“I’ve always liked rock music,” he says. “I liked that there was less bullshit and they weren’t trying to fool you. For example, John Lennon or Bob Dylan, they’re just using a guitar to convey something. I love that and that’s what the core of [Darlia] is. It’s using a guitar to say, ‘I’m not fucking about, I’m just doing something’.”
As soon as Darlia’s debut EP Knock Knock landed last October, the group’s sonic semblance to both grunge and Britpop led the UK press to nominate them as harbingers of a new rock revival. Day is aware of garnering comparisons to such iconic forebears, but recapitulating the 1990s’ major rock movements wasn’t the intention.
“I don’t want to be a grunge band at all,” he says. “I’m not a fan of grunge, I don’t love grunge, I don’t have anything to do with grunge. The only thing that ties me and the ’90s together is the fact that I was born in ’94.”
While the UK music press has a tendency to make exaggerated proclamations about paradigm shifts in rock music every other month, hindsight suggests that nothing from the last few years justifies use of the terms ‘movement’ or ‘revolution’. However, Day believes the time for a change is here.
“In 2000 and 2001 there was a new wave of new guitar and it was like, ‘This is the new noise’, as opposed to the ’90s. I think that restarted in maybe 2012, but did not actually happen at all. Then in 2013 it was like, ‘Is it going to happen? No it’s not.’ And then, 2014 – ‘OK, yes it is’,”
Day might be confident that a real resurgence is upon us, but he’s not necessarily satisfied with the work of his contemporaries. “Last year I did not read the NME, I didn’t read any music magazines, I didn’t care about anything. But I was kind of aware that Palma Violets and Peace and Swim Deep and anyone who basically held a guitar – that was cool again. And I knew that this was starting again, this whole guitar bollocks.”
Bollocks? Surely the guitar’s return to the spotlight is a positive shift for a band in Darlia’s position. Well, to paraphrase Morrissey, Day stresses that simply playing an electric guitar is not enough to make you a rock’n’roll star.
“It does not make the genre; what you hold in your hand. The Prodigy – I would say that’s got rock and that’s got punk inside it. I don’t even think there’s a single guitar, apart from a few tracks, but they’ve got more punk than anything that’s around today. What really pisses me off is when people are not rock’n’roll and they’re not punk but they are conveying that false image by holding a guitar and using that as imagery.”
Fair enough. There have been plenty of bands through history who’ve utilised the guitar as their primary tool without producing music appropriately deemed ‘rock’ or ‘punk’. But if Day’s willing to make these hard statements, what does he believe it is that properly constitutes rock music?
“The human species is a primal thing and we act on instinct,” he says. “I think that if you’ve got a guitar in your hand, a drummer and a bassist – that’s instinctive, that’s primal. You’re just doing it, you’re not fucking about with any politics.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
