Naomi’s band name proclaims her hatred of humans. Reviewing her ‘Pipedreams and Lullabies’ single back in DrunkenWerewolf issue 6, Hg was sceptical of this claim. When the opportunity arose more recently to interview her, he took the chance to find out whether or not his suspicions were justified…
I gather your name comes from the previous band you were in, Morbo Hates Humans. I like Naomi Hates Humans – its in-yer-face, confrontational nature – but you don’t seem particularly misanthropic. Have I mis-read you?
No, I think that’s fairly astute. When I decided to go out and start playing music live again I toyed with playing under my own name or something else but I couldn’t decide on anything. Nothing felt right. I had been vaguely known as Naomi Hates Humans back in the Morbo days and I thought it was quite funny and memorable so I stuck with it. MHH never really made it out of Bournemouth and by this stage I was living and playing in London so there were very few people around who knew the connection to my old band.
Divorced of its origins the name is confrontational, and quite a few of the early songs were as well but these days it’s just amusingly out of sync with the actual music. I also find the whole referring to myself in the third person thing quite funny as well. However, it does lend itself to lazy reviewers who find misanthropy in the songs where there clearly isn’t any. It’s been a blessing and a burden.
You’re associated with the antifolk movement. Movements can be often a source of collective strength, but equally occasionally a rather limiting millstone around one’s neck. How do you feel about being “antifolk”?
I don’t think of myself as antifolk any more. When I started going out on my own with just my acoustic guitar, I sought out the London antifolk movement because it seemed like it would be a good fit with what I was doing. I don’t think you can really call antifolk a genre as the bands differ quite heavily but as I understood it, it was a scene made up of like-minded musicians.
I made some good friends in that group of people but there never seemed to really be the collective spirit that I’d experienced in the DIY punk scene I’d been involved in in my younger days – down on the south coast. The whole all-for-one spirit just didn’t seem to be there, and for me, if you’re going to have a ‘scene’ that’s the most important part.
I also never felt very accepted in the group. For a little while I was putting on acoustic gigs at a place in Kings Cross and always had at least one antifolk type on the bill but the rest of the ‘scene’ would never come out to support the thing. I lost a lot of money on those gigs and that was the point that I just started to think, you know what, fuck you guys. Also, I’d started playing with the first incarnation of the band and my songs were starting to differ quite a lot from the early days when I stylistically really did fit in with the ‘antifolk’ thing. It just felt like the right time to cut my losses.
I get a sense that at heart you’re a punk, in that there’s a fairly strong theme of individualism (and occasional hints of anti-authoritarianism) running through your material. You seem “political”, with a small “p”. Is this fair?
I’ve been thinking about this recently, and in the beginning of Naomi Hates Humans (and MHH before that) I’d say wholeheartedly yes. Recently though, I think my lyrics have shifted to being more personal. It’s incredibly cathartic to go on stage and basically shout at everyone “this is how I feel/felt and it hurts and I’m going to tell you about it”. In many ways that’s a big step forward for me, to be that honest about my feelings but I’ve got a little caught up in it recently. I think I need to find a balance. No one likes a moaner. Except emos.
Some artists avoid cover versions, but you’ve embraced a rather eclectic range of them, including the “versus” album you did with Tim Holehouse. Do you see any common theme running through the covers that you choose to play?
For me, learning other people’s songs is a vital way to get better at your instrument and get ideas for your own songs. The guitar isn’t my first instrument (in fact it’s my third) and I didn’t really take it up until I was 19. I had some lessons in the first year of uni just to get the basics covered but other than that I’ve basically taught myself, in a rather haphazard fashion.
When I formed my old band I’d only been playing the guitar for a few months. It was learning how to play other people’s songs (by getting tabs off the internet, or working them out by ear, or even watching them on TV and trying to copy the shapes of their hands) that I learnt a wider range of chords and playing styles that I could then incorporate in to my own songs. I still rarely know what chord I’m actually playing.
After Morbo Hates Humans, you were a solo artist for a while but eventually started to gather a band around you again. Was this always the plan, or was being solo something you experimented with and ultimately found lacking?
I was solo for two years and it does make life easier from an organisational point of view. The decision to form a band came about because I decided to record an album with some money my grandparents left me. It seemed like a good opportunity to try to fill out the songs a bit. So I enlisted Sagar and Lewis. Initially they were just going to play on the album but we played a launch gig and I really enjoyed it, I’d forgotten how fun playing in a band could be so I persuaded the boys to stick around. We didn’t practice very often and the whole sound was quite ramshackle but it was good fun.
After we recorded the second EP, Sagar had to leave the band to concentrate on another band he was in. So Lewis and I asked Drea (who’d recorded and produced the EP) to join us on drums and my flatmate Josh to play second guitar and backing vocals, and now the band almost sounds like a completely different band again. And I love it. I think it’s important for a band to evolve. These days I consider ‘Naomi Hates Humans’ to really mean the band rather than just me.
You’ve got quite a focused web presence, using all the usual suspects (MySpace, Facebook, Last.fm, etc), as well as having your own website. It’s clearly something that you see as important. What advice would you give to other artists on this subject?
Well, Lewis, Josh and I are all web designers, in fact for the past year and a half I’ve been making websites at a record label, so for us it’s really important. I think the key thing, especially if you’re a new band, is to get some kind of recordings and get them everywhere you can on the internet. Obviously there’s MySpace, Facebook and Last.fm but there’s also things like thesixtyone.com and I’d say YouTube is also important.
The more places you are, the more likely it is that people will stumble across you and want to find out more. This is another way that covers can help actually, the fickle people of the internet sure do like it when they know the words to a song. The most watched video on our YouTube channel by a ludicrously wide margin is a video of us (me, Lewis and Sagar) playing Why Don’t You Do Right at a friend’s birthday party two years ago. But people who’ve seen that have also gone on to watch videos of us playing our own songs and then sought out the website and joined the mailing list.
Better Weird Than Dead is your own label. Was self-releasing a conscious, ideological choice or more of a pragmatic necessity?
A bit of both, but in reality no one was beating down my door to put my records out so in that respect it was very much a necessity. It was also an experience I learnt a hell of a lot from. Essentially, both my paternal grandparents, who I’d been extremely close to, died within a year of each other and they left me some money. Not exactly a king’s ransom, but enough to record and put out an album, which is something I’d been wanting to do for a while.
I kind of got so caught up in the whole idea that I really didn’t take care of the finer details. The recordings themselves were not great and littered with mistakes. We recorded and mixed 12 songs in 22 hours, 10 hours on the first day, then we went to a party all night, then recorded and mixed the rest in 12 hours the next day. Needless to say the quality suffered. I still really like the album but it could have been so much more. I also blew a lot of money on packaging.
Basically two years later, all the inheritance is gone and I still have 900 copies of the album in my flat. Lesson well and truly learnt. That’s a big part of why last year’s EP was an internet release, there is no money to do another CD. It’s something I really need to address this year because we have a lot of new songs I’d really like to get out there…
What are your plans for 2010 and beyond?
Well we’ve had a two month hiatus; there just wasn’t time to do much around the Christmas period. So we’re just getting back in to practicing now. I wrote four new songs in that period. I’d like to do another EP this year, maybe even an album; we’ll have to see how it goes. We’ve been toying with the idea of putting on our own gigs this year as well.
Away from NHH, I’ve recently undertaken a largely ridiculous plan to write a song about each and every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, in order, on a Yamaha keyboard I bought when I was 14. My friend Henri is going to play 80s-style guitar riffs over the top of them. We are called Mothers Opposed to the Occult and at the moment we kind of sound like a combination of Le Tigre, Bon Jovi and the music from Castlevania. I have no good reasons or excuses for this project other than that it will be awesome.
If all goes well, in twenty years’ time what would you like people to say when Naomi Hates Humans comes up in conversation?
Good grief! I’ve never been one for grand schemes. If at least a few people remember us fondly that will be good enough for me.
This interview took place in early February 2010 for DrunkenWerewolf magazine issue 11 (March 2010). DrunkenWerewolf is published bi-monthly and covers new and unusual acts who operate in a roughly acoustic/indie/experimental vein.
