Working Men’s Club: Feeling the Fear Fear
Yorkshire dance collective Working Men’s Club released a deluxe edition of their most recent album Fear Fear last month, and you can hear tracks from it when the band come to Cambridge.
This extended version also features a bonus five-track Steel City EP which has remixes courtesy of Sheffield producers such as Toddla T and Ross Orton, who produced the album itself. Orton also produced Working Men’s Club’s well received (self-titled) debut LP in 2020.
Speaking to the Cambridge Independent from his home in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, the group’s frontman and principal songwriter Syd Minsky-Sargeant says he and his bandmates have been preparing for their UK tour, having got back from playing gigs across Europe and America a couple of weeks previously.
Syd describes the latest album, which came out in July, as being “slightly more left-field” than the first record. “I don’t think it’s that left-field but it’s definitely, I guess, less obvious than the first album,” he notes. “I think there’s been a different reaction, but that’s not a bad thing, and it’s nice to not necessarily be pigeon-holed into one corner.”
After selling out both the Manchester Ritz and Brixton Electric last year, the band’s upcoming UK tour will be their most extensive to date. It follows triumphant appearances at this year’s Great Escape, Tramlines, Bluedot and Primavera festivals and a run of intimate shows staged in conjunction with some of the top independent record stores in the UK during album release week.
Although he is just 21, Syd certainly isn’t new to this – some of the songs for the first album were written when he was just 16. “I’ve been making music all my life, really,” he says, “so it was nice to finally put an album out in 2020.”
He continues: “The album was finished before the pandemic – in Christmas 2019 – but then it obviously came out during the pandemic so that, I guess, brought a different viewpoint from a listener’s perspective because they were hearing it for the first time during that period.”
The first track to be released off Fear Fear was the synth-heavy Widow. “It was initially a kind of guitar song,” recalls Syd. “It was written in my room during the process of writing bits for the first album, but it didn’t make it on to that record – and then we came back to it for the second album and completely reimagined it, sonically.
“We started using lots of synthesisers and really working on sound design. It was definitely a project that tune in itself. We spent a lot of time fixating on the minute details and adding a different life to the song.”
Syd’s first instrument was the guitar and he believes that that was where a lot of his “melodic knowledge” came from. “I used that as a foundation to apply to other things,” he says, “such as piano, synthesiser and other melodic sound sources.”
The digital deluxe edition of Fear Fear is out now, alongside the Steel City EP remixes by Charla Green, Diessa, Ross Orton, Todla T, and Forgemasters. Come and witness first hand Syd’s undeniable gift for melody when Working Men’s Club perform at the Cambridge Junction on Sunday, November 27.
Tickets are £18 in advance. from junction.co.uk. For more on Working Men’s Club, go to workingmensclub.net/.
