Florence Shaw (Dry Cleaning) with Sue Tompkins

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast, we’ve got two women whose singing styles are similar in that they’re both absolutely singular, unmistakable, and wonderfully out of step—just don’t call it spoken-word. It’s Florence Shaw of Dry Cleaning and Sue Tompkins of Life Without Buildings.

As you’ll hear in this chat, Dry Cleaning sort of fell together in London around 2017, when the three instrumentalists approached their friend Florence Shaw to add some vocals to the music they had been writing. It turned out that Shaw’s approach—speaking dense, clearly crafted but never obvious words—slotted in perfectly with the sort of nervous-yet-precise songs they had been working on. By 2020, Dry Cleaning had signed with the venerated 4AD label and the next year released a debut album, New Long Leg, that earned comparisons to post-punk greats like Siouxsie and Sonic Youth. For their third studio album, Secret Love, Dry Cleaning worked with producer-slash-musician Cate Le Bon, and they stretched out a bit, mellowing the sharp corners a bit while Shaw experiments more with vocal melody than before. Check out “Cruise Ship Designer” from Secret Love right here.

Another person that eagle-eared listeners have compared Florence Shaw to is Sue Tompkins of the legendary, kinda-lost Scottish band Life Without Buildings. Life Without Buildings only released one album, Any Other City, in their brief three-year run, but it had a focused impact. Shaw remembers hearing the record as a teen. “It blew my mind that you could free yourself from the pressure of making traditional sense in lyrics,” she told the website Hearing Things, before mentioning that she’d love to meet Tompkins one day and thank her. Well, with some recent activity on the Life Without Buildings front—Tompkins contributed vocals to a new Sleaford Mods song, and the band just announced a couple of reunion shows—it seemed like the perfect time to get them together.

In this delightful chat, Tompkins and Shaw talk about the similar origins of their respective bands, how genuinely kind the dudes of Sleaford Mods are, and their understandable reticence about the term “spoken word.” They also chatted a bunch about the TV shows Dragons’ Den and Eastenders, but we had to trim that in the interest of time. Trust me, it was great. Enjoy. 

Thanks for listening to the Talkhouse Podcast, and thanks to Sue Tompkins and Florence Shaw for chatting. If you liked what you heard, please follow Talkhouse on your favorite podcasting platform and check out all the great stuff at Talkhouse.com. This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan, and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by the Range. See you next time!

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