10/6/11

NOTHING BAD MAGAZINE

10th June 2011

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In 2005, Tom Vek nailed himself to the proverbial cross of UK indie, leaving us with nothing but his scripture, the masterpiece that was (and remains)

‘We Have Sound’. Only once Vek’s garage door had been rolled away and his body found missing, did

we realise that he’d done so much more than make a record - he’d absolved a nation of four years of

post-Strokes musical sin...

In the six years that followed, false audio proph-ets came and went, but none of them could fill his shoes. Or glasses. Just when hope was all but lost, in the fourth month of 2011, magi heard distorted drum loops in the East and behold: A saviour with a side parting. Nothing but green lights from here,

let the ‘Leisure Seizure’ begin...

- Fred Macpherson, of Spector

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Photography: Katie ColeslawLighting: Kee Kyung SanAssistant: Jamie Sinclair

Shot at Recession Studios

Tom Vek

Tom Vek

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Tom Vek

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Tom VekTom Vek

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Tom VekTom Vek

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Tom Vek

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Tom Vek

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Tom Vek

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Tom Vek

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Tom Vek

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Tom Vek

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Interview by Katie Bagley

Interview

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Firstly, he was away for 5 years, not 6. “It’s five be-cause we stopped doing stuff at the beginning of 2006. So it’s five years… and a bit.”

Five years and a bit can seem like a lifetime, especially to fans. So when news of a new album leaked on Twitter ahead of the official announcement, many looked at the date (April 1st) and wrote it off as a prank. Oddly enough, Tom himself had been thinking about pranking everyone.

Interview

“When we were hav-ing a planning meeting it was looking like the announcement of the album was (going to be) around the 1st and we were thinking about whether it should be a joke, whether it should be a fake announce-ment or something. But we didn’t know if it was going to work or not.” Then came the official news that confirmed the leak – Tom Vek was back and breaking his hiatus with the release of a new al-bum, ‘Leisure Seizure’.

“I wanted the album to represent the process it took to get finished. I think I be-came morbidly fascinat-ed with why myself or a hypothetical person in my situation would feel any frustration about being in such a lucky situation.” “I’d been interested in the word Seizure for a while,” he says, when asked about the album’s name. “It’s something that repre-sents the most extreme version of something, not an explosion, just a

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Interview

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Interview

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Interview

white light that fills the screen, out of the blue and with no reason or meaning. I think it’s a self-levelling concept that utilised a physical threat to help someone regulate their psycho-logical indulgences, which is where the Leisure word comes in. And then, well… the two words look cool together and that’s my fundamental driving force and then that helps undermine the whole deep element of it.” Monday sees the beginning of a tour that will take him through Europe and onto New York. ”I can’t remember what it’s like to play live,” he admits. “You’ve got a lot to think about and you’re always distracted by what’s actually happen-ing and whether you

can hear what you’re playing.” But the most surreal moment playing live was his cameo in the now-defunct US TV show The O.C. “There was a fake audience and they did this thing where the track was playing only when the camera was on us and then as the camera moved off us the volume would go down but we had to be in the background just bopping so they could film dialogue. As soon as I got the call I went out and bought both box sets and got quite hooked on it. I’ve actually got a picture of me hold-ing the bagel slicer in the Cohens’ kitchen. I thought that was an iconic item from the kitchen.”

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Interview

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Interview

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Interview

Next Issue17th June 2011

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