The Room

Since launching the project in 1979, Dave has been invested in the power of songwriting to tell stories. Doom Pop is full of some of the highest concept science fiction songs you would ever have heard. 

The song, Continent of Lies, for instance, grew out of the January 6th Capitol riots and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and was written before the release of their comeback album, Restless Fate, in 2022. Dave opted to keep it until Doom Pop, rewriting the lyrics and remixing it. There’s also Drill Baby Drill, which tries to imagine Donald Trump’s psyche and disregard for future generations. Meanwhile, Trespassing is a three-minute condensation of a screenplay Dave once wrote for The Film Council. 

“I went to this All Tomorrow’s Parties thing at Camber Sands curated by Steve Albini and it was the first time I saw Godspeed you Black Emperor live, and I had their music in mind when I was writing the script. I later heard that Danny Boyle also had that music in his mind when he was writing 28 Days Later!

“The story is about where the underclass have been outcast from all the major cities and the only ways they can get work is if they go into endangered slavery as household servants or volunteer for projects in camps. There’s this camp where they think they’re having their dreams monitored but in fact rich people are turning up in their limousines and having their psyches projected into the young bodies to joyride in them for several hours and leave them possibly wrecked! And that is what Trespassing is about.”

It won’t surprise you after hearing these very rich inspirations that Dave teaches creative writing professionally. One of the songs, self-titled The Room, is inspired by the plot of Tarkovsky’s Russian film Stalker, about a place called The Zone where all your innermost desires come true. 

Echo and the Bunnymen and The Fall are commonly cited as inspirations and spiritual peers for The Room, but since the break, Dave has also found inspiration in the work of Bill Callahan and Bonnie Prince Billy, once more very lyrically driven artistes: “I’m constantly looking for new material to write about and it’s fun to change tact for the things I write about now and again,” he says. 

Among the tracks is a rerecording of an eighties The Room classic, Things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl. “We kind of felt that if we were to go out as The Room (after the members performed in other bands and formations in the hiatus), then we needed to record an old Room song, and that was the one we chose, just because we liked the song a lot and figured there’s a lot of people that won’t have heard of it anyway, because it’s not like it was a massive hit at the time.”

One of the songs Dave is proudest of is Magic Games, written from the singer’s perspective when he was four years old, sitting in his grandmother’s parlour with his ageing grandad and playing with toys: “That one isn’t a doom song! I was thinking about how quite often when you’re writing a fantasy novel, you take things out of the real world or out of your memories from childhood and you distort them and turn them into material.”

Being a creative writer, and the lead of a long-running band, means one must toughen up to feedback, not just the good stuff, but the bad bits too. 

“I remember when we brought out our first single we got a positive review in the NME from John Morley, but we got a poor review from Sounds saying we sounded like Wire on an off day! You learn to accommodate the idea that a lot of people aren’t gonna like what you do. I’m not even sure my wife likes what we do!”