At this point in time Drenge find themselves in a funny position. Though their attitude and general demeanour suggests they shrug off attention, the siblings find themselves the focus of plenty – from booking agents, from journalists, from detractors on the internet… the list goes on.
“It’s fine when people are coming to shows and buying records and stuff,” Eoin says of life in the spotlight. “That’s all really great. But then you have the weird part, the negative attention that the internet can bring, which really isn’t so nice.
“I have a friend who rounds up all the negative tweets about us, about our personalities and the way we look, and sends them over in massive batches. Every morning, I get ten or 15 negative tweets, and they just grow week on week; that’s a very odd thing. Your private life seems to slowly unravel.”
Are the brothers ever tempted to bite back? “I guess so,” Loveless says, “but we’ve seen it happen to a lot of people before. It’s just a natural human impulse to want to have a go at something. I guess I’m probably just as bad for complaining about it. It’s still weird to think of all this directed at us, though.”
Given they have grown up under the same roof and now play in a band together, I ask Eoin if the songwriting is any easier, or if the natural brotherly impulse to fight and compete makes things difficult.
“We argue about things because we both have strong opinions, but we always find a way to make it work. We’re a lot more confident because we’re able to talk to each other honestly and not get too personal or too bogged down in silly stuff. Ultimately, when we’re writing together, the main consideration is that we only write music that we’d really want to play live, or that we think people would really want to hear.”
There’s a rough and raw quality to Drenge’s music, although according to Loveless, this extremely basic approach suits them just fine.The lyrical subject matter of Drenge’s songs is equally plain, with a general theme of young people fucking about and getting into trouble in a dreary English backwater town. Loveless explains that they try to write as simply and honestly as possible, using only influences from their real lives and observations.
“To be honest, most of the songs just come from walking the streets. It’s like, if you were to go into a dodgy pub and get a drink and then just sit down and watch everything happening around you, talk to people – those are the kinds of things that really inspire us. I don’t write about any real people necessarily, but I build the lyrics based on my observations. I like them to be quite visual and image-based.”
While there’s obviously a negative side to the growing fame – not least of all the opinions of various Twitter tossers – the upsides of breaking out certainly outweigh the downs. The past 18 months have given the Loveless boys their fair share of exciting moments, and I ask Eoin if there’s one particular experience that stands out, one moment that made him realise it was all coming true.
“We played to a pretty wild crowd at Reading Festival last year,” he says. “The most exciting part is that there were two mosh pits, side by side. I’ve never actually seen that before, and it was really crazy to be able to watch that from the front, from a performer’s perspective instead of an audience one. That’s one of those moments where you think, ‘Yeah, wow.’”
Drenge will soon be making their first trip to Australia, and are about as excited as two youngsters who are about to jet off to a far corner of the world can be. “We really, really can’t wait to make it down there,” Loveless says. “We’ve not got much time to spare, but we have a few days off in between Laneway and the sideshows we’re doing. There’s a lot of flying involved, of course. Thankfully, because we’re playing a festival, we get a lot of time on the day to relax and see some other bands when we’re not playing, which is great.”
Loveless can’t quite predict what Drenge’s live show will involve come Laneway, however. “We’ll probably be drenched in a lot of sweat, because I imagine it will be very hot in Australia!” he says. “I feel like we get stronger as a band the more shows we play, so I feel like by the time we get to Laneway, we’ll be even better than we are already. I’m honestly really excited to be coming down – I never expected anything like this to ever be happening for us. I didn’t think that we’d get big enough that we could actually get down to Australia.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
