Morning!
What a lovely Monday it is, probably the best Monday since last Monday because last Monday was a bank holiday but also there was no edition of The New Cue last Monday so this one just edges it.
Before we get started on today’s edition, we’re happy to announce our third New Cue event at The Social, on Little Portland Street in London’s West End: a screening of the KLF documentary Who Killed The KLF on Friday May 20th. There’ll also be an onstage Q&A with director Chris Atkins about the film - and it’s quite the story, as Chris was given a lengthy prison sentence for a tax fraud associated with funding the film. We’re also very excited to be giving away FREE KLF PONCHOS to the first fifty ticket-holder. Get your tickets here.
Today we’ve got a chat with Sunflower Bean’s Julia Cumming about the band’s excellent new record, adding a bit of an exotic edge to TNC by nattering away as she was having a dander round Manhattan. See, you don’t need to go on holiday! You’ve got everything you need right here.
Today is a free edition, as is every Monday, but if you want the full TNC package (nothing saucy, just full access to our Wednesday and Friday editions plus the whole archive), then click Subscribe Now. It costs £5 a month and you won’t regret it and if you do hopefully your email goes into spam.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Julia Cumming
On Friday, Sunflower Bean released their brilliant new record Headful Of Sugar. It’s the New York trio’s third and transplants the melodic, tightly-wound indie-rock of their earlier work onto a widescreen pop production, sonically dynamic and big-sounding but intricate at the same time, their hooks sharper than ever.
In the swooping Who Put You Up To This?, it also contains the best opening track to an album all year. Please don’t write in, it’s a fact. Niall spoke to vocalist and bassist Julia Cumming about the record’s creation over the phone as Julia was having a stroll around her NYC neighbourhood.
Hello, is that Julia?
Yeah, can you hear me?
I can. Where are you at the moment?
I like to do calls while I’m walking sometimes. It’s starting to get nice out so I’m trying to enjoy the outside world a little bit.
That’s nice. Where’s your stroll going to take you today, or are you making it up as you go?
I’m kind of making it up, walking in a little bit of a circle. I live in the area that I grew up in, which is Alphabet City-slash-East Village. I’m gonna see where the conversation takes us and then I’ll see where the feet take us.
Is there many of the old residents round that way or are you one of the few remaining from when you were a kid?
I mean, I went to public school here and I grew up with a lot of very real New Yorkers that were just surviving. I think a lot of diehards stay but a lot of them leave, although I don’t know where you would go from here, you know what I mean?
That it can’t be improved for you?
I would love to spend more time in London, I would love to spend a little more time in California, but when it comes to an exciting city, New York has it all.
How much has it changed since you were a kid?
Oh, completely. I mean, it’s so cliché to talk about how cities change, because we always want it to be like we knew it and we loved it. But, like London and any of these cities and development cycles, I think that it has obviously become it’s definitely more of a corporate playground and place for rich kids to take videos for TikTok about the restaurants they go to and things like that. But there’s still a lot to do and there’s still cool things, you just have to seek it out and you have to fight for it and be a purveyor of those cool things and try to make more of them happen because it’s worth it.
My situation is that the apartment I live in is actually the one I grew up in because it’s rent stabilised, so my family doesn’t live there but we all fought to keep it in the family because they moved in there in 1989. I think in New York and London, to live in these cities, you’re either rich or you’re scheming, scrambling to stay on an old deal. For me, it’s a little bit of necessity. For most of Sunflower Bean’s career, we’ve been touring so it’s not like I really lived anywhere, this is just where my things were. Now that we’ve been few years into a pandemic, I definitely live here.
As a songwriter, do you still find New York a creatively inspiring place?
I do. One of my favourite activities is listening to music and walking around New York City with nowhere to go and no one to talk to and just think and walk and listen. That is in my top three things to do in general. I think I’m very inspired by the city like that. New York is the kind of city that you have a private relationship with, that only you two know about. It’s like a cruel family member that kicks you when you’re down but lifts you up when you really need it and there’s always people around too. A New Yorker will always look out for another New Yorker, we try to pretend like we don’t but New Yorkers are really caring and all of that means a lot to me.
The fact that there has been the so many crackdowns over the years of independent venues and there has been such an attempt to squash the real energy coming from this place, I do think that’s very uninspiring. I think that there’s a lack of support within the community because everyone is so desperate to make something happen that they find it hard to be happy for each other. There’s not a lot of community. It’s more kind of like finger pointing and bitching. But that’s fine!
Often, New York bands arrive as part of a wave of exciting new groups but from the outside Sunflower Bean seem like a bit of a lone wolf. Does it feel like that from the inside?
Yeah, we’ve always been doing our own thing. What’s cool about that is that every person who likes us, they really found us, it’s very brick by brick, and that can’t really be disassembled by a fad or a trend. Because we’ve been in our own space, it’s been a different way into people’s musical psyche. I’m really grateful for that. We come out of DIY, we’re very used to going in and out of venues and really playing for each person in the room and trying to get them on our side. I think all of that reflects into our career.
The new record is great, very sonically lush.
Thanks, I appreciate that! I really feel like the record is meant to have this mixtape-slash-playlist quality that you would make for a friend that you give them and you want to hear which ones they respond to because sonically it’s meant to hit a lot of different parts of your brain. I’ve always been really obsessed with one-hit wonders and earworm-type songs, where you like them in a way that almost annoys you because you’re like, ‘Why do I like this?!’. I feel like that particular feeling was something I was chasing on this record, we wanted it to be a surprising and fun experience from a dark time, we wanted it to be something that felt like very live, real and tangible.
What did you find yourself writing about?
Oh, man, well that was kind of the craziest part because the idea of the record was our lifeline. We were meeting up almost every day to like write songs and none of the labels knew when anything was coming out, nobody knew what to do, nobody had any ideas, you couldn’t travel, you couldn’t work with anyone, you couldn’t do shit. So we would just sit in the room all day, looking at each other saying, ‘Well, what are we gonna say today?’ And sometimes some very weird stuff came out, sometimes some very cool and good stuff came out. There’s about 80 songs that the world has not heard.
Wow, you were busy then.
Yeah, we were working. I think the songs that made it onto Headful Of Sugar are the ones that we felt were being driven by a similar emotional and sonic ethos, with a loud vocal, clear lyrics, very, very direct, big distorted bass, psychedelic atmosphere, big drums, trying to make something that felt modern and existed in the now rather than in the past.
Did you learn anything about yourself making it?
Yeah, definitely. I think what was good was that because we didn’t know how or when it was going to come out, we took a lot of different risks, like on Stand By Me, which is so painfully heterosexual and modern, and Post Love. I used to DJ these club nights in New York City all the time, right before the pandemic started, and I became obsessed with the idea of making a Sunflower Bean song that you could dance to at clubs. I would put all these songs on and see how the room reacted and I was like, ‘I want to be in this, I want people to hear our music in this room’, inspired by a very live experience. Making Post Love seems unexpected but day 300 into the pandemic, I was like, ‘why the fuck not?’. We had more time to go through musical phases and I think that that is reflected on the record.
Which song means the most to you?
I think Otherside means a lot to me. I was coming out of a really dark period, in a lot of pain and physical pain, it was a bad time. The song just came barreling out of me and Olive [Faber, drummer] and Nick [Kivlen, guitarist and co-vocalist] really took it there and Olive had that vision for the end of the song, which was to create this drum-scape where she was just ‘Alright, all of us get on the drums, it doesn’t matter what you play, I’m gonna like turn it into something’. It was a very true example of what it’s like to be in our band, we use the music and the experience as a way of being there for each other.
You mentioned the fact Sunflower Bean came out of a DIY background, how does that relate to who you are as a band now?
That it’s true. On this record we did this big Rolling Stone piece and the headline said, “New York’s scrappiest band blows up”. And I’m like, ‘oh, fuck, that’s kind of a diss’. But it’s also so true! Sunflower Bean is a family business, it’s me and Nick and Olive, and my manager, Crista. We are the entirety of the whole thing. We have labels and this and that but we’re a family business, a family artistic project really. I think that is 100% is connected to DIY, it’s 100% connected to how we do things. None of us have famous parents, none of us had a giant pool of money to try to start a career with, we just desperately wanted to make music together and wanted to do this and I think that is the DIY spirit, finding a room, putting the amps in the room, getting the PA, showing up, carrying all your stuff, playing the show no matter what, all that kind of spirit took this record over the finish line. I think it’s going to be a part of who we are forever.
Given the album is called Headful Of Sugar, are your sweet or savoury person?
Well, I think you need a little bit of both. I’m gonna say sweet right now because that’s what I’m thinking about but I think, like the record, you need a little bit of all of it to have a have a full real meal.
What’s the best dessert you’ve ever had?
Well, my favourite dessert is probably cheesecake from Veniero’s on 11th Street and Second Avenue. It’s an old, landmark New York bakery that is still really cool and not super touristy, but they make amazing cheesecake. All kinds of cheesecake, Oreo cheesecake, strawberry cheesecake. I’m gonna go with that.
It sounds tasty. Cheers for your time Julia, enjoy the rest of your walk!
Thank you. I appreciate it, hopefully see you in the UK!
ND