If there's one golden rule in the indie world, it's that bands with a singing drummer are shite. Come on, think of a half-decent one. And if you can't, it just shows you've never heard Animals That Swim. The other sacrosanct belief - that alternative acts with a trumpet as lead instrument are irredeemably naff - doesn't hold true either.

Not when you've got a band who write songs about meeting a pissed and thoroughly bitter Roy orbison down the local club, or failing to have a near-death experience after a car smash, or getting put down by paraplegic country genius Vic Chesnutt for heckling.

Animals That Swim (crap name, but so were Echo And The Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes) have long been an example of how not to be a successful rock band. Their three-year career has spawned a mere five singles and one album. And while they are all brilliantly witty and inventive, the hiatus that followed each release served to convince the few members of the public who'd actually heard them that the band had split up. But all that's about to change, with the band set for a period of unprecedented productivity, which is just about the best news indie music movers everywhere could hear.

Sitting in a bar near London's bloody Smithfields market, brothers Hugh and Al Barker - two-fifths of a herd fronted by middle sibling Hank Starrs (he's taken his girlfriend's name: "better name for a singer", he rightly notes) - reflect on their brilliant but thoroughly unsuccessful career to date.

Hugh, raises his head from his shamrock-inscribed Guinness and says: "Every single we've put out has sold more than the previous one, and the press has been almost totally positive, but it's all been fucked up by our inevitable failure to get the next thing out quickly. We've never been very organised."

The fact that most of the band were holding down part-time jobs didn't help matters and for a while the Animals seemed set to be just one more bunch of underschieving might-have-beens. Even now, they're leagues away from the big money, but with debut album, "Workshy", under their belts, they can at least claim to have made a minor classic. Which is music-biz speak for a cracker that's sold bugger all.

But the critical acclaim heaped on it, including a Top 20 placing in the NME's Best of '94 chart, has strengthened their resolve. None of them now has a full-time job, preferring instead to work the odd day here and there "doing bits and bobs" so that they can devote more hours to rehearsing and writing. They're even on the look-out for a manager to take care of "the increasingly time consuming business side of things".

Yet they're still stuck with the "soul on the dole" tag, plundered neatly from the music journalist's catechism of cliché. They seem to remember everything written about them, which isn't that hard as it's not that much, and are amazed at the opinions some writers have expressed.

Take "50 Dresses", a melancholy but hopeful kitchen sink drama about what the singer will buy his girlfriend when he becomes famous.

"Someone wrote that it was our paean to cross-dressing," laughs Hugh. "While someone else thought the protagonist eats, rather than feeds, the cats.

"When a band goes to such lengths as we do to write good words, reviewers should at least do us the favour of listening to them properly."

Al: "The one that annoyed me was that geezer from Radiohead who reviewed the singles in Melody Maker or NME one week. He said, I knew where it was going when it started, and it got there. It's quite good, but not really."

Hugh: "It was accurate though."

But inaccuracies aside, they're happy enough to admit that they've had remarkably little bad press. But Hugh is till puzzled: "Over the last year, loads of journalists have told us they us, but no one wants to champion us aggressively. I don't think they're embarrassed about us, they just like the idea of us being a really obscure little band who they'll be able to baffle people with in about five years time saying, There used to be this really great little band..."

Al agrees: "You wouldn't believe the amount of reviews that have said, In some just world, this would be number one."

Scarily, this is the kind of fate that befell those bands about five years ago whose sound the Animals most closely resemble - Microdisney, Yeah yeah Noh, Go-Betweens. However, the band are confident they can achieve their modest aims.

Al: "We've always said that our ambition is simply to make enough money from the records just to be in a band. Two hundred and fifty quid a week would be enough. The music is good stuff and eventually people will get to hear it and like it."

So why do they have a singing, standing drummer and a trumpet?

Al: "Hank is a brilliant singer and a great drummer. Anyway, we all hate sit-down singing drummers."

Yeah, right.

Hugh: "And Del used to play bass in the band, but he had to run away to Bristol when his then-girlfriend's husband threatened to shoot him. When he came back we had a new bassist, so we let him back in playing trumpet."

Later, with the duo having broken Band Rule Number One of not drinking during interviews and with tongues slightly loosened, Al says: "I think we're the best band in Britain, and I'm certainly confident we can go places. Why else would Del and I have given up our jobs?"

Why indeed? And Animals That Swim are very probably the best band in the country. Just no one knows it yet, perhaps not even the five members themselves. But give them time...

Who knows, they could yet live up to their boast on "Chapel Market", "I hope that you like this, it's the best thing yet!"

---

Sidebar review:

WORKSHY (Elemental ELM24) 1994

Brothers Hugh Barker and Hank Starrs prove to be Britain's brightest undiscovered songwriting talents on this sparkling debut. All human life is here, tales of ordinary madness, extraordinary lunacy, but mainly humorous observations of things they've seen down the boozer. In their world, it's not weird to bump into Roy Orbison down the local club, or to hear him whine about how "that Presley was the dumbest shit I ever met, he couldn't write a fucking note / It should have been me with the songs that I wrote". The closing "Sway With Me", a Charles Bukowski poem set to music, shows Del Crabtree's trumpet's importance to the sound. Do you like music? Do you like a laugh? Got a brain? Yup. Well buy this album now.

---

Return to the Animals That Swim archive...