One lives in a creepy punk rock room splattered with red, black and white paint. Another lives in a cabin-style room with a cow’s skull. A third claims that the theme for his room is “smooth jazz - its minty green”. If David Lynch had directed ‘Help!’ he might have envisioned The Beatles living together in something like the Brooklyn home of The Films.
   “It’s like a warehouse block,” explains singer Michael …, “three of us live there and Adam lives in the same neighbourhood. It’s a huge place, there’s tons of people in and out, bands stay, bands go, and it’s a flop-house.”
   “In the South when we didn’t have any money we’d crash with people or different bands we’d play with,” adds guitarist and keyboard player Kenneth …, “so in New York we set up this sort of hostel. I guarantee we’ll come back from this tour and someone will be there. Last time it was this really old guy with his shirt off smoking a cigarette in the dark.”

   All part of the spirit of community that drew the various members of The Films from their hometown of Denver to Charleston, South Carolina in 2003, keen to swap their “shitty” Denver bands for a more vibrant small-town rock scene. Charleston is a cobble stoned living museum of archaic 20’s Americana, but here Kenneth, Michael and drummer Adam … (who’d made the leap from Denver together) discovered a wriggling rock python of a scene prowling its gutters. A rag-bag of seven or eight bands – Southern fried rock outfits, honky-tonkers and new wave punk combos - were playing, promoting and partying together and the trio found “a cool vibe for us and our friends to run around to the bars and play all night, every night.”

   So, within a year of moving, they called up their Denver bassist mate Jake …, then living in LA, and talked him into moving down to Charleston, forming The Films with them to play “dirty Kinks” and setting out on a tour across the US South. In four days’ time.
   “There was already a tour booked,” says Adam. “We all learnt a bunch of songs in four days and went on tour.”
   “It was easy,” says Kenneth, “that was part of the reason we knew it was going to stick right off the bat.”

   Throughout 2004, between gigging everywhere from Atlanta to Nashville to Birmingham and back, The Films holed up in Charleston hosting scene parties where Libertines records would always end up on the stereo, playing three hour sets of Beatles, Kinks and Zombies covers in downtown wine bars to pay the rent (Michael: “Load out was the worst - there was usually a wrestling match between Jake and Adam on the street.” Jake: “I once chased him down the street with a refrigerator”) and penning Britpop-tinged punk songs (they were childhood Blur and Oasis fans) at a furious rate. “If we never wrote any more songs,” Adam claims, “we’d still have an excellent second record.”

   Indeed, The Films had enough top tunes for a debut album within months of forming, but decided to hold off recording it until they’d moved to New York to become “a faster-living band”, instead knocking together around fifty songs in Charleston and firing out demos to labels. The crowds across the South grew bigger, the A&R men started regularly filling Charleston hotels, the flights to LA to perform showcases came thick and fast; in the end, The Films were signed to Warner Brothers a mere four days before they moved out to their Brooklyn rock warehouse in 2005. At which point they scrapped all their previous songs and wrote an entire new album in the time it takes most bands to skin up properly.

   Perhaps it was the scuzzy thrust of the city or perhaps it was their freaksome new housing arrangements, but the songs they were writing – fuzzed-up Southern fried punk pop with Bowie and T Rex glam influences and sparky Britpop melodies that have become their brilliant first album ‘ALBUM TITLE HERE’ - now had a sinister, David Lynchian nightmare quality to their lyrics. There’s ‘Black Shoes’, about a “shit” of an ex-manager:
   Adam: “The kind of guy you’d want to go up to his house and throw a brick through his window. It’s kind of a triumph for us, that being the first single.”
   Kenneth: “It’s like that guy with the Black Crowes who drew a contract on a napkin in a bar and drew a pie chart going ‘I get this much, you get this much’. Then they ditched him because he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing and he resurfaces when they’re famous going ‘I got this napkin!’”
   There’s ‘Belt Loops’, “a paranoid jealousy kind of song”, and then there’s the downbeat country closer ‘Bodybag’, about a tragic lovers’ death pact.
   “It’s kind of hopeless,” lyricist Michael explains, “two people can’t be together or whatever and they end up dead at the end of it and there’s this gross bloody mess. If David Lynch put it in a movie it’d be the grossest thing ever but it’s heartbreaking at the same time. There’s emotions of a young person who’s upset about a girl and wants to go and get fucked up with his friends and get in a fight.”

   What emerges is a self-declared “nasty, dirty, fast and loud” album, one of the most exciting alternative debuts of recent times, and there’s a heap more where this came from.
   “We’re ready to make so many records right now,” says Michael. “Elvis Costello’s first three records came out within the first two years. Let’s do that.”

   Check yourselves in to the Films’ Fabulous Freakhouse then; you’ll be staying for a while.