Hannah Merricks and Craig Whittle both harbored the same dream: to form a great band. They meet at a pub in Liverpool where they both work and decide to join forces. So, King Hannah is born, and the days of washing glasses and pouring drinks are long gone. For now. Following the EP «Tell me your mind and I’ll tell you mine», the band are currently touring with their first album «I’m not sorry, I was just being me», both released by the Berlin based City Slang label. The witty, dark-humoured songs revolve around Merrick’s slow, sombre voice and Whittle’s eerie guitar sounds, reminiscing lost times of wetting the bed, watching old lovers choke on dumplings («at least that would be mildly fun»), concluding in the repeated outcry: «I’m all I’m ever gonna be». On the contrary, the pair have only begun their journey to make the best music possible.
Fabrikzeitung: What (and who) is «King Hannah» for you?
Hannah Merricks: I think of King Hannah as Craig and I.
Craig Whittle: So do I. It’s been Hannah and I for a long time now, writing music together, both being equally committed and it being our project. But obviously we have the band to make the songs come to life.
HM: We’re the creative force behind it. Everything we do is Craig and I’s idea, cause we have such a clear vision of how we want to a) sound, b) come across, as a band or as people, and we’re quite strict and firm about that. We’ve both got the same taste in music. It’s all our doing.
FZ: What is this clear vision?
CW: We’ve always wanted to be very honest and real, don’t we – a very natural sound, balanced between loud-quiet. The album has a kind of nostalgic, warm feeling to it. We always make musical choices that guide us towards those kinds of sounds and feels.
HM: And also good, in terms of tasteful. There’s so much music Craig and I can’t bear, that some people absolutely love. It’s very important to us that we don’t go down a route that we don’t like. The people who come to our shows, when we chat to them afterwards, they always seem to have a good taste in music. We hope that we’re attracting the right sorts of people. So yeah. Tasteful, good music.
CW: Classy.
HM: Classy, yeah. Timeless.
FZ: What is a good taste in music for you, then?
CW: We love that kind of raw, nineties, very honest, kind of storytelling, music; bands like Smog, Red House Painters, the Microphones. At quite a lot of gigs that we played, we talked to people afterwards and they’d be like, I saw Smog in here in 1998, I saw this person here. We’re playing in a lot of venues, especially in Europe, that have a history of putting on these kinds of bands. The same people have been going to these gigs for years.
FZ: How do you write your songs?
HM: You just sit down with an idea in your head, and then you just ramble on and on, until you have a collection, a voice memo of something, where you know there’s something in there that’s gonna work. So you have the idea at the start and then you follow through with that, that’s the theme of the song. I’ll write them in my room, and when they are in a good form, when there’s a song there, I’ll show Craig. He’ll carry on with it from there and add his guitar, fill it out, and then we’ll take it to the band. We have a session drummer and a session bass player, who listen to the reference tracks we give them, and we tell them our ideas of how we want the drums and the bass to sound. And then Craig also writes all the instrumental stuff. That’s how it goes.
FZ: You sing about what youth was, being a go-kart kid and past lovers. What role does the past and the nostalgic play in your music?
CW: We’re naturally very sentimental and nostalgic kind of people. We both had very nice, warm childhoods. That comes out in the music.
FZ: Your label, City Slang, writes: «One thing they knew intuitively, though, was that, if it was right, they’d know it was right. And, over time, it turned out it was right.» How did you know it was right? How did you find your sound together?
HM: It’s taken a long time. When Craig and I met, we were just friends for a while, which we realise now was crucial to what we’ve built and our current relationship. Our tastes in music have changed over the years. We listen to completely different bands than we listened to years ago, even this time last year we listened to different bands really, discovered new artists. And that’s how we formed our sound, isn’t it. Just getting to know one another, becoming more comfortable around each other over the years.
CW: I think it’s like seven, eight years now that we know each other. Which is a long time, long enough. Becoming excited about all different kinds of music, all kinds of sounds, our tastes changing, going deeper into the kind of music that we love.
HM: City Slang have offered us lovely opportunities, going like «can you write us an EP, okay now can you write us an album». So all of a sudden there’s this huge challenge in front of you and you’re thinking oh my god, this is happening. And you just do it, and then that forces something out of you that might not have happened otherwise.
FZ: How did you find your own sound in this movement around other bands you like?
HM: I think it’s a mixture of your (Craig’s) taste, and my taste, together
CW: It is. Hannah’s taste is very much that kind of nineties, female driven, Macy Star, PJ Harvey, Portishead, kind of era. And then my taste is, I love nineties music as well, Red House Painters, but also the seventies kind of Neil Young, that kind of like guitar-y driven music from the seventies.
HM: So we’re trying to mix, the seventies and the nineties coming together to create –
CW: – the eighties.
FZ: Do you share the same kind of humour?
HM: I think so. Craig’s the funny one. Pretty sure he’ll agree.
CW: Yeah. We have a very silly sense of humour.
HM: We like silly things, don’t we.
CW: When we were talking earlier, that we want the music to be honest and real, that might sound like we’re very very serious humans, but we’re not really. We take the job incredibly seriously, but we’re constantly laughing. That’s why humour made it into the album, because it’s very much a part of who we are.
FZ: Why is it «King Hannah» and not «Queen Hannah» or just «Hannah and Craig»?
HM: Well «Hannah and Craig» would be the worst band name ever. Before Craig and I met, I had the name in my head for one day. And when I met Craig I told him, and he liked it. I find it quite empowering, quite strong – even though king doesn’t mean «above queen». But queen is overused in the UK, people use it as a nickname, it’s got not very nice attachments to it. It wouldn’t be as memorable as King Hannah.
FZ: Taking a leap into the future: what kind of themes, sounds, interest you in upcoming songs?
CW: This year, because we’ve been on tour so much, we can’t wait to get back and start writing music. We listen to all those voice memos of ideas in the van. I think we know what we love about the album, and what we don’t love so much. So we’re really looking forward to having time, really diving in, figuring out how we want the next album to sound – we kind of know, but we also don’t know, which is quite exciting.
FZ: So what do you love about the album and what not?
CW: We love the way it sounds, don’t we? Sonically and stuff, we’re very proud of that. And then, what don’t you love about the album?
HM: I don’t know. I love it all. I’m very proud of it.
CW: Yeah yeah yeah, very very proud of it. But I think the moment you’re thinking oh, we can’t improve on this, that’s kind of over. We just constantly want to keep getting better and making better music.
FZ: In another interview you said, Hannah, «I remember wanting a band, and that was that». How does the reality fit with your expectations or desires?
HM: It’s exactly as I wanted. We just wanna keep going. And that’s how I envisioned it. It’s going in the right direction. So far.
King Hannah spielen am Mitwoch, den 24. August um 20 Uhr im Clubraum der Roten Fabrik.