Photography by Bohdan Cap

Nobody loves indie anymore. Dancing to intentionally awkward rhythms while students stamp on your toes? Why bother? Indie wasn’t always that. Once it really was independent — someone recording sometimes funny songs on their own in small spaces with little interest in sharing what they made with the world.  
     Le Volume Courbe are like that, which explains why they’ve gone almost unnoticed for the best part of a decade. Moving to London thirteen years ago from the North of France, Charlotte Marionneau has been writing songs and keeping the company of some of Britain’s most respected musicians ever since. Singing her heart out in her bedroom, she’s been joined by everyone from My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields to Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval strumming a guitar. “But it is just something I do for fun,” Marionneau pipes up. Even when Alan McGee got his hands on the track “Harmony” in 2001, “I didn’t take being a musician seriously,” she lilts in her French accent. “I never thought it was something I could do.”

Artwork by Boo Saville

Artist Boo Saville isn’t scared of things that go bump in the night. In fact, you could presume an avid fascination beyond moribund. She lingers over the physical embodiment of death, deliberating upon the remaining relic once breath, soul, imagination and bowels have stirred their last. Despite a righteous artistic background — a successful artist for an older sister and years spent diligently absorbing advice from tutors at London’s Slade School of Fine Art — what Saville remains best at is copying. “At art school you are told copying is cheating.” But she insists that it’s neither death nor copying from photographs that she’s fascinated by. “It is the iconography of death,” she says, “the dual quality of violence and redemption a corpse presents. Photographs have already begun that process of distortion, of creating an icon, a lie.”

Photography by Jay Brooks

Rock ‘n’ roll has been the same since its inception; same sentiments, same instruments, same chords. They do say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But with a simple set of rules and road signs to follow it’s easy for musicians to slip into cruise control. Which is what rumble strips are for — raised ridges at the side of highways that, as wheels slip off track, cause hammering jolts of alarm. Thankfully, The Rumble Strips, the band, live up to their namesake.
     Growing up in Tavistock, Devon, the boys — Charlie Waller on vocals, Tom Gorbutt on sax, Matthew Wheeler on drums, and Henry Clarke on guitar — first started playing together simply to relieve the boredom of small-town life. “We weren’t totally isolated,” Waller says of their beginnings. “It’s not like we didn’t listen to music; it was more that we grew up without the music press. We would ‘discover’ records by Adam & The Ants or The Stones, usually years too late and without any context to put them into.” This meant two things. First, their influences were widely varied. Second, by remaining oblivious to the idolatry rock stars inspire, there was no apprehension about following them down their well-trodden path. “It began,” Waller picks up, “without anyone really thinking about it but, by sixteen I was decided. This is what I was going to do.” And so, from the living rooms of parent’s houses the sounds of skiffly off-beat guitars, an awkward brass section and stuttered drums began to sound.

When Florence Welch first walked onstage she had the sweetest rag-doll style, keeping time with a wiggle of her hips. The 20-year-old immediately whipped London’s Working Men’s Clubs crowds into frenzies, even coaxing reluctant A&R types out of their dark corners and onto dance floors. “I had always hung out with bands,” she begins. “I could never do anything, play guitar or drums or even really sing, but I was very accustomed to that old rock and roll formula.” Her first venture into the spotlight was in 2005 at the final show by Camberwell’s ragamuffin blues boys, Ludes. Girlfriend of the keyboard player, “Flo” was encouraged onstage to sing backups. “I was sure I couldn’t sing, so when I got up there, because I was so nervous I kept yelling and drowning out anything else…I promised never to sing in public again.” However, the initial whirring of The Machine was in motion.