‘The Early Years of a person’s life is often when they are doing things purely on their own agenda, unspoilt and unconcerned by outside influence; pure and true to themselves. That’s the best place to be when you’re making music.’
When The Early Years released their debut EP in January 2006 it was a shot across the bows of a tired English music scene. ‘All Ones And Zeros’ was a euphoric, hypnotic, groove laden introduction to their world and boy did the world need it.
Formed only a year earlier by David Malkinson in Hackney, London, he started off The Early Years journey as a one man musical visionary. Armed with simple equipment he generated huge waves of psychedelic noise around the seedy venues of East London. Dave says “I started this as I wanted to do something different, something that wasn’t part of a scene and was essentially for myself.” Seeing one of David’s solo shows, an old friend, Roger Mackin was transfixed and knew his future lay in exploring these ideas that David was developing. It soon became apparent they required a rhythm section and the band was complete when another friend, Phil Raines took up the call and moved to London.
They wasted no time in finding an audience with which to share their sonic wares and immediately picked up rave reviews for their live shows based largely around David and Roger’s improvisations and Phil’s unrelenting, hypnotic grooves, traits more readily associated with the origins of dance music than those of the current UK live music scene. Their unique sound quickly won them fans in Steve Lamacq, Huw Stephens and John Kennedy at Radio 1 and XFM. They were invited into both stations within the same week to record sessions and shortly afterwards, signed to Beggars Banquet Records and released their debut EP ‘All Ones And Zeros’.
The rest of that year was spent writing new material and touring the UK, including headlining the BBC 6 Music stage at Latitude festival and winning Brian Eno’s admiration at the Truck Festival in Oxfordshire. Last year also saw the release of a second EP, ‘So Far Gone’ and their self-titled debut album. Both records were released to critical acclaim across the UK press, with singles receiving heavy rotation on MTV2 and
‘All Ones And Zeros’ being picked up by Nike as part of their World Cup ’06 advertising campaign.
The release of the debut LP was a clear statement of intent and illustrated that The Early Years have a gift for songcraft too with tracks such as ‘Brown Hearts’, ‘Song For Elizabeth’, and ‘This Ain’t Happiness’ offering an alluring contrast to the band’s origins. It is this aspect of their music that they take most enjoyment in, not only do they feel the need to experiment with sound and frequency, but they also have an all-consuming need to create melodic, beautiful songs and it is the amalgamation of these two aspects that defines the sound of The Early Years.
So far 2007 has seen the release of a new EP ‘The Great Awakening’ and the US and Japanese release of the debut album. This has led to the demand for a tour of the East Coast of America and several appearances at Austin’s ‘South By South West’ festival. This year has also seen the line-up expand to include fourth member and old friend, Brendan Kersey drafted in to play bass full-time having been augmenting their live sound since the summer of 2006.
In addition to a forthcoming tour, several UK and European festival performances and remixing tracks for various projects, The Early Years are currently locked in the studio creating new work for their second album.