Wild Beasts on their split, farewell tour and the future

The quartet, who shocked fans last September by announcing they would be splitting up after 16 years, are embarking on their farewell tour this month, with little clue about what's next

Wild Beasts – Ben Little, Hayden Thorpe, Chris Talbot and Tom Fleming – are on a farewell tour

“I guess it’s quite nice that we’re getting this funeral while we’re still alive,” says Wild Beasts’ drummer Chris Talbot. “We can kind of enjoy it and go to the wake, but it’s quite emotional.”

The much-loved “cult” indie (a term the band baulk at: “It went the way of the dinosaurs,” they say) quartet Wild Beasts shocked their devotees last September by announcing they would be splitting up after 16 years, stressing it was time “to leave this orbit”. The last we’ll see them performing will be for their farewell (“funeral”) tour in Dublin, Manchester and at London’s Hammersmith Apollo next week.

After five increasingly accomplished albums of original material – which began with 2008’s audacious Limbo, Panto and ended in 2016 with the polished synth-pop of Boy King – their demise feels way too soon and there is a sense of bewilderment (more than one Beast mentions the word “wilderness”) about what they’ll do next with their lives.

I speak to all four of Wild Beasts – singers Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming, guitarist Ben Little and Talbot – individually. The foursome, who have been friends since their school days in Kendal, formed their band in 2002 before moving to Leeds in 2005. They are uniformly eloquent, polite and candid and come across more like mild (not at all wild) beasts. They’re all the more interesting for it. The inventive quartet were a lot of unders: underappreciated, undervalued, underrated during their stint, but they were never dull or complacent (they refused, as Little points out, to be “pigeonholed”) and were quite possibly the boldest British band of the past decade.

Wild Beasts’ Fleming (top right), Talbot (bottom right), Little (top left), Thorpe (bottom left) seem disorientated about the future since announcing their split (Sion Marshall-Waters)

Many factors set them apart, from the gripping odd-couple vocals of Thorpe (falsetto) and Fleming (gruff baritone) to their highly sexualised (“Surround me like a warm bath/ Sum me up like an epitaph/ Be blatant as a bailiff/ I want my lips to blister when we kiss” on “Bed of Nails”) lyrics and their take on toxic masculinity (“Now I’m all f***ed and I can’t stand up/ So I better suck it up like a tough guy would,” Thorpe laments on “Tough Guy”) and the early 21st “male malaise”. Thorpe, who you sense is the “strong-minded” act’s de factor leader, maintains that their Northern roots strongly informed their thoughts on manliness.

“I don’t want to get too real for you, but at the end of the day we were four boys who went to a Northern comprehensive school in a farming community and without a certain tough guy persona or a certain front you didn’t afford yourself the space to be,” emphasises Thorpe.

“In my own experience it was utterly essential to have some kind of tough guy persona to draw from,” Thorpe adds. “But I do think that coming from a very stoic, quite brooding ancient farming culture meant that self-expression and openness and honesty and femininity were dangerous, they were the antithesis of that kind of [Northern] stillness. I think that our effeminate presentation and the peacocking and my falsetto voice were the most aggressive and flamboyant f*** you to all of that. It was the most punk-rock I could be in those circumstances.”

The band are releasing ‘Last Night All My Dreams Came True’, a career-spanning live studio album on 16 February via Domino Documents

“I think there’s a crisis of masculinity more than ever right now and I’d like to think that we challenged the preconception of northern males,” adds Talbot. “Where we grew up there was an expectancy of how you should be and how you should react towards women, towards other men, and it’s something I certainly felt. We were fortunate to have a voice and say, ‘no, there is another way’. We were brave to have the discussion and I’m proud of it.”

As a parting farewell gift to their fans, the Cumbrian group have produced one final, career-spanning album, Last Night All My Dreams Came True, a “snapshot” (or “Polaroid” as the poetic Thorpe puts it, or “representative of where we are as a live band right now”, according to Fleming) of live studio performances, which features excellent takes on the rousing “This Is Our Lot” (from 2009’s Mercury Prize nominated Two Dancers) and “Big Cat” (from the exquisite Boy King). Fleming admits that while he’s very proud of the record, the actual recording of it was a “turbulent” time (Little also confesses to a certain amount of “stress”) and that a split was something “in the air”. However, all four of them stress that the parting was “amicable” (which it absolutely appears to be) and they’ll remain friends.

“Artistically we all brought a lot to the table,” says Fleming. “There was a collective will and need for each other’s sake, there was a unity and you depend on each other.

“We’ve come this far together and it had been an amazing journey and an incredibly unlikely thing to get done,” adds Fleming, “but you do need everyone pulling in the same direction or it’s not a band; it takes so much force of will to get anything done.”


 After five albums – ending with the polished synth-pop of ‘Boy King’ – the band’s demise feels way too soon 

It’s the closest any of the group come to suggesting that they’re might have been some sort of “fallout”, but all four of them are united in being humbled by their fans’ heartfelt outpourings to their split (“This is heartbreaking, you were one of the most unique bands around”, “Thank you for being my favourite band” and so on).

“When you’re in the inside of something you don’t really get a full sense of the atmosphere outside,” explains Thorpe. “It wasn’t until I made the decision that I ever really got a true sense of what our music meant to people.

“Humbling was the word, it was quite something to digest, it felt like a rich emotional experience just to be on the receiving end of it, to be the conduit of this outpouring of emotion. I have to say it was absolutely life-affirming, why would I say otherwise? I was so blessed that that was the response.”

“I feel like we’ve really spoken to people at times and that is really important to me, we left a mark on people, an alternative and a bit of protest,” maintains Fleming. “It would have been great if we were in the Nineties and making a bit of money and some of the bigger things evaded us, we were too unusual and not savvy enough maybe. But it’s very hard to have too many complaints, we were very fortunate.”

So what’s the “wilderness” going to look like for the Wild Beasts?

Little, who has a 10-month old daughter and has moved back up to Kendal, says he’s “hooked on the production side” of music, while Talbot feels like he that might “no longer be a jobbing musician anymore”. Fleming and Thorpe, the main two songwriters for the band, appear similarly disorientated, with the former admitting “My arse is on the market again, I’ve been married for 10 years and suddenly I’m not”. Hayden, characteristically, has a slightly more allegorical (and bleaker) take on the future.

“In terms of life plans, the best analogy I have is when you look at a bath you don’t know if it’s boiling hot or whether it’s freezing cold until you’ve stepped your foot in it and I don’t know how the week after those shows is going to feel like,” says Hayden. “I don’t see myself returning to the North soon, I don’t know how I feel about living in a Brexit Britain but then you start to look at the Earth and somewhere on the Earth I do have to tolerate something, I both have to tolerate and be tolerated. I think many of us feel slightly in the wilderness right now. But the honest answer is I don’t have a clue.”

The band loathe the term “indefinite hiatus”, but let’s hope for all our sakes it’s just that and that the Beasts return one day fresher and wilder.

Wild Beasts tour from 15 February, starting at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre, until 17 February at London’s Eventim Apollo; their album ‘Last Night All My Dreams Came True’ is out now