Sibling Rivals

FOR a new band, Brother have wasted no time in winning friends…and making enemies.

But just as you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs…you can’t launch a full frontal assault on the rock scene without upsetting a few precious artistes. People like Liam Gallagher.

The Beady Eye star described them as “Little posh lads with tattoos”. Well… more or less. He actually threw in a juicy expletive, just for good measure.

Brother frontman Lee Newell laughs off the insult. In fact, he takes pride in it. It is, as he says, not every new band that gets a broadside from an ex-member of Oasis.

“Ah Liam!” he laughs. “You mean that bloke who started a new band with a really good name?

“He sang on some of the best pop songs of the past couple of decades, and now he’s fighting for the same magazine space as we are. He now has as high a profile as me…and a little fight comes along and he can’t deal with it.

“But I’m glad he spoke up. And, anyway, his brother Noel said he’s a big fan – and he’s the man!”

So what do they make of the ‘posh’ slur? “We’re not posh!” he snorts. “We’re just regular. I always think we are normal. We are just human beings living within four walls, surrounded by things.

“Anyway, we’re from Slough – a town which is most famous for starring on Road Wars – in every episode.”

Indeed, Brother could well be the Berkshire town’s best claim to fame since The Office. And, observers could be forgiven for spotting something of “chilled out entertainer” David Brent in Lee.

One word which has stuck to the cocksure rockers is ‘arrogant’. But then, isn’t that what we want from a guitar band? Feisty, bristling, posturing attitude? Of course it is.

And many others think so too. Rarely has a band as fresh as Brother achieved so much attention, so early.

Their first show saw them sharing a stage with Paul McCartney’s son James. And within two months of that, they were signed by Geffen.

They went on to tour with The Streets, and had their single, Darling Buds Of May engineered by respected producer Stephen Street (Blur, The Smiths and Kaiser Chiefs). The album is on the way.

“Things are going really well,” says Lee, who played his first gig in a Slough Indian restaurant, being paid in curry.

He is speaking from his tour bus, somewhere in Wiltshire, en route to a gig in Yeovil (“We’ve just gone past Stonehenge!” he says, like an excited tourist).

“On this tour we can see a noticeable difference in how we are playing and in the reaction we are getting,” he says.

They describe their sound as ‘gritpop’ – which translates as swaggering 90s-style indie-rock with punchy Mod drive and crushing slabs of guitar.

But how have they done it so quickly? Well, if the truth be told, they haven’t. They actually locked themselves away for 18 months, improving their game before letting themselves loose on us.

“Constantly touring on the circuit is a waste of time,” says Lee. “We’ve done that in other bands, but there’s no point. You’ve got to hone your sound, make sure you are really good, play a few select shows and make sure the right people come.”

He goes on: “We are just a bunch of guys having a laugh. It’s hard work – but I’m not complaining.”

And there has been a lot of fun. Take their recent trip to New York… where they found themselves being entertained by a ‘ladyboy’ who had, comically, concealed a bottle of wine in an intimate area of his/her person.

“Our stories usually sound more debauched than they were,” he laughs, “But that was debauched!”

So what next for Brother? Well, other than offering to headline Glastonbury, they are heading back to America to appear on The Late Show with David Letterman – something many bands can only dream of.

“It’s a huge deal and we are there!” he says, shining with pride. “There is a lot of love for us, but we also get a lot of hate. We’ve come so far in a short space of time and there are some disgruntled people. But then we are extreme in every single way.”

* Brother play the Oxford O2 Academy on May 7. Tickets cost £9 from ticketweb.co.uk