The Brighton indie scene grew quieter this year when Help She Can’t Swim called it a day, but guitarist and co-vocalist Tom Denny has come back. With a mini album of avant-pop DIY experiments that don’t hide away from a tune, Don’t Get Lost Or Hurt is like the mood swings of an English Stephen Malkmus – quirky and noisy at times, gentle and melancholic at others.
Did the Lonely Ghosts start before Help She Can’t Swim split up?
It started before the second Help album came out because there was a year-long gap between that LP being made and it being released. It was an experiment though – it wasn’t supposed to take over.
So did the project play a part in the end of that band?
No, no. The band was a very important thing to me – I spent four years doing it – and I wouldn’t have split it up just to do Lonely Ghosts, or because Lonely Ghosts was going to sign to a major deal. Help She Can’t Swim just got to a point where we ran out of steam. The delay in the second album coming out took a lot of the wind out of our sails. With that record we knew we had to do something with it. The first one was, Wow, we get to make an LP. Then it got a bit more serious.
Did Lonely Ghosts change when it stopped being a side project?
It just meant that I focused my energy on it, had more ideas to throw at it. In terms of writing songs, nothing really changed. Help She Can’t Swim never got round to making a third album so I never had the problem of whether a song would be for one project or the other.
Did you start recording or playing live first?
The recording is integral to the whole thing – I write a bit of the song and then I start recording. The whole thing is like a home recording experiment to see what I could do so the writing and recording go hand in hand. It’s quite rare that I start recording something that I’ve actually finished. The first gig was just me with a guitar and an iPod but it’s moved on from that now. I try not to use any backing tracks.
One Inch Badge seems to be going from strength to strength this year.
My mini album and Pope Joan’s mini album have been the first CDs released and the live shows have come on a long way. We’re doing Lightning Bolt at the Hope on Sunday 2nd. It’s a collective based thing where a lot of the people involved are in Brighton bands. It’s like a family. I really like being involved because it’s the closest thing to being involved in a music scene, a community of people helping each other out.
