White Lies set to steal the show
IF ever a band threatened to steal the show from the headliners on the influential Shockwaves NME Awards tour, that band is White Lies.
The three-piece from Ealing, West London, are third on the bill of this year's tour, below Glasvegas and Friendly Fires, and above Florence & the Machine.
The 17-date jaunt starts tomorrow in Liverpool, and arrives at the O2 Academy in Newcastle on Sunday.
And the timing couldn't be better for the indie-rockers, whose debut album To Lose My Life was released last week, and went straight to No 1.
That was followed by a nomination in the best new band category in the NME Shockwaves Awards.
White Lies are Harry McVeigh (vocals, guitar), Jack Brown (drums), and Charles Cave (bass, backing vocals), and they began life in 2005 as a teenage band called Fear of Flying.
Described as a "weekend project", they released two double A-side vinyl singles on independent record label Young and Lost Club.
Two weeks before they were due to start university, they decided to take a gap year, and perform new material which they felt didn't suit their current band.
"We thought 'This is veering towards something much better'," says Cave, "and there came a point where we realised we had these new songs that sounded really different, so we decided to wipe the slate clean."
Fear of Flying disbanded, and returned as White Lies, so named, they said, because "white lies are common but quite dark, and that's how we see ourselves".
The new sound owed a lot to the likes of Editors, Interpol and Joy Division, and their subsequent rise has been a meteoric one.
They played their first gig under the new name on February 27 last year, sparking a label scramble which eventually saw them sign to Fiction Records.
Three months later they made their TV debut on Later... with Jools Holland, playing their singles Unfinished Business and Death.
The summer saw them headline Radio 1's Big Weekend at Maidstone, and they went on to play numerous festivals, including Oxegen, T in the Park, and Reading-Leeds.
Their first headline tour visited 13 UK venues in September and October, and they spent two months recording their album before a short US tour and a support slot back home with Glasvegas.
They ended the year at Xfm's indoor Winter Wonderland festival, and were second in the BBC's Sound of 2009 poll.
Chief lyric-writer Cave is the creator of their dark, cinematic tales of murder, madness, revenge, loss, and love from beyond the grave.
He's working on a new piece concerning a girl who hates her parents so much that, to get their revenge on her, they include a clause in their will forcing her to have them stuffed and mounted in her front room so she has to look at them every day. And that's one of the brighter tracks.
Tickets for the NME show in Newcastle, priced 15.26, are still available from (08444) 772000, or www.nme.com/gigs.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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