Tawny Owl And The Birds Of Prey are a delightfully eerie alt-pop outfit from Norwich. Mixing genres and drawing influences from genres and musical movements spanning decades, the band offer a diverse and eclectic range of harmonies and technical chord structures that are commercially appealing enough to project the bands talent across a wide field without jeopardizing the bands dark underground credibility.
Jack began as a solo artist performing under the stage name Tawny Owl, but the recent decision to take on a band (The Birds Of Prey) has resulted in the outfit you hear today. Speaking to Jack you really get a feel of his intelligence and the marvel behind the obvious technical ability that went into producing the music becomes apparent.

NOIZE: Describe your sound.

TAWNY OWL: Thurston forms a band backed by The Funk Brothers but with Norwich teenagers instead of music Gods. We like pop music and really loud guitars. Lots of close three / four part harmony and strange harmonies, creepy sounds, feedback, and Phil Spector produced songs.

NOIZE: What inspires you as an artist when it comes to song writing?

TAWNY OWL: I take a lot of influence from books. I read a lot and I think that filters through into our song writing. Some of my lyrics are paraphrased ideas from what other people have said, and lyrically I like my song structures to be a kind of slide show of ideas and images that come together to represent something. Wow pretentious. My background as a musician also has something to do with it, I tend towards cluster chords and complicated lines, but I really love 60s pop and that is a definite influence. I think the 60s pop thing is probably my biggest inspiration for writing music, a lot of it is so sad lyrically but so upbeat. Like that first song by Phil Spector - To Know Him Is To Love Him, it’s this beautiful ballad but the title takes its name from Spector’s Dad’s grave inscription. And lines like “Everyone says there’ll come a day / When I’ll walk alongside of him” are just amazingly sad when thought of in context. It’s easy to just go aww cute pop song but it’s so dark.

I also feel drawn to scary things. I love horror movies and creepy Victorian waltzes. Halloween is definitely my favourite holiday, spooky Xmas right? I definitely elicit a response from the listener on some level and shock, suspense and surprise are my preferred techniques. That doesn’t mean I’m going to be up on stage doing an Iggy Pop but I definitely like to keep the listener guessing.

Finally the Tawny Owl thing is a real aid to my song writing. I’m a pretty normal person really. I’m quite boring so writing as a different person is my liberation. I can say, paradoxically, what I really feel and what I mean in a way I might find interesting and hope that others will be interested too.

NOIZE: How did the band come together? How did you meet?

TAWNY OWL: I was doing solo stuff around Norwich and I decided to form a band. I’d just gotten noticed by team Milkbar and kind of wanted to broaden my palette a bit. Drums were a big thing. I basically got Alex Carson very early on; he runs Barefeet Records and does his own thing. He went about snapping up Lucy Burns from Francis and Louis, Lydia Walker who he knew to be a talented singer, guitarist, violinist and songwriter in her own right. After that we worked through some drummers including Fab from the Kabeedies until we found Hector who also plays for Magpied. His tightness from Magpied was allowed to run free a little bit in our more fluid and improvisational songs. Finally, and just recently, we recruited Sam Hill who does an incredible solo ambient project. We were looking for someone who could do bass and laptop / synth but not indie synth and the way he uses his mandolin is kind of exactly what we had in mind. The addition of bass is pretty handy too.

Basically we were all just musicians and everybody still had their solo or other group stuff still going on but we were liked playing together and worked well as a band, we’re all very much looking forward to a few weeks’ intense rehearsals.

NOIZE: You originally started as a solo artist what made you want to take on a band?

TAWNY OWL: Well like I said I wanted to extend the sound a bit more, I started doing this with a laptop but I wanted lots of live drums. I really like some very drum heavy albums like Liars Drums Not Dead and the stuff by Boredoms. Also I was trying to do harmonies with pitch shifters and stuff and it sounded absolutely crazy when all I really wanted was a couple of female vocalists. More musicians just meant that songs were given a bit more breathing room. Also being in a band is so much more fun than being a solo artist.

NOIZE: Congratulations on signing to Milkbar. How did this come about? Are you happy about the way things are going so far?

TAWNY OWL: It’s been great! I get on with Lewis and Jake and all the other bands. More people have heard of us, we play more gigs and we got some stellar recordings down with Jeremy Warmsley. It’s also a bit of a community feel. I DJ for the Milkbar club night and run House of Dolls with Lewis, Jake and my friend Joe. The entire bands club together, we come to each others shows and like one another’s music. Well I hope they like my music, I like theirs at any rate. I’m gutted that Cold Hands are on hiatus at the moment but Lunaire are a definite must see. Incredible live band. This year, since January, has been one of the best times of my life, it’s kind of weird cause of all my friends are in bands or involved in music in some way so my social life and band life are really one and the same. Pretty sweet.

NOIZE: Double A side Ghost Writer / Cinema is out in June. Could you tell us a bit about this? Talk us through the production of the single.

TAWNY OWL: We spent four days in London with Jeremy Warmsley who had seen us at the Arts Centre in Norwich when he opened the Milkbar label. I guess he was impressed with our show because he offered to work with us on our single. We kind of leapt at Jeremy’s offer and in March of this year cut the tracks. It was recorded at House of Strange and in Jeremy’s house. House of Strange has been the studio at which a lot of our favourites have been recorded, people like Emmy the Great and Noah and the Whale. We sound very different to those bands but we were really psyched to be there. On a personal level it was so fulfilling to watch these songs get recorded because they’ve been with me so long, been through so many permutations and so on. I’ve nearly killed off Tawny Owl a couple of times but getting a decent recording done felt like the perfect justification for sticking with it in spite of the number of shitty gigs I played solo or the self doubt I feel when writing music.

The actual recording process was really fun, really hectic and quite a bonding experience. I found out Alex spends like twenty minutes a day on his hair, him and Hector were like the pimps of Covent Garden, never have I seen women flock to the two in Norwich. Apart from Hector. I think he has the lynx effect. Lydia was like the one take wonder, she nailed it every time. And Lucy as ever, was there to calm me down when I got stressed or pissed off. She’s pretty good at helping me not smoke to keep the old voice box in working order. It was fun and we’re really happy with the results.

NOIZE: Are there any artists / bands / producers you would really love to work with?

TAWNY OWL: Christ so many. Hmm. Phil Spector definitely. I’d love to work with people like Diplo or Bangladesh as I love their music but don’t write that kind of thing at all. It would be interesting to see how it came out. I would love to work with Clipse or JME or Bun B but I can’t really see it happening some how. Also hip hop indie cross over is generally shit but we could make something good. Maybe. In Norwich there are people I’d love to work with, Check Out Girls and Mat Riviere spring to mind. I think I’m playing trumpet for Francis and Louis and Alex Carson’s next recordings and I’m psyched about that. I definitely would like to work with someone who does a lot of electronic stuff. Burial, Four Tet, The Knife… These are all dream people it’s hardly like I have them on speed dial. Also other dream people to work with are Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Thurston Moore and Animal Collective.

I’d like to collaborate with writers too. I’d like to nab Phillip Roth; Ghost Writer is very much inspired by his book of the same name. And Cormac McCarthy, we could do like this badass dessert surf shit but really creepy and he could read like the opening to All The Pretty Horses, it would be incredible. Again this almost certainly won’t happen. Or a poet like John Cooper Clarke or someone like Simon Armitage.

NOIZE: Going by your gig listing you don’t seem to be touring much is there a reason for this and are there any plans to get out there in the future?

TAWNY OWL: We were all at school / uni right now. As soon as exam time is out of the way we’re going to be playing lots more gigs luckily it coincides with single release time. So all is good.

NOIZE: What has been the best show you’ve played so far and why?

TAWNY OWL: There’s been a few crackers. I really enjoyed a gig for Something Good which was in a scout hut in Norwich. Lots of my favourite bands were there like the aforementioned Check Out Girls, plus the Balky Mule from Fat Cat records played. It was organized by my friend Grace of the Middle Ones and it was a really nice chilled out spring day. Lots of ice cold beer and good vibes and I thought we played well, also all morning before we played the whole band were round my house with some friends. Everyone was hung over as a wolverine and we just sat with a few hair of the dog beers watching trashy b movies squished on the sofa, I think we watched this awesome Troma movie called Class of Nuke Em High. Its soooooo good. We ran through some songs and stuff. Lewis from the label was sick in my bathroom. It was such a good day.

Some of the Milkbar gigs stand out too. The first one with Warmsley at the Arts Centre in Norwich was fun, that was the first one we played as a band and we were all pretty nervous but the audience were really receptive. There was one we played at the Marquee we played in Norwich too. Alex was ill and couldn’t make it and I was like smashing my guitar against the amp and stuff. It was one of those really scrappy, aggressive gigs where nothing goes too wrong.

I really like playing in Norwich, you tend to know like half of the audience and everyone else is in a band too, it’s a cool environment.

NOIZE: And the worst?

TAWNY OWL: Hmm some of my acoustic were pretty shocking. There was one in a really horrible bar in Norwich which I won’t name because I think its run by Russian mafiosos or something. It was fucking crazy. I was in one of those open acoustic showcase things and everyone rambling through Dylan and Oasis covers. I get on and my music is a bit strange sometimes, so I’m sat convulsing and screaming and thrashing the shit out of my guitar and some guy starts heckling me and I can’t hear him cause I’m all in a jazz trance and have my eyes closed and everything. Anyway so he’s like “Oi gay boy get off the fucking stage you poncy cunt” and all this, and my friend Fuchsia, who is a bona fide badass rolls up to this guy and goes “fuck off” and smashes the pint out of his hand covering him in beer. Now he’s about to smack her in the face but realises she’s a hot girl, he faces a moral conundrum, should he hit her and be damned or should he do something not entirely wrong in every sense of the word? I stop playing cause I can hear there’s this massive commotion by the bar and everybody’s screaming and pushing and some of the people are right in some of the other people’s faces and it’s all about to kick off. Fuchsia just walks out of the pub unscathed, however some of our friends are there and this one lad Josh, who is pissed as arseholes, sidles up to the bloke and is like “yeah?” This guy is some kind of sixth foot four mother fucker with like skins tattooed on his forehead and HATE and shit all on his knuckles, he has a tattoo of two tears coming from his eye. He is clearly not someone to fuck with. Anyway, my boy Joe rolls in and is all like “alright everybody chill the fuck out” they nip outside and Joe starts handing out cigarettes. I quietly walk off stage into a now entirely empty pub. Some other weird shit happened that night too but it’s a really really long story, involving pro plus, the police and a man unable to urinate.

NOIZE: Any regrets so far?

TAWNY OWL: I smashed a really nice on stage once. Wish I hadn’t.

NOIZE: What are your plans for the future? Album, touring etc…

TAWNY OWL: Well it depends really. I’m going to keep that under my hat for now. Suffice to say I’ll be playing plenty of gigs this summer.

NOIZE: What are you doing right now?

TAWNY OWL: Right this second? I’m in the library. Tonight I’m going to see a secret gig in Norwich, makes me feel really cool! I have some work and some revision to do and then I’m going to grab some food. Probably a pie.

By David Kendall

www.myspace.com/tawnyowlband