"I remember when I first joined, and you said 'Right, I've got a great idea for a song. I wanna make this noise: UUUUUURRRRGGGGHHHHH!'"
i.
Above the King Alfred in their native Southampton, Hunting Lodge make so much noise they blow out an amp. This is the third time I've seen the band play live and the second time I've seen them interrupted by some kind of equipment failure. Hunting Lodge bring a small localised field of chaos with them wherever they play. There are stories of band members falling down fire escapes, of hardened soundmen being shocked and appalled, of venue managers accusing Hunting Lodge of "not being music". A gig in a tiny room at the back of the Railway Inn in Winchester ended with drummer Seth Cooke conducting a lap of honour of the venue, wandering topless through the audience beating a cymbal raised above his head. Afterwards, an acquaintance chastised him for the fact that Hunting Lodge don't come with a hazard warning for the audience. Regular bass player Paul Brown normally spends the vast majority of any given gig shirtless in the audience, menacing hapless punters. According to Russell Arnott (who plays "filling bits of space, could do with a bit of noise there" guitar), "Paul just likes humping people with his bass." According to Dan Bennett, the band's other guitarist, "He's got more and more into that the more gigs we play."
Sadly, Paul is out of action with a back injury for the next six months to a year. His shoes are currently being filled by Clive Henry (who also supplies occasional sax, clarinet and vocals). Watching Clive repeatedly punch himself in the side of the head while performing, it occurs to me that the role of bass player for Hunting Lodge requires attributes normally associated with 'base jumper'. Clive ends tonight's gig curled up in a ball over his sax, emitting mournful noises, somewhere in the middle of the crowd.
ii.
When I meet two-thirds of Hunting Lodge in the pub earlier in the day, they're a lot more reasonable, thoughtful and good-humoured than you might expect given their live presence. Vocalist Dan Chandler in particular is hard to recognise as the damaged caveman who stumbles about bellowing and shrieking on stage. I ask him if the way Hunting Lodge play live is intended to be confrontational.
"I think there's a certain conscious decision to make it chaotic, but it's not really confrontational. It's more like we're all having fun together."
It is fun. It's fun just to watch, you know? But some people have preconceptions, that they want a band to stay behind a certain line or boundary.
Seth: "I just see it as us naturally overspilling, rather than us trying to provoke a reaction. There's no real dividing line between stage and crowd."
Russell: "We are quite a large band, and some of the places we play, we actually can't fit on the stage, we're forced to play on the floor. I do think audience interaction is integral. That's why you go and see your favourite band play a gig - otherwise you'd just sit at home and turn your CD up really loud."
Dan Chandler: "We've come to expect a sort of 'us and them' reaction from the crowd. I don't know why that is. I think the kind of gigs we're tending to play now, the better gigs anyway, people know what to expect to a certain degree..."
Seth: "The crowd's going to realise what kind of band we are even before we start playing the first song, and if they don't want to be part of that, they're going to give us a wide berth. If they don't mind the chance of being knocked by something, they'll get down the front."
Where does all the energy, the sense of extreme emotion in your music come from? Is it mostly joy, or is it anger?
Dan Bennett: "For me it's not anger. I don't want to draw comparisons, because they're a fucking amazing band and I don't want to say we're like them, but the band I would like us to be like, in effect not sound, are Lightning Bolt. Any other bands doing that sort of thing before Lightning Bolt, it was an angry thing."
Dan Chandler: "Joy, anger... It's a tap into primitive emotions. It's a cathartic thing: taking your top off and shouting really loud and smashing things."
Russell: "I always feel a bit like a kid again when I'm on stage."
I think catharsis and just having fun are often connected more than is recognised.
Dan Chandler: "That's got to be true... It's a clich?, but it's about losing yourself."
Seth: "It's hard to be self-conscious when you're losing yourself."
iii.
Hunting Lodge overlap with what you might call post punk or dance punk, but barely. Hunting Lodge lift up great big concrete chunks of sound and then they drop them into place again and again, hammering your senses but also slowly locking into a pattern, a groove, something you can dance to. And then sometimes that rhythmic structure breaks, and everything comes tumbling out all over the place and crushes you like a bug.
Over the top of this, Dan Chandler howls and grunts found words and phrases, lyrics often as elusive as fragments of a dream. 'The Plough' lifts lines from a poem that Paul's niece wrote for Harvest Festival, while 'My Friend Paul's Mother's Miscarriage' quotes lines from the New Testament about Jesus cursing a fig tree. Dan says his lyrics aren't angry at all, but there's a darkness there - imagery from nature keeps cropping up, but it's not necessarily a pretty sight.
"Nick Cave said that when he was in the Birthday Party, he used words as weapons... Well I don't think I would consider my words to be weapons, but I use words as objects - as lumps of stuff, rather than a coherent narrative. Certain words are there to give a vague outline of a certain feeling."
The lyrics are also often "autonomous" from the music, but somehow it all fuses together, even the apparently random song titles. 'Mighty In The Forward-Striding Toes' was pulled out of Seth's copy of the I-Ching, because "we thought it sounded really cool", but it sounds right. The song's lurching, stop-start guitars sound, in Russell's words, "like a robot walking down the street, destroying buildings".
Hunting Lodge's music has evolved from something they describe as "slow and sludgy" to something with "more energy, much more of a live feel, and much more of a groove to it", as heard on a split single with Mugstar, 'The Average Sound of Whitley Bay'. The band believe Clive's presence has introduced further variety and that their sound will only get better when Paul returns. In the meantime, they're about to start recording a full-length album, due for release on Blood Red Sounds, they've recently supported the legendary Lydia Lunch, and they'll be joining Oneida, Acid Mothers Temple and others at Bristol's Venn Festival in June.
iv.
What's your ideal audience reaction? Do you want people to be dancing?
Dan Bennett: "Yeah. Definitely."
Hunting Lodge play on the Saturday at the Venn Festival in Bristol, on the weekend of 3-5th June 2005.
Hunting Lodge Website
Venn Festival Website
