Chapel Club singer Lewis Bowman was reticent about putting his poetry to the band's 'big, anthemic tunes' – but it worked. Anyway, it's time to break out of the white-boys-with- guitars mould, he tells LAUREN MURPHY
LEWIS BOWMAN is not your average indie frontman. A small, slightly weedy-looking chap, it’s not only the Londoner’s physical appearance that seems at odds with his band Chapel Club’s muscular, doom-laced anthems.
Image might be important to his bandmates (see guitarist Mike Hibbert’s amazing quiff and Alex Parry’s nerd-chic fashion sense), but for Bowman it’s always been about the songs. Besides, it’s not like the singer slogged away at a musical apprenticeship for years, fine-tuning his public persona; Chapel Club is his first band, and “musician” was never an occupation he aspired to.
“I was one of those people whose life was kind of unconsciously structured around the music they like,” he says. “When I was at uni I got very into the DIY club scene that was around at the time. It was just when indie was starting to get big again after The Strokes, and when electro was just starting to cross over, and the indie crowd were starting to get into dance music. I was going to a lot of clubs, and running a lot of club nights, but I’d never been in a band.”
After meeting Hibbert at parties through mutual friends, Bowman was convinced to turn the poetry he’d been dabbling at in to lyrics. “I’d written stuff, but nobody had ever seen it – Mike certainly hadn’t seen it. And he never will,” he laughs. “I hung around with a lot of people who were musicians, but I always thought that I’d have to feel so comfortable to try it, and I didn’t see it happening. It was only when I met Mike, and the other guys through him, that I thought I’d give it a bash. I kind of had to be coerced into it by my girlfriend and various other people.”
Chapel Club (a name inspired by the church near their rehearsal space) spent a couple of years honing their line-up and a clutch of songs they'd written together, but once they'd solidified both it wasn't long before the AR men came a-knocking – specifically after hearing the band's first unofficial single, Surfacing, a powerful surge of dark indie-rock that pilfers and warps lyrics from Dream a Little Dream of Me. Contrary to rumours, however, the quintet didn't sign to Universal imprint Loog for big money.
“There wasn’t a bidding war; it never got to that point,” says Bowman. “We’re lucky enough to have a really good manager who’s quite an honourable bloke, and he said: ‘We don’t want to start a bidding war, because that’s not the kind of thing you want to start out doing – making enemies in the industry, playing people off against each other’.
“We did have quite a bit of interest, though – we could have fielded lots of different offers. But we kind of put a cap on it very quickly. We got offers in, and we just said ‘Okay, who do we like? If their offer’s good, let’s just take it’. We didn’t get signed for a lot of money. At the time, I thought it was really wise. And now I’m thinking, ‘Well, all these other bands who’ve been signed recently and have gotten loads of hype, they’re not denying that they signed for lots of money, so maybe we should have’,” he laughs.
Bowman takes his craft as a lyricist extremely seriously, though he’s wary that his sincerity may come across as conceit. In fact, as strong a debut as Palace is, he’s already somewhat dismissive of it, choosing instead to burble excitedly about what their second record will bring.
“I’m sure Palace won’t sell anything – just because guitar music doesn’t, does it? I mean, hopefully it’ll sell some, but it won’t set the world on fire. We’re not well-known enough, we don’t get played on the radio. Which doesn’t bother me at all, I kind of like it – because the less known you are, the more the people who do discover it will hopefully get in to it. We don’t know how long we’ll get to do this. We know we’re on tour until the summer, but I doubt we’ll be touring it beyond that.
“I think the album is such a strong album lyrically and musically, and I think it’s got some really thrilling moments, but I just feel like it’s not the time for guitar bands – in terms of sales, anyway. And we have to think about that.
“We’ll be looking at it the next album a lot more holistically, and trying to create something that can be, well, not a work of art in the grand, high-and-mighty sense, but something that can be seen to have some bearing on the wider culture, rather than just an album of rock songs.
“I personally don’t really have my sights set on being the biggest band in the world, in the way that a new band like Brother or someone does. Having an ambition to headline Glastonbury is great, but my ambition is really just for intelligent people to listen to the songs and say ‘This is a reasonably good addition to the wider culture, in the same way a good book is, or a good film is’.”
Bowman is wary of Chapel Club being dismissed as just another guitar band amid the wave of young British acts dominating the scene. Though Palace was recorded to sound big, loud and compelling – in part, thanks to the steering hand of Paul Epworth – there are other strings to their bow just waiting to be plucked. The potential for evolution is hinted at on the slow pulse of The Shore, the trickling beat of Fine Light and even the commercial single All the Eastern Girls, a song encased in a haze of guitars but with flourishes of subtly glittering synth throughout.
Finding the middle ground between Bowman’s wordy lyric sheet, with its themes of love, death, nature and spiritualism, and his bandmates’ love of “big, anthemic tunes”, as he puts it, will be a challenge. Yet the singer, who cites Scott Walker and Harry Belafonte as influences, rather than the oft- assumed likes of bands such as Echo and the Bunnymen, Editors and Joy Division, thinks Chapel Club’s progression is a no-brainer.
“Even though I’m a fan of so many guitar bands, past and present, and even though I think they’re an entirely valid form of musical act, I’m aware that a lot of people dismiss boys with guitars. White boys with guitars, anyway – it’s completely out of hand these days,” he laughs.
“Everyone just thinks ‘we’ve have enough of Snow Patrol’. But we’ve been recording some new songs recently, and our sound is changing very, very fast – so hopefully there’ll be less of those comparisons in future, and more people just saying ‘Let’s see what they do next’.”
Palace is out now. Chapel Club play Dublin’s Academy 2 on Feb 25 and Belfast’s Auntie Annie’s on Feb 26
