Mitchell Museum: National Treasures

If you grew up on shiny pop bands with expensive haircuts, beaming from the glossy pages of the teeny pop Bibles of the time, chances are you became a little dispirited upon learning that said acts could barely stand the sight of each other in real life, let alone hang out or live together. It’s enough to drive you to grow your hair, wear flannel shirts and hate yourself.

So it’s a pleasant surprise when The Skinny finds itself in a first floor flat in Glasgow’s Sauciehall Street, a domain that acts as a home, rehearsal room, album storage facility, play-pen and general doss-pad for Mitchell Museum, a quartet of young, upbeat, affable, ‘actual friends’ who live, play and breathe in each others’ pockets with nary a spiteful word or awkwardly flung fist in sight. Oh, and they just happen to have made one of the quirkiest Scottish pop albums for some time.

As The Skinny photographer ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ at the cornucopia of ramshackle delights the Mitchell’s dwelling presents for photo opportunities, the band opt for the rooftop garden as fit for interview purpose, if only to get away from the towering boxes of newly delivered vinyl pressings of their upcoming debut album. A variety of garden furniture chairs showcasing the changing fads of domesticity over the past few decades is fed through the kitchen window, warm beer is served straight from the off-licence, before Dougie, Raindeer, Kris and Cammy take their seats.

Getting to the nub of how all four got together as Mitchell Museum takes some time though, as, aside from brothers Raindeer and Cammy, they all met as friends first and so constantly veer off on genial tangents. “Me and Cammy both went to see Ben Folds Five on my nineteenth birthday,” begins bassist Kris on his induction. “We were both in the same car together.” However, lead singer and keyboardist Cammy points this out as something of a red herring in that they only figured out that their paths had crossed yesterday afternoon.

After five minutes of such banter, drummer Raindeer, a New Year’s party and alcohol emerge as the foundations of Mitchell Museum. “I’d been living in Manchester for a while, but one New Year I was back in Glasgow, trying to figure out whether to come back or not,” says Kris. “I didn’t know Raindeer at all but he came up and sat next to me and said; ‘See you, I like you. I think we could be pals. You know what? We should be pals.’ Then he gave me a hug – so I moved back to Glasgow.”

Apocryphal or not, the remainder of the evening saw the group gather around Raindeer who was “a bit drunk and hitting the piano,” according to Cammy. “We all joined in and then started doing it on a weekly basis after that.” As brothers growing up listening to Mercury Rev and The Flaming Lips, Cammy and Raindeer were already well honed, the younger Raindeer owing his current drumming skills to the fact that his older sibling let him into his band in the first place, meaning he had to pick up his game. Dougie and Kris simply gelled with this set-up from the beginning.

The name came much later as the band playfully wrestled with each other on potential monikers such as Muscle Pony, now doubling as a side-project for Kris. However, the band claim it’s not a nod to the Native American museum in Illinois but rather an alliterative play on the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. “There’s also the Mitchell Fishing Reel Museum,” points out Cammy. “I’m desperate to knock them off the Google page,” rallies Kris. Cammy is less vehement towards his rivals though. “There’s some nice old fishing reels there,” he admits, much to the band’s laughter. “I’m not kidding.”

With all due respect to the history of fishing reels, Mitchell Museum’s upcoming debut album, The Peters Port Memorial Service, should see them rise a few places in the Google search engine. It’s a fresh, confident debut, bulging with experimental ideas, yet honed into some of the jauntiest and cerebral penetrating pop nuggets heard this year. Yet as much as it is a playful album, it is also one that sounds increasingly mature with each listen, an album that knows when to breathe and when to plough headlong.

Cammy picks up on this train of thought; “I’m not making a criticism as such, but a lot of bands bang out all the songs that they’ve got from their live set for their first album,” he says judiciously. “So it often ends up sounding like a ‘Best Of’ collection. For me, when it comes to listening to an album I want to listen to something that sounds like a whole piece, the same way as you might feel about a novel.”

Cammy cites Dark Side of the Moon as a ‘sort of’ influence, though not one of their more obvious ones. Peters Port is certainly far from being a prog epic, and in terms of narrative, a story written by Cammy for the album was rejected by the rest of the band as “horrifying”, though it did end up subtly infused into the album’s artwork. At first, such dark leanings seem incongruous to the gleeful, upbeat carnival pomp of Peters Port until you listen more closely to Cammy’s lyrics.

“A lot of the lyrics are to do with some pretty dark things,” reveals Cammy. “I’ve got a bit of a past where I wasn’t so, um, sane in the brain shall we say. I’ve dealt with that now though. So a lot of it comes from just feeling quite crap about stuff. Then we put it into a jaunty tune!” Kris summarises this creative process further; “He goes to his dark place and then we have to play it.”

Though Cammy talks of the album having a “through line”, his lyrics seem more concerned with the abstract than with having any story-telling purpose. His style and delivery are at times reminiscent of Yoni Wolf of indie hip-hop outfit WHY? “We all love WHY?” agrees Cammy when put to him. “Oh you’ve made him happy,” bellows Raindeer. “You’ve made his day!”

Musically, there is little in the Mitchell Museum that feels as if it was forged in their home city. The aforementioned neo-psychedelic pop of The Flaming Lips, as well as Tripping Daisy, are reference points that are likely to be well-documented in the wake of the album’s release, whereas standout tracks like No.3 seem to be a missing link between Mercury Rev’s early experimentalism and the ornate lullabies of their later period. However, in the wake of their recent popularity, many are naming the Animal Collective as a touchstone.

“Oh, I can’t stand them,” jokes Cammy, all too aware of the influence the New York troupe have had on his band. At this point Raindeer reminds his older brother of a phone call he made after hearing 2007s Strawberry Jam. “You were going on about the first track on the album having this sort of sound like a dinosaur screeching on it,” laughs Raindeer before adopting an impersonation. “Raindeer! I think that’s like a sample or something! I think I want to do that!”

Conceding the point, Cammy picks up on the path this put him on. “I really wanted to sample stuff but didn’t know how to. All I could do was play a keyboard, I didn’t know how to use a proper sampler, so I just kept looking through stuff on e-Bay and thought ‘how can I make a sample sound come out of a keyboard’. Then I saw the DJX and thought ‘I remember that from the old days!’”

At this point the band breaks into unilateral, if somewhat ironic praise of this antiquated keyboard with “a memory sample of around six seconds”. Out of financial necessity and a lack of technological prowess the band claim it became the backbone of their sound. “You play a banjo line and then just sample that and it’ll make up the basis of a song,” shrugs Cammy modestly. “So yeah, the DJX is pivotal.”

It’s a humble beginning perhaps, but it's something the band have become accustomed to. Peters Port has been a self-financed labour of love that has taken its toll on the young quartet. “There are some bands that have contacts with certain important people,” says Cammy of enduring to land a record deal. “We had a bit of that, but we were concerned about how long it was going to take. It’s also a bit of a shaky time just now so we thought we'd try and do it ourselves and see how we get on with it.”

Not that there hasn’t been interest, and with it some tall tales, as Raindeer relates. “We did a gig in the Brixton Windmill and there were some guys from Rough Trade who came to see us – we’re not signed to Rough Trade,” he deadpans to laughter. “At the time they seemed very keen on the whole thing, but for some reason they had been told that Nigel Godrich was producing our album. That was hilarious. ‘Yeah, old Nige, he’s putting the finishing touches to it in my bedroom just now’. We’ve no idea where that came from.” “Maybe it was when Dougie was going about shouting at them ‘Nigel Godrich is producing our album!’” suggests Kris.

Behind the laughter though, the band admit that despite the current glow of having completed and produced a brilliant debut album that is now on the cusp of release, they would like someone else to take the baton from here. “Ideally we’d like to move onto a nice label, like the one that was mentioned,” hints Kris. “It would be good to have some kind of label,” agrees Raindeer, “and with that, some money, or at least more money than we’ve got just now. But more importantly, someone who likes what we do and would like to help get our music out to more people.”

Is this something that the band’s future hinges on? “It would be a good start,” shrugs Raindeer, showing that either way, it won’t impede future MM material. “Then after that, U2 levels of success,” he laughs. Kris sits up with an objection. “No, I don’t think I want to be as much of a dick as U2,” he levels reasonably. “We’ll start referring to Cammy as the new Bono,” carries on Raindeer obliviously. “Oh, I can fill those shoes,” states Cammy, rising to the challenge. “Those tiny shoes. Hasn’t he got tiny feet?” Kris flops back down. “I don’t want to comment on Bono’s tiny feet,” he sighs. “Although perhaps I just have.”

Whomever’s shoes they choose to fill, it seems certain that Mitchell Museum will be walking their very own ramshackle path.