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Music

We Got Dutch Uncles To Eat Themselves

Well...themselves in burger form.

I'm sat with Dutch Uncles in Almost Famous, a burger restaurant on the second floor of what would have been a graphic design studio, talking about their cheap marketing ploy. They have branded an artery clogging monstrosity of a burger "Godboy", after a track from their new album.

As reported by the Coventry Telegraph the burger in question is Dutch cheese, seared wild boar sausage, shoestring fried onions, Dizzy Blonde beer based sauce, chipotle ketchup with a speared Jellybaby (Godboy) with a mini dutchcheesesteakburger.

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However we decided to trump our regional rivals, and sit down with the band to taste their creation. The food arrives.

Noisey: I’m a bit worried. So you came up with this?

Robin: No, we didn’t come up with this.

Duncan: When we were approached, we were thinking, ooh, can we have a chocolate waffle, you know?

So this is all a sham?

Robin: We got an email and saw what they’d come up with. And were like, all right!

Duncan: It’s just burger and sausages I guess. But the cheese steak on the top is pretty owning it. They picked the song title out of the list. But in fairness that song is about having a hangover. So it kind of works. But I think it’s meant to be the Jelly Baby as the Godboy, holding up the mini burger.

Excellent. And you’ve got a new record, not giving up music to immerse yourself in the burger game?

Duncan: Well, we had to keep going to keep being a band, really. We hadn’t sold 40 million copies of Cadenza so erm, couldn’t exactly sit back for a while!

Did you go into the studio with an idea? Or did you want to do mortality and addiction?

Duncan: Lyrically I wanted to do more interesting things, not actually related to personal influences. I water to write songs like that Talking Heads "Don’t Worry About The Government". Just to be able to write a song that says "I live here, these are my friends, this is my flat, this is the way I feel about it.” But with a different slant. But I didn’t find my way about that at the time, so it fell into a personal ideas again. It’s all right, still works. Every song is intentionally still love and sex and death. So you know, it’s all right. "Threads" and "Flexin'" were the first to be written and they were about sexual habits and demeanours and things like that.

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Ha, had you just seen Shame?

Duncan: I hadn’t! But when I was writing "Threads" I was looking into the whole autoerotic-asphyxiation. There were some interesting stories concerning it at the time so that was an insight. And "Flexin'" was a cheeky slant at a Prince song about S&M - y'know, beat me up, tie me down, and tell me what to do.

Christ. Umm, I was going to ask about phasing, use of glockenspiel, and a major reference to Steve Reich. Were you wanting to introduce him to your audience?

Robin: Yeah, I suppose so. I think wanted to have more fun with it. Writing and experimenting with different mathematical-musical ideas that we couldn’t really do with the previous album. But not only is there so much Reich you want to recreate and let influence you, you can’t really because of logistics. You can’t get hold of marimbas or strings that easy. But we said that we were going to have these things, we were going to make it happen somehow. Which I think opened up the Reich a bit more.

I guess one of the problems is that you can’t turnout onto a festival stage when you’ve got 15 minutes of marimba. You’re going to feel like your pants are around your ankles by that point.

Robin: With "Flexin'", for example, when I was writing that music It’s one of these weird rhythmic ideas to fit in an 8-bar idea.

Duncan: We’ve gone through everything angular that we could possible get out hands on. Even the early, the very early on. We’re talking We did this as a more classic album. A classic album. Tim Drum by Japan, basically whatever CD was in my car at the time.

So what are you going to do for your next album?

Robin: Pasties.

Good shout. Thanks guys!