Correcto are based in Glasgow, they play truly spiky guitar pop songs that somehow blur around the edges and they have recently signed to Domino Recording Company. Gathered together as a quartet by the label at the behest of long-time collaborators Danny Saunders and Richard Wright, Franz Ferdinand’s Paul Thomson and Patrick Doyle, lately separated from the young corpse of the Royal We, complete the band’s line-up.
The songs, which belong to Saunders, take lovelorn and struggle – more so than's seen in the cocky pomp of Franz or the tweenage romp of Doyle’s previous act, removing the double you and leaving its narrator lonely and isolated with personality forced to grow out across the songs like wild flower. Teenage, teenage, teenage but disorientated and done with a wisdom that suggests it's nostalgia or playful immaturity holding sway.
This would all be so typical, so Gregory’s Girl, so pastel perhaps if it wasn’t for the untraceable element at the band’s heart that invites the space-punk guitars of SY to come and blow the thing open a bit and then you remember that a) Gregory’s Girl was great but never set in Glasgow and b) you’ve never been further north than Chester, so it’s probably better to keep those ideas about what it might be like over Hadrian’s Wall in your head and just ask someone who really knows before we all end up as punks or pensioners on a tourist’s postcard home from London…Danny
Are you alright to speak at the moment Danny? I can't get through to Paul just yet...
I think he’s just trying to record some stuff with Franz in the studio at the moment, just keep trying.
Yeah, I’ll keep trying.
He’ll break at some point…
Does he smoke?
No, he doesn’t actually.
So no fag breaks then?
No, maybe the odd pie break or something.
The live shows coming up – is this your first set of dates?
In this line-up anyway, yeah - me and Richard have been playing together for a while and we’ve had different drummers but yeah, I suppose these are the first ones with this line-up. We did play a gig in Glasgow last July at the Indian Summer festival.
Coming from Glasgow, how tangible is the weight of bands past? You seem to follow in that tradition of Postcard Records-style guitar-pop – are there any links between the bands playing up there now or is it more disparate?
I suppose Glasgow bands have always been, mostly, pop music. And pop music is just folk music really; for people to go out and have a good time to - people don’t necessarily want to go out and have some sort of education. At the end of the week you wanna go out and hear some good songs and have a dance rather than think about things too much – well, at least in my case. I guess you just try to be as honest as you can and not try to kid anyone… I think it’s just about making that connection and it’s great when it happens.
I do think it’s good when it’s done right, but all the bands charting with that formula at the minute rely, I think, on that empathy a bit too much – there’s nothing exotic or interesting about them and they don’t really do anything with that empathy. The amount of acts banging on about the 9-5 and how shit it is, rubbing their audience’s faces in it...
That’s true… they all do what they do and fine, y’know, but I think it’s more interesting to take that mundanity – which I do think is interesting, Ray Davies’ stuff has always interested me among other people – and just inject a… not surrealism, but a slightly unreal sense into it as well. And then you get some sort of conflict in your song or kind of make it like a strange little place where things are real but they’re also unreal I suppose. A bit like having a bad hangover or that feeling like if you’ve banged your head… everything slows down.
Just moments of difference within the routine…
Yeah, just normal but… not normal at the same time.
The way the video’s shot, it works like that in the way it’s very kind of warped by nostalgia. Quite faded…
Yeah, it’s true; the video I took a chance with. We had a slightly tight deadline so I just bought some stuff off eBay – home movie stuff – and so a lot of that isn’t shot by me it’s shot from really old footage I got off eBay.
That’s really interesting actually – so what, that’s other people’s home videos?
Yeah, other people’s home movies. Obviously some of it’s ours, just us kicking about doing what we do, y’know…
Is there a big market on eBay for people selling their home videos then?
There’s some great stuff in the States – it can be a bit complicated buying stuff but it’s amazing what you find, I feel like we’re starting a little collection up ‘cause you never know what you’re getting – it could be great, it could be nothing of course, just damaged tape. I just bought stuff and luckily it was this interesting kind of…
Yeah sure, it works really well…
Oh thanks…
No worries. I guess it’s similar in a way to when people go out with minidiscs to hunt found sound in their natural environments, albeit in a different media…
Uhuh, no that’s true… I’m really pleased how it came out actually. Just a hotch potch of images.
Video: ‘Joni’
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After this, a new voicemail message has landed in the mechanics of my mobile, so it's ring ring and Paul Thomson's on the phone, talking on his role in Correcto.
What was the motivation for getting involved with Danny?
He’s always been kicking about in Glasgow – he’d open for other bands, just him and a guitar and I always quite liked him. I thought he wrote really good songs and could do with a band backing him up – as well as him and Richard, the guitar player who he started playing with, there was a guy called Will who used to be in [much-admired Glasgow post-punk act] Life Without Buildings, but he was a graphic designer, always busy and eventually moved away from Glasgow. Danny sent some recordings to Domino and eventually they decided to put it out, but he didn’t have a band as such then, so Domino suggested I play on it and I’ve known Danny for 12 years anyway… so, he came down and stayed with me in London for a week in January and we went into the studio and recorded the album and that was that.
Is the album sounding good?
Yeah, it’s really good. It’s something I can listen to a lot without really thinking about the fact that I’m actually on it. It’s more of Danny’s thing really, his songs and they’re cracking. It’s really fun and easy to make – kind of the opposite of Franz where there’s four of us and we’re all total perfectionists and do each other’s brains in writing songs ‘cause we’re so ruthless about not having any excess.
You said the recording went quickly – do you prefer working that way or do you still hanker perhaps for the more precise nature of Franz Ferdinand?
The end result of Franz is when I think that, because you put so much work in and when it comes out right it’s more rewarding. I think it’s worth putting in those hours but Correcto’s really a sort of side-project – we’ve only played one gig as a band. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it pans out live.
What about Patrick (Doyle, formerly of the Royal We)? How long have you known him?
I’ve not known Patrick for too long but he’s been kicking about for a wee while. He came from Aberdeenshire and he works in Mono, this vegan restaurant stroke bar, stroke venue, stroke record shop in Glasgow where we all hang out.
We had this one post on the boards, I remember, where someone said they recognised him from the vegan shop as this uber-indie looking kid and that it was good to put a name to the face…
He’s quite familiar with everyone and he’s got about four different bands up here. He’s got a band called Sexy Kids as well, who are formed from the ashes of the Royal We.
There’s more than one of them in it?
Yeah, there’s him and Roxanne – she was on the cover of one of our records, on the front of ‘Do You Want To’. All these familiar faces are in everybody else’s bands. It’s kind of often like that in Glasgow.
Correcto's debut single 'Joni' came out this week through Domino, (review), on 7" and digital download. The band have just finished recording their next video, for new single 'Do It Better' which will see the dankish light of independent record stores on the 11th of February; two weeks before their self-titled debut album arrives on the 25th. Keep up-to-date via the news pages of DiS, or at the band's MySpace, here.