The New Cue #397 July 15: Soft Play's Laurie Vincent
“The shackles are off, people are free to express themselves.”
Hello,
Welcome to your weekly free edition of The New Cue. Today we’ve got a chat with one-half of Kent rogues Soft Play as Laurie Vincent tells us about leaving the era of Slaves behind, embracing their heavier side and the unwitting role that Damon Albarn had in bringing the estranged duo back together again.
We’ll see you on Friday for the usual Recommender shenanigans.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Soft Play’s Laurie Vincent
On Friday, Soft Play release their new record Heavy Jelly. It is a glorious new beginning for the Kent two-piece formerly known as Slaves, a debut that is not a debut but feels like a debut so maybe we should just call it a debut. It was back at the end of 2022 that Laurie Vincent and Isaac Holman announced they were changing their name, stating in a post that the moniker “doesn’t represent who we are as people or what our music stands for any longer… We want to sincerely apologise to anyone we’ve offended.”
It wasn’t the only transformation the punk duo were going through at the time. After three albums, all of which went Top Ten in the UK, and a Mercury nomination, the pair that came across as blood brothers in music and interviews had drifted from each other to the extent that they were both making music separately, Holman under the Baby Dave handle and Vincent as Larry Pink The Human. But a period of reconciliation has given way to some of their best music yet, the heavy bits heavier, the funny bits funnier, the hooks sharper.
Last week, Chris was supposed to talk to Laurie about their new lease of life but had to bail because the poor lad was ill. Instead, Niall stepped in the next day and heard all about the death of Slaves and the emergence of Soft Play…
Hello Laurie, thanks for doing this.
Yeah, no worries. Thanks for having us.
Sorry about Chris cancelling, he’s ill. He sends his regards. When did you last pull a sicky?
I don’t think I’ve done it for anything work-related for a while, but I’ve definitely bailed out of plans.
Putting a sicky’s not the same when you’ve got kids anyway.
Exactly, you don’t actually get to chill at all.
You just get more jobs loaded on.
Yeah, going out is usually the relief. I think I’ve cancelled a rehearsal recently, and I feel like I pulled out of doing a gig.
I asked Chris what he’d prepped and one thing he said was that the first time he interviewed you two he’d asked what sandwich you’d be and wanted to follow that up to see if you were still the same sandwich.
I wonder what we said back then. At the moment, I think the go-to classic would be one of those Pret chicken and bacon caesar baguettes. That’s just so consistent.
Are you a Mr Consistent then?
I am pretty consistent, yeah. I don’t know if you believe in star signs but I’m a Capricorn, which is pretty reliable, pretty hard working. Once I get attached to someone, I will have their back forever. So yeah, I’m pretty consistent.
What star sign is Isaac?
I’m 99% sure he’s a Scorpio. Let me check... He’s 30th October, that’s a Scorpio I think... Yeah, he’s a Scorpio.
Is he a Scorpio in person?
I’m pretty sure Scorpio’s are meant to be pretty fiery, they’ve got a bite. He doesn’t really have a bite, but I guess when you think about his live personality he is, and I feel like every Scorpio I know has got quite a big personality and they’re quite charismatic. So I guess he is.
Congratulations on the record, it’s fantastic. Does it feel like a fourth record to you or does it feel like a debut?
Yeah, it feels like a debut. I was talking about it earlier in therapy. I wish someone was like, ‘You’re not allowed to do anything through your 20s, or you can do it all but you’re not allowed to release it’, because I didn’t know who I was. I look back at that person and I feel like they only started getting comfortable in my own skin in the last few years. They’re all the cliches about being 31, you just start to become more comfortable with who you are. I think this record and our band now and everything, I feel like finally it’s all in our control and we’re doing it how we want to do it. And so it does feel like a debut, but with all of the history of the past to teach us and lead the way.
How does feeling more at ease with who you are actually manifest itself in the record?
Well, firstly, I think I felt really empowered to turn around and be like, ‘We’re not rushing this and we need more time’, because I think ultimately people want to get you back out there. They want to get the momentum going. There was a lot of momentum behind the first post we did [announcing the name change], it attracted a lot of attention, so it would have been tempting to release something off the back of that, but I felt really passionately they needed to sit alone and it wasn’t an opportunity to capitalise on getting exposure. It was a moment that we actually set the record straight. And then when Punk’s Dead came out, there was a bit of pressure to get an album going. But we both knew that it wasn’t quite over the line yet. Then we had another session and I still wanted to do one more. They’re like, ‘You need to hand it in now otherwise you can’t come out for however long...’ - these mystical deadlines that are always a problem.
I’m a journalist, so I understand.
Exactly. You hand it in on time and then they put it out late anyway. I feel really bad when we give people deadlines because I always know that it’s not the end of the world. So, yeah, I felt like we were so much more in control because we knew what we wanted and we set the bar ourselves, whereas before, we were just stuck in this tour-album-promote cycle that where we weren’t actually thinking about what we were doing.
Did you set any rules this time in terms of do’s and don’t’s?
I guess a ‘do’ would be explore the song till you feel like it’s got there, even if it’s not going to be on the record, so we have about 15 B-sides that didn’t make the record. Some of them are really strong and arguably they’re better than anything we’ve got on our last albums. But it was, ‘Keep cutting back’. A ‘don’t’ was releasing something just for the sake of it. It was like, ‘Oh, this song is really electronic-y, it doesn’t fit with what we’re doing’ and it would be like ‘Well, do finish it and don’t just give up on it because you think it’s not going to work, but also don’t put it out if you’re not 100% proud of it’. We gave ourselves permission to really experiment.
I feel like when we got signed to a major label, we had a big management company behind us, all that stuff, and it was like ‘You’re really big, or you’re getting there off your own back, how can we make you bigger?’. I think people loved the fact we were really heavy and we were really silly. Then we accidentally fell into this thinking that it’s got to be more palatable, it’s got to be more indie to get to the next level. We put Punk’s Dead out thinking it wasn’t gonna even be a single. It was like, ‘Oh, no, people want the music to be really fucking heavy’. That song lit the fuse to direct us towards a super heavy, really uncompromising record where it goes as silly, as heavy, as deep as we’ve ever done. And I think without Punk’s Dead starting that we wouldn’t have got there.
It’s not like you were an acoustic duo before but it does feel like you’ve really been embraced by the rock world since you’ve been back.
I don’t know if this was just in my head back then, but it felt like we were being told, ‘If you go down this route, you’re going to be an indie band’ and ‘If you go down this route, you’re going to be a rock band’, and you have to pick your lane. It was never given to us, ‘Just do it all’, there was this fear that if you did this thing, you won’t get that thing. It was the same with publications. ‘If you give this person an exclusive, they won’t give you one’ or ‘If you go to this radio station first...’ This time, it’s just been like, ‘Fuck it’. I’m embracing the fact that I went to Download when I was a kid, and then I went to Reading and I went to Glastonbury. It wasn’t that I was like, ‘Oh, there’s only one festival for me’. It was like, ‘if Refused are playing Download, I’m going to Download’ and embracing that.
Where Isaac and I grew up in the noughties, there was a lot more tribalism. It was, ‘Are you a skater? Are you a chav? Are you a grunger?’ and you had to stick in those lanes for fear of being ostracised. When we left being Slaves, there were kids that were 12 that are now 19 and they’re gig goers. So we’ve got this huge, whole new audience bolstering our previous audience and their currency is being as individual as possible. They don’t care about being part of a tribe. Their tribe is individualism, so you’re not getting punished for being a rock band; you’re not getting punished for having influences that aren’t deemed cool because nothing is uncool anymore. I feel like the shackles are off and people are free to express themselves.
What do you see as the full-stop on Slaves and that era?
I guess the full, full stop is the name change. But I felt like we stopped having fun. It was a promise we made to each other when we first started, we never expected to be super big, we never really expected anything to happen, we thought we’d always just play floor shows and have fun and then the moment it stops being fun, let’s stop. We kind of stayed true to that. I mean, we definitely didn’t have fun for about a year. That’s not to say there weren’t good moments, but the wheels were coming off slowly. It always sticks in my head headlining Ally Pally but being so unhappy, which is not what people would expect or want to hear necessarily, but it’s the truth.
In what way, how was that playing out?
I’d be there with my partner at the time, and my first son doing my thing, and then Isaac would be with his girlfriend at the time and we literally couldn’t even be in a room together. I’d go to find him to ask him about the setlist and he’d be at a local pub, and he’s not invited me to go to the pub, and I’d feel hurt that I hadn’t been invited, but then I didn’t realise that he was having a really tough time mentally and he felt like he had to avoid the gig because he couldn’t handle being there. There was just this awful scenario where neither of us were being honest with each other.
What was it that brought you back together after you’d drifted away from each other?
I’d moved to Tunbridge Wells. That’s where Isaac lives, I’ve never lived here before. He was working as a gardener and starting to do his Baby Dave stuff, he was babysitting for me so I could go to therapy because I didn’t have anyone else do it so we started becoming friends again. We were on quite good terms and I’d built a studio in my garden. It was the Christmas when it was lockdown. He was in my studio and we were making a beat on Christmas Day or something. A month later, we were like, ‘That was fun, shall we do it again?’. We wrote a song that didn’t make the record and then we didn’t do anything for another few months.
Then just before Christmas in 2022, just before Blur announced they were headlining Wembley Stadium, they asked about our availability. We were inactive at that point. I was like, ‘Fucking hell, that is too good an opportunity to pass up’, so I discussed it with Isaac. ‘Maybe we should do this’. But I had a pretty strong contingent that if we started again, it had to be consistent with how we want to go forward. I knew from the years off we had taken that I wanted to change the name anyway so we had some really challenging conversations back and forth, and we couldn’t quite get it together.
Then that gig opportunity went away, so we were just like, ‘Okay, fuck it’. Then they added a second date because the first one sold out so quick. We got asked the same question and I was like, right, ‘Let’s fucking sort this out’. Isaac has been pretty open about the fact he struggles with OCD and he couldn’t quite get his head around the idea of moving forward with a new name because there was so much attached to that, like our identity and everything that could go wrong. I basically gave him an ultimatum, ‘We don’t have to do it but if we do do it, I want a new name and that’s what I know’. I guess I bullied-slash-persuaded him. We came up with a new name and we released the statement. And then we didn’t get the gig anyway, but it felt like we’d done something really positive because we’d realised we wanted to do it again. That started everything rolling.
Have you spoken to Damon Albarn about all this? Is he aware of how he helped grease the wheels for you to get everything back on track?
I’m curious about that. I bumped into him at Glasto but obviously, as you can imagine, he was swamped with people so we just had a hug and said hello and that was it. But I do want to have that chat with him one day.
Then I guess it all came full circle with the fact that Robbie Williams played Parklife last week and you were one of the support acts.
That was so funny.
I mean, if anything demonstrates the multiple variant strands of Soft Play, it’s the fact that you’ve just told me that Blur story and in the past few months you’ve played Download, supported Robbie Williams and all of it seems to fit.
Yeah. IDLES did this really early interview, I think it was with Sound Of Violence or someone like that. They’re being interviewed and Joe says, ‘Slaves are like cartoon punk, they’re like cartoon characters’. I think at the time, I took it wrong, and I was like, ‘Ow, that hurts’. I’ve got to know him since and we’re friends. I then started thinking about people who are cartoonish, where their personalities are larger than life and you can think of them just with a few brush strokes, it doesn’t take much to imagine them and it started to dawn on me that that was our superpower. I think with this record, we embraced it. Rather than trying to take the serious poetic stance of a Fontaines or serious political stance of an IDLES, it was like, ‘We have to like really work out what our USP is’, and it’s always been the live show. It was, ‘how do we bring the live show into the studio? How can we get our sense of humour and the comedy and the sort of ‘we don’t give a fuck, but in a really gentle way’. It’s not like ‘Oh, fuck you, burn it down, spit at everyone!’. It’s like, ‘We’re gonna love Robbie Williams and Sheryl Crow’ and you can just deal with it, you can come to our shows or not.
Were there any other options for a new name?
Do you know what, it’s one of those things where it actually was the first one that was good enough to make an impression and it stuck. I had this really strong vision of it. I saw a festival where Wet Leg played and I loved the way Wet Leg looked on the backdrop, two three-letter words, how symmetrical it looked. I really wanted to have symmetry in the name, so two four-letter words works really well. And then just that play on this whole emotional, sweaty, sensitive punk thing. I like the idea of big tattooed, greased-up men with the logos stuck on top of them.
What’s been your favourite moment since Soft Play began?
Glastonbury was the first time everything’s gone just how I’d wanted it to. You can’t really control these things and usually, if something breaks on stage, it means that you’re left feeling vulnerable and you can’t enjoy the rest of the gig. But everything about that show, it feels like the start point now, like, ‘This is who we are and we finally demonstrated it to you all’. That was it for me, it feels the best it’s ever felt right now.
ND