Talking to: The Wife Guys of Reddit
Glasgow alt-rockers The Wife Guys of Reddit are on the up and up, fuelled by musical experimentation and a keen sense of the absurd. Originally formed as a duo by Arion Xenos and Niamh MacPhail, The Wife Guys have since been joined by Angus Fernie on keyboards and synths and Elise Atkinson on drums. Their latest single, Pig Fat, is raucous and thoroughly enjoyable, all murky bass and scratchy riffs, with a nicely surreal, rough-edged DIY video to match.
In a window between their gigs across the UK, and ahead of their trip to the Netherlands to play Left of the Dial festival later this year, we snuck in a lovely Sunday-evening natter taking in lockdown, creative process, Christmas covers and, yes, Glasgow’s little green parrots. Apart from connecting my flat and the band’s studio, the magic of Zoom meant we could even be joined by Elise, who was recovering from Covid at home.
How are you all doing and how’s your weekend been so far?
Arion: We’re good. Our weekend’s been fantastic – we’ve just played a couple of shows in England. Our first shows in England!
Niamh: And without a drummer... we had some sick laptop beats that were cooked up at 1:30pm on a laptop, on Friday, but…
Arion: Playing with a laptop was a different experience, and less dynamic, but you can just press a button to stop.
Niamh: The NXTGN all-dayer gig [we were supposed to play] in Middlesborough was cancelled, so we got a gig in Newcastle and then a gig in Sunderland instead. That was supporting Dancing on Tables, and then Johnny Foreigner. So quite a mix. We’re probably all doing a bit better than Elise is though…
How are you feeling, Elise?
Elise: Yeah, I’m OK! Still coughing, but the worst is definitely over.
So for those who have never heard of a “wife guy,” can you tell us what your name’s all about?
Arion: A wife guy is a guy who uses his partner for content and to get upvotes [where other users can bump up a member’s post] online, specifically on the Reddit forums. At some point there was a massive influx of guys being like, “oh, look what my wife did,” and we just thought, that’d be a great band name, and no one will ask us any questions about it! [Laughs] That’s it, really. We just thought it was funny.
Last month, you released your single Pig Fat. Could you tell us the story behind this single? I read somewhere that it was about fighting God…
Arion: True story. It’s about when we fought God. [Laughs]
Niamh: Yeah, it was a riff that we had floating around for a while, and we needed something suitably… suitably…
Arion: For want of a better word, wacky. Off-beat. We thought, right, what would an absolute idiot do? Fight God. OK, let’s try it. And the chorus was a riff that I wrote on the guitar, that was a separate thing, it was going be totally another song. But it worked.
The Wife Guys formed in winter 2020, which I remember being a very bleak time in terms of lockdowns. Was the band a conscious effort to find a positive outlet? Or was it just a fun thing to do, more generally?
Niamh: At the beginning, The Wife Guys were a vessel to enter a song into a Sufjan Stevens charity covers compilation. So maybe there was an element of, like, everything is horrible – let's do something nice out of it. It was quite odd in a way that our first content was a cover, and Christmassy.
Arion: Then off the back of that, we ended up doing a whole Christmas covers EP for charity, because why not?
I love Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas album.
Niamh: Yeah! We made O Come, O come, Emmanuel for that. Then we were like, let’s just do some other covers while we're here.
Who are your inspirations – musically, artistically, or just in life?
Niamh: I was listening to a podcast the other day featuring John Dwyer from the The Oh Sees talking about his approach to his early music. And he says, whatever you’re making – even if you move past a point where you say, “that wasn't for me,” or ‘that wasn't necessarily the direction I want to travel in with what I'm making” – as long as you're doing it, you're still doing it. I think there's definitely a feeling of that in The Wife Guys. Because the music we put out is all quite disparate, genre-wise. We just try everything out and see what works.
Right, it can be easy to get hung up on curating our creative output, questioning who we are and what we make. It gets very existential, but sometimes it’s important to just do it!
Niamh: Yeah – if you're spending so much time in your head, you're not spending that time creating.
There’s also an interesting cohesion between different elements in your music: Arion and Niamh take turns on vocals, and you also have a mix of grimy guitar and heavier sounds, such as on Pig Fat, and then a brighter, fresher, more swingy style on your previous EP, Wet and Tired. Do these complementary sounds come together naturally in your group process, or do different members of the band bring different vibes?
Arion: When it comes to the arrangement of the full band, it’s obviously a completely different thing with all four of us versus when it was just two. For instance, recording the different parts. Before we’d just sort of thrown together drums and recordings, and then we got an actual drummer [Elise] to play the drums.
Niamh: You know, a real live drummer – not just Arion who found himself behind a kit! It's made everything a lot better. And everyone's got such different sounds. There’s obviously a lot of crossover and music that we like and listen to, but we all have our own bits and pieces too.
Arion: In terms of the grimy guitar stuff, if I’m writing songs then that’s going to come out because that’s just how I play, it’ll be messy and jagged and whatever. But there's a mixture of the two: we've got other, more melodic songs compared to Pig Fat, but even then, when we play them with a band, there's still a bit of an edge.
Niamh: And then we’ve got some new stuff that we’re working on, which I really like because the ideas have been kicking around for a while and the songs are sounding quite cohesive together. That’s been really nice because it's a different sound. It feels like we’re moving towards big coagulation of everyone’s styles.
What other creative projects do you have going on apart from music?
Angus: I paint, and I put on exhibitions. I just had some pieces at the RGI Gallery in town, and also at Alchemy Experiments, on Byres Road.
Arion: Yeah, Angus makes beautiful prints!
What’s going on in the Glasgow music scene at the moment? And are there other bands or artists that you're excited about?
Arion: Yeah, there’s quite a lot of good stuff happening. One of our favourites is Dutch Wine. They’re great – noisy, post-punky. And Doss is fantastic.
Elise: I’ve been seeing a lot of jazzy stuff, I really like corto.alto.
Niamh: There’s lots of great music from different scenes here. Lots of cheap venue hire Glasgow as well, which is obviously great for DIY type artists.
What insider knowledge would you share with someone who’s never been to Glasgow before?
Arion: If you’re looking for a nice music venues, we were recently at the Old Hairdressers, that's a lovely place. It’s got a big upstairs space that’s used as a gallery quite a lot, and lovely wooden floors!
Niamh: The Hug and Pint, too - the people are lovely. Most nights there are gigs, and there’s great vegan food.
Elise: Kelvin Walkway – there's nice walks and things to do. Or the canal. And in Dawsholm Park, there's like little green budgie parrots. It sounds made up, but there are. Flocks of parrots in the trees.
You've got lots of gigs coming up this year, including Left of the Dial festival in the Netherlands. After all this time playing in lockdown, how does it feel to be unleashed on the world and able to travel? What are you most looking forward to about touring?
Niamh: Poor world, is all I can say! [Laughs]
Arion: Yeah, it’s obviously really great. From not doing much gigging at all, we've done lots of gigs in the past… yeah, not even a year yet, as a four-piece. We’ve all been playing as a four-piece since June last year – so, eight months.
Niamh: We’re so excited about getting out there. It's almost like going from one extreme to the other. Because most of us have been still going out and doing things, but not 100% as before [Covid], so it's gonna be really weird to suddenly be in the Netherlands. And Left of the Dial is exciting. We played our first couple of gigs supporting Joe and the Shitboys, and they played Left of the Dial last year. And we just saw it and thought it was a brilliant lineup. Just lots of weird stuff.
Arion: Yeah, there was a big long promo video from last year's one and it just looked like, whoa, there's so much happening.
Niamh: And loads of artists you haven't heard of, but every one you listen to, you think, “this is actually really up my street.” Great curation from Left of the Dial.
That’s so true – it’s great when you have no preconceptions about something and you end up loving it. There’s obviously a team that’s carefully put it all together, and it's a human process – not an algorithm just saying, “if you like that, you might like this…”
Arion: Ha, yeah. Spotify algorithm festival. Can you imagine!
What can we look forward to from The Wife Guys in future?
Arion: We're writing new material, booking lots of gigs for the end of year. So yeah, just more of this really!
The Wife Guys of Reddit are playing on May 1, 2022 at the Stag and Dagger, Glasgow. They’ll also be at the Great Eastern in Edinburgh on May 21, 2022 and at Left of the Dial festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands on October 20, 2022.
Check out all their music and socials here.
Find Angus Fernie’s stunning prints (in my unbiased opinion!) on his website, and keep up with his work and exhibitions on Instagram.
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