Bull: ‘I would like to try and make the songs less personal, but they are’

It was there as teenagers that the pair played their first gig – “at the Christmas party”, Beer recalls – Lucas then being a student at All Saints, along with his sister, who is Beer’s girlfriend.

The alt-rock band’s personnel has evolved since then – with Kai West and Tom Gabbatiss replacing original rhythm section Rory Welbrock and Louis Edge – but Beer feels their working methods remain largely the same. “I tend to write a song and then we play it together and we do a lot of improvising and jamming,” he says.

Last summer Bull became the first band from York to sign to a major label since Shed Seven in 1993. “We’d been working with a great label in York called Young Thugs,” says Lucas, “and one of the guys who runs it, Dave Greenbrown, was managing us for a while and during that period he was approached by the managing director of EMI who was interested in what was happening in York and wanted to know of any good bands or artists who were coming out of York at the time. Dave invited him to one of our gigs at the Crescent Community Club – we were supporting Warmduscher – and he saw us and liked us.”

Since clinching a deal, Bull have released three singles – Green, Bonzo Please and Disco Living. Now comes an EP, Love Goo. “When the first one came out that was amazing because it was also at the time we announced that we’d signed to EMI,” says Beer. “It was probably the biggest response we’d ever seen online to an announcement we’d made, I got messages from alll my friends and it was really cool. With the second one it was still pretty good, we came up with ways of making it funny and interesting online, but by the third and fourth it is starting to be a bit like ‘I was we were starting to play some gigs’. But that said, we’re trying to do everything we can to make it interesting for people sat at home on their computers.”

Love Goo is about family arguments, Beer says. “It’s like a letter to myself when I’m in a state of denial, that in between my head and the other person’s head is the truth,” he explains. “It’s about helping me get along with people that I really love and I shouldn’t be mean to anyone.”

The video comprises footage that West shot on an old VHS camera in the Netherlands a couple of years ago. “He was just shooting a few seconds-long clips and that became the video,” says Lucas. “It was the sequential clips of us on tour with our friends.”

Many of Beer’s songs have a personal slant, he acknowledges. “I would like to try and make them less, but they are,” he laughs. “They can be anything, songs. They can be about characters or your friends, but they do always come back to yourself. I’ve got a song called Perfect Teeth, I was going to say it’s intentionally cryptic but it’s actually because I wrote the lyrics which all made sense and then I lost them. I wrote about 10 verses for it but then we just used about two verses that I remembered. The ones you remember are the ones that tend to be a bit weird.

“Sometimes I try and make it have a point or a universal message. I don’t know if I think about it at the time but it’s something that I seem to do to try to make it accessible.”

An album is also in the bag for release in March. “We did it in Amsterdam with Remko Schouten,” says Lucas. “He did live sound for Pavement for pretty much their whole career, so he’s got a good idea of what we like. We finished off our last day in the studio the day before the Dutch lockdown and we got back two weeks before the English one.”

“It was ridiculous,” Beer remembers. “We were going to do an all-day gig in the Netherlands the next day with five bands from England and five from the Netherlands but then we got messages from people saying, ‘Everything’s shutting down’. We had not watched the news, we hadn’t even heard what Covid was, and I was going, ‘Are you sure? That sounds a bit over the top’. We cancelled the gig there and then and rushed back to the UK and when we did it was like nothing had happened for two weeks in the UK. Everything closed in the Netherlands really fast, really efficiently.”

Love Goo is out now. www.bulltheband.com