Meet PARADE, the London octet prioritising true collaboration

The line-up for the London eight-piece band PARADE includes members with roles from ‘painter’ and ‘animator’ to ‘improviser’, ‘fashion designer’ and ‘sound artist’. When Rolling Stone UK meet six of the eight at the south London art studio of member Toby (aka the painter CATO), he says: “I fill in the gaps a bit.” Multi-instrumentalist Jago, meanwhile, “offers moral support and sometimes plays the synth”.

As is probably obvious already, the make-up and artistry of the collective/group/band (they don’t mind which you call them) is brilliantly fluid and untraditional, and is shown on upcoming debut mixtape Lightning Hit the Trees.

Its first two songs, ‘Picking Flowers’ and ‘Que?’, begin to show the breadth of their sound. The former track is a jazz song filtered through a somewhat nightmarish lens of sound design, cut through with bewitching Spanish guitar. ‘Que?’ meanwhile, is a complex and frenzied noise rock song coming apart at the seams.

The band – Toby and Jago alongside Louie, Fiorella, Yottie, Isaac, Owen and Callum – are a true democracy when other bands simply wear the idea as an aesthetic. Songs are built from the ground up in improvised jams, or created in smaller splinter groups before being brought to all eight. The creation is as freeform, surprising and constantly changing as the music produced at the end.

Ahead of the release of the mixtape and with new song ‘Reach’ out now, the members tell us how they came to find a home in PARADE, explain its infinite amount of offshoot projects, and why starting a band of this size and scale in the current musical and financial climate is a statement in itself.

Read our Play Next interview with PARADE, and listen to ‘Picking Flowers’ and ‘Que?’ on our Play Next playlist on Spotify, below.

They will play a special mixtape release show on July 10 at Portico Gallery in south London, the day before the mixtape is released.

There’s such a fluidity to all your roles in the band – is that something that excited you when forming PARADE?

Toby: I was quite in and out of this project. It’s the first time I’ve been involved in a project where the pressure wasn’t on me to come up with something every time. I could come in and everyone’s already making something, which is so refreshing.

Jago: It’s changed and grown with different people involved at different stages. We’d like that to continue. It’s not limited to the people that are here now. It should evolve and change.

Fiorella: It’s really intuitive and natural and undiscussed. It gives people the freedom to come in and be creative, or be there and not [be creative], or not be there at all.

With such a disparate cast and set of musical backgrounds, what ties it all together to make a PARADE song?

Owen: We had a lot of songs before that different pockets of the group had made. When it came down to thinking about this project, all we had in mind was to try and make something that was still an expression of every different member of the group, but had some sense of continuation from track to track.

Toby: It’s all new, isn’t it? That’s what it has in common.

Owen: The nature of all being in a room together for the first time, working towards something rather than just collecting different periods of time, was important. We were thinking of doing a compilation of all our songs from other projects, but decided to start something new instead.

With no boundaries to the music, do you feel like you ended up writing music differently to before?

Fiorella: For me, personally, it’s a story. I love storytelling, and everything for me when I write has to be very real. It’s a really beautiful experience to sit with everyone and discuss the words so they can be relatable to others, as well as being received authentically. It has to be transparent so everyone feels part of it and understands it.

Owen: It’s not just the lyrics either, it’s any aspect of the track. Even a four bar guitar riff, that gets discussed in a constant back-and-forth.

Isaac: Everyone has an opinion, which is a good thing. It could be tricky, but it’s not.

Fiorella: It stimulates your creativity, and makes you look outside what you’ve already done.

Can you tell me about your different musical backgrounds, and how they interact within PARADE?

Owen: Fio’s coming from a jazz singing background, and Yottie’s from abstract, leftfield, glitchy production. Yottie, Toby and Jago have never had any musical education, so they’ve learned instruments in the way that suited them. Isaac has been playing the saxophone for many years, and the bleed in between those two sides of musicality is what has defined the sound.

Toby: Owen has been learning how to compose for an orchestra. Isaac knows the mode and the key, but sees things in abstract ways. But then I started making music because of Jago’s production, and we turned it into this new type of hip-hop. I was competing to write bars with Yottie and other people.

Jago: [Toby and I] made an EP with Owen and Yottie on it that was released on Rhythm Section.

Owen: That project put us in touch with our manager, and then also Isaac. We’ve now created a band reimagining that sample sound into a live setting, which has now turned into atonal punk music. We haven’t released it yet but it’s coming.

Is it satisfying and stimulating to work within a group that has vastly different levels and types of musical education?

Isaac: It can be quite constricted working with people who have all of these rules.

Toby: When we started playing with Isaac, I was just learning the bass, and I was very nervous because I couldn’t – and sort of still can’t – play all the notes. But there’s people like Bernie Worrell, who Jago probably sampled back in the day. He joined Talking Heads as their bass synth player. He could play Mozart and shit, and they can play a G. That collaboration is beautiful, having naivety and sophisticated ideas in one makes something more alive.

The climate for new bands, especially in London, is well documented right now – does starting an eight-piece band at this time feel particularly defiant?

Fiorella: Authenticity is super important, and we all feel that together. In life, you have to continue with that and keep those people around, because the world’s a weird place.

Yottie: Carving out time for doing this in a place like London is really deliberate.

Toby: It’s something that we want for our lives, as opposed to a marketing goal or whatever. It’s how we want to live, and this is a way to try and sustain that.