[Hip Priest]

They're new, I think, and from England. I don't know if they are well known yet. They're a bit like indie used to be, sort of.

I think I quite like them. There's some videos and stuff at the Young Knives site, as you would imagine. 'She's Attracted To' is the new single, I think.

Um, that's my hard sell. Some of you might like them. What do you think?

[Hip Priest]

Well the emotionally charged above post didn't convince anyone, did it? So the thread is bumped, two-and-a-half months later. Maybe today's Sunday Telegraph wil do better:

'Everyone likes a village fête'
(Filed: 19/08/2006)

The Young Knives dress like farmers and celebrate rural life. Ben Thompson welcomes the sound of agrarian post-punk

The Young Knives, a bucolic power trio who grew up together in the small Leicestershire market town of Ashby de la Zouch, are commendably willing to flout the conventions of indie cool.

Rather than move to London to seek metropolitan credibility, they decided to share a house in a village just outside Oxford.

Lead singer and guitarist Henry Dartnall and his bass-playing younger brother, Thomas (known by the mystifying nickname, "House of Lords"), dress like literary-minded young farmers - and last week's launch party for their excellent debut album Voices of Animals and Men took the form of a village fête.

"Everybody likes a village fête," explains the elder Dartnall. "Turn up, fling a welly, have a go on the coconut shy, drink a pint of real ale…"

In the early, teenage stages of the band's fragmented 15-year history, their rustic identity was even more pronounced. "We used to be called Simple Pastoral Existence," says drummer Oliver Askew. "There are lots of photos of us jumping off hay bales."

"And we had a song called 'Rural Jive'," adds Henry with a grimace. "It was slightly funky."

While their early forays into pastoral pop were not, Henry admits, "set in any context other than the fact that we all lived in the countryside", the band have honed their agrarian post-punk sound to a point where they can now hold their own against dynamic urbanites such as the Rakes.

Produced by the Gang of Four's Andy Gill, Voices of Animals and Men is riotously entertaining. Typical of the group's deft and witty song writing is She's Attracted To, about a disastrous first encounter with a new girlfriend's snobby parents ("Your dad cornered me in the hallway while you were in the loo").

It culminates in an all-out brawl, with Henry and his potential father-in-law "fighting in the driveway under the security lights". Less immediate, but genuinely magical after a couple of listens, is Tailors, which gives expression to the band's admiration for the dying craft of sewing on buttons.

The Young Knives' concern with such fine cultural detail aligns them with a growing pop movement in this country. It's a movement that raids the dusty recesses of what you might call pre-pop British history - the First World War, the age of Empire, the pre-Beeching railway system - with the same voracity with which Blur and Oasis once plundered the music of the Kinks and the Beatles.

Kept alive through the lean post-Britpop years by handlebar-moustachioed Medway maverick Billy Childish, it was recently given new momentum by South Coast naval nostalgists British Sea Power.

The only problem with this style of English Heritage pop is that sometimes the presentation - the plus-fours, the stuffed herons on stage - can seem more important than the music itself.

But the Young Knives steer clear of wilful parochialism: the inspired geek-chic of Wes Anderson's urbane American film Rushmore, for example, is a big influence.

Above all, the band celebrates idiosyncrasy. "Our songs are generally written from the viewpoint of someone who's outside something," Henry Dartnall explains.

"What we like about the beekeepers and Morris dancers that we use in the artwork on our record covers is that they're these little subcultures devoting a lot of energy to something which nobody else understands."

The Young Knives' empathy for people who spend time on seemingly insignificant things is rooted in years of toiling away at day jobs while working at their music in total obscurity.

When the band reconvened after Henry left college in 1999, and the three childhood friends set up house together in Oxfordshire, their highest commercial ambitions were, Thomas admits, "to get a gig in Oxford and maybe one day put out a record. We never imagined ourselves anywhere close to, say, being in Blur: that would be ridiculous."

While the unimaginable is still a little way off, the crowd of 70 excited teenagers that crams itself between the shelves of a Kingston-upon-Thames record shop to watch the Young Knives do a raucous in-store show know that they're watching something special.

And as the band's anti-work place gossip anthem Here Comes the Rumour Mill echoes down the street, the crowded town centre basks in a heady breeze of arcadia.

# 'Voices of Animals and Men' (Transgressive) is out on Monday

[Toilet & Bowels]

are they the band who dress up as butchers in their video?