Turin Brakes: New disc Brakes

Clare Dwyer Hogg hears how Turin Brakes rose to the challenge of Difficult Second Album Syndrome

"I just don't listen to music. Music is not the drive or inspiration behind what we're doing. It's mathematical problem-solving. What we're trying to achieve is the same sort of thing as an accountant, but with sound instead of maths." Those are the words of Olly Knights, one half of Turin Brakes (the vocals); the other half, Gale Paridjanian (guitar), is laughing into his drink. We are sitting in a pub in Cambridge, toward the end of Turin Brakes' 22 date tour, and though they are exhausted, tiredness hasn't put a stop to the irony.

They're a sardonic couple who obviously don't take themselves too seriously, as is appropriate for south-London boys made good. "I don't understand why everyone is so obsessed with the fact that we come from south London – why is that so amazing?" Knight asks. Perhaps it's just a way of placing them. There was a lot of placing going on around the time of 2001's Mercury prize-nominated The Optimist; the two boys with a guitar and searching vocals were seen as figureheads of the fleeting New Acoustic Movement. But since that flurry of hype, they've been quietly going about their business, and their new album, Ether Song, has something different about it.

The change was wholly intentional. Meeting the Air and Beck producer Tony Hoffer while he worked with Supergrass on Life on Other Planets, they took their chance and left to record with him in the States. "He wasn't connected to the first album in the slightest," Knight says. "It may sound crazy that we'd work with someone who wasn't particularly overawed by us, but actually it was great. Everyone that was close to us loved that first album and didn't want us to change, but we wanted to move forward. Hoffer was our ticket out of staleness."

It was such thinking that emboldened them to put down some tracks they initially thought were too strange. "Panic Attack" is one of these, and evidence of how Knights and Paridjanian have moved on creatively. What had been a simple demo – two voices and a guitar – turned into a marker of change. "We messed about with it, so it felt like we weren't just stopping at traditional songs. Its whole structure is about panic attacks, not just the words – it's the whole way it's put together, cut up and repasted."

They are in it for the music, and whether people praise it or not is peripheral to what they do. "If you breathe," Knights says, "someone's going to criticise you. That's what we've learned. So we just have faith in what we're doing." Ask them if they have faith in anything else and a silence ensues. Knights is the first to speak. "I try to, sometimes," he says, "and I'm probably searching for something, but I don't officially belong to any club. Nor does Gale. "I suppose it's more about finding your own answers than relying on someone else's story. That's one of the things that this album is about." When asked if that's the soundbite for the album, Knight replies, "That or nothing." An extended bout of laughter follows. "We have a commitment to some sort of vision that's pretty abstract most of the time, but there is a vision, and if someone gets in the way, we do have to run them over with a big steamroller. That's the way it works."

There is a quiet determination to Knights and Paridjanian that runs just beneath the surface, as becomes clear when the subject of the other regular band members comes up. They are the uncelebrated, shadowy figures of Turin Brakes and, Knights says, they "get treated like they don't exist by most people. It'd be much more fun to interview them, you know. They have lives."

There's no time to talk to them properly before the gig starts, but for the record, the band members who have been with Turin Brakes for more than three years are Rob Allum (drums), Eddie Myer (bass) and Phil Marten (keyboard). Turin Brakes are a duo with five members, then, and that seems to sit perfectly well with that abstract vision they're following.

The album 'Ether Song' is out now on Source. Turin Brakes play the Brixton Academy, London SW9 (020-7771 3000) tonight