The English press, usually keen on short-term excitements, have bet on this band. Coming from Brighton and led by two brothers, The Electric Soft Parade and their classy debut record deserve more than short term-excitement. As unbelievable as it seems, this is a band that may last. Two young rebels named White in a rock band. The White Stripes? No, the Electric Soft Parade. “This is really some kind of coincidence. Moreover we were getting known at the same time” explains Alex White (20) and his brother Tom (17!). This is where the comparison stops: the music of this band from Brighton does not exactly sound like the nasty rock of Jack and Meg. The band has been together for “6 or 7 months” with two other members for concerts. But, as Alex says, “my brother and I have been seriously playing music since 4 or 5 years. All this buzz around us is quite recent. For example it is the first time we got out of England for the band. This is exciting”. The two brothers look happy to be here to talk about “Holes in the Wall”, their debut record. Honestly, Holes in the Wall is not the supreme record but the age of its creators makes us forgive many of its defaults. The main one is the fact that it goes in every direction. It seems that Tom and Alex have played all of the instruments. One can really feel that the two brothers allowed themselves to put every weird idea they might have on the record: vocoder, accordion, there is always something unnecessary. Moreover, this is a way over-produced record but strangely enough, it does not end up being unpleasant. It is like a spurt of pop Chantilly-cream. It is true that this record is swarming with ideas. Through very tuneful songs the White brothers manage to put some originality: the F# barre riff of album opener Start Again is quite common except that it is played thirteen times. Not 4, nor 8 or 12. Alex: “Well, thanks for the compliment, this is really something we want to achieve: to write things at the same time classic and bold...” Happy, Tom interrupts his brother: “And modern. That’s the problem of many many bands, they are stuck in the past. We are trying to do a bit of both. To sound like the whole Beatles catalogue recorded with modern technology” Good point for this band: they do not do double-speech. Their first single (in France), Silent to the Dark, is also quite ambitious. In this song the brothers stretched to 9 minutes a song that only has two verses, a chorus and a bridge. Right in the middle, they cooked up a very long prog part that seems neverending. Did they want to do as good as Good Vibrations, Happiness is a Warm Gun, Bohemian Rhapsody or Paranoid Android, that is to say the complex anthemic songs? Alex answers: “Those songs you mention are great songs, they’ll be listened to until the end of time. We could have made a record with only three minute long singles but it would not have been as interesting” The boys are said to be keen on the movie This is Spinal Tap. Is their vision of the music industry altered by this? Alex: “Many things are true in that movie. The more people from the music industry we meet, the more we understand where those characters come from! I used to think that the characters were pure fiction, almost cartoons. But they do exist in real life. You just need to go to any office of any record company to see them” On this subject, even the young Tom sounds very mature: “We realise that we must not take all this too seriously. When you begin to have stickers on your record that say that it is the record of the year... If we believed in all this, god, we would be insane... It happened to so many bands. We cannot even hate this because it has always existed. That movie is almost 20 years old but there is still as much coke” The Electric Soft Parade have many other ideas up their sleeves. Alex agrees: “We have already written new songs and I’d like to get better, especially about lyrics. I want to be proud of them” The two brothers know how to read music, can sing quite good and can play – in a quite good way - every instrument that's needed to make good pop music. There must be a guru or something. A guy named Tom Friend might be that guy. “It was a natural choice, he’s part of the record company. We’re quite close, he helps us on every matter of business. He’s become our friend. A few weeks later he turned up in the studio. We needed him to discover how to make a good use of a studio. He helps us with finding our sound and taught us a few things about how to structure the songs etc. He’s very helpful, he’s been doing this for years” We would have loved not to hear about this man in the shadow. B.Farkas, translation TheGhostchild Rock’n’Folk, February 2002