about how life can change when you let go of the things that might have once held you back.
23 years ago, I appealed, via a Brighton forum on a distant version of the internet, for people “with no musical talent”. I had just moved to Brighton and wanted to form a band. I had written a song, so it seemed like a good idea. My Assistant bandmates, Pete and Anne-Sophie both replied and, for the last twenty-odd years, whenever life has allowed us, we’ve written songs together or with each other in mind – more recently taking it in turns to share the load, iron the songs out, record them, embellish and improve them.
From time to time I write in Brighton, scrabbling at my guitar while my toddlers busy themselves around my feet. Over in Oxford, Pete writes songs daily, and for Pete they flow out steadily, a kind of diary-keeping. He keeps most for himself and will occasionally say ‘this is for Assistant’, and once he’s done that a few times the odd alchemy of making a collection of songs begins, with left-field ambushes from Anne-Sophie, who chips in with her own surprising, inscrutable demos.
As our songs come together, we begin to swap ideas for album titles, sleeve designs, concepts. Pete’s songs are pure of expression. My songs come less easily and are generally autobiography which is then clothed in a disguise of vagueness. I’m not always sure I know what I want my songs to be doing, so they often exist in many variations for months and even years, until I find a variant that I’m happy with. Pete is decisive and sure of touch. I am much less so, my clumsy fingers conjuring many flimsy takes, so Pete will often send me emails with subject lines like ‘new album?’, wondering if we’re done.
However, I like to sit on the songs for so long that I almost forget where they come from. I forget how to play them. And then I start to reassemble them, swapping stuff out, changing something here, there. Eventually, at some point, they are finished. But since we reformed properly, in 2020, we have tended towards doing almost nothing with our songs at this point. They go up on Bandcamp, very quietly, where they sit undiscovered. Once I sent an email to the host of my favourite radio show – Josh Meadows – who cheerfully played us four times. I learned absolutely nothing from this. Months passed.
Since 2020 we have made three albums this way; collated by post, assembled slowly. The songs have become increasingly personal and important to us. And I think of each of these Assistant albums (one is unreleased) as finished, whole, totally real. Our own art. But it’s not often I will mention them to anyone. A few friends know and are supportive – but they are not really fans of the music. So the songs just sit there.
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Perhaps we are an imaginary band? I like to think of us that way. I can see us low-down on the bill supporting Felt or The Servants in a London Polytechnic in 1987. Or we might have squeezed a song onto a compilation album alongside an early Electric Soft Parade demo or a Young Knives b-side. We played some really great gigs in Brighton and London in the early 2000s, in fact, but we were quite drunk and they’re harder to remember than I’d like.
At Christmas this year, I suddenly thought: “I’ll tell everyone about our band”. So I created a Twitter account and began sharing songs that we’d written alongside some little reviews of records I liked and videos from YouTube. This is where things started getting a bit weird. With remarkable speed, people began listening! Not only did they listen, but they told me they liked the songs, and even began referencing back my very favourite artists too. My imaginary band was flickering into life, and it made me very happy.
Pete and Anne-So were completely disbelieving. “Who are these people????” Anne-Sophie would say. “We are becoming a cult band”.
We are probably still way too small to be a cult band, but then… but then I am suddenly filled with a giddy conviction that we are indeed going to become a cult band. “We’re the new Blue Orchids”, I tell myself, as I click on our Bandcamp stats to see that, somehow, we got 30,40,60, even 100 plays that day. It is not much, really, but it is really really really exciting. I squint and try to imagine our audience.
The lesson, I suspect, is that lots of people out there really love pop music, and feel the same way about it as I do – they chase that delightful moment of discovery, that instance of recognition when you hear a song and think “oh, I get what they’re trying to do here”. As a few people tune in, I’m getting that mirrored back to me after years of celebrating the weird little songs that crept into my life. Music is so great – the rush which heralds the discovery of a great new song is a feeling almost completely unchanged from all the way back then – back when I was sat in my bedroom in 1994 staring at a wall of Blur posters. A new song to love is like receiving a kiss.
And I discover, too, that some people are just incredibly nice. They will be insanely generous with their time and energy, going out of their way to share the things you share, to recommend you, even get you played on the radio. People have gone out of their way, which I did not expect at all. This small thing which is happening to Assistant is so wildly great and totally unexpected, so tremendously nice. And in the meantime, all of a sudden, I am discovering wonderful bands left right and centre, and exchanging messages with them as if I too am in a band – a real one, not an imaginary one. It’s flipping great.
The work of art you make has so much more value than you think it does, especially if it is made with love. I think in retrospect it’s probably for the best that I am not (or was not) ambitious about having an audience, as it has allowed me to enjoy making art without needing to improve, or break out, or face the horror of criticism, either. But now I am telling people, and will do so until they tell me to stop.
If you make stuff, I really, really recommend telling people about your art, even if, like me, you have to do it through a veil of very British irony and embarrassment. You deserve the thrill of having your work noticed. I wish I had done it earlier.
UPDATE: Since this piece was written Assistant have signed a record deal and are releasing their two most recent LPs through Subjangle on the 21st April.
