Back in London, the duo began honing tracks from dozens and dozens of ideas at Jack’s
studio. “It’s like a vision of Hell, a Bosch painting, just this ginormous rubbish dump,”
describes Jack of the industrial waste processing facility next to which he lived and
worked, “there’s bits of trees, cars, kids’ toys, just all this dirt and filth everywhere. Ev-
ery broken remnant of life you can imagine.” These New Puritans’ unit was sandwiched
between this and a couple of vigorous Evangelical churches - Sundays were certainly in-
teresting - and it became imperative to counterbalance the bells and classical instrumen-
tation with something loud enough to cut through the cacophony. “We’ve always had
that balance between the sublime and the filth”, notes George.
It is no great revelation that there have been long pauses between TNP albums. Why?
The brothers half-joke about it being a protest against the overabundance in modern
music, or a deliberate process of artificial scarcity.
In fact, in These New Puritans' case it is a red herring for a workrate that is intensive,
continuous and entirely DIY. This is a legacy, one might speculate, from their unassum-
ing Essex origins. “Music should flow out of your life, it shouldn’t be a separate activity,”
says George of their method, “Jack just doesn’t stop working.” While their sound can
perhaps be deceptively sophisticated, they are entirely self-taught.
