Issue 85 / February 2018

album out of it, present it as it is, then go ‘BANG!’ and do a
complete left turn. I suppose in that way we’re Bowie’s children.
The guitar’s gonna get fucked off…!”
“It feels like, when we get the album out, that’s almost like the
end of something rather than the start of something,” Jonny adds.
“It’d be more of a finale of what we’ve been doing over the past
three years. Partly because 50% of the songs we write get left to
one side because they don’t fit into the nucleus of what we are at
that time – but they might be in the future, in some shape or form.”
Does that, I wonder, make it harder to write and work within
such narrow guidelines? Especially when you’re trying to please
six members equally.
“No,” is the emphatic response from both, to which Mick adds:
“You’ve got to have a destination.”
“Everything gets written fully and we finish it, and it’s only
at the end that we decide if it stays or not,” Jonny clarifies, before
Mick sums it up neatly. “Live, once something takes shape, you
start to understand what the sound is. You do start to define
yourself. I don’t mind that now – because things have a uniform,
have a way of talking. So, people might notice it and think, ‘Oh,
I get that.’ But it doesn’t mean that it’s got to stay the same
forever.”
Which way Rongorongo will lean after they complete this part
of their journey is anyone’s guess – but there’s a long way to go
before we even have to consider that. Right now. they’re on the
crest of a wave, fine-tuning the setup they currently have. They’ve
never sounded better live than they have in the past couple of
months – even if it looks like they’re not enjoying it. Things are
moving so quickly for Rongorongo that I wouldn’t be surprised
if their album came out in the second half of 2018 in a flurry of
activity, sweeping everything in their path.
“To me, it’s all pop music – I’m a massive believer of that,”
says Mick as we near the four-hour mark in our rambling chat. “It’s
moved on so much now that [there] are loads of micro-genres that
define themselves, but I just think it’s all pop music. Like, Public
Enemy and NWA were rock bands as far as I was concerned, they
sampled it all: soul, rock, disco.” Both Mick and Jonny are students
of music, which is probably why our conversation runs off on so
many tangents – from Lana Del Rey’s dismal chart performance
to Slade to Smashing Pumpkins. My main take home from the
chat – aside from Mick exhorting me to put my laziness aside
and learn to play the guitar (“Just do it – writing songs isn’t that
hard!”) – comes back to something Mick said earlier: that music is
just escapism. We all need it, even if we do it through the prism
of the very thing that causes us disquiet in the first place. Perhaps
inevitably, the spectre of a Third World War is never far from our
discussion, but I’m sure it’s with a huge amount of tongue in cheek
that Mick leans in close to my recording device and leaves his
parting shot.
“Never think you’re at your worst because your worst is yet to
come…!” !
Words: Christopher Torpey / @CATorp
Photography: Robin Clewley / robinclewley.co.uk
rongorongoband.co.uk
Singles Black Rain and Euclid are out now via War Room Records.
“Sometimes it
seems like the
inner world is
wearing thin,
the outer world
is caving in”
FEATURE
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