“We’re definitely keen on saying we’re from Luton, as opposed to being another London band,” says Simon Tyrie, the frontman of Regressive Left, as he explains how moving to the capital with band-mate and fellow Lutonian Georgia Hardy helped shape his band’s identity.
The well-trodden path has historically been for a band to leave the town in search of their musical fortune in the Big Smoke. But when Regressive Left caught fire and gained national attention off the back of their debut single, ‘Eternal Returns’, they refreshingly stayed true to their roots.
“I used to get really annoyed by that, when you see a band say they’re from London, but they’re not. It is something you can fall into,” said the singer.
“It’s a big thing when you’re from a small place and you see somebody that’s doing all right is from the same place, especially when you’re just starting up. We didn’t have much of that, except the big people from the 80s, like Paul Young.”
By the time Tyrie and Hardy left for university in London five years ago, it’s fair to say Luton wasn’t a hotbed of guitar music outside of a largely metal scene, cultivated expertly by the Luton Live/s Promotions team.
That was beginning to change before the coronavirus pandemic with the emergence of a new breed of Luton indie and rock bands like SOURDOUGH, Dois Padres, JW Paris and The Palpitations. And despite the Covid shutdown of live music venues, coverage of local music was maintained throughout the pandemic by the town’s music and arts zine, Vandalism Begins at Home, which is when Regressive Left seemed to pop-up out of nowhere, fully formed. It was such a pleasant surprise because they’d never played a proper gig before coronavirus struck.
But a feature in the pages of the Vandalism, alongside a string of excited track reviews, have not just been confined to the town. The national music press and radio have had their heads turned too,purely by the strength of those three singles.
But now live music has returned, that trio of tracks are finally flexing their muscles as dance-floor fillers, none more so than their latest release, ‘Cream Militia’, which is a sensationally pulsing slice of electro art-rock.
Remarkably, in a fortunate twist after the lockdown postponement of the Ceremony #1 all-day festival at Bedford Esquires, Regressive Left’s first ever proper gig was last month at major UK festival Latitude.
“Latitude was really great!” said drummer Hardy, adding: “It ended up being our first live set after Ceremony got postponed. So we were thrown in the deep end with our first show being in an 800-capacity tent at a major festival, but everyone went crazy for it and we had loads of compliments after, so we’ve come in with a bang and it’s been great for our confidence.”
Further impressive festival slots have since been added. In this last week they’ve played the So Young Festival and, still to come, are slots at Fred Perry Subculture’s All Our Tomorrows at London’s iconic 100 Club, End of the Road, Dot To Dot, Wide Awake, Mutations, Manchester Psych Fest, Wild Paths and a first foreign foray to Belgium’s Sonic City, all leading to a headline slot at the Windmill in Brixton on October 1.
Though Covid fate launched them into Latitude, their rescheduled original live debut is up next at Esquires’ Ceremony #1 all-dayer (August 29), which promises to be a special one for Regressive Left.
It was at the legendary Bedford venue that Tyrie and Hardy supported the Mercury Music Prize-winning Wolf Alice in their former teenage band Lupo. Incidentally, also on the bill that day was pop megastar Tom Grennan in his former band The Jebs.
In the audience that day was guitarist Crosby, then of the band Blisseyes. They and Lupo would often play on the same bills in Luton and he would later join the latter before completing the line-up in Regressive Left.
“We started putting a lot of nights on at The Edge,” says Tyrie of the now defunct Park Street indie venue, adding: “The first time we played I was 17, so technically I was underage.
“We put on a night where we played and Will’s band played. We had a little mini scene going at the time but it was very small.
“There weren’t loads of people coming to see us but it was a tight-knit group. Then when we moved to London, we lost a lot of connections with Luton.”
They’ve since moved back closer, but life in the capital helped play its part in solidifying the band’s unique political dance-rock persuasions, which burst inventively out of Tyrie’s lyrics.
“It wasn’t until 2016, post the Brexit vote, post (Jeremy) Corbyn, post Trump, that things seemed to really explode,” the singer said of his interest in a politics. It’s one that is unashamedly front and centre, starting with the band’s moniker, chosen as an attempt to reclaim the phrase from being a slur used against people with progressive views and broadly socialist politics.
“Living in London, and being from Luton, I think the more I lived there, I became really aware of how everything was becoming more and more unequal and divided.
“I’ve never been more aware of the fact that I’m from Luton until you start working at a company in London. I’ve always thought of myself as being middle class, because my parents are teachers, but then people were making fun out of my accent and it’s this really discombobulating thing, just because I didn’t go to private school.
“When we were in Lupo, we were just students and drifting along. But then you start working a real job and you suddenly realise, ‘Wow! This is fucked’.
“Where I work is right in the City and there’s more and more homeless people, yet it’s right opposite Goldman Sachs (investment bank) and it’s this really messed up area.
“So, it (politics) didn’t used to be a thing but, with the music, we had a couple of years where we weren’t playing in a band. We got sick of the stuff that we were doing, the sound that we were making and we wanted to reconnect with what we originally really liked, rather than trying to chase whatever was popular, which is what you do when you’re younger.
“We were all DJing a lot, doing club nights and Georgia was putting on club nights (in London’s Shacklewell Arms, The Moth Club and the Old Blue Last) and, from that, we wanted to make different music. A lot can happen in a couple of years, which is the period of time it took to start thinking about Regressive Left, what it was going to be and to start sowing the seed of this project.”
But despite their political inspirations, the band’s music is refreshingly removed from the from the current post IDLES zeitgeist. So, instead of an angry punk punch, their music is more of a new-wave, dance-your-troubles-away approach for a generation for whom opportunity and social mobility is little more than a fairytale.
“It’s not particularly us trying to change the world, but just writing about what you see and what you experience,” says Hardy.
Tyrie adds: “When I was writing this stuff, I definitely didn’t want us to feel like Manic Street Preachers or this really corny Billy Bragg style politics.
“In the time that we weren’t making music, I was working a lot and reading a lot of really geeky political theory that I really wanted to get into songs.
“There were people that did it in the past, like Elvis Costello, that wasn’t completely on the nose. It was just of its time, it reflected the mood and it was more about society.”
They needn’t worry. From the lyrical wordplay of the very first line of debut single, ‘Eternal Returns’, Regressive Left earmarked themselves as something unique.
“Nobody carries ‘round change anymore, they wait for it to come…” sings Tyrie in a David Byrne brogue, while drawing on a concept from heavyweight philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in describing the depressingly cyclical nature of life.
But that’s the joyous juxtaposition at play here, because the music is made to make you move, not mope.
“One of the things we really wanted when we started Regressive Left, was to be a guitar band, but for our music to be danceable,” said Hardy.
“So that’s where we’re really influenced by bands like Talking Heads and ESG.”
Tyrie adds: “We were DJing clubs and Georgia was putting on a gig and we’d be playing music before and after gigs and we’d put on this new UK jazz stuff.
“It had this strong bass and was really danceable. I remember thinking that I really like to do something like this as a band.”
The band cite a collective love for new jazz artists like Moses Boyd, Nubya Garcia, Youssef Dayes and Kamaal Williams.
Hardy said: “It didn’t influence us musically, because we’re nothing like that. But we were realising that they were doing such exciting things and melding genres together in ways that had never happened before. I think that freed us quite a lot from our own music chains. We realised that you can do what you want.”
Right now, it’s working and by any current barometer, Regressive Left are only going to get bigger.
Omnis qui et quidem quo. Aut et a est quae occaecati perspiciatis. Aut officiis in et.