“Dry Cleaning’s guitarist Tom Dowse, drummer Nick Buxton, and Lewis Maynard had been friends and musical collaborators for years; at first Dry Cleaning was simply their latest project, formed after a karaoke night and based out of the miniscule garage next to the house of Maynard’s mum. One day, however, after a mutual friend’s exhibition, Dowse played some snippets of what they’d been working on to Florence Shaw, a visual artist, picture researcher and drawing lecturer. A few days later, she came to his flat armed with a copy of Michael Bernard Loggins’ Fears Of Your Life to read out over the music, and later still started contributing words of her own. Before long she was the group’s frontperson, her dryness, wit, and linguistic acrobatics acting as the perfect counter to the musicians’ taut instrumentals. Eventually they produced two thrilling EPs, 2019’s Sweet Princessand Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks. On stage, the contrast between the stillness of Shaw and the emphatic energy of Dowse and Maynard became even more pronounced. They swapped influences from Black Sabbath to Augustus Pablo to Yuzo Koshiro. “It all absorbed,” says Dowse. “Then when we got back to writing, we felt like we were drawing very organically from a collective palette.”
UK band Dry Cleaning will release their debut album, “New Long Leg”, on April 2nd and they were just on long-running BBC series Later with Jools Holland (via London’s Moth Club) to play the album’s lead single, “Scratchcard Lanyard.”
We’d really recommend checking out Dry Cleaning’s recent performance on Later… with Jools Holland! We mentioned it above, we’re mentioning it now and no doubt we’ll mention it again in a matter of days. It’s great, what can we say?!
Watch Dry Cleaning perform Scratchcard Lanyard filmed at the Moth Club (Live on Later)
