The Chapman Family are the goth kids in the corner of the party

It seems almost backwards then, as singer Kingsley hands me a beer hospitably, that The Chapman Family should be playing here. It was, he says, on the 2009 NME Radar Tour that he picked up this makeshift bottle-opening trick. The peak point of the Chapman Family’s mini-mountain of hype, which saw them billed with La Roux on the new talent showcase and made magazine cover stars after just two singles.

They were, along with White Lies, black-wearing luvvies of the new “dark music” which, if you believe the magazine whose cover they adorned, mixed elements 80s post-punk with 90s angst. Killing Joke meets Nine Inch Nails, fused with the throwback dark synths made radio-friendly again by the Editors.

But the hype ripple dissipated and the Chapman Family seemingly dissolved back into life in their native Redcar. That was until this month, when they re-emerged to release their debut album into a commercial indie-pop scene which has all but forgotten the black shirt brigade, embracing instead the hay-baling folk balladry of what the Chapman Family like to call the “Mumford wagon”.

Kingsley Chapman

“Our little cool bus trundled past quite quickly,” says singer Kingsley, lighting the first of a steady stream of cigarettes. “We never have been fashionable. So it’s not necessarily been the case that we’ve been able to fall of a bandwagon because we weren’t really on it.”

“Last year was the breath in. We got the hype then we realised that because of it we were going to have to really step up. We couldn’t release an album that was half arsed in any way or we couldn’t rush out an album with songs that maybe weren’t the best representation of who we are,” says bassist Pop Chapman.

It’s a who that’s very much tied up with a where. Burn This Town is the aptly titled album for a band whose home town was hit so hard by the recession and closure of the local steelworks, that the council made fake fronts to hide the boarded-up shops. Kingsley flicks through images on his camera phone – a fake bookshop and electrical store on the fit anonymously on the high street beside Poundland and Greggs. “The point was to make it not so depressing. But it’s just hiding from the public the reality. And I think that’s quite frightening,” he says.

Pop Chapman

Looking the gleaning panels, with their computer generated handbags and imaginary shoppers, you can almost feel the sense of hopelessness at the root of so much of the Chapman Family’s grim lyrical realism. Tracks like ‘Anxiety’ – “they say your best isn’t good enough,” or ‘Kids’ – a thrashing pseudo-metal call to arms for disaffected youth, set off by Kingsley’s cries of “the kids are not alright!”

“It’s a shit hole,” he says of Redcar. “But we couldn’t have written the album we’ve written in London… I think you can only write about what you see. I don’t go to indie clubs and try to chat up girls. I can’t write about that. It’s just got to be where you’re from and the times you’re in.”

“There’s this overriding feeling of apathy that’s gone across the nation. You watch the news and you see people from Egypt and Libya rising up and actually caring about what’s going on around them and you look around here and people just want to get fucking pissed.”

In spite of this, Pop insists loquaciously that there’s a sense of euphoria in their music alongside the angst and the anger. “We don’t want to depress people, we’re trying to empower them,” he chirps. “Some young people identify with the darkness. As a teenager you’re very isolated if you’re different.”

Pop would know. He got shot at with an air rifle aged 15 for dressing like a goth. Although he laughs about it now (“It felt like being punched really hard and being stung by a bee at the same time!”) it adds a dimension of justifiability to his angst. An open admission that some things do happen as teenagers that shape us for good.

Which is why the Chapman Family’s social commentary should not be misconstrued as protest. As Kingsley says, he “hates preachy musicians”. It is instead, quite simply, an honest human affinity with other isolated souls – from the minimum wagers in provincial northern towns, to bedroom-bound teenager that nobody understands.

“We’re not the cool kids,” says Pop, “We’re not cool looking guys from London. We don’t have a fashionable element to our music. No matter what we do we’re always slightly outside. We’re always going to be the goth kids at the corner of the party”.