The brotherhood of I Am Kloot
There’s blood on your legs,” sings the small man with the big guitar. “I love you . . .” Has there ever been a more mysterious, more sinisterly romantic line in popular music than the lyric of Twist by I Am Kloot?
“It’s beautifully ambivalent, isn’t it?” smiles singer Johnny Bramwell, who has steadfastly declined to elaborate on its meaning during the decade since he wrote it.
There’s not much mystery or magic in pop music any more, but the Manchester trio I Am Kloot have it in abundance. From the day in 1999 when they deliberately gave themselves an enigmatic name with no precise meaning to their decision to put a picture of three anonymous tramps on the cover of their debut album, they have always preferred to let their songs speak for themselves. Bramwell has defined, and refined, a darkly romantic songwriting style that is simultaneously his own and the continuation of a northern tradition that encompasses everything from the kitchen-sink realism of postwar cinema through the Beatles to Morrissey, via Joy Division and the poetry of John Cooper Clarke.
If you had to give it a name, you might be tempted to call it “northern gothic”. And if you had to describe John Harold Arnold Bramwell, he would either be a small angry man with bad teeth and too much drink inside him or Britain’s most underrated musical and lyrical genius. Or quite possibly both.
In these digital-download days of instant gratification, you could be forgiven for thinking that pop groups only ever become overnight sensations or instant flops. But the story of I Am Kloot proves that it doesn’t always have to be that way. It was in the late 1990s that a trio of Mancunians, two of them working as concert promoters for the city’s Night & Day venue, formed a band and borrowed £1,000 to put out a limited-edition single on a local label called Ugly Man. It sold out through nothing more than word of mouth. So successful were they at maintaining their mystery that, at one point, Bramwell recalls, “someone came up to us and told us we should book this great new band called I Am Kloot for a gig”.
Kloot break most of the rules of pop star-dom. They were not then, and are certainly not now, the youngest or prettiest kids on the block. Two of them can see their fortieth birthdays looming on the horizon, and their singer sailed past it some time ago. In almost 10 years of setting Bramwell’s twisted tales of love and disaster to heartbreaking melodies, they have had “six or seven” managers, signed to five different labels, released four studio albums – plus a Peel Sessions compilation – and had a solitary hit single in 2005, when they reached the giddy heights of number 38.
Yet they have the same lineup (Bramwell on guitar and vocals, Peter Jobson on bass and piano, Andy Hargreaves on drums), the same sound man (Richard), the same publicist (Andy), the same booking agent (James) and, until recently, the same merchandise seller (Luke having recently given way to Tony) as they did when they started. What is more, they have done it without the support of UK radio or television, or the music press. And they have fallen victim to some strange business decisions, such as their record company deciding not to release the remarkable video for Proof, consisting solely of a close-up of Christopher Eccleston’s face, recording every nuance of emotion in the song. It’s on YouTube, but their label of the time decided, in its wisdom, not to release either the single or the video – not even when Eccleston was named as the new Doctor Who weeks later.
Yet they take the knocks in good spirit. Not only are Bramwell, Jobson and Hargreaves content with their lot, they are more convinced than ever that mainstream success is just around the corner. “We are all enormously ambitious,” declares Jobson, “and we firmly believe that the best is yet to come.” Bramwell, whose persona seems informed by a constant battle between self-belief and self-doubt, puts it more succinctly. “To be honest,” he declares, “I really do think, well, I know, that I’m the best.”
“One thing about Johnny,” says Jobson of his best friend, “is he’s absolutely fearless. He has this childlike sense of wonder and he’s very direct. That comes across in his songwriting as well. It explains why a lot of our fans are so passionate about what we do. You can’t really take us or leave us.”
It’s true: they might not be the best-known band in Britain, but once you’ve heard them – or, especially, seen them – it’s hard not to lose your heart to I Am Kloot. Their gigs, joyous communal events illuminated by Bramwell’s self-mocking banter and an audience who know their songs by heart, invariably sell out. If they were judged on their fans’ passion alone, I Am Kloot would surely be among the most popular bands in the country. There is an intimacy between band and audience that should be an object lesson to others; it’s reinforced by Bramwell’s occasional private gigs (usually with Jobson) at fans’ weddings, birthday parties and other social engagements.
If Bramwell had been born two centuries earlier, he would surely have been sipping laudanum and absinthe with Coleridge or brawling with Shelley; he’s like the missing link between William Blake and Alan Bennett. On stage, he likes to introduce every tune as being about “love and disaster”. It’s become something of a private joke, but he’s entirely serious. “That’s where the pleasure lies,” he explains earnestly. “On the crux. Just before the pain.”
When we first spoke for this article, we had barely parted company before he began to worry about what he had said. “Can we try and get away from all this damn truth and reality stuff,” he texted as soon as his train left Euston for Manchester. “It’s so demeaning.” Before long, and possibly after a visit to the bar, he was getting philosophical. “Nature. Law. Order. These are our watchwords,” he informed me, signing off with a slightly worrying flourish: “Ha aaaaaargh.” The next day came a new message: “We could talk about the nature of secrets. Science as religion. Beliefs. Unreality. There’s nothing remotely interesting in me.” Our text relationship continued in sporadic spurts. One dramatic message, received at 4.40am, read simply: “Please save me or else I shall die.”
It must be interesting to be in Johnny Bramwell’s world: a place where every day begins with impossibly high hopes and unrealistic romantic possibilities, and seems destined to end in heartbreak, at the bottom of an empty glass, as the girl of his dreams disappears in another man’s arms. It is, one imagines, a richly fertile source of inspiration for his musical genius.