We chat to Wild Beasts about their GIF novel for The Jameson Works

Date
27 November 2014

Wild Beasts frontman Hayden Thorpe vividly remembers coming across Mattis Dovier’s work. The band had been approached to take part in The Jameson Works, a project which focuses on how creativity happens and the insights and stories picked up along the way that are as much a part of the creative process as the final outcome. Searching for some reference material, Hayden came onto It’s Nice That and saw this post of Mattis’ GIFs. “It was pretty confrontational,” he remembers. “You could see Mattis’ hand behind the work and that reflects the way we now work too.”

Initially attracted by the openness of The Jameson Works collaboration (“a very rare opportunity”), the band knew immediately they had to find a way of working with Mattis. “This guy was a doing something we have been looking for,” Tom Fleming remembers,” and after we found Mattis there was only really one contender.”

“That’s the way it works – we never have an ejector seat but we knew with Mattis we were in very capable hands,” Hayden adds. From their first conversations with the French illustrator and animator, the band were struck by how similar their creative outlooks were, albeit in very different fields. “It’s very rare to give something to someone who’s not in our immediate circle and they’re able to run with it,” drummer Chris Talbot explains. “In fact it’s hard to overstate how rare that is. But we liked that sense of the unknown as well, we wanted to build something up from scratch.”

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The Jameson Works & Wild Beasts

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The crowd during the discussion

Mattis was given two unreleased Wild Beasts tracks – Soft Future and Blood Knowledge – and he started creating a GIF novel that responded to the songs and the stories told within them. The band then revisited the tracks after seeing his initial sketches and the project developed from there. “It was like a tennis match,” Tom says. “We went back into the studio and picked apart our tracks to make them fit to what we were seeing.”

Keyboard player Ben Little remembers being struck by Mattis’ technical skill and vision, and the way his work brought to mind the Japanese illustrations and retro video games of the guys’ younger days. As the novel evolved, the band became and more and more excited by the collaboration. “With our terrible French and his adequate English we had to find other ways to communicate,” Hayden says. “We feel this is just the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”

The band is clearly genuinely passionate about The Jameson Works project and impatient for the final novel to be revealed on 10 December. “We wanted to do something sincere, something we could really get involved in, stand by and be proud of,” Tom says. It’s been a wonderful project.”

“It was important that if we were going to do something that we had some flesh in it,” Chris agrees. “That’s where the good stuff comes from, when you put your neck on the line,” Hayden says. “It’s been one of our most rewarding experiences as a band.”

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Drummer Chris Talbot

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The Mattis Dovier poster at the event

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The crowd during the discussion

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Wild Beasts and Mattis Dovier

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The Jameson Works

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About the Author

Rob Alderson

Rob joined It’s Nice That as Online Editor in July 2011 before becoming Editor-in-Chief and working across all editorial projects including itsnicethat.com, Printed Pages, Here and Nicer Tuesdays. Rob left It’s Nice That in June 2015.

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