Is there a system for loading the van? “Just biggest stuff first,” says Llewellyn, lugging his cello downstairs. Though Hughes ended the show with an emotional kiss-off to caroline’s debut, they will bring it on the road for another round in North America this spring, ushering in the band’s second phase.Īs the auditorium empties, band members stack gear by the stage door. For the new song, “When I Get Home,” Llewellyn brings up a horde of young acoustic guitarists from the crowd, who encircle him on wooden chairs and learn the chords in real-time. Folk principles gird the ethereal experience. So rapt is the crowd that a security-intercom crackle, or a tiptoeing toilet-goer, can send a frisson through the room, jolting us back into the material world. But everyone is irreplaceable.”Ī fortnight later, eight pairs of wide-leg trousers billow onstage beneath EartH Theatre’s steep auditorium. “You couldn’t dream up a scenario where you would earn less money. “Making this sort of music, and then having eight people,” Llewellyn adds, chuckling. “The idea of doing some sort of commercial venture as an eight-piece band is insane,” says Hughes. Without a belief this might in fact happen, caroline could be doomed. Hughes acknowledges rising awareness of streaming economics and dodgy label models, and would like to see musicians who earn “tiny fucking crumbs” return to collective action and “agitate for an assertive class politics.” When Boris Johnson’s Conservatives crushed Corbyn’s Labour in 2019, focus returned to fostering local communities and building systems outside government, including within music. “You think, how has this been constructed? That’s politically interesting.” I do think that wave of optimism has had a wide impact on culture and music.” That sense of artistic adventure can inspire social change, he says. “That didn’t just manifest itself in the lyrics, but also in the experimentalism. “The political mood was one of hope-the idea that, structurally, things could change for the better,” says Hughes. Have you guys ever heard of prog? There’s a lot of fantasy elements at play.” “Then I came in,” O’Malley says, grinning. “It was showing it again in another context,” Llewellyn elaborates. I’m glad we don’t do that anymore, because I don’t have it in me.” One song used jarring guitars to mangle words lifted from a Neo-Nazi rant, “not in the punk sense of trying to shock, but to say: This is fucking happening.” “That’s why there’s been this growth of speak-singy bands. “I wasn’t talking about Trump, but the stakes felt higher, and being overtly political felt apt,” he says. Primaries dominated that fall’s news cycle, the usually quiet Hughes transformed himself into a polemicist. They moved to London and booked shows at New Cross pubs, barking out post-punk inspired by the cult Montreal outfit Ought. When the outfit ran its course, a second caroline prequel took shape in 2016, when uni friends Llewellyn and Hughes made some recordings for fun while holidaying in France. They honed a ramshackle brand of “drunken Appalachian folk”-including a dubious cover of Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls”-at local weddings and, during a pair of campervan adventures, on the streets of Europe. One has come through that route, and the other is appropriating an aesthetic that they ditched when it wasn’t useful.”īefore caroline emerged, Llewellyn and O’Malley belonged to a ragtag crew of Sussex folkies. In retrospect, they’re from different worlds. “They got lumped in with bluegrass and country artists that me and Mike loved, like Old Crow Medicine Show. “It was easier to covertly appropriate, as did, because there wasn’t much going on like that,” he says of the dust-bowl cosplayers. After 40 minutes of this, all at once, caroline settle, ready to belt out some lugubrious noise. A faint buzzing is detected, despaired over and, to everyone’s relief, eradicated. They interrogate the setlist, optimal song lengths, and matters of “mic complexity.” They propose, peer-review, and revise plans for the rehearsal itself. They debate nearly everything as a group, including the particulars of the imminent show, at Hackney’s 750-seater EartH Theatre. The founding three, all 29 and promiscuous with their instruments, are reluctant bandleaders, forever dreaming up ways to usurp their authority and make caroline an autonomous, eight-person democracy. Amid the stream of trumpeters, flautists, and violinists, the core trio-Casper Hughes, Jasper Llewellyn, and Mike O’Malley-confer in the far corner. Two weeks before the biggest show of their lives, the experimental folk octet caroline squeeze into a south London rehearsal space the size of a pub bathroom, shuffling around to accommodate incoming bandmates.
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