Clutching a comforting cup of tea, Anthony Ellis is recalling the first time he met Agyness Deyn. It was, he says enthusiastically, “four or five years ago” in a kitchen in the North of England where he was touring with his band the Five O’Clock Heroes. “She had longer hair,” he remembers, leaning over to signal just how long with his hand, “and she was very sweet even then.” As he continues to describe the encounter, which came some time before Deyn was proclaimed by fashion critics as the next Kate Moss, Deyn chats away obliviously to the man beside her. That man is Sam Embery, the band’s drummer - someone with whom she shares a sibling like bond. As they giggle at a private joke, Ellis glances at them like a proud father. “You crazy kids,” he says, as if right on cue, before returning to his story. “I remember it very well and then when she came to New York, Sam was actually there at the time and those two would hang around a lot.” Seemingly, invigorated at the mention of her comrade, Deyn switches conversations. “We used to run around New York together,” she enthuses, in her sweet Mancunian accent, “we’d be like the kids and he’d be like go play, go play.”
All three are gathered together on an uncomfortable sofa in East London to talk about Deyn’s collaboration on Five O’Clock Heroes new single ‘Who’, a task that is made harder by the fact that all are nursing hangovers of differing intensities. It has, after all, been a heady few days. “It’s been so much fun though,” says Deyn, who has taken a break from her modelling career to help the band promote the single. “It’s felt like a month, this week, because we’ve been so busy.”
‘Who’ is the first song to be taken from the bands new album ‘Speak Your Language’, which, by Ellis’s own admission, is a far fuller record than their debut ‘Bend To The Breaks’, which was released in 2006. The guitars rhythms are more complex, the drum patterns steely and infectious, and the experimentation with brass has given Five O’Clock Heroes a far greater depth. Of course, it’s Deyn’s collaboration that for the moment has garnered all the attention, however. Which is something that, until this week, hadn’t even crossed Deyn’s mind.
“No because we were always like…I’ve been learning guitar for like a few years already and Anthony’s always been helping me with my music anyway, you know, so that was never really an issue,” she says. “But, I think, in the last week it’s been like shit - this is a bit crazy. Especially how fast it’s happened - from us messing around in the studio, having a laugh doing it and then how fast it’s gone from then to now, and now we’re here playing gigs and it’s kind of like a bit unbelievable, it’s really crazy.”
‘Who’ was never consciously written with Deyn in mind. It was originally the produce of a writing session that Ellis had with a French friend and it was only after Deyn heard the original version at his apartment in New York that Ellis decided to translate it. Already it’s proved to be a wise move. On the night before we meet, the band, and Deyn, pre-recorded a performance on Channel 4’s Sunday Night Project. A slot they could have only dreamed of in the past.
“We, the band, we’ve never had anything like that and that’s amazing,” admits Ellis, sincerely. “It was really special, I thought it was a really special moment actually.” Deyn and Embery start chuckling at Ellis’s sensitivity, in the way that children find it hard to grasp that parents can be sentimental. “It was emotional for my manager, she’s been with us for a long time,” he adds. “The thing is, because we’ve come from such an organic sort of start, it makes it so much more…” Ellis is clearly struggling for words now. “Everybody was there backstage, it was really nice. It was a really fun night actually.”
Anthony Ellis was born in England but moved to New York when he was nineteen. His arrival in 2000 came on the eve of the city’s most recent musical renaissance, which saw the emergence of bands like The Strokes, The White Stripes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Having moved to the city with the intention of developing a music career, Ellis suddenly found himself right in the middle of it. He was there, for example, when The Strokes played their infamous residency at the Mercury Lounge, and like everyone else present, he knew we was witnessing a significant cultural and musical moment. “They were all good looking,” he recalls, to Deyn’s obvious approval. “And they were setting up their own equipment and I was like, all I saw was their drums and I thought, ‘that’s a cool logo’, you know, and then they started. They had some serious energy in those days, they had energy, real energy, and were hugely influential on every New York band – it goes without saying.”
Inspired by what as happening around him, Ellis established Five O’Clock Heroes with similarly like-minded and enlightened people who also found themselves in New York at the right time. Although they eventually recorded a debut album, albeit with no money and therefore no studio time, the band have as yet failed to capture the same success as the bands that were so influential in their formation. Spend time with Ellis, who has a hint of the Julian Casablancas about him in the flesh, however, and it’s clear he has no intention on giving up.
Deyn shares his belief as well, that’s why the model isn’t concerned by claims that the band are using her profile to further their own career. “It brings a different dynamic to it as well, do you know what I mean?” she says, rhetorically. “And it is what it is, people can say stuff, whatever, but if you listened to all that stuff then you’d never do anything in life. You shouldn’t think maybe I shouldn’t do that because you know somebody is gonna be like, ‘that’s no good’.”
Having appeared on the cover of both the British and American editions of Vogue and been heralded as the face of her generation all before her twenty-sixth birthday, Deyn knows this better than most. She is very clever, for example, on the occasions that I enquire about her modelling career. With an innocent flicker of her eyelids and ruffle of her peroxide hair, she’ll answer the question for as long as she needs to, which is usually a sentence on fashion followed by three about music. But then Deyn loves music. Having been groomed by her brother in the history of Manchester bands – The Stones Roses, Oasis, Happy Mondays - she’s already got her own band in the pipeline and is often at Ellis’s apartment playing him her new material. “In a strange way she’s going through a phase of writing, like I was a long time ago and she’s always really excited to hear it back, to play it to people,” Ellis says, sounding slightly parental again. “Some of it’s weird and some of its great. No matter what it is it’s interesting because she is just a generally creative person.”
As talk turns to the rest of the year and the series of shows that Deyn will play with the band over the summer, I ask her how her initiation week in the world of music has compared to her modelling career. “Yeah, I kind of like it better,” she replies, sounding a little shy about her admission. Why? “I suppose it’s more manly,” she says, laughing loudly. It’s clear that, despite claiming to be "no Whitney Houston”, Deyn doesn’t want this to end when she boards the plane back to New York. “She definitely wants to go on the road,” Ellis says. “She can handle it, she’s proper hardcore. It’s just a question of time because she’s really, really busy.” Deyn nervously pulls at her dress. “But I’m prepared to be unbusy.”
The original article, published on Monday 16th June 2008, can be found here.
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