Speaking to Fuzz Lightyear’s frontman and guitarist, Ben Parry, and bassist Varun Govil about their EP, ‘Zero Guilt’, it’s clear they want to be back where they belong – playing too loud on a stage too small to fit the four-piece.
And yet this latest project was built without the rapport and feedback of a crowd. Most of the songs were created during 2020’s lockdown, and they say it’s what makes ‘Zero Guilt’ feel like a time capsule, a snapshot in time: their last shot at giving it a go as a straight guitar band. Now they’re more electronically influenced, more industrial, and have brought Alex Calder into the mix for synths.
The band initially formed in 2018 as a three-piece at Leeds Conservatoire – Ben and Virun with Josh Taylor, their drummer. They moved in together before lockdown – into a nine-bed house populated by many of the city’s other DIY bands – and spent much of it bunkered down watching live sessions and rehearsing in their rooms.
‘Zero Guilt’ picks apart feelings of incubation, isolation, and, less abstractly, 1966’s Aberfan disaster in Wales, where a waste tip kept on top of a mountain slid down as slurry, killing 144 people in the village of Aberfan – mostly children. For Ben, a Welshman, it was important to interrogate that history. It’s a project that pulls no punches, tells no lies.
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What does your music-making process look like?
Ben: A lot of the parts we come up with get made then and there, and that we stick with. If anything, we spend more time labouring over the structures, deciding if a section is necessary. We trim the fat.
Virun: When we wrote ‘White and Green’, the opening track for the EP, that took a lot of revisions. But a lot of the songs are quite instinctive – actually getting the bones down, what the song is about – but then we’ll spend a lot of time tightening nuts and bolts. We’ll get a really solid live take, make sure that energy is there, but from there we spend a lot of time trying to see how weird we can get: which bits we can push and fuck with. Once we have guitars or drumsticks in our hands, we just want to be going full pelt, making music.
Do you think of Fuzz as a band built to play live? Is that more important than putting out records?
Virun: We like both a lot, but live is our home. When we’re writing songs, if it doesn’t sound good played live, then it’s not worth working on.
Ben: Live is a better medium of music. There’s so many limitations when it comes to a digital or physical medium: a limit to the volume, the frequency response, and the emotional reaction you can have.There’s a reason people go crazier at shows than they do just listening in their headphones and that’s because your body has a primal, emotional response. I don’t think anyone will ever be able to recreate that feeling in any other way. Just seeing that emotional reaction is how you know you’re digging in the right direction.
How do you reconcile your band name and the music you make? To me, the name is so easy going, and then your music is so heavy and gritty.
Ben: For a while, I probably hated the name, but at the start we were more of a garage rock band, more easy going. Nowadays, I think of bands like Ringo Deathstarr where it’s a bit of a pun but still a bit serious. When you hear the name ‘Fuzz Lightyear’, you think of a big loud band, and ultimately that is what we are.
What influences were you sharing at the time you made the EP, and what inspires you more now?
Ben: We listened to a lot of crowd rock, noise rock kind of stuff. It was that period when post-punk was really huge – Squid was everywhere.
We lived in a nine-person house with a few other musicians from around the Leeds scene. It’s a city that encourages you to be constantly doing things, for the act of just making things and making things happen. What gets us most excited is seeing your friend play a new song and realising it’s the best thing in the world, and realising you need to be better.
Virun: The few things that have stuck around as influences from the start to now are probably Gilla Band, Show Me The Body, and Sonic Youth. I think those three are the only ones that have stayed steadfast, but also because all three of them encompass so many varieties of sounds, so there’s something new to dig into.
Do you feel it’s a natural progression to go from guitar to more of an electronic sound?
Virun: I think it’s a sign of the times. I think everything is a bit more club-focussed these days. Suddenly you’re in a big city where you can go on nights out: you find people making way cooler music than you knew existed, hearing mind-bending dance music and realising how much fun it is to be out at three in the morning.
Ben: I think there is a bit of us that will always be a really loud rock band: we love turning up as much as we can, getting weird new pedals. But there’s a lot more you can do digitally with sound. There is a barrier at some point; the amp can only get so loud, or guitars can only produce a certain amount of sounds. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a year we go back to trying to write punk music again.
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My favourite song on the EP was ‘Aberfan’: I hadn’t known the details of it until I looked it up afterwards. What prompted you to write that song?
Ben: During lockdown, I had a lot of time to look into Welsh history and investigate my origins and the culture of where I grew up, and how that influenced me as a person. I’d been living in England for two years, so I wanted to learn a little bit more about home.
As a kid, we’d always talked about Aberfan as an injustice that’s an indelible example of government oppression of Wales. I wouldn’t necessarily describe Wales as an oppressed people, but I would say there have been wrongs that have been done to us that aren’t necessarily talked about, and I just felt very inspired by those feelings I had in my childhood of political radicalisation, and wanted to – maybe naively – fight the system and be more active politically. Having a fresh take, and being able to retell the stories was something I really needed to do.
Do you feel there’s a political thrust behind what Fuzz are doing? Is that a priority to you?
Virun: To say we’re a radically political band would be a bit dishonest. End of the day, we’re four guys doing this because we love music, but we really care about the people around us and our histories. When you see some of the tragedies in the world, it’s hard not to respond to that.
We’re not personally going down and shutting down arms factories, but we do try and support our local community where we can. We’ve done a few fundraisers for local queer charities, and we fundraised for Palestinian organisations a few times.
When we’re putting lineups together, we’re really conscious that we are four lads and when we have control, try and make sure we’re platforming people with different backgrounds – not as a box ticking exercise, but because these are people who are making art we really love. If you want things to change, you have to do something; you can’t just hope someone else does it.
What’s next for Fuzz Lightyear?
Ben: We’re in a bit of a childlike phase at the moment, which is, throw as many ideas as we can at the wall and see what sticks. We’ve just finished demoing a small handful of tracks, so what’s next is new music at some point. We’re doing our first London headline in March, and a few other dates around it.
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‘Zero Guilt’ EP is out now. Catch Fuzz Lightyear at London’s Lexington on March 30th.
Words: Kate Jeffrie
Photo Credit: Machine In Train Station
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