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Indie / Alternative / Britpop
Moke
| Netherlands/Ireland (in cooperation with Klaus Bönisch Künstler- und Konzertagentur GmbH)
Booking-Agent:
Oliver Arnold
+49 30 261032928
oa@f-cat.de
Moke, Holland’s finest are back. The success of 2007’s golden debut Shorland is a hard act to follow. But rest assured the second album The Long And Dangerous Sea hits home with a vengeance. Backed by a symphony orchestra, it’s of Ocean Rain grandeur . This is clearly their masterpiece. What’s more? It comes with wonderful pictures by fellow native Dutchman, the world’s most prolific pop photographer and U2’s staff pics man, Anton Corbijn. More? First single Switch hits you KO, OK? Arenas should be in sight now.
It looks so normal now, but is it really? Only two years ago they suddenly came out of the blue: Moke from Amsterdam. After a few shows in London supporting their friend and mentor Paul Weller, the ball started rolling. It literally did with the band’s theme music to the highlights of the UEFA Champions League on Dutch public TV. Holland’s biggest TV talk show embraced the lads straight away and gave them a monthly stint on the show. Next top fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld decided to dress them. In no time they were successful. Audibly, the cliché of the always difficult second album did not get a hold of them. If you see it as a big challenge to top your successes, then the perspective is completely different. They started working so eagerly and ambitiously, that it felt like second nature to do the second album. That’s what you get, when you do what you like most.
Repetition is a sign of weakness in pop music. That’s why so many bands are scared to follow up a success. Moke obviously hasn’t shied away from the challenge: The Long And Dangerous Sea is very different from Shorland, which put the band firmly on the map in the first place. Making a Shorland Vol. 2 would have been the easy way out. But that’s not the way they work. ‘We are our own biggest critics,’ affirms singer Felix Maginn openly. ‘We deliberately have not gone into the domain of the previous album. No copy cats please! We wanted it to be totally different. As it was it will never be again.’ This one was meant to go further than the first one and take us into new musical areas.’
Musically and design-wise Moke are proof of an out of the box mentality. Moke are still Moke, with Brit-oriented indie pop, but possibly on an ‘arena level’ now. ‘This way it remained exciting for all of us,’ claims front man Felix Maginn. It all sounds very logical now, but try to do it with a ‘safe’ golden album in your hands. For less you would already get the shivers. The expectations were sky-high to say it with a silly cliché. Maginn adds another smart one on op of it: ‘It should’ve come straight from the heart.’ And it does.
The big success of Shorland slowed down the plans for its follow-up album considerably. Meanwhile, Moke picked up various awards, highlighted by a 3FM Award (2008) for Best Alternative act. The band was so much in demand with festivals and clubs – with the show at Pinkpop’s main stage in 2008 being the undisputed live peak so far – that there was hardly any time to actually start cutting the album. The last domestic club tour was as good as sold-out. The pressure got even higher thanks to a growing demand for shows abroad due to a German release on Universal’s Island label imprint. Add to this the many European dates with the likes of Paul Weller, Keane, Razorlight and Amy MacDonald, and you get an idea of a truly successful band.
