Council battles are over as band gets Iggy with it
BELOVED by BBC 6 Music and fêted by Iggy Pop, The Lovely Eggs are a psychedelic punk duo from Lancaster resolutely committed to the notion of a band as a way of life. Over the course of 18 years Holly Ross and David Blackwell have pursued their own path, releasing music, art, gigging and and even hosting their own TV series on YouTube.
Their seventh album, Eggsistenstialism, follows an 18-month battle with their local authority to save Lancaster Music Coop, a community rehearsal rooms and recording studio complex, from redevelopment.
Singer and guitarist Ross explains that she and Blackwell felt indebted to the Co-op for their own musical development. “The reason why we’re in a band today, and the reason why our band pays the bills and we don’t have other jobs, we’ve got all the free booze and the amazing crowds that we get to play for, we’ve got to thank Lancaster Music Co-op for that,” she says.
“When me and David were both growing up, that place was invaluable, and basically for the last year we’ve been fighting Lancaster City Council to try to get them to agree to support us after they evicted us five years ago.”
It came down to defending a lifestyle, Ross says. “We want other people to be able to live like us, and if you want that then you need to have that at a very early age and the opportunities open to everyone. If the Music Co-op isn’t there the kids don’t get that opportunity.”
Ross says the record attempts to convey how daunting it felt trying to juggle their own band while constantly firing off emails and having meetings with the city council then finding themselves “put in charge of a £1m building project”. “It was a feeling of being overwhelmed by life,” she says. Nonetheless, she sees a universality in their situation. “Although the songs can be perceived as specific to our situation, I don’t think they really are because that’s something that people feel a lot nowadays, overwhelmed by stuff. People have got more work and there’s only 24 hours in the day, everyone feels overwhelmed and struggling with the amount of stuff that we’re expected to do. I think there’s a universal appeal in that way.”
The chinks of light in the record represent the band’s glass-half full outlook. “We live for the good times,” says Ross. “We didn’t want any of it to be (the way it was). Five years ago when the council said they would repair the building we expected them to do it...and it just wasn’t, they tried to sweep it under the carpet.
“But we feel like we’re out of the other side of it now. We’ve got a 99-year lease signed on the building, it’s meant that we can go back to doing what we do best, which is making records and being in a band and having fun. (So the album) is hopeful but it’s still documenting the bad times.”
The Music Co-op was where Ross and
Blackwell first met when Ross’s then-band Angelica started rehearsing there. “David recorded our first demos because he worked as a sound engineer in the studio at the Music Co-op,” Ross recalls. “So that’s why we record all our stuff ourselves now because he knows how to do it all.”
Eggsistentialism is their third album in a row to be produced by Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev/Sparklehorse). Although Fridmann is based in upstate New York, Ross says that they have developed a good working relationship.
“I’d like to say that he has become a friend now,” she says. “We’ve got a way of working with him where we say we think we might be ready to record an album now and he’s like, ‘Okay, send me some ideas over’. We don’t really do demos, we think it’s a bit of a waste of time to work on a song and then go that’s great, let’s do it again. So we will send him some rough ideas of a song and then he’ll make some suggestions remotely and then we’ll keep that conversation going.”
Ross appreciates the consistent support that they’ve had over the years from BBC 6 Music DJs such as Marc Riley and Huw Stephens. It also led them to a collaboration with Iggy Pop, who has a show on the station. “With him DJ-ing on 6 Music he became aware of our music and became a fan of our band. Then when we were doing the single I, Moron (in 2021) we knew that something was missing and David said, it would just sound great with Iggy Pop’s voice on there, why don’t we ask him? So we did. ”
Eggsistentialism is out on Friday. The Lovely Eggs play at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on Sunday May 26.