Palma Violets: playing like idiots

“In times of turmoil, find a home to attack from”: it might serve as a motto for someone who has lost everything. But you’ll find it chalked over the door of Palma Violets’ home base at “180”, an artistic squat at 180 Lambeth Road in London where the group’s music started life. “A creative hub”, the band members call it. Upstairs there is a rehearsal space; downstairs in the tiny basement was where, until recently, they used to squeeze in with their public. The squat at 180 was so decisive for Palma Violets – who take their name from the British sweets known as Parma Violets – that they gave its name to their debut album, which saw them hailed across the Channel at the beginning of the year as the latest saviours of rock ‘n’ roll; earlier, the BBC had included them in its influential “Sound of 2013”. But they haven’t lost their heads. “They said that about the Darkness too,” chuckles their drummer, William Doyle, in the lobby of a Brussels hotel. “We try to take as little notice of it as possible.”

Doyle, a lanky lad with no rock ‘n’ roll airs about him, tells us how things took off for the band when, two years ago at the Reading festival, their frontman, Sam Fryer, got talking with Alexander “Chilli” Jesson. That was the start of a bromance along the lines of Peter Doherty and Carl Barât of the Libertines, to whose ramshackle, drunken Brit-rock Palma Violets owe a lot. Doyle, who originally wanted to be a session musician, used to play in jazz quartets and big bands, but realised that there was too much hard work involved. He loves jazz and regards Ed Thigpen, Oscar Peterson’s drummer, as a genius, but is also quite fond of some death metal now and then. Are there traces of that in Palma Violets’ rough rock palette? “‘Play like an idiot,’ Sam told me. [Laughs] Keep it simple! If you listen to the great rock ‘n’ roll bands, you can hear that not much happens. That way, you leave more holes to be filled by your soul.”

Jesson – who was outside having a cigarette – joins us, in a cool white shirt, with a cigarette behind his ear, reminding us of someone cruising down a highway, one hand resting lightly on the steering wheel – a buccaneer, a bit like Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road. “I can’t manage four chords,” he laughs. It was the singer and bass-player Jesson who wrote “Best of Friends”, though, the band’s tempestuous breakthrough single. “Simplicity is the key to success,” he believes. “No technical showing-off, just emotion. Music is not a complicated formula.” It is that direct emotion that finds expression amid the raw guitars that producer Steve Mackey (Pulp, Jarvis Cocker) steers along gravelly paths. Friendship, parties, foaming beer, laughing, bawling, going crazy... “I hardly have any friends outside the band,” answers Jesson when I tell him that “Rattlesnake Highway” sounds like a celebration of life and friendship. With Joe Strummer of the Clash looking over his shoulder, as he admits in the song. “I love Joe. I used to listen to a lot of Nick Cave, but Sam made me fall in love with the Clash. I wish Strummer was still around. When you’re making rock ‘n’ roll, you always have the feeling that your heroes are in it, that they are there with you, going through the same struggle.”

PALMA VIOLETS 3/11, 20.00, €21/24, Ancienne Belgique, boulevard Anspachlaan 110, 
Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-548.24.24, www.abconcerts.be