Benefits on their Glastonbury debut and plans for new music

Benefits have spoken to NME about making their Glastonbury Festival debut tonight (Friday June 23).

The Teesside noise punks will be performing under the invitation of Billy Bragg on his legendary Left Field stage this evening, shortly after the mysterious set from The Churnups – widely believed to be Foo Fighters, or least something featuring Dave Grohl, after he was spotted on site earlier today.

Still, Benefits frontman Kingsley Hall isn’t worried about pulling a big crowd shortly after. “We’re not up against them,” replied Hall. “As soon as they finish, we start. There’s no crossover. If you’re really quick, you can get from the Pyramid to the Left Field in 10 or 20 minutes. Get a jog on. Yesterday when I was wondering around I saw two celebrities. I saw Richie [Anderson] – the lad who does the traffic for Radio 2. I was proper starstruck and couldn’t speak to him. I also saw Joe Wicks. He could train people to do a jog around.”

Ahead of their set tonight, Hall spoke to NME about Glasto dreams, the state of the world, Twitter furore at new bands, Royal Blood’s Radio One Big Weekend incident, and what to expect from the follow-up to their acclaimed debut album ‘Nails‘.

Hello Kingsley. How did you end up being invited by Billy Bragg to play his Left Field stage at Glasto?

Hall: “It was a weird one. I’m on Twitter for about 99 per cent of the day, and I noticed that he’d started following us. I thought, ‘That’s a bit weird’. He only follows about 10 people – it’s Jeremy Corbyn, some lefties and us. I sent him a message going, ‘Hiya Billy, you’re very good, I like your songs, you’re an inspiration in terms of how you go about this business’. He replied, ‘I’ve been following you for a bit and I really like what you do and what you’re saying, do you want to meet up the next time I’m around your way?’ It turns out he was playing Stockton, my hometown, supporting Paul Heaton of The Beautiful South.

“We met up, had a chat – anything for a free backstage dinner – and he asked if I wanted to play his stage at Glastonbury. I was like, ‘Obviously of course I do’. The only way we’d get it would be to get a freebie to get paid to be here. That’s amazing.”

Does Glastonbury feel profoundly different to other gigs?

“It’s huge. Regardless of being on Invada Records and regardless of releasing an album, regardless of having nice things said about us by certain bits of the media, we’re still a small band and have a DIY aesthetic. We’re from a small town, so for us to be here is a bit like Middlesbrough FC getting to the Champion’s League Final, in a way. For us, it’s the biggest achievement we’ve had. We don’t know if it’s going to be the endpoint or the startpoint, but we’ve just got to embrace it and give it everything we’ve got. We’d never dreamed of being able to come here with this band.

“The politics tie into this place, most of it. Before coming, I would have said that musically we wouldn’t tie into here, but having walked around yesterday, we tie in completely. This place is a madhouse. You turn a corner and there’s a cyberpunk dystopian Bladerunner nightmare, then you turn another and there’s some hippie playing bagpipes in the nude, then there’s people just sitting and watching the sunrise. How beautiful. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The more shows you play, the more you feel a really fixed and celebratory community growing around Benefits. Did you see that coming?

“I spoke to Billy Bragg about this too, but it’s very easy to be a an angry band. It’s very easy to be a shouty band. There are some bands that do it and get away with it, but I don’t think we can. I don’t want us to. I’m not just an angry person. It’s about collective humanity and everyone pulling together and trying to success, collaboratively.

“Yes there’s shouting, there are blastbeats, there’s hardcore, there are moments where we’re trying to make the audience dance a little bit. That’s standard, but there are moments where we are trying to make people feel human and to think about their power, their beauty and their uniqueness. You’re not just a Twitter like or a fucking YouTube view. You are important. You have power. You can fucking do things and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I think the message of this whole festival is similar to that… with a few fucking ‘peace and love’ signs and a fair few spliffs.”

Your set does clash with Royal Blood, however. Maybe you could cover them?

“I feel sorry for those guys. I think he was just having a laugh [at Radio One Big Weekend]. I watched that short clip they made of everything he said and thought, ‘This is taken a bit out of context here’. You can easily manipulate footage to look like things here. If you can manipulate it then you’re going to create some kind of storm.

“I saw [this week’s NME cover stars] Picture Parlour tweeting about questioning where they come from. People are so quick to judge. As a people, we can’t just moan all the time and say, ‘These new young bands aren’t getting representation’ and ‘The Rolling Stones and these old knackers are headlining festivals again’ – it’s shit – but there’s a place for everyone. There’s a place for a Blur comeback, The 1975, all these bands, but you can’t moan about a lack of female representation in music and then fucking tear them down. It’s mental.”

• READ MORE:Meet Benefits: an instant punk battlecry against flag-shaggers (and Chris Martin)

How’s progress going on album Number Two?

“Our drummer Cat [Myers, former Mogwai and current Texas live drummer] is a machine. She joined after the album was finished. We want to get stuff out as soon as possible. The point of the band originally was to react to current urgencies: political, social or whatever. It could be 750 people drowning in the Med or five millionaires drowning in a submarine, that could be child poverty going through the roof in my constituency. We’ve been promoting ‘Nails’, but now we need to knuckle down and get things sorted.

“We’re still writing all the time, but we need to get this done as soon as possible. The point of us was to be urgent and to be quick. That’s why the songs are so fast.”

Has it been difficult to start writing again, given how much of yourself you put into ‘Nails’?

“That album was written over a period of about two years, but this chaos and this turmoil in this world won’t just fucking evaporate, even if Labour takes power or if Putin pulls out of Ukraine. None of the madness will stop. Obviously they would be good things, because it can’t be as bad as it is now, but you can’t stop being angry about this stuff. But what has switched with the new material is to move more into human emotion. Focus in on it. What’s my story? What’s your story? Why do you feel this way? How is it affecting people?”

What do you think it will sound like this time?

“Bringing Cat in has changed things, and all of the band bring in different influences. ‘Nails’ has a thread running through it, but it jumps around. It moves from garage to industrial, to hardcore punk, to techno, to ambient. What direction do we take it now? We have varied tastes. It’s like walking around Glastonbury: you walk through The Glade and it’s all mad techno. Just because you’re wearing a Sam Fender t-shirt doesn’t mean you can’t like all that. I think more people are like that. There would be nothing more boring than our album if it was just to appease one type of person. We’ve had 6 Music Dad fans, Louder Than War readers, I want us to play Download because we have metal fans too.

Benefits play the Left Field at 7.30pm tonight.

Check out all the latest from Glastonbury 2023 on the NME liveblog here, and see more news, reviews, photos, interviews and more here.