Shall we take a little trip to Essex? It’s east of London but it’s definitely not east London, the land of Blur, Depeche Mode, The Prodigy, Dr Feelgood, wheeler-dealers and dodgy geezers, Maldon sea salt, blokes who wash their Ford Mondeos religiously every Sunday morning, Tiptree jam, Grayson Perry, nosey neighbours, rowdy clubs, Joey Essex, Dermot O’Leary, Squarepusher, Basildon Man, a place where ring road towns lazily bleed into beautiful stretches of countryside underneath widescreen skies. It’s down the A12 and to the birthplace of radio that we’re headed. Keep going past Brentwood and all its TOWIE tanning beds and take a left into Chelmsford, the home of RAT BOY. After a decade of global tours as far afield as China, Japan and the US, a period that has included diversions into hip-hop, US-influenced ska-punk, RAT BOY have come back to base. Their excellent new record ‘SUBURBIA CALLING’ is all about returning to their roots.
“I wanted to sing about Essex,” says vocalist, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Jordan Cardy of the themes behind the band’s third album. “Essex is where we live and when you’ve grown up somewhere you notice things about it. There’s so much to draw on. Essex is really close to London but it’s different in a lot of ways. We’ve got a lot of freedom here, we built a place where we can record and rehearse and hang out, somewhere you wouldn’t be able to have in London. I wanted to write about Essex and England, our early songs were like that but I hadn’t written like that in a while. It felt like a good time to write about Essex again.”
But wait – we can hear you saying “they?”, “our?”, “band?”, “erm, isn’t RAT BOY a solo artist?”. No, not anymore. RAT BOY has always blurred the lines between being a project revolving solely around Cardy – the titular RAT BOY, so called because his school friends said he looked like a rodent – and being a full-on gang (there are four of them on the cover of their effervescent 2017 debut ‘SCUM’ and bassist Liam Haygarth, guitarist Harry Todd and drummer Noah Booth were all integral to the making of 2019 follow-up ‘INTERNATTIONALLY UNKNOWN’). But now they wanted to properly, no pun intended, ratify the decision. “It is officially a band,” says Cardy, “a band with the most confusing name but it’s a bit late to rebrand. This album is more of a group effort. Having us all play on the album says that we’re a band.”
It was back in April 2023 when the choice was made, the quartet meeting for a coffee and a walk around Promenade Park in Maldon, the Blackwater estuary-based town where Cardy currently resides, and spoke about what to do next. Covid had derailed a planned RAT BOY tour, and then Cardy, Haygarth and Todd had worked on their Beastie Boys-inspired side-project Lowlife whilst Booth worked on his own music. All agreed they wanted to reignite RAT BOY as a fully-fledged group. “RAT BOY started as a solo thing but we got the band together around it,” explains Cardy. “We mostly did live shows together and a bit of writing but never full on. After Covid happened, we realised the most fun and creative thing about the RAT BOY stuff was doing the videos together and playing gigs. The gigs were always way more energetic and way more fun and when we recorded together, it turned into something else and I enjoyed that bit the most. When we’ve done stuff together, they’re the bits that I remember the most fondly.”
With that sorted, they settled on the idea that a new record should be built on the thrilling alchemy of their live shows and began working on songs at their HQ – a converted barn on the outskirts of Chelmsford. “We had these demos so we were like, ‘Let’s rehearse them like we’re about to do a gig, see what works and what doesn’t’. Previously, you’d play a song live that you’ve already recorded and think, ‘Fucking hell, this doesn’t feel nice, that bit is too long’, so it was nice to trim the fat.”
Having their own hub to operate from was crucial, meaning that they weren’t on anyone else’s clock. “When we worked with Tim Armstrong from Rancid,” Cardy says, referring to the ‘INTERNATTIONALLY UNKNOWN’’ sessions, “he could work whenever he wanted, turn up whenever he wanted. That influenced us in having this space. It’s a place where you can be creative. We can be self-sufficient. We’re doing all our screen-printing here, we keep our merch here, rehearse here and record here.”
From their initial sessions, each song ended up with two versions, one a home demo and one of the whole band playing the track live, with both being sent to producer Stephen Street, famed for his work with The Smiths and Blur, to wade through. “Stephen went through both versions and picked bits out of each one,” explains Cardy. “He had a puzzle of hundreds of pieces of music to merge together. Obviously, he’s done sick stuff so we trusted him.”
Sonically pulling on the sounds of Britpop, 90s indie and classic melodicism, with a little scattering of 2-Tone’s propulsive grooves in there too, ‘SUBURBIA CALLING’ is a record paying homage to true British greats at the same time as pushing things forward. It’s an album of many different shades: the title track blends Graham Coxon-style guitar flourishes with sunny, infectious hooks, ‘SHE’S THE ONE’, written by Cardy for his wife, is strummed 60s guitar-pop with a Kinks-y breeziness to it and ‘RUDY’S WORLD’ mixes ska rhythms with a careening punk chorus. There are songs that sound like The Specials in space (the Lil Aaron-featuring ‘ONE IN A MILLION’) and songs made for igniting 2003-era indie disco dancefloors (‘BEST IS YET TO COME’), Madness-style vaudeville indie-pop (‘BOY WONDER’) and a brilliantly riotous moment that sounds like a cross between ‘Parklife’ and the Only Fools And Horses theme tune (‘ESSEX LAND’).
“Doing a more British sound came naturally,” says Cardy. “The sound just made sense as we were writing about living in Essex.” The album title, a play on The Clash’s iconic ‘London Calling’, sums up what all these songs are about. “We went off and did different things, rented a studio space in London, toured, and this is us coming back to Essex.”
It's a decade now since Cardy’s self-released debut ‘THE MIXTAPE’ unveiled a precocious, inventive new talent in British music and thrust the teenager and his mates into the limelight. “It was confusing and came out of nowhere,” he recalls. “We didn’t really know what was going on. It went from one month sending mix tapes to every email address you could find that worked in music and no-one getting back to us to all of a sudden we had an agent booking us gigs. Our third gig was at Shepherds Bush Empire. I couldn’t even talk between songs. It was weird that it happened. It was probably a good thing just to be thrown in at the deep end.”
Since then, RAT BOY’s music has connected far and wide, from electrifying performances at Coachella (where they still play a clip of the band trying to kick themselves in the head in between sets) and fan mania in Japan. ‘We were like, ‘Why are we playing in Japan, no-one is going to know who we are’ and we got there and people were wearing cut-outs of our faces as masks. We were like, ‘What the fuck?!’,” Cardy laughs.
The chaos and the capers have always been down to the four of them and that’s why they were so keen for ‘SUBURBIA CALLING’ to be a fresh start, the true unveiling of RAT BOY the band. “It wouldn’t work with anyone else,” Cardy says. “We take the piss out of each other a lot and we can make up quite quickly.” And there you have the two golden rules of making a band work. RAT BOY are about to embark on their best adventure yet. Pick up, suburbia is calling for you…
