MUSIC

Recently back from France, Bristol four-piece Call The Doctor are promoting new single ‘Take Me Out’. Julian Owen makes an appointment.

Some bands have the songs. Others, the stagecraft. Still others, ambition. Rare beasts indeed are those who could place ticks against all three. Call The Doctor are one such band. And it’s bloody hard work. “The worst it got was Leeds, driving home after the gig to go to work the next morning,” says guitarist/backing vocalist Rob Hallworth. “When you’re on stage it’s worth it,” says singer/guitarist Patti Aberhart. “Then suddenly the show’s over, you have to pack all your gear away and... oh god.”

They’re talking about a gig in March. There were 13 others in that month alone, promoting the new ‘Take Me Out’ single, including shows in Paris, Bordeaux and Le Mans. Thus, the disconnect between onstage glamour and offstage grind. “Every show we played in France there were crowds,” says Patti. “Their response was really positive, they were dancing. Very un-British.” “We had our first crowd surfer,” adds Rob, noting that the continental road trip “made us feel like rock stars for the first time.” On the other hand... “In Paris,” he continues, “the accommodation was basically all sharing the same bed together.” “Never again,” shudders Patti. “That would be wrong.”

Such is band life when you’re trying to hammer home profile-raising enthusiastic support from the likes of 6 Music’s Steve Lamacq and Tom Robinson, and Xfm’s John Kennedy, drawn in by a sound of confidence and fire. Fronting the kind of rip-chord pop you’d expect from a band named after a Sleater-Kinney album, Patti addresses microphones with yelps and purrs and strength, and performs with the urgency of a rebel leader imploring the masses to action. Rob’s guitar mines a seemingly endless seam of boiling knife-through-melted-butter riffs, John Raftery’s drums bring what Rob rightly calls “controlled, uptempo, sharp bursts of spiky attitude”, and Chris Davis’s bass locks everything vacuum-packed tight. Added together it makes for what the NME called “jerky girly post-punk”.

“I don’t know why they call us ‘punk’,” says Patti. “But it’s like, if NME says it, it must be right.” What would you like to be called? “Enerzhee,” says Patrick, unexpectedly. Sorry, we’ve not introduced Patrick. He’s a fan the group met in Bordeaux, and today he sits between Rob and Patti in the Watershed, solemn of countenance and fixing Venue with a steady, unyielding gaze for the duration of the interview. It is, if fortune smiles, the closest your correspondent will come to understanding the dread paranoia of an Ofsted inspection. Patti takes up the conversation as Patrick returns to a mute undressing of Venue’s soul. “I’m happy just with ‘alternative pop-indie’,” says Patti, before adding brightly: “Is Blondie post-punk? I don’t mind that.”

That’s handy. The aforementioned latest single rolls out across crisp, staccato guitar chords and hangs off a begging-to-be-chanted chorus: “I don’t want to bring you down, but you just take it out of me.” More similarly to the CBGBs aces still, the accompanying video centres on a camera-magnet frontwoman, all eye-rolling insouciant chic and red-light-spells-danger lipstick.

For this we have to part-thank the size of her hometown: Wellington, NZ. “Very small, cramped. It got a bit boring. My music career wasn’t taking off too much. I did the odd solo show, but never really found a band I connected with. I’d had enough, wanted to travel around, and had family living here.” Thus, following three years in jazz school, she moved to Bristol in 2008 and put up an advert on Gumtree. Rob saw it, and understood Patti’s earlier plight. “I’d tried a few times to form band, but it’s really hard to find people you click with musically – I just met people playing metal riffs and covers. Patti mentioned The Kills and PJ Harvey, just a few influences which grabbed me. We met at Bristol Festival, demoed a few songs on my laptop, then sought the rest of the band. It took a good six months before we found our sound and the four of us were comfortable. Rather than me or Patti writing, we wrote the songs as a group, all four influences coming in. One of us has an idea, be it bass line or guitar riff, and everyone contributes around that. That’s how we became our own entity.”

And became brilliantly prolific. A year after their 2009 formation, an eponymous mini-album was distributed via local label Glasstone Records. Today they’re working on their first long player ‘proper’. “I think the mini-album was like our live show recorded,” says Rob. “Now we’ve all got better as musicians we can be a bit more intricate, but still with a pop edge.” The evolution is paying off. On that March tour, fans from Leicester travelled to a show in Birmingham, others journeyed from Cambridge to Nottingham. They can expect their loyalty to be rewarded soon. “It’s all very well playing to your friends in Bristol,” says Rob, “but if you’re serious and you want to be noticed, you’ve got to get out there. It’s about getting the ball rolling.”

CALL THE DOCTOR PLAYED THE LOUISIANA, BRISTOL ON SAT 7 MAY. FFI: WWW.MYSPACE.COM/CTDOCTOR

Copyright Julian Owen 2011