Double Handsome Dragons - Phil Mitchell

"Moondust sprinkled over a hive of vicious, flying insects who are engaged in a centuries old battle 
with the ancient beasts of folklore over possession of the best dance move in the universe."

This is what influenced Double Handsome Dragons. So wake up to a world of celestial harmony,
entomology and more bright blinking sky lights we've often brushed off ignorantly as earthly.

Double Handsome Dragons were an experimental 4-piece post-rock band from Peterburough, UK. Formed in 2007, their cross-hatching of genres range from electronica to screamo, and even a touch of indie-rock thrown in, all blended up together for all-the-more of an enjoyable listen. To date they have released 2 EPs, and 2 mini-albums, catching up on more progression than pioneers like Genesis and King Crimson would dare to admit.

It has been said that daily, they fought with potted plants and lawnmowers to get to their instruments, and sometimes they were even attacked. They have scars, and they feel safe and warm in their bedrooms. They also liked to travel to far away lands to play for decent, handsome people.

Unfortunately, Double Handsome Dragons disbanded in 2011, for reasons still unclear; the cloudy departure of a certain member, and an inspired effort at starting over fresh. Luckily, to clear some air, I got the opportunity to speak with guitarist Phil Mitchell on electronics, the advantages of home recordings and why red guitars are just better than the rest.

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1) Double Handsome Dragons seemed to be quite an imaginative bunch. How did it all come together? Roots are always important.

Phil Mitchell - James and I are brothers and we started our first band when we were at school, with a friend on bass. We’ve played in a band together ever since. Our first band was called Tic, and we made experimental punk rock stuff – it was music to have epileptic fits to. One of our friends once said: “Tic were the best band and the worst band; often at the same gig; often in the same song” – that sums it up perfectly. Dan joined Tic as a dancer and backing singer. He used to strip to his underpants, paint himself purple, and jump about the stage on a spacehopper. Tic had several different members – we had Mark doing samplers, Dave on bass, and at times we had Joe playing bongos, and Will scratching on decks and playing a small guitar. Tic split up when a certain member starting turning up at band practice with a crack dealer in tow – bad times.

Simon was in a pop punk band called Coaster at the same time as Tic, and when that folded he was in a band with James called Superstar Hospital, which sounded a bit like Weezer. I joined a band called Sidearm (who took a lot of influence from At the Drive-in and Trail of Dead) and when our bass player left to move to London, we asked Simon to step in. Sidearm started to do less and less gigs so we decided to start another band – Double Handsome Dragons.

It took us a long time to come up with DHD’s sound. We wanted it to be instrumental because none of us could sing, and I really liked Mogwai’s song "Glasgow Megasnake". After about a year we had 5-6 songs which we recorded ourselves. They sound really basic compared to what we did later, but we’re still proud of them because we did it ourselves. We then went out and started playing gigs. And it turns out that people seemed to like it. So we carried on.


2) Growing up in Peterborough, how would you describe it's local live music scene? What were/are some of your favourite places to play? Is it somewhere you would encourage other bands to stop past on tour?

PM: Peterborough doesn’t really have a music scene anymore, but there were periods when it did. About 14-15 years ago, The Crown Pub was the centre of the scene. The Park was a good venue when it hosted the 'Club With No Name'. And most recently, The Glass Onion had amazing gigs. But these have all since closed now.

We put on gigs at The Glass Onion. It was a pub/community centre run by an arty crowd. The venue was small, and we couldn’t charge money at the door, but because the atmosphere and crowd were so great, bands didn’t mind playing for free. The best Dragons gigs were played here.

Now there’s only one venue and I haven’t seen a decent band play there in a long time. They’re not keen on having bands there unless they can guarantee a crowd which means you don’t get the less well known touring bands – certainly not bands I’m interested in. DHD refused to play there.


3) After releasing a few EPs and demos, Double Handsome Dragons released the mini-album titled "Lions & Tigers and HOLY SHIT WHAT WAS THAT!!??", swimming with delicious texture and a shattering, yet notable use of electronics. Was it ever a mutual decision to incorporate electronics into your music?

PM: In Tic, we used a lot of samples, so it was nothing new. We saw 65daysofstatic using computer backing tracks, and were intrigued with how they did that. Once we figured it out, we soon realized that it could make our sound huge; almost orchestral. There weren’t many bands using electronics in that way, and there still aren't that many today, but we loved it.  Creating the backing tracks meant using way more imagination than if we just played our drums and guitars. We all took turns playing the keyboard, or glockenspiel, or stylophone – whatever was lying around. We just wanted to sound a bit different from everyone else – every band does – and electronics were a good way to do so.

4) For the record, what was REALLY amongst all those lions and tigers? It's always kind of worried me a bit.

PM: If you read the description of such a beast, your eyes would swell up and burst. To speak it's name would tear your eardrums to shreds and make your brain implode - And for that reason I shall never say.


5) Your releases seem to stick to recurring subjects; Insects, animals and outer space. Where did the inspiration behind all of this come from?

PM: I guess we were influenced by our dad's generation's prog-rock concept albums. The ideas usually came from us just chatting between playing songs at practice. When we wrote songs they didn’t typically have names. Once we named one, the others would follow in a similar theme. Coming up with songs names was good fun. Some were really stupid though e.g. "A Swarm of Bears With Sparrows Wings"


6) Double Handsome Dragons released their self-tilted mini-album in 2010, which I thought was of remarkable quality. Again, a fine display of both involved instrumentation, and a sophisticated use of electronics. Could you tell me how this record fell into place? How long did it take to write and record? Where was it recorded?

PM: The songs were written in our practice space over a year. We always wrote the songs as a band without the electronics. We never wrote songs in the studio. The electronics always came afterwards. It usually took a while to write songs because we often made them too complicated for ourselves – although it’s a good way of improving your playing. It could get quite frustrating; especially if we were practicing after work and we’d all had a hard day. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to have a fresh sound.

The songs were recorded in my spare bedroom, my living room, and James’s bedroom. We did it all ourselves. We figured that we could spend hundreds of pounds in a studio, and get something we weren’t happy with, or we could spend a few hundred on decent microphones and monitors, and spend as much time as we liked recording to get something we all loved. James is the one who puts in all the hard work with recording and mixing – he likes doing that kind of thing – I don’t have the right temperament. So thanks for saying it sounds high quality – he spent a lot of time on it. It seemed to take forever and I’m not actually sure how long it took to record in the end.


7) On your facebook page, you're listed as handling "Red guitars", what do you have against other colours? But seriously, What guitar do you play on?

PM: Red cars go faster. Red guitars just sound better.

I use a Gibson SG faded cherry red guitar. My Grandad gave me the money for it just before he died so it has a lot of sentimental value. It’s an awesome guitar, but it’s looking a bit worse for wear as I tend to play it pretty hard. I have a Fender Telecaster as back up too.

8) As a guitarist, would you care to name some of your personal influences while writing music? And which artists would the four of you agree on?

PM: Personally I took a lot of influence from At the Drive-in and The Mars Volta – they have some very nice sounding, urgent chords. I like the wall of noise that ..And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead produce. And then I like the epic loud endings of a lot of noisy post-rock bands like Mogwai and Russian Circles. The Japanese band Envy are one of my favourites – mixing hardcore and post-rock. I listen to a lot of music – I love discovering new sounds – so I take a lot of influence from all sorts of artists.

DHD didn’t really agree on much music. James and I have similar musical tastes, but he likes his hip-hop and drum & bass more than the rest of us. Dan likes classic rock and Primus. Simon likes Radiohead and Weezer. I think our different musical tastes helped formed the DHD sound. If a band all like different things, then you don’t fall into the trap of trying to sound like someone you all like.


9) Personally speaking, what are your top 5 albums of 2012?

• Cloud Nothings -  Attack on Memory
• Future Of The Left - The Plot Against Common Sense
• ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead - Lost Songs
• The Twilight Sad - No One Can Ever Know
• Deftones - Koi No Yokan

10) Double Handsome Dragons went on to form a new project, There Are Ghosts, which is also coincidentally the title of a Double Handsome Dragons song. How does this new project differ to what you had been previously doing? How would you describe There Are Ghosts?

PM: There Are Ghosts is a little bit darker. And there’s a crazy man screaming over it. James and I are in the band along with Jay who played bass for DHD when Simon wouldn’t tour Ireland with us, and Shaun who sings. Jay was a big DHD fan and became a good friend, so when DHD split he was well up for starting a new band. We wrote some instrumental songs, but we all came to the conclusion that we wanted to have some singing – we had done the instrumental thing for too long – so along came Shaun, who we knew from some crazy local bands (Frisco Farr and Aotea). He’s also a wrestler. There are a lot of DHD fans who have bought into the new band's sound. We’re like a hardcore version of DHD.



11) What were the reasons behind the break-up? Was it more to do with relocation? Or did you all feel that your tastes had changed too much to continue under the same name?

PM: Double Handsome Dragons came to quite a sudden end, and it’s still a bit of a mystery as to why it all happened, but Dan decided to leave. We were having problems writing new songs and Dan stopped talking to us – literally stopped talking. We think he felt he wasn’t being listened to, but we couldn’t say anything right to him – whatever we said seemed to annoy him. He doesn’t talk to us at all now. He never even told us he wanted to leave; he just did.

We thought about continuing under the DHD name with Jay on guitar, but Simon wasn’t into it as much as he had been, so he took the opportunity to leave. That gave us the chance to do something different and now we’re loving the new band.


12) Would Double Handsome Dragons ever consider putting out any further releases in the future? What are your thoughts on bands keeping a "studio-only" ethic?

PM: I can say with almost certainty that DHD won’t be putting anything else out. DHD was the product of all four of us; it wouldn’t work without us all working on it and with Dan’s lack-of-speaking-to-us, that isn’t going to happen.

If a band has a studio only ethic then they’re not a real band. Real bands play live. If you don’t play live together you can’t bond together and studio ideas remain bland and uninspired – that’s my thought on it anyhow.

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The UFO's and wasps may have left this planet, but for now There Are Ghosts are here to haunt!

Thanks so much to Phil for answering my questions!

"Killing and killing and KFC"