LIMINAL POST-POSTPUNKS DRY CLEANING WRITE LISTS, DESTROY
“Lockdown… seemed to mirror what was happening in my mind.” FLORENCE SHAW
SOUTH LONDONERS Dry Cleaning went to America in March 2020, just in time for Covid to stop everything. “It was like the apocalypse,” says their singular voice Florence Shaw of their last gig, at Los Angeles venue El Cid on March 12. “People running down the streets with shopping carts full of food, torrential rain – which is not normal for LA. We had a massive turnout. It must have been one of the last gigs on the planet.”
Then, she says, a sudden stop. Shaw, who admits to disassociating in anxiety-inducing situations anyway, has an ambivalent attitude to the general confinement. “Lockdown has this weird combination of drama and dullness,” she says. “Somehow it seemed to mirror what was happening in my mind.”
The group’s ace new album
New Long Leg manages many perspectives. To tuneful-but-abrasive indie, Shaw free-associates hurt, alienation, food, loneliness, body parts, fatbergs, the Antiques Roadshow, Brexit and more. “I love that list format,” she says, “which is just being direct about the contents of your mind, in a way.”
Ripe with angst, humour and tenderness, its humdrum exteriors illuminate interior ambivalences. As MOJO discovers, she’s happy for her spoken, southern English delivery to be compared to Neil Tennant. “In daily life you do feel extreme emotions of anger or sadness or love, and you’re not screaming and losing it,” she continues. “You have to repress them. So, it felt realer to me to talk about those feelings in a kind of measured way.”
Shaw knew drummer Nick Buxton and bassist Lewis Maynard when they were art students in London in the late noughties, and met guitarist Tom Dowse a decade later. She was getting over a “horrible” break up and working as a picture researcher and illustration lecturer when Dowse suggested she join in 2018. Taking early lyrics from Michael Bernard Loggins’ list-‘zine Fears Of Your Life, she was soon augmenting her stash of piquant words and phrases from mass-market mags, the high street, below-the-line YouTube comments and elsewhere. After 2019 EPs Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks And Drinks, they signed to indie 4AD and recorded New
Long Leg in Rockfield Studios in Wales with John Parish during the “first lockdown”.
Their debut is more focused and accomplished than the EPs, less driven by wayward energy. Now writing more personal texts, Shaw says she adopts personas so emotional themes aren’t “too traumatic to share. It’s interesting to think of myself as a character in the songs. Are you mysterious? Knowable? A friend? Or someone who’d tell you to fuck off? But your innermost stuff, your subconscious, is still splattered out on a plate. Even though most of it’s in riddle form, you suddenly think, Oh Christ, I feel quite naked, like an unhealed scab.”
And like so many others, she would love to start gigging again. “I would play to a bus stop queue right now,” she says of live performance’s cathartic benefits. “Disclosing things, I get a huge vulnerability hangover.
But once I’m over that,
I want it again, like anything that gives you a hangover.”