DeWolff Talk New Album, Return To The UK And More

Dutch psych-rock renegades DeWolff will return for their first headline UK Tour in March 2024 following their ‘Love, Death & In Between’ album release. We chatted to the band all about their future plans: 

 Who is in DeWolff and what do they play?

Pablo van de Poel: guitars and vocals
Robin Piso: Hammond organ and bass synth
Luka van de Poel: drums and vocals

Your latest album ‘Love, Death & In Between’ is out now on Mascot Records.
How did you want to approach the making of this record?

Our previous album “Wolffpack” was written and recorded during COVID, so unlike
all our previous albums, a lot of songs on this album were recorded in isolation. So
while Luka and I might lay down the guitar and drum tracks together, Robin would
add his parts later and then send it back to us. For us it was a new and kind of
exciting way of working at first (because this way of recording also meant that we
could collaborate with musicians from abroad like Theo Lawrence or Luther
Dickinson), but as we got deeper into quarantine we were just aching to playing
music together again.

So for the next album -Love Death & In Between- we decided we wanted to record
everything live, without any overdubs. That meant bringing in additional musicians
because even if a song needed a tambourine, we wanted to have someone in the
room with us playing the tambourine live. We also wanted to go on an adventure;
the whole COVID period was pretty uneventful and we could all use some
adventure in our lives and so we decided to record this album all analog in the
magnificent Kerwax studio in East Brittany in France. We were there for two weeks
and we had such a blast there. Some songs we recorded with 11 people in the
room, like the 16 minute song Rosita. A friend of ours came along to cook the most
wonderful food, so for two weeks we ate together, drank together and we just had a
great time. We were really doing this for ourselves and we didn’t think what we
were doing would have any commercial value at all but that didn’t bother us. We
were dead wrong because the album went to number 1 in the Netherlands!

Where did you record the album and who produced it?

We recorded it at Kerwax in the small town of Loguivy-Plougras in Brittany, France.
We produced it ourselves but the album was engineered by the owner of the studio
Christophe Chavanon.

Do you have any favoured stage instruments, effects, pedals etc?5 – Where is
your hometown and could you please describe it in five words?

Of course! My favourite instruments that I use live are a Gibson Firebird V that I’ve
had for a long time and that looks like it’s 60 years old because I played the hell out
of it and my 2014 Gibson Les Paul lemonburst, that was given to me by Gibson’s
CEO Cesar Gueikian. I use an Isle of Tone fuzz pedal that I leave on 100% of the
time (a Luxe ’64 and sometimes a Haze ’65) and I use my guitar’s volume to clean
up my sound. I run it through 3 Marshall amplifiers: an 18 watts 1973x, a 50 watt
JTM45 combo and a 50 watt1987x Plexi, all equipped with early 70’s Celestion
Greenback Speakers. Luka uses an early 1950’s Gretsch Round Badge
Broadkaster in sizes 24/13/16/18, a 14×6.5” Ludwig Supraphonic snare from 1964
and Istanbul Agop cymbals. Robin uses a Hammond A100, Leslie 145, Roland
JP-08 bass synthesizer and a Ampeg micro VR bass amp.

Where is your hometown and could you please describe it in five words? 

I (Pablo) live in the tiny
village of Geulle, in the south of the Netherlands. Five words: tiny, near Maastricht,
foresty, hilly. Luka lives in the even tinier town of Viel. In five words: “hills, cows,
rural, quiet, swimming pool”. Robin lives in Deventer: “Cosy, authentic, green,
affordable and a little bit boring (although that’s quite nice sometimes!)”

Do you have any interesting, funny or memorable stories from the album
recording sessions?

Plenty! One of the hardest songs to record was “Gilded (Ruin of Love)”, because it’s
very dynamic and also the vocal harmonies were quite tricky to get right. But after
about 10 takes we had it. We listened back to it and were pretty satisfied and
continued to record another song. When we finished recording that second song,
the engineer Christophe summoned us together and quite gravely said “I have to
tell you something…” We had no idea what he was gonna say but the news
seemed quite bad… He then shamefully told us that he had accidentally recorded
the last song over the final take of Gilded! So it was gone! We had to do it all over
again! That is something that can happen when you record to tape; you could
potentially accidentally erase something and there’s no Command Z button on a
tape recorder: when a recording is gone, it’s gone forever!

Another memory that I will never forget is the recording of Rosita, our 16 minute
epic. Normally when you record a song, you spend about 5 minutes in a deeply
focused state and then when it’s done you return to the “normal” world to listen
back, evaluate, joke around, etc. But during the recording of Rosita we were all in
that deeply focused state -11 people in 1 room- for about 16 exhilarating minutes! It
genuinely felt like we were getting high on music. Towards the end of the song
people started crying, it was such a deeply moving experience. We really felt like
we had captured some kind of magic and when we listened back to it I cried too: it
was one of the most profoundly beautiful musical experiences of my life.

 Do you have any plans for live shows in Europe/UK to support the release in
2024?

Definitely! We’re currently in the middle of a Dutch club tour: about 20 shows and
they’re all sold out. So that’s about 14.000 people that we’re reaching in this tiny
country alone! Then in March we’ll be coming to the UK to finally do our first
headlining club tour, which we’re really looking forward to.

How do you look after your voices?

We don’t. In the first 8 or 9 years of DeWolff I spent so much time worrying about
my voice: not talking all day, drinking tea, not too much partying… It didn’t work
really, because in the end sometimes my voice would be good and sometimes it
would still be bad. All the worrying made me miserable and then I had a total mind
blowing experience where I thought we had played the last show of the tour and we
partied so hard that night. Next morning it turned out it wasn’t the last show of the
tour, we had another show to do! I had the worst hangover and I couldn’t really
worry about the upcoming show because I just knew it was going to be terrible. But
we got on stage and it was the best show of the tour! I decided there and then not
to worry about my voice anymore and it worked: I almost never have voice
problems anymore. The mind is a very powerful thing indeed. Also, sleeping helps.
If I ever still have voice problems it’s mostly because I didn’t get enough sleep.
Switching to in ear monitoring also helped: I don’t have to scream all the time
anymore just to hear myself.

On the 1st June 2023, you produced the world’s fastest Studio-to-store record.
How did that idea/opportunity arise and what are your memories of that day?

We have a very good relationship with the people from Record Industry, Europe’s
largest vinyl pressing plant in Haarlem (the Netherlands) and they were planning a
vinyl festival. They wanted to do something together with us to promote the festival
so they asked us if we had any cool ideas that we could collaborate on. Robin then
came up with the idea of breaking Jack White’s world record for the World’s Fastest
Vinyl.

It was the ultimate opportunity because we could use all the facilities of
Europe’s largest pressing plant! So we planned this whole thing but really we didn’t
expect it to get this much attention! The song we recorded was the aforementioned
Rosita, but now in a 20 minute version. It was such a thrilling experience and one
really funny thing that happened was that the vinyl cutting technicians needed some
time to switch over the vinyl from side A to side B. So in the middle of the song
Rosita is a part that we repeated endlessly while the technicians flipped over the
record. They gave us -still playing- the thumbs up when they were ready and only
then did we proceed with the rest of the song. When the song was finished the
lacquer that had just been cut went downstairs to the actual pressing plant and
there it was pressed, the artwork was printed and folded and then we hopped on a
bunch of bicycles to deliver the first 100 records to a nearby record store and when
we made the first sale 3 hours had passed since we commenced recording. So we
broke Jack White’s world record by something like 57 minutes, but with a 20 minute
song! He even reacted to our Instagram post, which was kinda cool.

 One of the tracks on the album is ‘Night Train’. What was the story/inspiration?

The inspiration for the song came from a Sister Rosetta Tharpe version of a gospel
song called This Train. It talks of a metaphorical train that goes to heaven. But on
that train there’s no room for “sinners, gamblers” and all kinds of people that are
wrongdoers in the eyes of God. But we wanted to write about a place -the DeWolff
show- where everyone is welcome and where we can all put aside our differences
and experience the magic of live music together. That’s where the inspiration from
the lyrics came from. The inspiration for the riff came from a guitar demonstration
that I did for Gibson: they asked me to play something for a demo video and I just
improvised something and what came out was the riff for Night Train. I think that
demo video is still online somewhere.

What makes DeWolff happy and what makes you unhappy?

Playing live makes us happy, but also being in a studio and creating new stuff
makes us really happy. What doesn’t make us happy is music that’s not played by
human beings. Humans being able to express themselves through their instruments
is such a beautiful thing, it’s one of the things that defines us. But if it’s not made by
humans (or another life form 😉 it has no value at all to us and the fact that the
mainstream public doesn’t really seem to care about this makes us sad. 

Photo Credit: Satellite June

DeWolff’s latest album ‘Love, Death & In Between’ is out now on Mascot Records/Mascot Label Group.

In addition, DeWolff will embark on their first headline UK Tour in March 2024 at the following venues: 

13 March – Newcastle, The Cluny 
14 March – Edinburgh. The Voodoo Rooms
15 March – Aberdeen, The Tunnels
16 March – Glasgow, Hug & Pint
17 March – Manchester, Night & Day
19 March – Bristol, The Louisiana
20 March – Oxford, The Bullingdon
21 March – Nottingham, Bodega
22 March – Hastings, Black Box
23 March – London, Omeara

For tickets and more information visit their official website here: https://www.dewolff.nu/#/home