Uncompromising, angry, frustrated, brilliant

"You've got to do something, you've got to shout about something, or it's pointless." seethes Chris Olley, singer with Six By Seven. "You get on stage, you've got to try and wake people up, not just go "Why does it always rain on me?""

You might be forgiven for thinking that Nottingham's answer to the dark side exist under a constant thunderous deluge - their two albums to date, 1998's The Things We Make and new slab of doomy brilliance The Closer I Get don't point to many sunny intervals beaming through. But Olley's words serve as the band's mission statement, their music dodging the drizzle of adequacy to make real noise and grab issues of life and death by the throat.

Blessed with an explosive live reputation, it's not uncommon to hear dumbstruck audience members say it's "just like the old days". Not that Six By Seven slosh about in retro waters - they work hard at making unabashed intensity something to be proud of again. Acting on a record company tip-off, Olley recently listened to an edition of Steve Lamacq's radio indie-test just to hear their teeth-splitting statement of intent, "Eat Junk Become Junk."

"He played it last and it just sounded so ferocious, it came flying out of the radio next to all that indie guitar stuff, and it was like, "Fucking hell, man."

Olley starts hitting the old-skool rhetoric hard: "Trance is disco. The Manic Street Preachers are Genesis. All these bands have become dinosaurs. They should do us all a favour and split up. Just go away. These days are over. Forget it, man. We need to start again. Like it says on "England And A Broken Radio" [from The Closer I Get] - 'Everybody needs to start again / everybody needs a gig for a quid."'

It's not just disdain for the indie rank-and-file that makes the polemic ring true. "This country is dirty and depressing me." sings Olley on "Eat Junk Become Junk" - a song that, unsurprisingly, "isn't just about food".

"England is better off financially," he says, "but because there's more stuff available to younger people, it's made them less pissed off. But I still believe there's a whole load of people that are sitting at home, pissed off - and not because they haven't got a stereo. Or a moped."

With such disgust comes impeccable outsider credentials. Raised in an Army family, Olley didn't actually live in Britain until he was 18. Heading for Nottingham to study photography, he hooked up with guitarist Sam Hempton, drummer Chris Davies and keyboardist James Flower, later recruiting bassist Paul Douglas. A love of Nirvana and the Pixies was a given, as was a fondness for the disorientation experiments of Sonic Youth and Spacemen 3, but there's a song on their latest album called "Sawn Off Metallica T-Shirt" ("Got a really fucking stupid haircut / got a backseat for a bed") that comes nearer to tapping their roots.

"Rock. Metal." sighs Olley. "I was like that when I was 16 - pissed up, going to festivals ... you know that person you always see with the heavy metal t-shirt, lying in the mud with a bottle of cider and their missing the band they came to see? That was me."

The first band he saw were Iron Maiden, but they still see their understanding of repetition and "no guitar solos" as dance-influenced, another strand of their culture. "I don't know why we got compared to Pink Floyd" sighs Chris, recalling the Wish You Were Here references of their early days. "When I think of Pink Floyd, I think of Dave Gilmour's endless meandering guitar fills. It's like the soundtrack to an airshow on Sunday afternoon TV."

More like the soundtrack to an aircrash. "It never really dawned on me how many references to death there were on this record until we finished it." says Chris, musing over the ironic "Ten Places To Die", or the suicidal "One Easy Ship Away". "If anyone spent time with us, they'd realise we're not morbid. It's actually quite a positive record - a lot of songs are protest songs, and that's a good thing."

The Closer I Get was, the singer states, an easier album for the band to make than The Things We Make, where personality clashes ruled.

"People say it's a good thing there's some internal tension." says Olley, wryly. "But what we've learned to do is to tolerate each other a lot more. It comes from five people having a really strong idea of what we don't want to do." He laughs. "It's like a quest to find out what we do want to do. Then fill in the gaps left by other bands."

Victoria Segal

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