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Home > News & Reviews > Clean Cut Kid
Preparation Is Key: Clean Cut Kid's Building Blocks
Thursday, 12 November 2015	 Written by Laura Johnson
Clean Cut Kid played their first gig only eight months ago. Yet here they are, hours removed from a set at Cardiff's Undertone as part of Sŵn Festival, with headline slots at Reading and Leeds' BBC Introducing Stage and a buzz-heavy breakthrough single, Vitamin C, already under their collective belt.
Precise details on their debut LP, though, remain shrouded in secrecy. A number of questions must be asked: Who exactly are Clean Cut Kid? Where did they come from? And what's going on with that album? We spoke with Mike, Evelyn, Saul and Ross to find out.
So, let's start at the beginning. How did Clean Cut Kid come together?
Mike: I met Evelyn three years ago. Evelyn was an artist in her own right and I was kinda putting the sound together and recording the stuff. We just started working together on it.
It was kind of electric, we were always trying to work the mad fuzz sound. That sound was there from the start even though there was only two of us. And I'd met Saul six years earlier when I was playing with another project and recording in a studio and I think you [Saul] were living in the rehearsal room below. When me and Ev were looking to pick up another person I was like: 'I met this guy, he's really cool. I don't know anything about him, or where he could be, but we should track him down.'
This sounds like bullshit, but it's true. We were just out one night getting food and we just saw him stood at two o'clock in the morning busking in the centre of Liverpool. We walked up to him and said: 'Are you up for jamming and playing some stuff together?' He was like: 'Yeah, shall we do four in the morning?' I was like: 'No, let's do a normal time tomorrow.' The next day we went to his rehearsal room and started jamming stuff out, and I think we'd only been playing together for a couple of weeks when we recorded Vitamin C and Runaway. That was almost exactly two years ago.
We weren't really gigging, we were trying to work a way of getting the live thing together and Ross was the missing piece. I had been working with Ross doing workshop teaching. We'd been getting a train journey together and realised, no matter how obscure, we were into the same music. Loads of small bands like Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Red House Painters, Waxahatchee and loads of Seattle bands. Then I just came down to loads of your [Ross'] gigs didn't I? I was just sat in the corner of the gigs watching him play with other bands.
Ross: Scaring the shit out of me with his massive beard.
Mike: Ross was with us for six months and again, we didn't touch socials, didn't do anything. We were just rehearsing, we didn't do anything until the day it was ready, and then I went and found a manager. We booked one gig in London, a tiny little gig, we didn't even list it under Clean Cut Kid, we did everything as secretly as we could so we didn't pop up on any industry radars. We invited six little, choice, industry people that we wanted to share it with at the start.
Why was that? To test the waters?
Evelyn: Pretty much, yeah. We hadn't done any gigs, so we were just like: 'Oh my god. How is this even gonna go down?'
Mike: And we'd all played in hundreds of projects and kind of didn't want to make any mistakes on it. Because I'd been working for years, I had like over 100 tunes written. We'd already arranged them, played them, recorded them. A load of stuff was recorded in the studio. We're like: 'This is ready, we just need the live thing to be ready.' Otherwise, it's not going to have the impact we need it to have.
Does it bother you that some people see the band's progress as a rise out of nowhere?
Evelyn: Not really. I guess in terms of us being a public thing, where people actually know about us, that's been a really quick journey. Obviously the first gig was March this year, and that was the first thing where we were like: 'We're a band!' Even though we did all that stuff before, I guess for me it didn't feel like it all began until we did that first gig and we were out there.
Ross, I saw a video of you in Topshop being pleasantly surprised at Vitamin C being played. Do things like this still happen?
Ross: Yeah, you are still pinching yourself.
Mike: It's just a weird thing that you can't take out how it's spreading. When you go to festivals and you've got full fields worth of people singing the words back to you, it's mad. Leeds and Reading were our 11th and 12th gigs. We were headlining those two stages. It's just been such a big jump.
Is it true that you find it hard to recreate what you've done in the studio in the live show?
Mike: The recorded thing and the live thing are two different things. The recorded thing is virtually all me. I produced it, I played drums on Vitamin C and Runaway, and I played all the guitars and most of the key parts. The album will be 75% played by me in the studio. When you try and do that live it's a completely different product because you've taken one person's interpretation of how to do everything - from the groove, to the layering up of arrangements, to trying [to] get inflections from the way you play guitar into the way you play everything else.
Ross: It becomes an interpretation of all Mike's layers and my own kind of thing, and that's why it takes a different shape.
Is this how the band will always work? With Mike steering the creative ship?
Mike: It's how it's definitely going to be on the first record. I can't really see the formula of it changing too much. On the next record, I see me demoing three quarters of the record and not even going into the studio and then these guys just coming in and Rich, and the guy who co-produced it with me, coming in at the end of the second record and just kind of studioing it up. I see the second record virtually being demos that are made into studio recordings. So I can completely get around it.
So, what's the progress with the debut album at the moment?
Mike: We're 14 tracks in. We think we'll probably record 22. That'll be the double vinyl. There'll be 16 altogether probably, which will be on the deluxe version, the normal version will probably have about 11 tracks.
Were they all recorded by Mike?
Saul: We've recorded our own parts on ones that we might have jammed out on first. But others Mike has literally dreamt out every single detail of how the song goes, like 10 different deep guitar parts. So when he goes in, obviously because he can play play bass, drums, guitar, keyboard, he's just got to get it down. He ends up recording the songs in like a day, because he hasn't got to spend a day telling me how to play it.
Mike, do you find songwriting easy?
Evelyn: He does find it easy.
Mike: Sometimes. It's just whether the right songs are coming out. I think the thing with Clean Cut Kid is people will realise the more they get to know the band that the line between making a specialist record and making a pop monster is so fine that sometimes it's literally turning something up 2db. Everyone goes: 'What? This is just a pop tune!' Then you pull it down and they're like: 'No, no, this is like a specialist tune.' It's so fine you wouldn't believe. We have things bounce back and forth so much, where people just tweak one tiny thing and all of a sudden nobody gets the band. It's really really tough.
Also, I naturally write pop songs and then I arrange them in this kind of messed up way, so it's kind of like getting the right amount of messed up. If we make a full album of really well written pop now, even if we make it in our form, people are gonna look at us and go: 'What is this? What are these beards? We have to go in the specialist route and Vitamin C is the perfect thing for that, because nobody gets it when they hear it and by the fourth listen everyone's totally having it.
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Condition: Hardcover, red leather. Like new, no observable flaws. Has previous owner's bookplate attached, which can be pasted over on request.
The Red Badge of Courage is an 1895 war novel by American author Stephen Crane (1871–1900). Taking place during the American Civil War, the story is about a young private of the Union Army, Henry Fleming, who must overcome initial fear and shame to become a hero on the battlefield. Although Crane was born after the war, and had not at the time experienced battle firsthand, the novel is known for its Realism. Crane began writing the novel in 1893, using various contemporary and written accounts as inspiration for the story. It is believed that he based the fictional battle on that of Chancellorsville; he may also have interviewed veterans of the 124th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment, commonly known as the Orange Blossoms. A shortened version of the manuscript was initially serialized in newspapers in December 1894, before the full novel was published in October 1895.
The novel is known for its distinctive style, as well as its use of realistic battle sequences, repeated use of color imagery and irony, as well as what Crane called a "psychological portrayal of fear". Several of the themes that the story explores deal with maturation, heroism/cowardice, and the indifference of nature. The Red Badge of Courage garnered widespread acclaim shortly after its publication, making Crane an instant celebrity at the age of twenty-four. It is now thought to be his most important work.


November 2003 a group of eight middle school students decided to visit the local areas haunted location. Their plan was to stay the night in the hopes of getting a glimpse of one of the resident spirits.
Their hopes high for a night of mystery, intrigue and a few steps will have no doubt turned to uncertainty as they crossed the threshold into Nam Koo Terrace. It is said a feeling of appalling loneliness that is also confusingly felt along with the feeling of a crowded space hits those who enter the property.
This abandoned house is also known locally as the Wan Chai Haunted House and its legends no doubt grew to infamy as verbal recounts of what happened this night passed from neighbour to neighbour, through the students of the local schools and child to child in the playground located close by.
That night the students set up their small camp in one of the empty rooms and decided to attempt to contact the spirits through their version of a ouija board. It was during this session that three of the girls in the group became agitated, their minds filling with terrible images.
One of the girls then completely flipped and became psychotic.
The students fled the building but as they made it to the gate the girl who had been most affected took on a strange persona and would not step off the property. It was at this stage the other two girls affected during the ouija session heard a male voice calling them to the second floor.
The police were called and when they tried to forcefully remove the girl she snapped and attacked them. It took both police officers to remove the girl and she was sent off to a hospital for psychiatric assessment and treatment, along with two of the other students who were emotionally affected by the nights activities.
The Oriental Daily newspaper ran the story and soon many other papers and media outlets followed suit. The legend of Nam Koo Terrace was now fully lodged in everyone's psyche but the legends of ghosts and hauntings of this location go back quite a time.
The two story building was built in a period between 1915 and 1921 in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong, China. The land was purchased and leased by prominent Chinese businessman 'To Chun-man'. The house itself was designed to mimic European style houses while still incorporating facets of feng shui.
In the 1940's the Japanese invaded and occupied Hong Kong. During this period the Japanese military turned Nam Koo Terrace, along with many other buildings in the district, into a military brothel. It remained as a brothel for four years until 1945.
It was during this period that the legends began starting with tales of local women being taken to the 'comfort house' to be repeatedly raped by the Japanese soldiers before being tortured and killed. Many of these women were said to have been decapitated by the soldiers before being dumped to be found by their friends and relatives.
Nam Koo Terrace is also known as a suicide house, a location where people come to end their own lives. As recently as 2010 bodies have been recovered from the rooms of the house or cut down from the branches of the gardens trees. It is not known how many people have ended their lives in the house but estimates put it at higher than 30.
Murder is also said to have taken place on the grounds several times.
Still, even with all the dark history and the hauntings people like to venture to the overgrown building. Urban explorers love to scale the sides of the derelict home or venture into the below ground 'secret' entrance.
The hauntings are made up of visions of headless or bloody women, their cries piercing the mind as blocking your ears does not lessen their impact. A man in black has been seen wandering the building and it is thought it was his voice the girls heard on that night in 2003.
'Spectral fires' have been reported but these at least can be chalked up to the squatters who have called the building home on and off through the years.
People who have entered the building say there is just something plain wrong with the feel of the place. What it feels like at night they are not quite sure as not many people are brave, or stupid enough, to visit it after the sun goes down.
Nam Koo Terrace is a Grade 1 Historical Building and as such is likely to stay around for a long time to come. Hopewell Holdings who plan to develop the area has stated that they aim to restore the old building and preserve its 90 years of history.


Learn what the Library has to offer to help you with your job search, including the Library's subscription to "JobNow," which features live coaches to help you with your resume writing and interviewing skills. This free class will also cover information on using social media and the most notable websites to use for different phases of your job search.
This class will be held on Wednesday, July 18 from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the Library's Meeting Room C.


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Create your own scenic outdoor landscape with your choice of our beautiful wall murals. They're the perfect solution to the room with no view. Each of our large wall murals gives you an expansive view that'll make you feel as though you've traveled miles and found the serenity of the great outdoors. Each comes in separate, easy to install panels. Install by simply pasting and smoothing like wallpaper.


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image	Portrush
Sunrise in Portrush
Portrush became the highlight of our trip to Ireland because of its beauty, unique atmosphere, friendly people and proximity to landmarks such as the Giant's Causeway, Dunluce Castle, and Bushmills Distillery.
Portrush is a quaint little town located on a mile long peninsula of the Antrim coast in Northern Ireland. It seems like the end of the world because the Northern Ireland railroad track ends here, in the old town of Portrush.
East side beach
The peninsula, where the old town is located, is surrounded by the sea. Wild waves of the sea pound the white sandy beaches of the east and the west sides of the peninsula, and the rocks of Ramore Head at the tip of peninsula on stormy days.
When the sea is relatively quiet, the glistening from the sun on the west beach makes a golden sparkly path on the surface of the sea to the infinitely distant horizon.
Portrush harbor
Cozy Portrush harbor is home for a few dozen yachts and boats. A lifeboat of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) is anchored here too.
Portrush has a long history that dates back to the 12th century. Now it's a resort town with shops, restaurants, hotels, a railroad station, a small clinic, RNLI, a few churches, the Town Hall, a famous golf course, a visitor center and a surfing school. The town certainly has its character and has a mixture of architectural styles from Gothic to Victorian.
People stop their cars in the middle of the road just to talk when they see their friends passing by. Hardy and courageous surfers, dressed in wetsuits, ride the waves to the east side beach even when the temperature reaches only 46 degrees Fahrenheit (plus 7 Celsius). We were wearing warm jackets.
Buses connect Portrush to Colerain and other towns. The Rambler bus, which takes passengers to the landmarks of the Antrim coast – such as Dunluce Castle, the Giant's Causeway, Bushmills distillery and Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge – operates from the middle of April to the end of September. However, we discovered breathtaking scenery in Portrush such as Ramore Head and the east side and the west side beaches.
We stayed at Albany Lodge on the top floor. Our room had a stunning view of the east beach and even of Dunluce Castle in the far distance. We could watch from the warmth and comfort of our room a daredevil windsurfer, whose tiny figure jumped across the turbulent waves, pulled by his sail. Sometimes he disappeared from view and we worried. But he got back on his board and continued his dangerous game with unruly waves. He rode his board for about ten minutes into the sea, then turned and surfed back to the shore. How exciting!
At night the view was equally impressive. Deserted streets were lit by lights, mapping the crescent of the shore line. A Union Jack was fluttering on a pole under the gusts of wind and rain.
Our host and the owner of Albany Lodge, Richard, told us about life in Portrush with the typically Irish sense of humor, which is very delightful. He also gave us an overview of the history and the customs of the area. There are lots of good restaurants and cafés in Portrush, but we followed Richard's advice and went to the Ramore Wine Bar restaurant. This restaurant is located on the west beach and has great views, gourmet food and very reasonable prices.
There are more attractions in this lovely, windy and rainy town that captured our hearts. (To be continued)
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Round here, you can be however you wanna be," Elise Davis sings at the end "33," one of 10 self-empowered southern anthems from her newest album, Cactus.
ged 24, Conor Brendan has been a recording artist for over a decade. He has written and recorded over 70 songs professionally. Conor & The Wild Hunt is a Progressive Indie Folk band, ranging from cinematic ballads to social justice themes, incorporating psychedelic interludes and explosive tribal-like passages. Conor Brendan performed at Boulder Theatre with Trevor Hall, Nahko, Wookiefoot, Earth Guardians, and Tubby Love. He has also performed at other major venues such as World Café Live, Rams Head Live, Rams Head On Stage, The 8x10, Gordon Center Theater, Metro Gallery, Mercury Lounge, Rockwood Music Hall, The Bitter End, Oregon Ridge Amphitheater, The Cabooze, Headquarters Live, and the Altamont Theater, among others. One of his songs was placed in the show 'Forever'. Conor is a water protector who spent a month on the front lines of Standing Rock, and performed in multiple concerts to support the Sioux Nation, solo and accompanying Peter Yarrow and other artists.
Conor & The Wild Hunt have released a single, and are preparing to release a full length debut album. Stay tuned!


I just wish the evening could have been longer so we could have heard more songs from Liv.
A hauntingly beautiful performance from Liv Austen on a Steinway Grand Piano. Perfect setting for such an intimate show.