Often when Ultimate Painting meet up to record, they won’t even get as far as picking up their instruments. Singer-guitarists Jack Cooper and James Hoare will meet at Hoare’s house – he has all the analogue equipment they could ever need in his front room – bringing with them lyric fragments and melodic ideas, with every intention of knuckling down on a new track. Then they just sort of … don’t.
“We’ll set aside days in the week where we’re going to record,” says Cooper, sipping black coffee in a Turkish cafe in east London. “But we’ll have, like, a cup of tea and something to eat, and go, ‘I don’t really wanna do anything today.’” Luckily, this creative lethargy is almost always mutual – it’s just a matter of who admits it first. “Normally the other person’s waiting for the person to say it,” Hoare agrees, “so they’re not …”
“So they’re not the bad guy!”
And yet somehow the duo – who formed in 2014 after Cooper’s band, Mazes, supported Hoare’s Veronica Falls on tour – have managed to make three albums in as many years. All of them are as resolutely unhurried as their creators’ work ethic – sparse, lo-fi guitars humming under catchy but undemonstrative melodies. Their latest, Dusk, is perhaps their most languid and unfussy so far. It takes as much care over the spaces between the notes, the deep, contemplative breaths in, as it does over the melodies themselves.
“Everyone’s minds nowadays are cluttered,” says Cooper. “I think what we do is like a reaction against how life can be. The songs we find ourselves played next to on the radio, you have these digital recordings where there’s hundreds of tracks on Pro Tools and it’s like, clutter. I think it’s a reaction against that, against modern life, in that we’re stripping everything away. It feels sort of cathartic.”
Lyrically, too, Ultimate Painting’s music is pared down to its core, never using three words where one will do. If they find a line that works, one that gets to the heart of a song, they’ll repeat it over and over. Hoare, who resembles a sort of grungy Benedict Cumberbatch, a stick-and-poke Beatles tattoo adorning his left arm, is prone to self-deprecation, so he suggests it’s down to laziness. When he suggests that he can’t really write upbeat songs, Cooper swiftly takes him to task.
“I don’t accept that you can’t write upbeat songs,” he retorts. “I really love James’s song Break the Chain, and I really like that line, ‘It’s all right to break the chain.’ I think that’s really quite a joyous lyric. It’s melancholic but it’s cool.” It happens several times throughout our conversation – this quiet but firm confirmation of the other’s abilities, no glimmer of self-doubt allowed to pass unchecked.
That’s not to say they don’t have the occasional disagreement. Hoare’s reluctance to come out and say when he doesn’t like a song has been problematic in the past. “Sometimes when you’ve been working on something for a few days at home, you bring it and James just sort of looks out the window,” Cooper laughs. “He’ll do a thing where if I brought something that he doesn’t like, he won’t say anything, he’ll wait for me to cotton on to the fact that it’s not right.” Hoare nods slowly.
“In hindsight,” he says, “it would be better just to say it straight away.”
“Yeah,” Cooper says, “it totally would.”
Though originally from different ends of the country (Cooper is from Blackpool, Hoare from Devon), they both now live in London. Their music comes, they believe, more in spite of their location than because of it. “It just seems like everything is getting pushed further and further out,” Cooper says. “I think this city in particular is crazy, the whole place is being hollowed out. When you go into central London, you go into these places with beautiful old houses around Regent’s Park and no one lives there. They’re owned by foreign investors, and that kind of attitude is spreading across the city. It definitely affects music venues or artist spaces. But people always find a way of creating, of reacting against that kind of thing.”
For them, that reaction lies in the languor of their music – a respite from the empty buzz of the capital – but it also, occasionally, crystallises into something more biting. In the song (I’ve Got the) Sanctioned Blues, Cooper sings of a nightmare train journey to a jobseekers’ meeting. At the time, the band described the song as an attempt to “make sense” of the Conservative government.
Do they feel confident trying political commentary in song? “I do like discussing politics,” says Cooper, “and I’m constantly thinking about it and talking to people about it. I don’t feel like I’m an authority. So I often try and take a step back from it, because I’m still processing what I think anyway. So it’s difficult.”
But then, it seems, everything is difficult. He says none of the thoughts or opinions he’s articulated in the last hour are set in stone. At least not for the moment. “When I completely figure everything out, which I intend to do, we can talk again,” Cooper says, smiling. “On my death bed.”
