Tiscali Showcase - Larrikin Love

But one day in the overgrown garden in Isleworth, playing with his sister, he felt free. More than that: 'I felt great about being a kid. I remembered that day and in the studio came up with this little part on the ukelele.' A huge Pogues fan, Edward initially wanted the song to sound 'huge' like Fairy Tale Of New York or A Pair Of Brown Eyes. 'Instead it came out much more frail.' 'Then I looked back at the other songs we'd already recorded for the album, and the sentiments… I realised if I stuck Fell At The Feet Of Rae in the middle of the album it broke it up in a really good way. All the uncomfortable songs about growing up - not in emo way! It worked at the beginning. Then the ones at the end are where I established a bit of self-control and looked forward.' Part One, comprising six tracks, would be called Hate. Part Two, which was just Fell At The Feet Of Rae, would be Fairytale. Part Three, a four-track sprint, would be Freedom.'

I wanted the first part to be incredibly aggressive, and the singing is very aggressive, and the lyrics are a bit… bleurgh! Suddenly there's this nice little song in the middle. I would use that reminder of childhood innocence to gain freedom in third part. It is,' he says with a note of pithy self-mockery, 'like a self-help CD.'

Together all this would form The Freedom Spark, the first record by Larrikin Love. Edward - gypsy poet, reluctant 'Thamesbeat' sage and original 'grindie' (grime + indie) enthusiast - would be more than satisfied. He had survived a challenging childhood and the pressures of being frontman of one the grooviest young bands on the 'scene' to make an album that was as ambitious as it was tuneful, as personal as it was inclusive, as reflective as it was jump-around-in-a-sticky-floored-indie-disco. Result!

Larrikin Love are more than the sum of their cultural/musical parts. Still, the parts are pretty great in themselves. Edward, who does the singing and stuff, has a Spanish grandma, his dad runs charity Garden Africa, his godfather is one of the Bhundu Boys (courtesy of an auntie who was their tour manager), and one of his uncles is a saxophonist from Cameroon who helped kickstart young Edward's musical dreams by gifting him a sax. Micko Larkin (guitar) and Coz Kerigan (drums) are Irish lads born in London slap bang in the middle of the music-mad Celtic diaspora. Bass player Alfie Ambrose comes from Southall, 'from the last white family in our tower block', and is mad for Motown.

Out of this brilliant jumble of ideas came a band who form the missing link between Gogol Bordello, The Libertines, The Pogues, ska and the French Romantics (they're a bunch of poets, not the latest skinny oiks in Dior to stumble out of East London; although by this time next week there probably will be a band called that). If Morrissey were a young Naughties boho who was more enthusiastic dreamer than studiedly camp and waspish, he might sound a lot like Edward.

Larrikin Love cut their teeth in the Twickenham milieu that has also thrown up good friends Mystery Jets and Jamie T. Other likeminded mates have contributed to The Freedom Spark: Patrick Wolf, Mechanical Bride, The Rumble Strips, as well as the aforesaid Jamie. In 2005 their gigs, and initial indie releases Little Boy Lost and Six Queens (on labels Transgressive and Young And Lost Club), drew widespread praise. Here was a band with moshpit energy but music hall wit and dark poetry. As one of Edward's signature lyrics has it, on the album's agit-folk-punk throwdown Downing Street Kindling, "everything that I adore came well before 1984". 'I'm trying to add a bit humour,' says Edward of that song, which appears in the opening Hate section of The Freedom Spark. He thinks it's good 'to make rather extravagant remarks which don't really work but do work.' Lines like "England has nothing more to offer me" come from 'frustration, from childhood. I think everything comes from childhood.'

But then not everyone's childhood was like Edward's. Between the ages of six and 14 he was the man of the house. He knows it sounds stupid but when he saw About A Boy (Hugh Grant starring in film of Nick Hornby book, music by Badly Drawn Boy) he really related to the kid who comes down to breakfast to find mum sobbing at the kitchen table. Throw in his mute sister and 'I was really alone for a long time, picking up the pieces for my mum. I really had to take control of things. After three or four years of doing that, maybe I had a little bit of a breakdown as well. I just stopped and lost it a bit.' Edward was 11.

There followed a series of strange boyfriends for mum: the one who came out midway through the relationship. The one who was gay from the start but wanted to be a dad to the kids. The schizophrenic one who made Edward follow him into the bathroom to watch him rip his hair out. 'I thought this was normal!' laughs Edward. 'By the time I was 14 I felt like an old man already.' When Edward was 16, his mum found true love and left London for Sussex. Edward stayed in London on his own, surviving via three jobs, song- and verse-writing, and on a diet of Rimbaud and Verlaine poetry - a shared obsession between him and his girlfriend Alice, who does all the artwork for Larrikin Love.

Then, another meltdown: 'I'd ignored so many things when I was younger that it all came back to me in a rush. It all exploded in my head, I couldn't get up in the morning… Who am I? I'd lost a part of me.' He escaped the city to see his mum in Brighton. Walking on Sussex Downs, he had a minor epiphany. Well, he got a grip. He wrote the rollicking On Sussex Downs - got something out of his system - and, returning to London, realised he could write about his past in a positive way. Forever Untitled and On A Burning Coast, the turbo-folk tunes bristling with brass and strings (and heartache and understanding and longing and hope) that close the album, were the result.

Unsurprisingly perhaps given his trapped childhood, it's travelling that acts as a major motor for Edward's imagination. The sunny skank of Meet Me By The Getaway Car, the oldest song on the album, was written when he was 16, just after his exams and just before he and Alice went to Thailand and Malaysia. The Eastern European-style folk helter-skelter of Edwould was (oddly) written in Brazil. The intrictate but uplifthing poetry Well, Love Does Furnish A Love began life on the Heathrow Express - Edward and Alice spotted an albino girl and her boyfriend in floods of tears and spent a long-haul flight imagining the scenarios that might have caused such upset.

The appeal of The Pogues is easy to understand - and hear. But what bearing do Rimbaud and co have on Larrikin Love? 'Rimbaud was just wild,' Edward enthuses. 'He abandoned all form of metre and rhyme - fuck that, I'm gonna write how I'm gonna write. He'd have lines about walking along the street, the rain like champagne, and his clothes were more of an idea! Really wonderful words. And I loved the fact that he ran away from home at 13, and gave up poetry at 19 to become an arms dealer! He was one in a million.' The band's next single Happy As Annie was inspired by a Rimbaud poem about a soldier under a tree. He's seemingly sleeping but he actually has a bullet through him. So Happy As Annie is about a girl lying dead in a field, all set to a manic urchin hoedown and scorching riffs. The chorus of 'Children please beware!' is certainly catchy, but well, a little, unsettling.

Yes, Edward admits, Larrikin Love's new sponsors at Warner Bros did raise an eyebrow at that. 'They did shit themselves at first, but I showed what I meant, I wasn't tying to scare them for the hell of it and be controversial. I was meaning it. I'm not Plan B [who has done a remix too 'revolting' to use]. You can do too much to make people uncomfortable.'

And next? Edward would love to work with Sudanese child soldier-turned-rapper Emmanual Jal. He's excited about working again with ace troubador Kid Harpoon (check him out on myspace) on further grindie collaborations with north London beats commando Statik. He's looking forward to going to China next week.

Lord knows what Larrikin Love songs will come out of those experiences. The Freedom Spark is a blinding first chapter. But there are more to come from this most imaginative - and appealingly skew-whiff - of young bands. 'We're not a band of two-minute pop songs stuck together and bashed out,' says Edward Larrikin. 'Each album will be a proper record in itself.'

Craig Mclean July 2006

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