YORK FIBBERS PRESENTS TURIN BRAKES

Never a particularly easy band to pin down, we may know Turin Brakes as unassuming South London lads strumming acoustic guitars with spine-tingling harmonies and brilliant, bittersweet love songs. Beyond that, not much …

That could all change with the their first career-spanning Best Of album. Beginning with The Door, it follows our heroes through four contrasting albums to Dark On Fire from 2007. And in doing so, it finally makes full and proper sense.

‘We seem to confuse a lot of people, because we’re not straightforward,’ says lead singer and rhythm guitarist Olly. ‘But that’s why people like us, too. We have been difficult to market. It’s much easier to sell vanilla ice cream than something with lots of interesting, nutty bits’

Its always been too easy to airbrush the summery acoustic guitars and hushed harmonies of school friends Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian, vocals recorded as if stretched out on a sunbeam, sun hat on head. But underneath the shimmery cool British space-glam and thoughtful, classy SoCal folk pop lies an uneasy social nakedness; fully formed and brutally emotive.

Over to the guys again, “We tend to pass all our influences through the genre of folk-tinged indie rock … some say we make a sweet spine tingling kind of noise while others say we are quietly seething but at our core we are a music making / song writing duo more than a little obsessed with guitars. And some say we even rock like monkeys!”Turin BrakesJersey Budd