 |  | Detroit Social ClubSat there at Nissan Sunderland, night shift, Saturday, designing machines that make other machines David Burn is going quietly mental.
David Burn, the man who is Detroit Social Club, has always been a music-head. An audiophile, but not in a geek way. He dug Spector and bought Sound On Sound. But he liked the art, not the science, of sonic experimentation. In the evenings, away from his day job, the self-taught, Newcastle-born producer/guitarist/writer plotted his move from car engineering to music engineering. No, more than that – Burn wanted to make music that moved and dazzled and wowed.
So Burn handed in his notice and, in 2007, opened the doors of The Garage Studios in central Newcastle: a recording and rehearsal facility catering to all yr local muso’s needs, with some cracking posters on the walls too. “I ran it from a musician’s point of view rather than a businessman’s.” He’d produce bands himself, all the while using studio downtime to work on his own music. A trip to New York inspired him to start exploring the musical DNA of American icons – Neil Young, Beck, and Tom Waits – while, back home, he studied American history at university. That summer, 2007, he began conceiving a band that could be a vehicle for the songs that were roaring into life in his head: the rolling psychedelia of Sunshine People, the blues bleeps and throbs of Black And White.
Detroit Social Club were the result. The Detroit referenced his own motor-city experiences and some of the iconic bands he loved: MC5, Stooges and Mowtown; the Social Club a nod to the pride in his northern background. Put together it meant wide-screen, high-impact, deep-meaning rock’n’soul. It meant intimate anthems and big-room ballads. It meant music to take your head off and rip your heart out.
Within a few months Burn had set up a Myspace; within a few weeks he was fielding calls from record labels by the dozen. He recruited a band from amidst the ranks of the musicians who’d come through the doors of The Garage. In May 2008, the charismatic singer/guitarist and his newly recruited gang (Corty – bass; Bondy – lead guitarist; Dale – keyboard player; Welshy – guitarist; Greenie – drums) played their first gig at Newcastle’s Other Rooms. Five labels and 250 real people turned up. Detroit Social Club had lift off.
Crouched under the Menin Gate, in Flanders fields, springtime. David Burn finds his granddad’s names on the memorial to the glorious dead of World War 2. Nearby, the inscription of a poem written by a soldier off into battle on the Somme. He knows he’s about to die; he knows he has to write to his mum and tell her it’ll be alright; he’s happy to be doing this, dying, for this cause. He writes: “Together we kiss the sun.” David Burn, aged 12, cries at this. His history teacher puts his arm around him. “Today you’ve taken a big step to being a man.”
Kiss The Sun – rousing, direct, bold, uplifting, personal but communal – is typical Detroit Social Club. Lyrically, Burn has drawn from deep personal experience, from the memories of that school trip to the Belgian battlefields, and of his own family. Musically, it’s the perfect opener to Detroit Social Club’s debut album, to be released May 24th.
The stirring Northern Man is equally totemic. “I’m a proud northerner, but the lyrics are about the stigma of being a northern person.” Inspiration came from an all-night chat with a mate. “Aged 34 he’s been on the dole half his life. He thought that that was his lot, all he could ever expect” he said Burn was “lucky” that he had the band and things seemed to be going well for them. Burn was having none of it – he’d worked for his “luck”, for his opportunities.
“We have been the underdog in the north, yet I don’t believe in using it as an excuse. The first verse is deliberately pessimistic – ‘I’ve been living in silence, I’ve been living with fear on my mind’. The second verse is optimistic – ‘find something to believe in, finding something you can call your own’. And the chorus is: just fucking get up.”
Silver, meanwhile, which featured as the b-side to the band’s debut indie single (the chanting hipshake of Rivers & Rainbows, released in late 2008), is a mantric blues shuffle, addressed to Burn’s young daughter. Sunshine People, their second single (released last year), is the result of Burn’s desire to write a song that “sounds massive but has a bit of integrity. It’s easier to write a song like that,” he admits. “Ballsy, big, whack up the guitar. But I wanted to try make it groove as well, and have depth. That’s the one that gets people going live. We shift between playing it first and last. ‘Cause it’s the one that gets us going too. And it makes you wanna go a bit mental. Which isn’t what I want us to sound like at all,” he says firmly. But, he adds with a grin, “it’s OK to have the occasional song like that.”
He co-produced Detroit Social Club’s debut with Jim Abbiss – Burn admired the albums he’d made with Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian, but was more impressed with Abbiss’s work with UNKLE. “I tried out three different producers before Jim,” says this man with a self-confessed fixation on the top-to-bottom detail of his band, from “sonics to lyrics to sleeve” and Jim also pays a lot of attention to detail.” Still, a clutch of the songs on the album are featured in their original demo version, as dreamt up by Burn on his own in The Garage. Simply, “the vibe on those first versions was the best.”
When not in the studio, Detroit Social Club spent 2008 supporting Primal Scream and Razorlight, and touring the UK’s club circuit. Songs like Chemistry – imagine Arcade Fire with a British epic-folk twist – helped win Burn and co an impassioned fanbase. Here was a brand new British band with guts, soul and tunes to hang your coat on. A band crackling out energy. A band to believe in.
Stood on a stage in Leeds tonight. David Burn and Detroit Social Club are giving it loads. “Any band can have a good gig. You go see a band, you want to be drawn in, claimed, taken, transported, lifted. It’s proper, it’s genuine. You can’t argue with that, can you? Can you? David Burn says: “I’d rather play a gig with loads of mistakes but at least it’s real. We’re not just a northern band who play guitars whacked up to 11. Our music’s a lot more than that. And a lot deeper than that. As it says in Universe/Modern World: ‘I just wanna rise above the judgments that kill me…’”
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