THE WOLFHOUNDS RELEASE NEW SINGLE DIVIDE AND FALL THIS WEEK.

The Romford band’s spiky FEELING SO STRANGE AGAIN was a highlight of the legendary NME compilation C86 – an expanded edition of which is currently in the works and will be out next year. Following a fistful of releases including seminal singles THE ANTI-MIDAS TOUCH and CUT THE CAKE, plus UK Indie Chart Top Ten album UNSEEN RIPPLES FROM A PEBBLE (1987) and 1989’s BRIGHT AND GUILTY, The Wolfhounds split in 1990.
Reforming for an anniversary show in 2005, the band have continued to gig their peculiarly English take on the art-punk of Sonic Youth AND THE controlled aggression of Sugar. Earlier this summer the band set the bar extremely high when opening the SCARED TO GET HAPPY mini-festival in London (listen again to an edition of The Mouthcast recorded at the event, here).
Fresh studio material finally surfaced in 2012 in the form of the three track EP001, followed by last January’s single CHEER UP. In this brief Q&A to highlight the release of new single DIVIDE AND FALL (backed by THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF PUBLIC LIFE), The Wolfhounds’ frontman David Callahan reveals the band’s future plans…

HOW HAS GETTING THE WOLFHOUNDS BACK TOGETHER BEEN?
We freely admit that we got The Wolfhounds back together just to play a couple of tempting ‘revival’ shows that we’d been offered, but discovered that both I and guitarist Andy Golding had continued to write over the years, and that we still seemed to compliment and kick each other up the arse like we used to. And this despite me having had a fairly successful second musical career in Moonshake.

WERE THERE THINGS THAT STILL NEEDED TO BE SAID?
There’s always something to be said. We’ve also found that some of our old songs make even more sense now – e.g. CHARTERHOUSE, from 1989, essentially skewering the connection between the old school tie and leading bankers as the cause of financial woes… Sound familiar? If anything, we get angrier and keener to express ourselves with anything that comes to hand, as we get older.

DIVIDE AND FALL, THE NEW SINGLE… 
… is a kind of a love song, essentially an expression of ‘me and you against the world’, about the difficulties of preserving your two senses of self in a couple, and your support for each other, when the world keeps throwing problems at you. It’s also a promise to an old ex-girlfriend of mine to keep being supportive and remain friends. We are.

WHEN WAS IT WRITTEN?
DIVIDE AND FALL was fully written several years ago, but it needed Andy’s counterpoint guitar to lift it. The words were written simultaneously, but others are scribbled down separately and then edited to fit.

DO YOUR WRITE ACOUSTICALLY AND TAKE FINISHED SONGS TO THE BAND, OR DOES THE BAND JAM NEW MATERIAL OUT?
I bash out a lot of newer songs on a knackered guitar that was glued together after a more recent girlfriend threw it against the wall… Consequently it’s slightly out of tune and makes nice droney noises that I have to fight to control. It’s very inspiring… Other songs are written with Andy’s music, a combination of the two, or sometimes even on an old school outboard sampler. We recorded it with Anthony Chapman (who used to be in Collapsed Lung of EAT MY GOAL fame) in a teaching studio in Buckinghamshire, though the b-side was recorded at home.

IS THERE AN ALBUM BY THE WOLFHOUNDS ON THE WAY?
An album will be out next spring, we hope. It’ll be a bringing together of the four EPs / singles we’ll have done by then, plus a couple of other tracks recorded around the same time. This has been our ongoing plan over the last couple of years. However, we fully intend to record a standalone album sooner or later. We reckon we’ve probably got a three-year backlog of songs at the moment, owing to the difficulties of finding the time to rehearse and record: families plus jobs plus recession equals creative frustration… But the flow continues – we have another single, entitled ANTHEM, out at the end of next January.

… PLANS FOR MORE LIVE SHOWS?
We’ve been steadily but judiciously gigging throughout summer and autumn this year, and we intend to do maybe one more London show before the end of the year. Other than that we play the Northern Star Weekender on Sunday 30th March – a psychedelic festival at the Windmill in Brixton. There are foreign dates forthcoming, and weekend jaunts to the Midlands, North and Scotland being planned for next spring and summer as well.

Buy The Wolfhounds’ new single DIVIDE AND FALL on limited edition 7″ vinyl (and download) from Odd Box Records’ Bandcamp page here. Previous single CHEER UP is still available here