CAROLINE

From the noisy streets, community cafés and surprisingly verdant cemeteries of Southeast London have risenCAROLINE: a confoundingly brilliant eight-piece band with no obvious frontperson, fusing choral folk with fractured post-rock and experimental pop. As Sam Richards discovers, they haven’t made life easy for themselves. “But there has to be a vulnerability of some sort. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

Photo by EL HARDWICK

Caroline: settling in for another lengthy negotiation

“Like a bad dream…”: onstage at End Of The Road festival, September 2, 2023

END Of The Road festival, 2023. Caroline have been awarded a plum teatime slot on the Garden Stage, and the arena duly begins filling up with punters intrigued by the buzz surrounding their bewitching self-titled debut on Rough Trade and the personal endorsement of the label’s influential founder, Geoff Travis, who calls them “one of the great, innovative bands of their generation”.

But within the camp, all is not well. The father of wind player Alex McKenzie is dying of a terminal illness; a close friend of the band will also die during the festival itself. Violinist Oliver Hamilton has a broken arm and is attempting to play with his one good hand. And just as Caroline are due onstage, the power goes down, meaning that their soundcheck – a protracted affair at the best of times, due to their unorthodox mix of instruments – starts eating into their runtime. The crowd become audibly restless. And when Caroline do eventually start playing, it’s clear the sound hasn’t been fully righted; it’s hard to tell where the soundcheck ends and the real set begins. People begin drifting away, bemused.

“The reason why I started a band is because I wanted to play on that stage,” recalls multi-instrumentalist Mike O’Malley, with a pained expression. “So I’m finally doing it, but it’s all going wrong. It’s like a bad dream – as in, that’s specifically the kind of thing I have nightmares about. It was quite an emotionally fraught show.”

“It was a terrible setlist,” concedes fellow co-founder Jasper Llewellyn. “After starting 20 minutes late, we should have just played [2022 single] “Good Morning”. Instead, we played the most longform, improvisational, challenging song we had. So, yeah, it was all a bit difficult.”

On the other hand, everyone who stayed was treated to an emotionally pole-axing cover of Low’s “Nothing But Heart” that could only have been convincingly pulled off by a band going through the mill themselves. Caroline may have lost the casuals, but they instantly turned the other half of the crowd into devotees.

“I’m really excited to get playing again,” says Llewellyn, “because now I feel much more ANDY FORD confident to bring in the emotions that I’m actually feeling. Normally our performance style is quite muted, but at Rewire last month we were so nervous and excited to play our new material for the first time that I let myself express it.”