TRAILER TRASH TRACYS

AGONY & ECSTASY: TRAILER TRASH TRACYS

Dazed & Confused, October 2009

Ever got the bus through south London’s notorious Elephant and Castle at night? As you swoop past the intermittent lights that shine out of greying estates earmarked for demolition, you cannot help but marvel at the scale of this very public heartbreak. Jimmy Lee, one half of duo Trailer Trash Tracys, resides in the area – in the shittest council flat you are likely to see,” he says. “But it means I get a three-bedroom flat to myself for £200 a month.”

TTT make songs that seem like epic siren calls in this doomed night. At the root of them is the yearning 80s balladry of bands such as Berlin and Cocteau Twins. Swedish émigré Suzanne Aztoria’s vocals float and crackle like static ghosts over gorgeous songs that quiver under the weight of reverb. New Single “Candy Girl” articulates, among other things, the wooziness of coming down; the failure of modernism; the pain of leaving. Yet it is no miserable anthem. Above all, the song is soaked in the possibility of beauty rising out of desolation.

The pair started working together when they were both in a manufactured pop band. “We were in the indie version of Girls Aloud,” says Susanne. “We were in the middle of a contradiction,” adds Jimmy. “Sounding like the Jesus & Mary Chain, but having these pop songs to play. Needless to say, it didn’t work out.”

Something of the JMC stuck though – the nocturnal lushness that ignited the shoegaze scene, as well as Bobby Gillespie’s “boom, boom-boom, bap” drum style, pinched in turn off Phil Spector. “We can see why people would call it shoegaze, as we use a lot of reverb and other effects,” says Susanne. “But I don’t think it is as simple as that. It is really important for us that they are good songs.”

To say that their music is a passion for both might be to underplay it. “We do meet up a lot to write, record and rehearse,” Susanne attests. “We are kind of perfectionists, so a song has to be completely right for us to be happy with it.”

Yet obsession often leads to pain, and going over and over songs in his south London flat might be getting to Jimmy. “Since starting this band, I have been caught talking to myself,” he confesses. “That’s no bullshit, I don’t even realise.”