The Year: 2001The Album: Life Without Buildings, Any Other City
Who it Influenced: Thomas Tantrum, Maximo Park, Love Is All, Evans the Death, Los Campesinos!, Sleeping States
Life Without Buildings were a band from Glasgow, Scotland, who lasted all of three years. They released one LP, 2001's Any Other City, three B-sides, and, in 2007, a long-posthumous live album, Live at the Annandale Hotel, recorded in Sydney on an Australian tour in 2001.
That scarcity also extends to things beyond the music: the band were barely photographed, didn't give too many interviews, and only played a certain number of shows. Since they broke up, there's been no inklings of a reformation; no ATP to, as yet, lure them back.
Yet, back in 2001, I interviewed their unique, maddening, magical, manic vocalist Sue Tompkins', whose erratic, tourettic, sputtered and stuttered delivery was and is and always will be Life Without Buildings' defining instrument. Reading it over a decade on, it provides plentiful insight into the working ways behind such a unique artist; someone who, though quietly influential, could never be replicated.
"It begins totally from written stuff; I write constantly, with and without the band," Tompkins said. "When we have rehearsal, I'll take, maybe, 10 sheets of paper, with typewritten stuff on it. It might be just one word on one piece of paper, or the paper might be just full of writing. And, then, they play, and I listen to it, and I just take from what I've written, and try and fit it into what I've done. So, it becomes more freeform --if that's the word for it-- further into rehearsals; and, sometimes, further into gigs. But, then, a lot of the time, what I do might sound really freeform, but it's just the way the words are, and everything's actually really precise."
- Full review: Life Without Buildings, Any Other City
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