New era for Fossil Collective

DAVE Fendick didn’t want to be in a band. In fact he was sick of the whole idea.

Despite moderate success, when his first group broke up he and former bandmate Jonny Hooker decided to knock the whole idea on the head. But before leaving it for good, they had a few things to get off their chest – namely, a handful of songs which had been rejected by their old group, Leeds-based Vib Gyor.

“As soon as we had some success we decided to give it up,” he says, talking to me from his home in a chilly corner of West Yorkshire.

“We were pushing in different directions. Myself and Jonny wanted to strip it back and go more melodic, but other people in the band would have been happier to see us turn into The Killers.

“Jonny and I said ‘enough is enough’, and by the time the band split we were totally done with music. We just wanted to make a three-track CD of songs that weren’t suitable for Vib Gyor, just to show them!”

The result was a self-released EP of gently soaring music and stripped back harmonies. And, to everyone’s surprise, it went ballistic. The lads may have been happy to quit music, but the listening public certainly weren’t. A stop-start animated video for their demo On and On (depicting a courtship between a wolf and a stag) went viral on youtube.

“We had a quarter of million hits in two weeks, and that span our heads out,” says Dave.

“It was nothing to do with us, it was down to people sharing. And the irony is, we weren’t hoping for a record deal at all. We just wanted to do that EP and call it quits. But all these labels came knocking at our door.

“It was the opposite of what had happened with Vib Gyor, where we were trying so hard to get signed. It’s like what they say about looking for love, and not being able to find it. If you are more chilled-out it all finds itself.”

They called themselves Fossil Collective. ‘Fossil’ “because it sounded cool” and ‘Collective’ “because we wanted it to be a loose collective of musicians rather than a conventional band.”

Again, defying their modest expectations, that fluid entity has now ossified into a regular band.

Their achingly beautiful music takes its cue from Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, The Beach Boys, and Simon & Garfunkel – which were all early influences on the lads – as well as Midlake, Bon Iver and Radiohead.

It is, to flog the fossil analogy, skeletal; its warm and intense melodic harmonies beautifully crystalline and uncluttered. “We wanted to try something different to what everyone else is doing,” he says. “But everyone is influenced by Radiohead.”

And their eye for an enigmatic video also continues. The production for Wolves, showing a bearded young man lost in a snowy forest and on a gloomy beach perfectly accompanies the melancholic music.

“There is something dark and mysterious,” says Dave. “We thought it would be interesting to do something different. And the director used his friend, who is a better looking version of us, to act in it.”

Starting off utterly broke, they acknowledge the help that friends have given them.

For their Let It Go EP, for example, they were given the loan of a studio in a church crypt “We didn’t have a lot of money,” he recalls. “But a friend had a recording studio in a crypt beneath a church in Batley, which we were allowed to use for next to nothing. If there was a service or a funeral we’d have to stop playing. We’d listen out for the vicar to start playing the organ and have to wrap it up. It means we’ve got some good ambient noise on some of the tracks, though.”

Tomorrow the band play the Jericho Tavern, in Oxford, on a tour to promote their debut album Tell Where I Lie.

So how does Dave feel about having his plans to quit music being so dramatically knocked-back? “We are happy to carry on doing it,” he laughs.

“As soon as we found the appreciation, we found the motivation.”

Fossil Collective play the Jericho Tavern, Oxford, tomorrow.
Go to wegottickets.com
Album Tell Where I Lie is out on Dirty Hit Records