We have a long history with brothers Toby and Finnigan Kidd, stretching back over two decades to the emergence of their band Hatcham Social in New Cross in the early days of Joyzine and continuing through the label, Crocodile Laboratories, which they set up together, and more recently seeing Toby write the occasional article for Joyzine, while Finn provided the artwork for one of the birthday cards that housed our 20th anniversary compilation album (if you’d like one of the last few remaining copies, you can order them here).
The duo’s latest evolution is New Commercial Product, a new musical project opening up new paths of musical exploration, freed from the expectations that come with a long-established band like Hatcham Social.
Released via the recently expanded and renamed Crocodile Collective, their debut album Knees Up Amongst The Ruins is an intriguing, compelling and cohesive tangle of styles and themes, tackling the overtly political in atmospheric opener ‘A Buffoon In a Suit (Is This How It Works?)’ and the heartbreaking ‘Imaginary Borders’, social commentary in the wonky indie pop of ‘The Pressure of Life (Triggers My Anxiety)’ and the character-driven ‘Middle Class Murder Street’ and the deeply personal in the aching trip-hop tinged ‘You Are Not Alone’ and the bright guitars of ‘The Boy In Your Heart’.
We asked Finn and Toby to take us on a guided tour of the record.
TK: We went into this album project with the idea that we could shake off all the ideas and constraints that we had got caught up in with Hatcham Social. To just make songs and be free to write what we needed to write. I have always loved songwriters that tell stories, vignettes, we both have, and we leaned into that. This time it was just me and Finn and we could experiment and write and make things as good and as interesting as they should be to us, without the compromises that can happen with a bigger group. It was a mixture of us writing in the studio together and then bringing in some guests. A lot of the guests were improvising over basic tracks that we could edit and make something from later. It’s a really fun and exciting way to work. NCP started to revolve around a looping rhythmic quality. These are songs of mostly ordinary working people trying to survive a tech bro apocalypse.
1) A Buffoon In a Suit (Is This How It Works?)
FK: This has one of my favourite rhythms on the record. The drums and percussion with the interplay of the bass and the “Huh!” vocal just creates this really driving, aggressive pendulum swing that is hard not to move to.
TK: A lot of the lyrics for these songs, on my side, were written cycling to the studio from my house across Tottenham Marshes. We wanted to channel that kind of Fun Boy Three chanting chorus, deadpan and locked into the rhythm.
This way of using our voices together is part of what NCP is.
2) The Pressure Of Life (Triggers My Anxiety)
FK: I remember this starting out being conceptually based on this conversation that we would often have regarding the checkpoints of life, and how as you grow up, people constantly judge you on your success in relation to where you are and if you have achieved the same goals as them. These societal pressures and expectations of having a “professional” job, of having children, of getting married, of buying a house… and so on. All these things that maybe you don’t want, but are expected to have by a certain age.
TK: Sometimes it’s great to write a really simple Chuck Berry/Buddy Holly kinda song and then just take it somewhere else. This is one of my favourite guitar sounds on the record. A lot of the guitar sounds I get from messing around on Reaper rather than pedals. Brian O’Shaugnessy mixed the song so it ends like it’s all falling apart – very Joe Meek!
3) Imaginary Borders (ft. Charlotte Marionneau)
FK: Verses 1 and 2 were inspired by documented accounts by asylum seekers, and their experiences crossing the channel, and inhabiting the awful conditions of informal camps and migrant towns. We wanted to highlight the absurdity of these man made, made-up borders, and the disgusting ways in which their very existence and upkeep as a lawful construct inflicts pain and suffering on so many people. A system that we have only seen become more and more extreme and hostile under the leadership of people like Trump, selfishly encouraged the tech bros.
TK: Nations are a made up idea. We live in different places but there are no hard edges unless someone made them up. The artists Pil & Galia Kollectiv have made very interesting work about this, in particular a solo show they had called The Immigrants which included these inspiring actions undertaken by costumed performers in different locations across the UK which highlighted that environmental destruction does not stop at abstract lines on a map.
Our friend Charlotte from Le Volume Courbe (as well as playing with Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds) was kind enough to add a wonderfully delicate guest vocal on this in her native French, we felt like this just needed to cross continents to feel complete.
4) Middle Class Murder Street
FK: Perhaps the most absurd and also the most direct song on the record. I had a lot of fun writing the little spoken word first verse (almost a kind of rap lol), thinking of all the most archetypal upwardly mobile signposts. “Bougie” furniture and yoga pants, enjoying their “Champagne socials”. I really love Brian’s application of the delay on the vocals too.
TK: This was inspired by a street I used to live on in South London. I love the area but the street was full of people I found intolerable. Very arrogant and pretty well off but complaining about money a lot. But we all know these people. In some respects this is like the kind of song Damon used to be very good at writing in middle period Blur before he got so serious.
This has some Kinks energy about it. Maybe because in a way it’s quite silly and fun. There is something interesting about wrapping toxicity in a joviality that we love doing as NCP.
5) Working For Profit
FK: I remember the verse starting out as a punky, angry rant, thinking about how many skills and jobs I need to have just to be able to make ends meet. How ridiculous this all is, the life-long punishment for not wanting to be a banker.
TK: This has some interesting changes that make me think of Squeeze. My favourite part is the way the saxophone shifts the direction in the middle, with serpentine playing from Chris Cundy who guests on much of the record alongside Thomas Greene. Both incredible musicians and really added a lot to the record. We got to know them well when we played with Cold Specks, who I also toured a bit with playing bass. In fact we also both performed on a recording with Cold Specks once for a cover of a Swans song…forget which one now.
6) So I Made A Picture
FK: I remember thinking that we made the most ridiculous chorus with the downward discordant synth and bass rundowns, but now it doesn’t even sound extreme at all.
TK: Maybe I see it like a Frank O’Hara poem about wanting to buy a home declaimed into a chaotic mess. Thomas Greene plays some particularly rambunctious keyboard parts on this song. I sort of feel it has an Ian Dury and the Blockheads kinda feel it now.
This one came together really well at the launch show we had, each time we play it’s a slightly different band line up and this line up really just locked into this song so well.
7) You Are Not Alone
FK: Due to the looping nature of the recording process, this one came out with a really interesting kick drum pattern, where it ebbs and flows, builds and drops continuously from bar to bar. I think this really adds to the overall groove, adding a subtle detail on which the rest of the instrumentation sits. Also Toby’s vocal has a wonderful natural distortion and phase that happened, one of those lovely recording accidents.
Oh also, on this track I played the congas that are on ‘Movin’ On Up’ (Screamadelica).
TK: There are people in our lives who have gone through some really hard times. And in fact most people do at some point. But sometimes I look at them and hear what they say and I don’t know how to respond. So this song is for them. You don’t know what to say in person, but perhaps you can say part of it, something important, in a song. There are a couple of specific people this song is for but we can’t say who they are, it’s not for us to say that.
For me songs can be where you say things that you can’t find a way to say in the day to day.
8) Chicken Shop Kisses (ft. Adeleye Omotayo)
FK: Ade’s vocals brought such an incredible new element to this song, elevating it in a way we could not have predicted. In fact we have a fun photo of Ade from that session, him sitting in Toby’s living room on the sofa, with headphones and a mic. That was a great day, very joyous.
TK: Featuring the powerful guest voice of Adeleye Omotayo which just takes the song into a new place – something we could never have done otherwise. Finn was bringing in these interesting beats influenced by hip hop and pop production.
Part of what NCP does is take something synthetic that might be usually done with electronics and then play that idea with real instruments to songs that tell stories about people we know.
9) The Boy In Your Heart
FK: Probably one of my favourite songs that Toby has ever written. I still find it quite emotional listening to it, listening to the lyrics and the memories and regrets that they bring up in me. It’s a wonderful piece of narrative and self-reflective song writing, capturing our lives in London.
The drums came out well on this version too, very open with lots of space for the song to exist on top, but still with a little detail to keep them interesting – inspired a little by ‘Five Years’ by Bowie. Also Thomas’s piano is *chef’s kiss*.
TK: This song started life a long time ago – in fact we played an early version of it to Douglas Hart when I was producing a couple of (great) tracks for him for the Blank Editions label. I remember he was excited about these new songs we showed him. The other one got lost. But this one, it kept niggling. And we brought it out again for these sessions and finally found the lines we needed to finish it off.
It’s about many things but the starting point is our dear friend Dan Divine, Alan McGee’s son, who was in the punk band Flats. We all lived together in a small flat in New Cross at one point, just as things were kicking off for Hatcham Social (the band that me and Finn formed in the years before NCP, now known as BNCP). He was a big part of that whole moment.
10) Until They Become Conscious They Will Never Rebel
FK: The title and main lyric is, as some may recognise, a reference to Orwell’s 1984. This felt particularly apt with what was going on in the world at the time of writing, and continues to be very relevant, if not more so now.
TK: The line about Cut-throat Lane is inspired from a ghost story performed in Bruce Grove castle.
The Man From Powys (who has sold many more records than we have in his career as a rave music producer) to give us some rave magic!
Crocodile Collective and our friends at TheZineUK present Artful Fest at The Waiting Room in London on 15th October, featuring live performances from Shattercones, Great Silkie and Charlie Savidge + DJ sets by New Commercial Product and Jolt as well as some mystery special guests. Tickets, priced £8 + booking fee are available here.
New Commercial Product: Bandcamp
Crocodile Collective: Instagram / Facebook / Bandcamp
Interview by Paul Maps
Header and footer photographs by Joanna Curwood
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