Checked Out - Issue 1

Written by Louise Evans

The whole place was feeling this out of control flow of sheer self-expression, bouncing off the walls and filling up souls and shaking the floors and coming back at you and filling you up with ten times as much energy. That was the scene at The Checks’ most recent gig at the Masonic in Devonport, their first performance in months, where even the barmen at times stopped serving just to bear witness to the extraordinary energy erupting from the stage.

How does it feel when they play onstage – “I don’t know… how does a pineapple lump feel inside Kate Moss’s mouth? Pretty fucking good” answers Sven Pettersen after much consideration. The question is whether The Checks, who “have really built themselves up largely on live performances”, as Sven admits, can recreate the same thing in the studio.

The answer is suggested by Ed Knowles’ description of his live performance, “It comes to a point where you have to give across the same energy and performance regardless of what sort of crowd you’re playing to”. With that in mind, the theory is that hopefully they will be able to record the studio album with as much passion as their live performances and present something equally intoxicating.

With success possibly nigh, with The Checks about to travel to the UK to record their debut album, Sven and Eddie however do not think they’ll fit in with the current scene, “I reckon the Arctic Monkeys will hate us” says Ed. They have however already been acclaimed by UK music bible NME and it looks as though their uniqueness will only serve to benefit them, with the English music industry always on the look out for something fresh.

The Checks are currently listening to albums like Desire by Dylan, Astral Weeks by Van Morrison and in the case of Sven – jazz from Wes Montgomery and Chet Baker. However, they maintain the music they listen to doesn’t have much of an effect on the music they create. The ideas come about at odd times “like when you’re lying in bed at night looking at the ceiling” and “if the idea’s clear enough, everything else comes to it”, says Ed describing how a single person’s idea then develops when the whole band experiment with it.

Lyrically Ed is not optimistic about people understanding him and he is inspired, in particular, by Dylan in the way he contrasts two opposites to form a common bond and, in more classical terms, by the imagery of Shakespeare. Images play a large part in Knowles’ lyric writing, rather than images being a representation of a feeling, they are “for a feeling… not a mirror image of a feeling but part of the feeling”. Though he says a lot of his best stuff isn’t written down”. In regard to their anthemic Tired from Sleeping, Knowles says it is “the very thing you use to make yourself better, making you worse”.