Music Monday: King Krule on Peckham Rye with his pants down

The new King Krule album 'Man Alive' is out,  Archy Marshall has come a long way since hanging out on Deptford rooftops when first mentioned at Transpontine in 2013. He's playing Brixton Academy soon, though he did a more intimate gig at DIY Space for London (Ormside Road SE15) last week to raise money for the Blackheath tea hut, demolished when hit by a car recently.

South East London locations often get referenced in his songs and videos, as discussed here in relation to his 2017 album The OOZ. Peckham Rye featured on his 2015 side project 'A new place 2 drown' with his brother's photograph of a bench on the Rye gracing the cover.

The new album includes the track 'Comet Face' which starts of 'Woke up, Peckham Rye at half five,
Boy on the ground with his pants down,What happened to him in his past life?'. Great track that strangely put me in mind of The Pixies.

Update August 2020:

Comet Face has now been released as a single with a video filmed - of course - on Peckham Rye at night. It has a kind of Hound of the Baskervilles/werewolf plot in which the action switches between the present day and Victorians hunting a wild dog/wolf on the Rye, with Archy waking up on a Peckham Rye park bench.

Music Monday: King Krule - more songs about Peckham Rye and Bermondsey

King Krule has a new album out, The OOZ. In a recent Gilles Peterson interview the East Dulwich/Peckham Rye raised artist mentions that he demo'd some of the tracks at Shrunken Heads studio in Nunhead (40 Nunhead Green), and also talks about a recent night out at the Royal Albert in Deptford.  Bermondsey gets a couple of references on the album too, with two short tracks entitled 'Bermondsey Bosom (Left)' and 'Bermondsey Bosom (Right)'.  He played a pop up gig last month at the DIY Space for London in Ormside St SE15, and is now out on a big US/UK tour.

The video for the first single from the album, Czech One, was partially filmed in Elm Grove/Holly Grove off Rye Lane SE15 - with a scene outside the Rye Lane Market entrance. 

We first featured King Krule back in 2013 when his first album came out, 6 Feet Beneath The Moon. We noted his interest in East Dulwich history (he was born in Dunstans Road), and use of Deptford Church Street as a video location.

In the mean time he put out an album A New Place 2 Drown (2015) under his own name, Archy Marshall, with an accompanying book of  poetry and art work by Archy and his brother Jack. The cover shot is of a bench round a tree on Peckham Rye, and the Nunhead Reservoir features in a short accompanying film (still below of Archy at Reservoir)

Music Monday: Mount Kimbie

I guess we can't really count Mount Kimbie as local any more, as apparently the electronic duo moved last year from Peckham to Hackney. But it was definitely South London that made them -  Dom Maker and Kai Campos met at South Bank University, and started recording at home when living in Peckham. In the Guardian's words, they 'emerged from the south London post-dubstep scene', and they have played out at the Bussey Building in Peckham among other places.

Mount Kimbie, Carbonated EP (2011)
- image is Peckham High Street, note Burger King on left.

Their second album, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, was released on Warp last spring and received some great reviews. It features guest artists including King Krule, who was featured here a few weeks ago. They are sometimes mentioned in the same breath as James Blake and the XX, and yes there is that similar drowsy melancholy, space and melody.

The album was recorded at their studio in South Bermondsey, and also some of the time at the nearby Press Play Studio (Record Street, SE15) which is run by Andy Ramsay from Stereolab. In several interviews they have mentioned that the location influenced the sound of the album:

- Interview:  'We wrote the album in South Bermondsey, which is the home of Millwall Football Club, it's a docklands area. It's all very industrial and quite a dangerous place, pretty run-down. I think we were also much more in touch with this area as the space we were working in, rather than being shut up in our bedrooms all the time. The journey to the studio was actually really influential, as you'd walk through Peckham where the old album was shot and all the photos from the front cover were literally in front of you. So then getting on a bus and going somewhere entirely different gave a real sense of a change in tone'.

- Passion of the Weiss: 'The actual area that we’re writing in is just fucking bleak. It’s not like a gangland or something like that. It’s just really fucking boring, just loads of industrial estates and the journey to that is pretty horrible. And it does have an effect on what we’re doing...You have like no reason to go there unless you work in timber shipping or something like that...You can’t really think of it as this beautiful concrete thing. There’s no romantic side to the area at all. That’s definitely made us make more of a cold, spiteful record'

Not sure how 'dangerous' South Bermondsey is, unless you are wearing a West Ham shirt on a Saturday afternoon, but the area they are talking about is the industrial estates around Ilderton Road which are pretty bleak. But in just those sort of areas where's there relatively cheap space that interesting things sometimes happen. There are several other recording and rehearsal studios round there, in addition to the ones already mentioned here.

Music Monday: King Krule on East Dulwich History (& filmed in Deptford)

It's been a good year for King Krule (Archy Marshall), with his debut album 6 Feet Below the Moon released in the summer and getting good reviews. Last week (7 December) he was interviewed on Gilles Peterson's BBC Radio 6 show .

19-year-old Marshall, who went to Forest Hill Boys School and the Brits School in Croydon, talked about his various pseudonymous music projects. At least one of these, Edgar the Beatmaker (which he uses for his more hip hop flavoured work), owes something to local history, as he explains: 'I started reading about the history of the area I grew up in South East London, around Peckham and East Dulwich. I was getting into the guy who created East Dulwich and Peckham and it was a man called Edgar the Peacemaker and he was the first King of England to unite all the kingships, and his brother was a man called St Dunstan and I was born in Dunstans Road'. Yes indeed the first mention of Dulwich comes from 967 when King  Edgar the Peaceful granted Dilwihs ('meadow where the dill grew') to one Earl Aelfheah; Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, was his close adviser rather than brother.



In the interview, he also mentions recording in Bermondsey with electronic music duo Mount Kimbie. In fact later in the programme, Peterson names three albums as the best of 2013, all of them with South London connections: King Krule's, Mount Kimbie's Cold Spring Fault Less Youth and James Blake's Overgrown.

The video for King Krule's Easy Easy shows him towering above the DLR line on Deptford Church Street (so assume he must be on the roof of the Birds Nest pub?). No doubt you can spot some other South London locations in it, including I think scenes around Surrey Docks/Rotherhithe (thought I spotted Stave Hill).