Bella Platt
Full time student and live music enthusiast, actively involved in Manchester and Newcastle’s music scene, interviewing and reviewing grassroots bands and larger indie acts.
With their debut album ‘Cannonball’ out on 7th August, we chat with Billy Ward and Lola Cherry of London’s Man/Woman/Chainsaw
Man/Woman/Chainsaw wrote their debut album in two places that couldn’t be less alike: a half-abandoned North London vicarage with a homemade hessian monster lurking in the attic, and a distinctly unglamorous writing retreat in Kent. Somewhere between the two gloomy settings, their debut album ‘Cannonball’ took shape.
Mid-way through a hectic summer of touring, we caught up with Lola Cherry (Drums) and Billy Ward (Vocals) to talk about how a band living for live sets ended up becoming, in their words, “studio creatures,” and what it took to drag those new tracks back onto a stage.
Your debut album ‘Cannonball’ is out 7th August. At what point did you realise that was on the cards?
Lola: Coming from the EP and a few singles we had some songs we wanted in our first album, ones we’d been playing for a while. The label backing really helped make the process quicker. It was then time to go away and write more.
Billy: We had half the songs done by early summer, then there was a process of looking at what was missing. It was a quick flurry of songs written then.
Do you think the difference between old and new can be heard in the album?
Lola: The older ones took a lot of playing and road testing to tweak. The newer ones feel fresh, we got into a rhythm writing them which was a change.
Billy: We are studio creatures for those newer songs. So, we were trying to figure out how to play it live. ‘Nosedive’ is a great example of that difficulty.
Lola: Originally, it was a 7/8-minute track of us just playing, chopping and putting stuff together. We didn’t know how it was going to end, so we played it for ages when we tracked it. That’s when sitting with our producers really helped.
Billy: Then tracks like ‘Goddamn, Lizard Man!’ are much older – we wrote it in 2024. We want the listener to discern what its about, but its tone is spiteful and angry.
Lola: Within in the band we help each other discern what we’ve written about. Vera writes about things happening in her life, whereas Billy responds to media. Lyrically it’s different from songwriter to songwriter.
Billy: Lyrics that are written often get reinterpreted. Like in ‘Something Else to Give’ the lyric at the end was ‘I want what you’re offering’, but I thought Vera was singing ‘You don’t want what you’re offering’. We preferred that.
Lola: It can change the full meaning of the song.
What about ‘Only Girl,’ one of the most recent releases from the upcoming album?
Lola: That was one of the songs we wrote when we went on a retreat. It wasn’t anywhere fancy – we went to Kent. We were kind of parodying this super shoegaze band.
Billy: We got up in the morning, picked up our instruments and got gloomy. Then it really slowly warped, modulated into more intricate melodies. That’s when we realised ‘Only Girl’ was actually going to be a song.
Lola: We wrote it super quickly and wrote the chorus all together. We loved playing it, over and over, almost obsessively.
Billy: We had to cut out like three choruses; we liked it so much we’d put loads of them in.
Margo Broom and Seth Evans (Geordie Greep, black midi) co-produced. What were they like in the studio?
Lola: They were yin and yang. They worked insanely well together.
Billy: Good cop, bad cop. We’ll never tell who is who.
How do you think the album will translate when you play it live over summer?
Lola: We’ve started testing some of the songs out, it’s been fun. We love playing live the most, so its nice playing fresh tunes. Being nervous or not getting the reaction we wanted. There’s an adrenaline and awkwardness.
Billy: We all deal with that stress differently. Like we’ll be in rehearsal and it’ll sound great, the song will be ready, and you’re (Lola) always last to go.
Lola: We all come off the stage with different opinions. When it’s a good show that’s the best. But most of the time we’re very self-critical. The best gig for one person will be the worst for another. Then your mate will come over and say you sounded amazing- like really? That one?
Before your exotic retreat to Kent, you used to rehearse in an old vicarage in London?
Billy: It was my connect. A big old house in North London that we worked in, it was going unused and it had loads of creative spaces. Tom Hodges-Gilbert who made the artwork for our first EP, he was working downstairs while we were writing. He created a crazy hessian sack monster in the attic; it was really creepy. It was horrible – sheets of paper taped up in the rafters. Disturbing.
Lola: He had this incredible creativity; it echoed through the house. There was a pottery studio as well. We did our press shots there, album cover shots, and argued with the angry neighbour.
‘Cannonball,’ the debut album from Man/Woman/Chainsaw is out on 7th August via Fiction Records.
Listen to the singles here: