Few bands have the bravery, determination and self-belief to survive times as tough as Phobophobes have endured, pretty much intact. And even fewer have the talent to rebuild themselves with such creative voracity, making some of the most alluring, unsettling, inventive and cutting-edge music of the age – the sound of The Velvets, Wire, The Cramps, The Monks, Leonard Cohen and Country Teasers fed through the foul filters of South London. No matter what fate throws at them, Phobophobes are too strange and special to be beaten.
 
In 2013 singer and guitarist Jamie Taylor started “a three-piece with a drum machine in a pub” with his drumming keyboardist schoolmate Chris OC. Phobophobes’ simple yet confrontational garage punk tunes saw them instantly immersed in the South London gristle rock scene of Fat White Family, Goat Girl and Shame. When Jamie wasn’t living in Paris for a year writing songs or building art installations for his old Slade School art tutor Phyllida Barlow in the USA, Phobophobes gathered a solid following on South London’s underground circuit.
 
Featuring an ever-revolving cast list – ex-Fat White Family drummer Dan Lyons was one of the eleven member who’ve been in and out – they evolved into the gloriously cranky outfit that released 2015 single ‘Make A Person’, and began recording a debut album, ‘Miniature World’, at Utopia Village in Primrose Hill and at Abbey Road, where they ‘stole’ swabs from the studio’s oldest microphones, hoping to bag a piece of Paul McCartney’s DNA.
 
Then, in the hardest of blows, their guitarist George Russell died in 2016 from a drug overdose. Bassist Elliot Nash, George’s close friend and flatmate, didn’t feel he could return at all. Around the same time, their label refused to release the record. “The whole thing crumbled,” Jamie says. “We’d put so much work and so much into it but from a musical point of view it was no longer what it was, so we decided to have time off.”
 
After eight months without a show, the band reconvened, minus Nash, to play a mental health charity gig at the Windmill in Brixton in George’s honour and set about completing the album using recordings of his playing intended for demos, hiring production legend Youth to mix the record. George’s poetry was embedded deep in this “apocalyptic garage rock” album - Jamie even asked Will Self, one of George’s favourite writers, to recite one of George’s poems on the poignant, ruined country pop of ‘Human Baby’. Steve Lamacq played the track on 6 Music every day for a week.
 
Phobophobes rose again. The good people of Ra-Ra Rok records – formed by the managers of Black Midi and Shame - stepped in to finally release the album in 2018. By the summer, Phobophobes were ready to move on, into a confident, luxuriant new era.
 
Boy, did they move. Having played a tour with Killing Joke, Phobophobes jumped in their beaten-up van and drove seventeen hours across Europe to spend ten days at an old ‘80s studio in Barcelona, home of drummer Nathan Ridley. Sessions then moved to producer Youth’s studio near Granada, in the Andalusian mountains. Happily, Elliot had come along for the ride, playing lap steel guitar, and by the time they’d driven straight from Granada to play a rammed tent at Green Man festival, he was back in the band for good. After years of upheavals, Phobophobes were a solid, front-facing unit again, and they had a second album, Modern Medicine, to match.
 
“It’s a bit more theatrical,” Jamie explains, “capturing how we sound in venues. We wanted to do something that encapsulated that feel of the times we’re living in and also our personal experiences. It suited a more dramatic, theatrical record with a few more layers, a bit more thought to it.”
 
Modern Medicine is a masterpiece of corroded elegance, imbued with the left-field grace of John Cale and Leonard Cohen while embracing the scorched noise-scapes and skewed gutter funk of South London’s most inspired ruffians. Something of a portrait of Phobophobes’ world, it’s peopled by Tom Waits-style characters from the scene and way beyond – filth-synth anthem ‘Lick The Lid’ features a “gross estate agent” getting an Uber to his Tinder, coke-spoon deep in “the smashed avocado, sourdough, MacBook Pro inferno”. And ‘Moustache Mike’ is about a powder-shooting American banjo player who frequented the gristle rock circuit and Baby Jane Holzer, one of Warhol’s superstars who was namechecked in Roxy Music’s ‘Virginia Plain’, now a collector of Warhol’s artworks. “It’s photogenic America disappearing,” Jamie says.
 
America’s influence is also felt in first single ‘Blind Muscle’, a Rhubarb And Custard glam deconstruction about “a blind force, someone who can make very flippant decisions that affect people’s lives massively.” But politics play a sideline role in the record: even though ‘Hollow Body Boy’ closes with the line “I’m already in a prison, in a prison of your wealth, if you want to build a wall can you build it around yourself?”, it’s intended as a tribute to George, the hollow-body guitar player who would have thought such a thing about Trump.
 
Elsewhere, the millennial world infringes on Jamie’s tales of personal anguish. The addictive psych-pop clatter ‘Modern Medicine’ concerns our superficial relationships with drugs, and our app-age promiscuity forms the basis of the Cramps-y ‘Give Them A Body’. That anguish remains centre stage though. Gruesomely gorgeous carnival ballad ‘I Mean It All’ involves two partners dying at the peak of their love and ‘Negative Space’ finds Jamie getting an almost sexual relish from dark times and destructive relationships.
 
If we’re to find a core of this startlingly original, brutally honest and artfully edgy record though, it’s in the dual partnership of ‘Monostereo’ and ‘The Box’, both sharing the line “You think outside the box, the box keeps getting bigger”, a comment on the endless possibilities of creativity.
 
“It’s trying to immortalise yourself,” Jamie says. “It’s the struggle to keep something of yourself alive.”
 
And when you’ve struggled so hard, you’ve earnt the immortality.