Have a good wonder-trip
It’s part soundtrack, part yeti-like creature that dances onstage — Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay’s surreal project Lump is like nothing else, they tell Craig McLean
WHEN Marling met L i n d s a y, things q u i c k ly g o t h a i r y. Within two days the musicians were in a studio in Hoxton. Within a week most of the lyrics for their unnamed, paintstill-wet project were done, and a concept had been devised, helped along by Marling’s goddaughter.
If she had a band, the music-loving six-year-old said, she’d call it Lump.
And so Brit Award-winning singersongwriter Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay, the Mercury Prize-winning producer and member of neo-folk band Tunng, became Lump. And then Lump became a thing: a towering, hirsute, yetilike creature that features slumped on the sleeve of the pair’s self-titled debut album and dancing in their videos.
Lump, the album, is a nine-track, 32minute wonder-trip, an electronic soundtrack for a non-existent film inspired by Marling’s reading of the Surrealist Manifestoes. Beyond that, Marling’s description of the project, as paraphrased on the front cover of the Lump album, can’t be bettered, so I won’t try: “A heady blend of wonked-out guitars, Moog synths and pattering drums, set against droning, coiling clouds of flutes and lyrics inspired by early-20thcentury Surrealism and the absurdist poetry of Edward Lear and Ivor Cutler, slicing though the apparent emptiness of contemporary life.”
It is, we might add, brilliant, all the more so because it’s physically represented by a creature that’s half Dougal from The Magic Roundabout and half Swamp Thing.
Says Marling, 28: “I wanted a physical, abstract, innocent, genderless — before that was the zeitgeist-y thing — creature that’s lost in its own universe to represent the music. So when you’re listening to the music you can feel lost in it.”
Lindsay adds: “I’d been working on a pitch for a film soundtrack that didn’t really work out … But once Laura came up with the name, that made the project realise itself.”
On this grey afternoon, the first-time collaborators are sitting in their record