The ownership of ear plugs seems to becoming increasingly common for the discerning music fanatic nowadays. Not only do they stop post-gig tinnitus from being a monotone soundtrack to your dreams, but apparently, when coupled with a decent beard, people actually pretend to listen to your stagnant monologue on early-90s emo. However, ear plugs can make some bands sound as thin and lifeless as a sucked Pringle, and although you know you shouldn’t because you’ll end up looking like you’ve mugged Morrissey later in life, you put them back in the little colour-coded carry case in your pocket and carelessly enjoy. There are most definitely exceptions to this rule and Crazy Arm are one of them. The last time they played Leeds, upstairs at Santiago’s, the ENT department at Leeds General Infirmary had to pressgang in emergency staff to deal with the influx of patients; that gig is the reason for the bloodstains on my pillowcase, honest. We confront Crazy Arm singer Darren Johns about the volume his band plays at, and he admits "We do have a reputation for being loud, but it’s not big and it’s not clever", before adding with a shrug that "it just doesn’t feel right unless it’s ear-shatteringly loud." With this in mind, it's even more surprising that all of Crazy Arm’s songs are to be performed acoustically on their current tour, with an interesting side-garnish of fiddle, keyboard, and female vocals.
Sat on benches in a concreted pub "garden" in Leeds, half shouting over football commentary, we learn that the band are quite fresh to this concept themselves, as prior to the tour "We’d only done this thing four times before, three times in Plymouth and once at 2000 Trees Festival." Touring their first album Born To Ruin relentlessly over the last few years, and slowly adding a few singles to their live repertoire along the way (‘Ambertown’ and ‘Tribes’), Crazy Arm have always been a noisy, overdriven punk spectacle, so why the sudden change in approach? "I don’t lose my voice every night trying to shout over the really loud guitars." The band’s affection for their audience is also obvious with the admission that "it feels a lot more natural on stage. You can be more intimate with people. You’re not battling against noise." Darren is also chuffed that, "the response has been overwhelming, perhaps because people know what to expect with the electric sound."
Despite this pay-off realised early in the tour, however, it seems there’s a technical price to pay for an enthusiastic audience reaction. Having already played Manchester and Lincoln’s Crashed Out festival acoustically, the band are starting to realise the pitfalls of achieving a more organic sound. When we get to them, Crazy Arm have just finished a four hour set up and warm up for two acoustic guitars, a banjo, a fiddle, four vocals, a bass and drums, having not yet quite figured out how to properly tune their kitchen sink. Flustered, and clearly glad to catch a breath of fresh air, Darren confides "when we turn up and the PA isn’t prepared for it, it just takes ages and ages. Our engineer stresses us out because he’s so stressed."
Once we get chatting about the kind of music that the band listen to personally, it’s easier to see where the idea of an acoustic tour might have come from. Despite their first album being firmly rooted in punk rock, Darren informs us, "it’s funny, we don’t listen to that many punk or hardcore bands, especially in the van where it sounds shit anyway because it’s all too noisy. But I don’t listen to it at home either. I’d rather listen to Woody Guthrie or other really badly recorded folk music [...] Joni Mitchell is one of my favourite singers of all time." It also becomes apparent that the band have influences close to this website’s heart: "Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds is the most regular thing that turns up on the van’s stereo. No More Shall We Part is the saddest, most heart-wrenching record. We’ll be driving in tears, arms round each other, like 'Oh God'." Darren even clocks our reference to Kicking Against The Pricks, "Ah! I thought it must be. Either that or a later Johnny Cash reference!"
For the gig itself, we slope down the cellar steps of the Royal Park Pub to find tonight’s support comes from a couple of solo acoustic musicians - fortunate considering the amount of time it took Crazy Arm to set up. The first act we catch, Helen Chambers, fails to have any real impact on the small basement crowd despite her charming, northern-tinged voice. Her timid, warbling heart-wrenchers would fit well around a melancholy campfire, but here they have the audience longing for a mattress and duvet rather than slumber under the stars. Next up, Sam Russo is even less appealing (to audience members that aren’t his friends e.g. me), strumming flaccid, unimaginative chord progressions. As for the lyrical content, it seems the singer has slept seven nights in a car more as something to sing about later than out of necessity - if indeed he did at all.
By the time we get to Crazy Arm the crowd has swollen to about thirty (not bad for this dim cavern), but with little of the evening remaining, the band apologise at the start of their set that they might have to cut it short. Darren opens with a solo folk number, joined by a mystery female singer who accents his southern growl perfectly, before the six other members of the bloated ranks invade the stage. ‘Blind Summit’ and ‘Broken By The Wheel’, bolstered by the fiddle and keyboard, have a totally different quality to their electric album counterparts, allowing the lyrics and vocal melodies more air. The immediately apparent problem with playing these songs acoustically, however, is that the electric guitar flourishes and riffs fully voiced on record are barely audible. It may be a matter of personal taste, but songs like ‘Henry Fabian Flynn’ seem to fall a little flat in their breakdowns without that distorted drive. Perhaps Crazy Arm have got too competent at playing what is really quite musically complex roots-punk, and haven’t realised that simplifying songs isn’t always appropriate. The acoustic approach seems more for the benefit of existing fans than trying to win new ones though, and if the songs are familiar they are enjoyable. Darren seemed to be referencing the age-old mantra that any timeless song should still be breath-taking on one acoustic guitar, "it made sense to see if these songs could stand up on their own," also hinting that the tour is more of an experiment than anything else. As predicted, the set is cut short after five or six songs and the band resolve to play outside the pub, only to be told by the management that there is no way that is going to happen. Speculation abounds as to whether they could have lugged this orchestra outside anyway.
Finally, we ask Darren about the new album Union City Breath (11th October). He rejects the notion that playing acoustically has influenced the way the album will sound or was constructed, saying "We had a couple of acoustic songs that we were intending to be on the record anyway. But everything is running concurrently, all these ideas are running at the same time. The album was started before we thought about doing an acoustic tour." The fact that Crazy Arm played their largest shows to date last year on the Frank Turner and Chuck Ragan tour doesn’t seem to have factored in the way the band continue to write music either. Clearly, Crazy Arm still consider themselves a part of the underground music scene, asserting that their music has always sounded more grandiose than the venues they are most fond of playing, and that these two things need not be mutually exclusive; "I never think 'right, if we’re gonna play stadiums sometimes, then we need to have some stadium songs', we play small, squat-style venues and we’re still writing stadium-style anthems (or trying to). I like the idea of being considered a stadium band but in a really shitty pub."
Whether trying to play punk rock songs as a folk outfit is lunacy or not, it’s refreshing to find a band encouraging you to throw away your ear plugs, but keep your ideals.