Given that their name is taken from a misandric tract, Valerie Solanas’s notorious Society for Cutting Up Men, I started by asking Tom Cohen where he stands on gender relations. ‘That’s something we wanted to take into context with the artwork,’ he explained. ‘We had this idea of it being a masculine and feminine presence that is joint but somehow not particularly sexualised: a mangle of bodies and skin.’ Tom’s predilection for fleshy artwork, he tells me, is the greatest source of disagreement within the band. ‘I’m really into flesh and skin. I’d always like to push it to more of an extreme.’
Again into Eyes, S.C.U.M.’s recently released debut album, veers between dance and atmosphere, a variation controlled by the band’s drummer. ‘The electronics are vast, layered, and quite ethereal, but the dance element comes from Mel – she does things backwards, she’s amazing!’ An outtake from ‘Faith Unfolds’ became the short instrumental ‘Water’. ‘Initially the idea for it was to have it as an introductory track, like a prelude, but we thought that was too naff, so it became a pathway between ‘Paris’ and ‘Whitechapel’.’ The image of pathways reminds me of the sense of place that permeates the album. Several S.C.U.M. songs are ‘postcards’, named after the capital cities that the band visited on tour, Venice was the weirdest: ‘We ended up not sleeping anywhere and just being homeless in Venice.’ As for London, ‘there’s a lot of that desire to escape your surroundings and feeling slightly suffocated by it, but at the same time seeing all the beauty in it as well.’
So how did S.C.U.M. develop their sound from noise band beginnings? Tom cites ‘Amber Hands’ as a breakthrough in the band’s sound. ‘I think it really changed when Sam started to write for guitar. We really incorporated a stronger sense of melody. Before, we didn’t really have any songs, we just had a lot of noise.’ Might the synthesizer-heavy sound of S.C.U.M.’s music be part of a wider eighties revival? ‘I think there’s a correlation between now and the eighties in the sense that the eighties was the first decade when synthesizers were completely dominant in music. I think the only real association is that: the synthesisers and the reverb. I really can’t stand eighties clothing!’ Critics have often mentioned the band’s appearance. Tom doesn’t think their ‘look’ causes misunderstanding, necessarily, but it creates ‘this preconception, which isn’t necessarily true. It’s not contrived. We never talk about what we’re going to wear beforehand.’
Tom acknowledges shoegaze influences – he was ‘obsessed’ with My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. He still cites film music as inspiration; for him, film soundtracks seem ‘to be the ideal way of making music, because you already get given the context and you just have to extend what the film does.’
We end on Tom’s experience of meeting teenagers at gigs, and he admits he sees himself in them. ‘In Manchester this 14 year old boy in a nice old suit came up to me and talked to me about music and he was saying, ‘I’ve got two violins with delay and a guitar.’ That’s exactly what I was like at that age, and that’s where S.C.U.M. came from.’ Talking to Tom, I gained the impression that that the band is always moving onwards into new sonic terrain. Hopefully they’ll send back some interesting postcards.
