Breton: a breath of fresh airiness

The arty British band decamped to Iceland to work on their debut album, Ed Power reports

BRETON’S reputation precedes them. One of the year’s most buzzed about new bands, the English quintet started out writing psychedelic, highly impenetrable movie scores. They graduated to performing at squat parties and warehouse raves in London. Now they live in a disused bank vault and have been known to appear on stage in hooded cowls.

One expects them to be a group of arty, pretentious young men. So it’s a surprise when frontman Roman Rappak bounds down the stairs from his dressing room at Dublin’s Academy venue. In jeans and hoodie, he is alarmingly normal and surprisingly chatty. !

On record, if not in person, the group’s reputation for weirdness remains foolproof. Breton have just released their debut album, Other People’s Problems. It is a mix of avant-garde guitars and industrial beats. Reviews have been ecstatic. This amuses Rappak, who never set out to be a pop star.

“We were at art school, looking for a way to attract audiences to our movies,” he says. “So we’d book these tiny venues — the backs of pubs really — and do two songs. After that we’d put on our films and play background music. That’s how it started.”

Breton were soon in demand as musicians rather than film-makers. They built a reputation as the most exciting band on the London squat circuit. Record company interest followed. Several majors sniffed around. Wiser than their years, Breton were suspicious of the promises.

“They say things like, ‘you’ll sell so many thousand copies of your single, so many thousand of your album’. It’s all numbers. The problem is that the clock is constantly ticking. You owe them money for all the studio time. Then your record doesn’t sell and you’re dropped. Suddenly, you’re a band everyone used to be talking about. A band for whom things didn’t work out.”

Rather than taking the conventional route, Breton played hard to get. Major label solicitations were politely turned down. They signed to Fat-Cat, a well-respected independent that lacks the marketing muscle of a major. Which suits Rappak and company fine. “We prefer taking things at our own pace,” he says. “We like the fact we are not being shoved in people’s faces.”

Breton have portentously christened their disused bank home ‘BretonLABs.’. The space is draughty and lacks a functioning toilet. It isn’t all grim, though. “You can get up in the morning and work on a movie, or rehearse a song or do your art,” says Rappak. “That’s hugely liberating. In London rehearsal spaces are very expensive. You need a record label sugar daddy paying the bills. Otherwise you are only going to have limited time together. And that restricts your ability to grow.”

Such freedom comes at a price. The neighbourhood where the bank stands isn’t the smartest, says the singer. “East London is where all the hipsters hang out. Where we are is very different. It’s not always alright to walk around. If a hipster tried to cycle about on a chopper bike, they’d probably be beaten up.”

The London riots kicked off around the corner, at Elephant and Castle.

“You won’t believe it but it was going on while I was recording a song,” Rappak remembers. “You had all these sirens blaring. When I listened back to the track, you could hear the police cars in the background. The really strange bit is they were incredibly cheesy. Here was a real-life event, actual ‘field music’ from modern London. And it sounded like something from a naff hip-hop record.”

Lacking heating or ventilation, as winter set in things got a bit bleak in the Lab. So their manager suggested Breton go somewhere sunnier — Iceland. “It was nearly 24 hours daylight over there at the time,” says Rappak. “It was full of nature and about as far away from a grim spot in London as you could get. The studio we went to belongs to the band Sigur Ros. They’d left all of their equipment. We were able to use it. Iceland had a huge influence on the finished record. If we’d done the entire LP in the UK I suspect it might sound like the work of a group of men in their 20s who sounded vaguely fed-up.”

With Breton taking off, are Rappak’s ambitions as a film-maker on the back-burner? He shrugs. “I don’t look at things that way. Everything I do has been about expressing a certain emotion. I feel like a documentary maker. I capture these feelings and try to make sense of them afterwards. I haven’t completely succeeded. It’s all part of that learning process.”

Breton are clearly determined to do things their own way. Still, there are hoops through which every young group is expected to jump. Last month, for instance, Rappak and company made the traditional indie band pilgrimage to the South By South West music festival in Austin, Texas. “One of the clichés about it is that you always fall out with your band-mates because you play so many gigs in such a short period of time. Well, that’s true in one respect — we got off an eight-hour flight and had to drive straight to a gig.”

Facilities at the venue weren’t exactly state of the art. “We’ve been getting quite big in France. We recently performed to 2,000 people. It was a nice space and everything was arranged how we would have wanted.... I wouldn’t say we were getting used to that kind of treatment but it was nice. Then you go to South By South West and you’re playing in the middle of the day and you’ve got 18 minutes to get your gear together. It’s radically different. You have to strip things down.”

With thousands of musicians flocking to Austin, SXSW is a smell-the-coffee-moment for those under the misapprehension they’ve already made it. “It’s humbling,” Rappak says. “Because it’s your band, obviously it is on your mind all the time. It can be easy to think the rest of the world believes you’re as important as you do. Then you go somewhere like South By South West and it dawns on you that, actually, you’re not that big a deal and have a long way to go. A wake-up call like that is extremely useful.”

* Other People’s Problems has just been released.