An show always has the potential to become the best night out of your life. The most recent contender for me was Green Man, where they turned the Walled Garden stage into an unrelenting dancefloor, stirring mosh pits and crowd-surfers into dance-punk delirium. Pairing massive choruses with acid influences and propulsive live drums, their crowds are in constant movement. By the end of their set, they’re also in total awe. For frontman and synth-player and vocalist , the best night of their lives happens almost every night.
“We’re having too much fun,” says Harry as we set down our pints in a Leeds alleyway clinging onto the title of beer garden. “You just get so excited. You meet loads of new people, and they’re all like, ‘You have to come to this club!’ and there’s absolutely no willpower,” adds Greg, “We’re like, ‘Cool. Where? When?’” Any brief returns to Leeds are reserved for catching up on laundry, sitting in front of the telly, and trying not to go insane.
Their last couple of weekends have been filled with festivals, with quickly followed by in the Lakes and Maui Festival in Suffolk, which Harry dubs the strangest festival they’ve ever played. “Harem pants. White people with dreads. No one had shoes on.” Beers were served in return for riddles solved, and their green room was dubbed the Love Bus (not by the band). “It was like Bristol on speed, or Bristol speed.”
Over the last year or so, Adult DVD have been swapping the dive bars of Leeds city centre for unfamiliar festival fields, Texan tour dates and even the streets of Tokyo. And everywhere they play, a huge crowd follows. “It was just so fucking surreal,” says Harry of their time in Japan, “Every show was really busy and people knew who we were. People made their own merch. We were in Texas two weeks before, our first time playing in the States. It was the weirdest month of our life.”
“We thought there was going to be five or six people, but it was a queue out the door,” adds Greg, “We also realised we’re also rubbish at signing stuff. Couldn’t get the coordination right. There was one sharpie between us.”
Adult DVD have had a reputation for their party-starting shows for a good few years, but the turning point for the band came at Truck Festival earlier this year, where they attracted a mammoth crowd who spent more time with their feet in the air than on the floor. But no matter how big or how raucous the crowds get, Adult DVD always want more. “Because we’re on a bigger stage now, it’s carnage,” notes Harry, “We’re always trying to kick it up a notch.”
“We’re taking an engineer out on this tour, we’re going to look at projections, lighting. We’re in a position now to do that, and playing venues that can do that for us. I can get my Madonna mic, work on some dance routines. I think I’ve realised how important lighting is. I’ve watched videos sometimes where it looks like someone’s left the big light on. I want strobes all the way through. I usually disappear to speak to the lighting engineer: ‘All strobe. Don’t worry if they tell you no. Just do it.’”
“And then we can’t see owt,” jokes Greg.
Some bands so renowned for their live presence would struggle to recreate their strobing live energy in the studio, but is just as infectious as their gigs. The record mimics their set, moving from punkier outings like ‘Cold Caller’ and ‘Cowboy On Aisle Three’ into straight-up dance tunes like ‘Ghillie Suit’, the energy unfaltering throughout. “That’s what we’ve always done live,” says Harry, “The set starts indie-ish, and then it ends like a fucking good night.”
It also helped that they recorded everything in-house at The Nave, with band members Danny and Jake taking on producer duties. “We’ve worked with other people and we ended up just telling them what we’d do,” notes Greg, “And not even in an ego way, we just know what we want it to sound like. So we may as well just do it ourselves.”
An essential part of that sound is live drums. Johnny Newells’s contributions from behind the kit have always been key to Adult DVD’s straddling of sonic worlds, giving their shows a pulse unlike other electronic acts who rely on drum machines. On the record, his playing is intentionally front and centre. “A lot of it’s in the drums. One of the most important things for us is having a live drummer and bringing that into the studio,” explains Harry, “It’s much more human, and that’s what we wanted.”
But perhaps the most essential part of creating their debut was an insistence on silliness. Lyrically, Adult DVD deal in bizarre characters and strange conspiracies, finding inspiration in overheard conversations and dark corners of the internet. Over the course of the record, they tell tales of born-again incels, deranged cowboys, coffin dodgers and bad bosses, each line and each persona more ridiculous than the last. “All the songs that have done well are the stupidest lyrically,” shrugs Harry. If there’s better shit to give a shit about, they don’t wanna know.
Take ‘Bill Murray’– a song that takes its premise from the confusion between its titular actor and Tom Hanks, listing off their characters with not-so-subtle descriptors – “Tom Hanks, Tom Hanks is a cowboy man” – before devolving into a repeated mantra of Murray’s name. It’s a winner in their setlist, often played at the close. “That was a placement lyric, and then it just ended up being the song,” remembers Greg.
“I met these two Welsh girls at Green Man who were convinced I was saying prawn curry,” notes Harry, “If Bill Murray gets cancelled, it was always called prawn curry. I don’t know what you’re on about. Prawn curry and Tom hanks, his favourite dish.”
‘Adult DVD’ is just as unserious as its Hollywood-indebted predecessors, with ‘Minimal Criminal’ rivalling Murray for stupidity. Harry takes on a character he describes as a real piece of shit, a wannabe criminal who hates heavy metal, spies on his neighbours’ sex lives, and hopes one day to start committing small crimes. “It’s about watching your neighbour’s swinging party but also like, not recycling,” explains Greg. “I actually can’t believe we put that on the album,” laughs Harry.
Their lyrics may be outrageous, but there is some basis in reality, in the strange characters you encounter in workplaces and odd Subreddits. “Me and Greg are pretty observant,” Harry notes, “If anyone looked at our chat with each other, they would probably think we were deranged, but it’s for lyrics.” The bunker-dwelling dirty old mucker at the centre of lead single ‘Real Tree Lee’, for example, was inspired by former coworkers chatting rubbish about the likes of Elon Musk, says Greg: “I don’t care, I don’t work there anymore.”
“We’re actually terrified of confrontation and we’re slagging people off,” jokes Harry. When they were done channeling their frustrations into frantic electronica, their celebrations were fairly modest, swapping the Nave for the New Headingley Club. A couple of pints, a pool tournament and a tapas of snacks from the trusty social club commemorated the creation of their debut record – “We had surf and turf – that being flame-grilled steak crisps, bacon fries and scampi fries” – it’s undeniably Adult DVD.
Outside of eavesdropping and long-standing electronic influences – “We always say Chemical Brothers” – Adult DVD are mostly taking inspiration from the bands making noise in Yorkshire basements. Harry cites a number of Leeds bands as his current obsessions, including moody duo , always sexy and soon-to-be support band – “They’re all fucking insane, man.” They’re playing with the latter at Armley Road warehouse venue Project House later this year, which will mark the band’s biggest hometown show yet.
Hanson’s live persona is Albarn-inspired, boyishly confident, but his hometown is the only place where he still feels a little uneasy stepping on stage. “I still don’t like playing in Leeds,” says Harry, “Well no, I do like it. But speaking in between songs is my least favourite thing, and here you just have all your mates looking at you like, ‘Oh yeah?’ Sometimes Jake takes a little while, or Johnny’s kick drum will go missing, and I feel like I have to say something. I’m nervous, but I’m always nervous. It’s the back end of the tour so we’ll be warmed up by then and really tired, but we can sleep in our own bed that night.”
“As long as you don’t tell any jokes, you’re fine,” says Greg, “Not that your jokes are bad.” At worst, there’s always the reliable comedown comfort of a New Headingley surf and turf.
Adult DVD will release their debut album on September 25th.