Who are Wu Lyf? What does it mean and what do they do? Wu Lyf are, in fact, the most enigmatic band to come out of Manchester since Joy Division. We got hold of “Elle Jaie” aka Ellery James Roberts, the vocalist of the band appropriately enough, for a telephone chat about the band and what we can expect from them in the future. Length: 03:07
With some amazing tracks, and a debut album we have reviewed previously, Wu Lyf are certainly ready to take on any and all challenges that come their way. They’re not stopping simply with being a band, but a brand and more-so that that, a project. Here is some highlights from the transcribe that didn’t make the edit.
one small seed: Would South Africa be a touring destination you’d consider?
Ellery: For me, well for us, we’ve always approached touring as opportunities to go and travel to interesting and exciting places, different to our day to day existence. I’d like to, I’d really like to go to South Africa, so if we can somehow work out a way cause I guess the one thing that this day and age, everything cost a hell of a lot of money. Just working how we can afford to do it, way out, but maybe. Actually we in Sweden at the moment, we were booked play in a church, but for some reason they’ve taken us off the billing at the church cause the church put a complaint in about us but I don’t really understand.
one small seed: Lots of rumors about occult ties and Satanism, would you like to set the record straight? Are you Satanists?
Ellery: We not Satanic. For us Lucifer, Lucifer is not even in the Bible, the word. There needed to be a bad guy, so they made a bad guy. And Lucifer once upon a time was the idea of western knowledge and enlightenment. It was a light in dark ages, but it slowly became applied to being the same thing as Satan.
one small seed: So is the church vibe your sound? Can we expect more in the next album?
Ellery: I never want to, we’ve done one thing, I never want to repeat doing things. It’s kind of a really stagnant way of making music so we’re working on new material and new ideas for the second record at the moment and the general main point we have at the moment is move on, don’t just repeat yourself. Yeah so, no, I don’t think I’m ever gonna set foot in a church again.
one small seed: With the advent of online platforms for delivery, what is your take on Soundcloud and other digital mediums?
Ellery: I like the physicality to a record, but also I can appreciate how useful they (soundcloud) are. So I mean for us we used the website, in this day and age it’s very easy to build a website for nothing on something like tumblr and then put some songs up on it and some pictures. I guess that’s how the initial people found out about us at live shows.
one small seed: Is it difficult to go to places where you’ve been hyped and how do you live up to that?
Ellery: We’ve been over to New York and Los Angeles. I guess they are obviously anomolies in the general way of American life, but one thing that’s really nice over there is that they don’t overly care about the hype. In England or Europe, everyone is like blah blah blah about the same old boring bullshit everytime, but people so far from what we’ve experienced in America have been generally respectful, they don’t have like cynical eyes made cynical through all the hype. If they like it, they’ve been really positive and really just a bit more interesting than the general European…ness, I dunno.
Wu Lyf is probably the only band of 2011 which can live up to the heat that surrounds them, living up to the expectations of new fans and music publications alike. Check out their debut album, Go Tell Fire To The Mountain available of their independent label found on their site.
