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By the time I speak to the South London post-punks of Dry Cleaning, the press cycle around their second LP, Stumpwork, is in full gear. The global music press has picked apart vocalist Florence Shaw’s episodic, sprechgesang writing on the album like pieces of chicken off the bone. There’s also been significant interest in their engagement with domestic politics, and a natural desire to mark the development of their sound against the yardstick of 2021’s breakthrough “New Long Leg”.
On our call, Florence, drummer Nick Buxton and bassist Lewis Maynard are tired from the previous night’s show in Cologne, the second stop of a 50-plus-date tour which will take them through to April this year. Their guitarist, Tom Dowse, is still asleep, and Florence tells
me the band are “completely fucked”. “It doesn’t take much!” she laughs. Lewis reckons it’ll be just under a week until the group stop feeling awful and regain their tour fitness. Then, everything will be okay until the last couple of days, when their bodies will shut down like athletes nearing the end of a marathon.
With so many interviews under their belt for “Stumpwork”, the trio are copacetic to beginning our chat in a more trivial direction. Lewis gets a hairbrush out of his trunk to use as a microphone, and we start on star signs and first crushes.
Lewis - Taurus/Gemini cusp: My first crush was Gerri Halliwell from Spice Girls. The girls who lived around the corner, they gave me a key ring of her as a present, because they knew I had a crush on her.
Nick - Gemini: I was probably about like, 11 or 12 or something. I went to the supermarket with my mum, and she helped me pick out some chocolates and a card and I gave them to this girl who I thought was really cool. I think I was pretty lame at school, and it just caused this enormous stir on Valentine's Day. She was way out of my league, and it didn't really work. I cried.
Florence - Aries: Oh no!
N: It was quite upsetting and probably shaped the rest of my life from that point.
F: My first crush was a man that was in a picture on the wall of a photo developing place. My mum used to get a lot of photos developed - she's an artist, so I used to just go with her whenever she was working. I remember having whole body sensations as a child seeing this man. He was wearing a boater and a striped blazer; he looked like a barbershop kind of guy. And he stood at the bottom of some stairs, looking up as though you're a princess or whatever. I was completely smitten with this guy in the photo.
N: Who was it?
F: He was like a guy in a stock photo. Yeah, so that's my crush.
The band wake Tom up to get his entries: Taurus, and Diana Ross.
F: (Laughs). He saw her on “Top of the Pops”. End of story.
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What was the most embarrassing thing that happened to you in high school?
N: Oh Jesus, make a fucking list.
L: We weren’t allowed to wear gel in our hair at school. I’d show up in it every day and I’d get sent to the toilets to wash it out. But through the day, I’d keep going back to the toilets and putting in more water, so I’d get to keep that gel look for about five minutes. It's probably why I've got long hair now, because I peaked too early with my styling.
F: I threw up during a school musical. It was about [World War 2] evacuees, and I was in the chorus at the side. The last song ended on everyone singing “Evacuees!!” and I just like, projectile vomited straight out of my mouth, during the crescendo of the whole show. Proper vomited everywhere, I had to be taken out, all the way down the corridor. So it really burst the bubble of the show, it spoiled the whole thing.
Wait, what was this musical?
F: It was a made-up musical for schools, not like a legit musical. They can’t afford the copyright or whatever it is, so they’re just like, “Okay, we’re going to do a musical about evacuees.” We got all these labels with our [evacuee] names and stuff. And yeah, I got sick all over mine.
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What was something you bought recently that you’re really stoked about?
F: I went to Venice last week and I spent 30 euros on fridge magnets. And they were really good! They're miniature foodstuffs, and very convincing. There’s one which is a little bag of pasta, and it has little tiny pastas inside it. I was trying to whittle down the ones I wanted, because they had cheese and sparkling water and all these different foods, and I started really stressing out in this shop… I ended up spending 30 euros on fridge magnets, but I feel great about it.
I would. I’d feel confident.
L: We've been traveling a lot, and about a month or two ago, I decided I wanted to make my travel experience better. So I bought this iPad, in the hope of making music while touring. No, it has turned into the band television, and we’re been watching loads of anything horror- related on it. Myself and Nick, we can’t watch horror films; we’re too scared.
F: I’m definitely too scared. It’s just Tom who can watch horror films, he’s the master.
L: We're slowly building ourselves up every day to actual scary stuff. We’ve been watching joke scary stuff.
F: Yeah, like “28 Days Haunted”.
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Okay, I want to talk about the album just a little bit. Heaps of the people-watching and sightseeing on “Stumpwork” was sourced from your everyday walks and trips around your neighbourhood. What are the landmarks around where you live?
F: There aren't very many, it’s very suburban. There's not a great deal to see, but that's often like the kind of thing I like. I just like seeing how people have done their front gardens and stuff. Or when people put kids’ drawings in the windows? People seem to be doing that a lot recently. I love all that.
But what landmarks are there in East Dulwich? I mean, like, seriously. I live in this weirdly posh area. It’s by miles the fanciest place I’ve ever lived, I just sort of wound up living there somehow. There’re loads of baby shops. Lots of prams. Loads of prosciutto.
N: There’s Fabulous Ice Fires.
F: Oh yeah. Really pretentious ice cream shops. The things I normally look at, though, when I'm wanting to write, is just the stuff that people have written on their bins and stuff. In London, we have wheelie bins, and people always try to customize them as if to say, “this is
my bin!”, because they get all mixed up. People put stickers or they write stuff on them - usually with a house paint brush - just like massive numbers and stuff like that. That's the kind of thing I like to look at.
I really like how this record places thoughts about the general shit way the world’s going beside your own collective personal tragedies and heartbreaks and losses. How do you cope with feeling generally helpless when things are hard?
F: Making music is good for that. Definitely, writing and performing are really cathartic things to do, if what you're making music about is kind of fairly sad.
It never brings me down. It's weird, that it doesn't depress me, even if what we've written is quite sombre, sometimes. It's a self-expression, isn't it? It feels good to get things out, as opposed to sort of ruminating on them alone. And also, being in a band is a group endeavour; there's something very sort of wholesome about that. It feels good.
L: A lot of our writing process happens in the process of us listening to our jams. It’s quite free, and therapeutic… I find it very helpful. I never remember the parts I’ve written, as in, you can just hit ‘listen back’ and I’ll go, “I guess that was me”.
N: It’s not a privilege to be able to make music, because anyone can do it. But having like, creative output in any sense is important. You don’t have to be making art or music or anything. Even if you have any kind of passion that you pour yourself into creatively, whatever it is, you know, like making model railways, or food, or whatever it is you do. I think it's really important to have that. I would always encourage people to try and make a connection between that thing and the way you feel about stuff, generally. For us [making music], I think, as much as you are pouring your experience into it, it's also escapism in a way. You kind of do it to fucking get away from all that.
F: Yeah. Or to be somebody, to be a more confident version of yourself, a sort of fantasy version of yourself. I guess that's particularly relevant to performance. Even though we're obviously very much ourselves [on stage] ... it's still weird, sort of like being in drag as
yourself. It’s a nice feeling.
Going back to what you were saying, Nick, I’d be interested in seeing how model railway building might be used as an outlet for somebody’s hard feelings.
F: Seriously! I would love to do that. And also, I bet it’s really common. At least in the UK, railways are so politicised. You could do like, an amazing protest model. Absolutely.
N: Well, it’s world building, isn't it? You’re creating a perfect world, where everything runs on time, and it’s accurate, and the weather’s always perfect. And you know, like, the great thing about some of those model railways is that they’re so immersive: you get in the middle of it and the whole thing’s around you. And then you have this sort of control panel where you control everything. You've created this thing that doesn't change; you're the only variable; you're totally in control.
F: Is anyone else like, really moved by that? Or am I just tired?
The stories you’re telling, like here, and in your song writing, are so reflective of London and the UK. I know you recorded “Stumpwork” straight after “New Long Leg”, and you didn’t get to do a lot of touring with everything that was still happening in 2021. Now that you’re heading out to do this big run of dates, do you think your writing will start to build outwards from London, or stay close to home?
F: I think it's inevitable. We don’t talk about what we do very much; we tend to work things out, practically, in the rehearsal room. And I think, because of that, what we do is quite immediate - it's what we're interested in at that moment. I think I'm going to do my absolute best not to write loads of really homesick lyrics. People always do that! As soon as they write an album that does okay, they start touring and then [comes] the missing-home album. I do get homesick, and I think we all do to a certain extent, and it's hard for that not to influence everything. It’s easy to be insular on tour - even though you're going to all these amazing places, you've got to remind yourself to actually look at them and experience them. I'm such a homebody, I have to remind myself to actually look at things sometimes.
I read an interview you did which I really loved, where you said that making the kind of observational work you do is inherently political. I’m curious, in listening to Dry Cleaning, what you do you hope people who don’t live in the same sphere as you can see and understand about the change that’s happening in the UK?
F: It’s so hard to say. I mean, “Conservative Hell”, for example: I never really thought of that as being about The Conservative Party, you know. I thought of it as more like just a global thing that's been happening for at least a decade, or more, where things in so many countries are turning very authoritarian, fascist, in this really sort of insidious way. But because of capitalism, generally, nobody's got as much time as they would like to actually engage with how disturbing that is and what we can potentially do to counter it.
People always seem to say that thing about the idea of the working week being designed to stop the proletariat from having time to protest. I don’t know, I really buy into that. It feels very real: this idea of being time poor, but with something very dystopian going on in the background, that you really should engage with more, but you can't quite because you're just kind of trying to survive. Feels like Kafka or something. That's on my mind a lot. I feel like that’s universal, or at least for a lot of people. I can imagine that might sound familiar. So rather than wanting it to be like, UK-centric, I think that's just where we're coming from.
N: Those are our experiences. But we're finding that people are relating to it across the world. It's hard to understand how well the music goes down in countries that don't speak English as a first language necessarily, but from my small experience of playing in like places like in Germany, now, it seems like people get it. Without us having to ram it down their throats, people get it. It can be quite subtle. I feel like often, when people go too deep and try and dissect what we’re doing, it’s almost like they’re not seeing the woods for the trees. There’s a bigger picture there, that I think is more of a feeling.
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