Shame: There are moments where you think youre superhuman | Music
Music This article is more than 3 years oldInterviewShame: ‘There are moments where you think you’re superhuman’
This article is more than 3 years oldChris CatchpoleThe post-punk band’s wild tour antics led to major burnout. Now older and wiser, they’re back with a deeply personal new album
A short walk from Nunhead station in south-east London, a disused nursing home has been converted into a communal living space for sculptors, joiners, welders and creatives. Behind a murky brown curtain you’ll find what used to be its utility room. More of a cupboard than a room, its washing machine has been dragged out to make way for a mattress, and a line of disconnected switches and pipes give it the air of Dr Frankenstein’s lab. Most notably, the walls, floor and ceiling have been painted a vivid pink, the shade used to calm down violent prisoners in jail. This is “the womb”, the place where Shame frontman Charlie Steen sought refuge while the band hatched their second album, Drunk Tank Pink.
“I found out recently that everyone hated that room,” laughs Steen, who has since left behind his flesh-coloured cubbyhole for a more conventional flat. “I found it cosy. Living next to the washing machine became slightly annoying, though. There’s 40 people living in that building. I got to know the mechanics of that machine so well just by the sound …”
Setting up a creative sanctuary amid the din of a spin cycle might not seem the wisest move, but Shame have always occupied a space between the ridiculous and the sublime. While still at school, the band set up their first rehearsal space above the same Brixton pub that notorious squat-rock degenerates Fat White Family called home. They weren’t old enough to legally drink and Steen didn’t even have a microphone, but the post-punk-inspired songs they wrote there soon led the five-piece to set up their own nights at nearby venue The Windmill.
As well as earning Shame a reputation as one of the capital’s most exciting live acts, their night, Chimney Shitters, lit the touch paper for an explosion of new guitar bands including Goat Girl, Sorry and Black Midi. It was a fertile musical crucible that, as with so many others small venues, is now under threat. Shame have joined a host of other artists to try to save The Windmill, offering up a number of auction lots: Steen will paint “any picture of your desire”, bassist Josh Finerty, drummer Charlie Forbes and guitarist Sean Coyle-Smith will write you a song, while guitarist Eddie Green is offering a Zoom cookalong.
After the success of their residency, Shame embarked on a near non-stop tour of duty, delivering incendiary performances across the UK, Europe and US before their debut, Songs of Praise, arrived in 2018. A riot of roughed-up punk anthems, its pint-hurling choruses and lyrics gleefully fascinated with the depravity they’d witnessed in backroom bars found its way into the Top 40. Rave reviews followed, and its white-knuckle clatter can be heard echoing through the likes of Idles, the Murder Capital and Fontaines DC.
Listening to the band (all in their early 20s, but looking even younger) reminisce, it becomes clear that life in Shame has been less The Filth and the Fury and more The Inbetweeners. Hiring a tour van that could only turn left; accepting a lift to the South By Southwest festival from a man with no shoes on; being told they needed to “up” their stage show for the Reading festival so renting an inflatable 20ft “tube man” … the band’s career to date appears to consist largely of logistical cock-ups and drunken mishaps.
Yet, while the band recently promoted Drunk Tank Pink (working title Love International on Planet Cloosh) with a video Q&A with Spice Girl Mel B (“Mel is a massive Shame fan,” explains Steen, “she’s hilarious”), it is a surprisingly serious-sounding record. Recorded in France at the start of last year with Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford, it rewires the boisterous energy of Songs of Praise into something very different: tracks twitch with nervous rhythms, sharp guitars elbow their way around lyrics filled with uncertainty and dislocation.
There’s still plenty to rouse a moshpit once the opportunity arises, but in the album’s atmosphere of claustrophobia and themes of detachment Shame have inadvertently made an apt soundtrack to life under Covid-19. “That’s marketing genius that is. We actually planned it all,” deadpans Forbes. “Wait until the world is in isolation and then drop the record.”
The next time we catch up with Charlie Steen he is struggling to shake off a hangover: the night before was the third and final time the pubs shut their doors to the public. One-on-one, Shame’s lead singer makes for easygoing and thoughtful company. He talks openly about himself with a frank matter-of-factness; if what he’s saying starts to get a little too deep or serious, he’ll relieve the pressure with a burst of schoolboy laughter.
Three years ago, a combination of Shame’s gruelling tour itinerary and their habit of treating each night like a lads’ holiday to Benidorm caught up with them, and Steen suffered a series of panic attacks in Germany. The band cancelled the rest of their dates and put him on the first flight home. “Because we’re passionate about what we do, you want to push yourself, and there are moments where you think you’re superhuman. But you learn that you’re mortal,” Steen reflects, before letting out a rapid fire “huh-huh-huh-huh!”
The strange nature of getting up in front of a crowd night after night is addressed on the new album’s barrelling curtain-raiser Alphabet (“Now what you see is what you get … Are you waiting / To feel good?”). Steen is quick to clarify how lucky the band are to be able to do something they love, but says the relentless grind of touring took its toll on him. “I remember being so self-obsessed at one point that I genuinely thought [performing] was like a modern-day human sacrifice, like The Wicker Man,” he says. “It is mad if you think about it. I’m driving 300 miles to some random place and then I’ll get up on stage – exhausted and weak – and sing about the most personal moments of my life to a group of strangers. And then they all clap at the end!”
After four years of near-constant gigging, Shame were parachuted back to London at the end of 2018. Given they went straight from doing their A-levels to living in the back of a van, the band fell into a classic bout of post-tour discombobulation.
Coyle-Smith says he felt so agoraphobic trying to adjust that he locked himself away in his bedroom, ignoring his friends’ calls and obsessively writing and recording fragments of music. Steen, meanwhile, was having intense dreams every night and the thought of being left alone with his thoughts terrified him.
He took a different tack to his bandmate, embarking on his own personal extended aftershow party that ended up lasting three months. “It got to a point where it was seven in the morning and I’m sat up with someone I’d only just met talking about UFOs and the pyramids thinking: ‘This has gone too far …’” he remembers.
Steen went into “the womb”, shut the door behind him and poured out the contents of his head on to the page. “Touring had allowed me to delay all these emotions, which made it worse when it came through,” he recalls. “The band were really understanding. To be sat in your room with five mates reading lyrics about something really personal – it’s like group therapy.”
When the band listen back to the album now, they don’t hear a record particularly fraught with anxiety; to them it just sounds good. But when Steen’s mum first heard the song Born in Luton she burst into tears. “Yeah, when people hear that they’re always like: ‘Are you OK?’” he smiles. “It’s just about being locked out of my flat. Maybe that’s one I’ll come back to in two years and realise what it actually is [about].”
The experience of making the record has been a cathartic one for Shame – healthy almost – and they start 2021 itching to get going: refreshed, recharged, older and hopefully wiser. “When the vaccine comes everything is gonna go on steroids, and all of what I’ve just said [about burnout] will be completely hypocritical,” laughs Steen. “We’ll be out doing 20 gigs a day. Everything is going to be cranked up to 50.”
He grins mischievously: “It’s going to be fucking wicked. I can’t wait.”
Drunk Tank Pink is out now
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