Le Tetsuo

Band member Jack Underwood tells us more…

Le Tetsuo formed in 2002 after I met Charlie through a housemate and she moved into my house (by accident) for a short time. I met Sam at Norwich School of Art and Design where all three Le Tetsuo members were studying.

Le Tetsuo started off playing support slots and house parties around Norwich in the vain hope that they might get paid or become more popular. These shows quickly became the stuff of art school legend and fans were reported to be climbing through front room windows and scaling garden walls to see what all the ‘fuss’ was about.

In 2004, the trio moved in together on where domestic bliss was punctuated by arguments about washing up, the phone bill, who bought loo roll last and whose pants are they in the corner! Despite the pressures of co-habitation Le Tetsuo continue to be a tight, loving unit committed to performing stupid, quick songs, that are designed above all else to make people enjoy themselves.

The Le Tetsuo ethic is directly opposed to the notion that music as art has a right to be self-important and loaded with meaning, which in turn, is expected to be thought about and endured by a paying audience. It seems arrogant to me at least to assume that a band has something to say, that people want to listen to it and that what is being said is unique or original in anyway.

Le Tetsuo accept that they are nothing but a bunch of arty-fag types with no moral or intellectual authority to make some sort of crass musical statement about ‘issues’, ‘the world’, ‘life’, ‘love’, ‘war’, ‘suffering’ or ‘the dark absences that linger in the souls of every modern TV-watching human being’. No, instead they choose short blasts of sexy nonsense, vacuous ‘hipster-speak’ lyrics.

We are influenced by the happy Norwich music scene we are part of and the bands that comprise it: Howlback Hum band nights, Wombatwombat etc and also by the music we like, such as Hendrix, the Pixies, Elastica, Kaito, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Shellac, Herman Dune and Frank Zappa, though not in that order.

We write our songs together in rehearsal. Most songs start with someone playing a new riff they made up and then structure, time signature, words, noises, usually follow. The process of writing is totally democratic and shared. No one member sits around writing for us. The way we do it ensures that one of us doesn’t write something self-indulgent.

We play mainly in Norwich at Howlback Hum event nights and the like and have put out a little record on the Mummy Where’s the Milkman? indie label based in Norwich. This label also puts out a Howlback Hum compilation which we are on.
John Peel opened his last-ever playlist/show with our song Nickers Off Ready When I Come Home and apparently said he liked it very much. It also got played by other Radio 1 DJs and on XFM and some Swedish radio station a couple of times.

Our name derives from a Japanese film. The ‘Le’ was added because we wanted to be put next to le tigre in record shops and also because we are pretentious art school types who speak occasional drunken French, plus there are too many ‘the’ bands around at the moment!

www.myspace.com/letetsuo