Pigeon Detectives Interview

Cool Pigeons

	Jimmi smashes through a fence, then disappears off the mountain edge. Terrific...Maxim has killed a Pigeon!

The Pigeon Detectives are suspended 9,000 feet in the air, dangling over a mountain in a cable car the size of a cupboard. Only two thin wires are preventing them from plunging onto the rocks and trees far below. Despite the fact that thousands of tourists do this every day, The Pigeon Detectives aren’t coping with it very well. ‘Shit fucking fuck bollocks,’ yelps bassist Dave, burying his face in the belly of guitarist Olly. ‘Why did we have to come up here?’

Sledge-ends

‘Here’ is the Austrian Alps, and ‘why’ is because Maxim want to take The Pigeon Detectives snowboarding. We thought it would be fun. We were wrong. The other guitarist, Ryan, is looking fixedly at the floor, saying, ‘We had to go up Ben Nevis in a cable car recently, and a bloke told us one of the cars had fallen off last year, but the people were just badly injured. Oh well, that’s alright then! This is far higher than that, though.’

Then it gets worse for the Leeds lads. The cable car reaches the top of a peak where it passes through a metal pylon. This shakes the metal box violently from side-to-side, prompting these phrases inside: ‘Fucking hell!’ ‘Jesus Christ!’ and ‘Aaaaaargh!’ Then it gets triply bad, as having now passed the peak, they look up through the window and see that we are in fact only half way through the journey. We’re on our way over a dizzying ravine up to the top of a mountain higher than God’s halo. ‘Look how far we’ve got to go!’ screams Dave, ‘I tell you what, I’m not coming down in this thing. I’m gonna slide back down on my arse!’

Alpine Madness

The previous night, the Pigeons had arrived at the ski resort hosting the Snowbombing Festival, an annual invasion of UK snowboarders, ski-ers, DJs and bands, all hell-bent on destroying the peace of the little mountain village of Mayrhofen. Matt Bowman, the Pigeon’s curly-topped singer, enters their hotel bar to be confronted by hundreds of people in fancy dress behaving like animals. It appears the band is staying in party central. Matt smiles, ‘This is amazing!’ Soon he and the band are stood between comedy Scousers, Batman and a gorilla. A couple of naughty Pigeons are after MDMA, which shouldn’t be a problem – people are practically snowboarding off mounds of it here. Even before rave-y granules arrive, they’re as confident and relaxed as Maxim has ever seen them. They have the look of a band with a shit-hot new album about to be released: sad, really, that just a few hours later, Maxim was about to shatter their confidence with the cable car ride from Hell. 

‘That was an extreme sport in itself, just travelling in that thing.’ says Dave as the band gratefully step onto the solid concrete of the cable car platform. Emerging out onto the spectacular mountain top, the band couldn’t look more out of place. As skiers whizz around in day-glo baby-gros, the band zip up their tiny leather jackets, and adjust to the sensation of snow seeping into their Converse. One look at the snowboarding gear convinces the Pigeons that they don’t want to do that, lest they look like ‘twats’. Maxim tentatively suggests sledging instead, which immediately has Matt and drummer Jimmi running for the hire shop. ‘That’s our problem,’ laughs Matt, ‘We want to be cool but then if someone suggest something daft like sledging, we’re like, “Brilliant!”’

Yes, the Leeds lads may never beat the Camden scenesters for cool, but on the flipside it means they’re not insufferable bell-ends. Along with The Enemy and The Courteeners, the Pigeons have brought down-to-earth honesty to post-Doherty guitar music. And although the Arctic Monkeys reign supreme, they’re nowhere near as much fun as the Pigeons: the Monkeys would never allow themselves to have this much of a laugh. Matt’s picked a fancy sledge with a steering wheel and a brake, which doesn’t seem to prevent him going arse-over-tit every time he ventures onto the nursery slope. As befitting his onstage heroics, he’s soon after bigger thrills: sledging off the big professional slope. You’re not really supposed to do that, as there’s a good chance you’ll die. Oh well…

Pigeons Cannot Fly

A crowd of onlookers gathers as Matt, Dave and Jimmi position themselves at the lip of the slope. It’s incredibly steep and as slippery as polished glass. It leads straight down the mountain, so even if they manage to avoid the rocks and trees, the G-Force will probably mash their brains into a pulp. A few worried voices express concern, and the boys hesitate. But then Matt clearly just thinks ‘fuck it’, and suddenly pushes off. Within two seconds he’s hit about 60 mph, and is frantically pushing down the brake to avoid a fast-approaching ramp. Panicked, he digs the brake in so hard that the sledge stops dead and he’s catapulted over the front of it to finish with a tidy somersault. People applaud as he laughs, ‘Your heart really goes when you start picking up speed, but it’s great!’

That’s good enough for Jimmi, who’s the type of bloke who has to take things further than everyone else. On his wooden sledge, he swerves off to the right. Without the luxury of a brake, he digs his Converse into the snow, which doesn’t stop him helplessly cutting across the serious skiers. He falls off to avoid a murder. It’s Dave’s turn next, but he stays frozen at the lip of the slope and remains there for the next 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, Matt and Jimmi are ready to go again, newly emboldened at still being alive. They push off and hurtle downwards - skiers start trying to keep their distance but predicting their trajectories is impossible. Matt manages to manoeuvre into the line of the slope proper, which means he’s travelling seriously fast and getting faster. That looks bad. But not as bad as watching Jimmi veer off the other way, smash right through a fence and, at high speed, disappear off the side of the mountain. Terrific…Maxim has killed a Pigeon.

Matt leaps off his ride and scrambles over to the cliff edge. Thankfully, within a few seconds, the staggering figure of Jimmi reappears. When the pair eventually get back to us, Jimmi is soaked to the skin. The band hoot with laughter. What happened?

‘The slope turned to the left but I kept going straight on!’ says the sheepish drummer, ‘I jumped off just as I was about to hit the fence but slid under it and started falling down the mountain. Only proper thick snow stopped me.’ ‘I think I shit myself more than Jimmi,’ says Matt, ‘I looked over the fence and it was just sheer cliff. Then he came walking out with snow in his hair. I thought you’d gone over the edge, I really did.’ ‘Scary shit,’ shudders Jimmi. Drummers really are indestructible. 

Unwanted Gest

The band calms themselves with a beer in a log cabin cafe and talk turns to the new album Emergency. Recorded in a typically hyperactive three weeks with legendary Smiths/Blur producer Stephen Street, it sees the boys add more shades to their bouncy guitar-pop. Says Matt, ‘In parts I think it’s darker, in other parts it’s vintage Pigeons. There’s songs like ‘This Is An Emergency’, which have definitely got a darker edge to them, but then there’s songs like ‘Say It Like You Mean It’ that are more poppy. There’s just good songs really.’ Olly chips in, ‘We just knuckled down for three weeks, and whatever came out, we recorded.’

At this point it’s worth pointing out that unlike Mancunians, people from Yorkshire don’t brag. You undersell yourself to avoid accusations of being a Billy Big Bollocks. So allow us to sell the album for them: Emergency is one of the albums of the year, on which songs like ‘Keep On Your Dress’ bring together spine-tingling melodies and punky aggression in a way not heard since The Strokes’ masterpiece Is This It. So there. It’s so good that the Pigeons’ calibre of celebrity fans should hopefully improve dramatically. ‘Johnny Douglas is a big fan. He plays midfield for Leeds United,’ says Matt.

Dave adds, ‘Some paper printed a load of bollocks that David Gest comes to all our gigs. Someone took a picture of Matt and David Gest was in the background, so then they decided he was our biggest fan.’

The band are reluctant to be drawn on what the songs on the album’s about – ‘We shy away from analysing the lyrics too much’ – which is fair play. Part of the reason the country loves the band is that they don’t need to ram their feelings down your throat by publicly crying through their eyeliner onto poetry books. They’re normal fellas who fall over in the snow, are scared of heights and get shafted at bastard Terminal 5. ‘On our flight back from Japan last week we lost eight guitars and eight suitcases,’ says Jimmi. ‘We do think BA are a bunch of knobs,’ says Matt, ‘but actually they did give us £800 each to buy some more clothes.’ So why didn’t they buy some ski wear for this trip? Ryan replies, ‘We weren’t really briefed that we’d be on top of a fucking mountain.’

The way down

The Pigeons pile into cable car for the journey down. As it passes over the lip of the mountain edge, the car tilts downwards so the band is staring directly down at Death.

‘Holy fucking shit!’ ‘Look at that!’ ‘Shit, that is not funny.’ says Dave, ‘Christ, this way’s even worse!’ Dave also now has the added problem of Matt being in a lively mood. In typically fearless fashion, the singer declares, ‘This doesn’t bother me at all’, and proceeds to jump up and down.

‘Shitting hell! Matt, can you sit down? You’re making me nervous.’ ‘I’m gonna rock it!’‘Don’t Matt! I’ll knock you out!’ Matt looks down at the arrowed trees thousands of feet below. ‘Actually, it’d be good for our careers if we died now.’ He muses. The others nod in agreement and it’s suddenly Maxim’s turn to soil underwear.

That night, at the more familiar stage height, the band send the Snowbombers right out of what's left of their minds with the most exhilarating performance of the festival. If they'd have died up the mountain, the world would have been robbed. But they didn't - yay!- so go see 'em play! (But be warned: do not bring along a sledge, snow or indeed a mountain. This may cause the band to have a collective nervous breakdown.)