Dry Cleaning
Bad Vibrations is excited to be hosting South London four-piece Dry Cleaning for their biggest show yet on 3rd March 2020 at Village Underground, following their sold out headlines with us in 2019.
The band formed when bassist Lewis Maynard, drummer Nick Buxton, and guitarist Tom Dowse recruited artist Florence Shaw as the group’s singer. Though never a performer, she’d always kept lists—neuroses, daily annoyances, advertising copy—with the idea to one day use them in her drawings, and these became the satirical patchwork of the band's lyrical content. Their debut EP, Sweet Princess, is a combination of energetic, guitar-driven music with deadpan but emotive vocals that paint a vivid pastiche of contemporary British life. Their next EP, 'Boundary Road Snacks And Drinks' is set to be released on October 25th and we look forward to hearing what's to come.
Tickets go on sale on Friday 4th October, and special guests will be announced soon.
Please do not buy second hand tickets outside of the Dice waiting list or See tickets exchange system. This is to protect you from scam and ensure tickets are legally yours.
"7.8/10. These six cerebral, spiky songs extract something touching and tragic from the mundanity of social media and social anxiety."
- Pitchfork on the ‘Sweet Princess’ EP
“There was quite a big emphasis at the start on ‘60s psych, although that’s become less apparent now. Lewis really loves funk and metal, so the sound actually started to move in a direction that I don’t think is that close to post-punk, personally.”
- Tom in an NME feature
Dry Cleaning in conversation with The Quietus
Florence Shaw, a visual artist, drawing lecturer and picture researcher, was recruited by Dowse, who she knew from art school. She had no prior experience in music, other than two years’ worth of piano as a child, but had incorporated the written word into her art. In a pub, after a friend’s exhibition, Dowse played Shaw some phone recordings of what he, Buxton and Maynard had been working on in the garage. “Something about it seemed to click, those two worlds meeting, Florence and the music.”
Meeting Dowse again at her flat shortly afterwards, “I was frightened,” Shaw remembers. “Not because you were coming to my house, but because you had a guitar. I was like ‘Oh, god, there’s a man with a guitar here!’ I had a book called Fears Of Your Life by Michael Bernard Loggins, where he wrote a list of all the things he was afraid of; so I think it got to the point where I was reading from that while Tom was playing the guitar.”
And so, Shaw entered the garage. “In a way, because we were so near each other, I felt less self-conscious,” she says. “You feel less exposed because they can’t see all of you, being super close is almost like not being seen. I’d never rehearsed anywhere before until the garage so I thought that was normal, I wasn’t ever thinking ‘this is tiny’. When we first rehearsed in the proper music room we use now, I was out of my mind. I thought ‘this is really intense, it’s too much, the lights are really bright, everyone can see me’. I always felt very comfortable in the garage, despite the smallness. Maybe we just need to find another mini room…”
She’s only half-joking. The use of Susan’s garage was part of the plan, in many ways the reason the band sound so enthrallingly taut, so spikey, frantic and engaging. It was a way to push three established musicians back out of their comfort zones. “I’ve never been in a band where I’m the only guitarist, and the bands I’ve been in are always noisy so I was less exposed back then,” remembers Dowse. “I can remember a very early version of ‘Goodnight’ where I was playing quite strange reversed octave chords, because my favourite kind of hardcore is that really grindy stuff with strange octaves, bands like Pg. 99 and Orchid, I was trying to do that in an indie way. These guys were like, can you not always put the distortion on? Can you do less? It took my playing to a different level, having to start pulling those chords apart.”