Hope springs nocturnal for Benefits

Benefits did not believe the stage was meant for them, and the video for “Missiles” captures that truth: grey sweatpants, no audience, hailing from a geographical and careerist dead end in the north-east of England. Their sound is a head-on collision between the spoken-word polemic of Kingsley Hall and Robbie Major’s electronics; poetry spat out like blood after a sucker punch, riled up by self-obliterating, almost haunted, dance music. Or, as Hall puts it: “Instantly unpopular, instantly unplayable.”

And yet, through a teeth-gritted need for expression - and a total lack of any other options - they have become the composers for the orchestra of our ordinary lives. The “issues-based music collective” emerged almost like a burning fever that had to be sweated out. They entered into March 2020 as a “normal” band, the kind with guitars and drums and a verse-chorus-verse mindset, and on the other side of lockdown and all its deprivations emerged a changed thing: a starved, volatile and fucking angry creature. Benefits raged against a stillborn future; a promise made that never arrived.

All the while, Hall held down jobs as a binman and factory worker to provide for his newborn daughter. It was a strange thing, reconciling those polarised realities. It’s something Hall and Major have still not yet caught up with. “There was never any ambition to play outside of our own postcode, to be honest,” Hall shares. “We did it purely for therapeutic reasons. Really, it was getting together on a Thursday night at a practice room in Stockton and just making as much noise as you could for two or three hours in an attempt to wash away the wars of your everyday life.” Major adds, “It was just something to keep us out of trouble.”

Constant Noise is Benefits’ second album, but in many ways, it feels like an arrival. NAILS was an intensely human document made without an audience, a mongrel mixtape built from years of work which had never seen the light of day. Without overthinking it, and choosing to strike while their reputation was white-hot, they sharpened what they already had rather than record new material. What you hear now, however, is Benefits working with intention. It took time and careful thought, many nights of Hall and Major exchanging beautiful and terrifying sounds in the small hours of the morning over email. And so, when NAILS was black-on-black painted to total darkness, Constant Noise adds a tiny bright white dot in the centre of it all. Something like hope - a brave thing to have.

Though Benefits was conceived as a collective, its only constants have been the two of them. “We might end up with one true listener – which will be one of us,” Major attests. Born in unsociable times, it’s about right that our conversation is crammed into an unsociable hour. After a failed attempt to meet them due to cancelled trains in need of repair, we talk on an evening after our day jobs end. Hall has to talk quietly; his six-year-old daughter is asleep in the next room and he has just put her to bed.

“Maybe this might take me a while to get into, so I apologise. I’ve literally just finished reading The BFG, so it’s not easy…” Hall begins agitatedly. An interview with Benefits feels like calling the two of them into the principal’s office to answer for what they’ve done. They trip over apologies and self-recriminations which bookend thoughtful responses they call “waffle”. Their discomfort, even when they’re not drawing attention to it, hangs thick in the air.

“I’ve got to be honest. I do find this stuff strange,” Hall finally tells me. “I become conscious about talking and what eventually goes onto a page, and not being as clever or as eloquent as the people you read. You know, we’re not designed for this, me and Robbie. This whole thing started to just try and get a little light in our week. I’ve done the band thing, Sophie, I did it fifteen years ago, so there’s no real need to do it again. We’re not media-trained, and I think we have a massive imposter syndrome chip on our shoulder, which is partly true and probably because we’re from the north-east. You’re pre-packaged with a chip on your shoulder; you have this thing there when you pop out of the womb. So we’ve got it double. I think I’ve drifted off a bit too much there. I’ll let Robbie answer, if you like…” And then: “I get a bit anxious, a bit nervous about these things. I tend to sort of stammer and go off-piste a little bit. So I apologise about that.”

To understand this, you must first understand what it means to live in the north-east; to be the inheritors of towns once booming with industry since neglected and laid to waste. What does it do to you, when you’re cut off geographically, socially and culturally? When talent is something you let go of or lose, trickling down the drain to London, or cast aside because the bills must be paid? Art is seen as indulgence, perhaps the last thing you can afford to have on your mind. Hall’s lyrics, notebooks upon notebooks of it all on his shelves, act as reportage of his world: a narrator both within it and somehow beyond it. On Constant Noise, he magnifies these details and in doing so, tells us a story on a national scale.

On “The Brambles”, over an unsettling, almost monastic choir, Hall describes the fly-killer light from the chip shop which pours into the puddles outside; a discarded, smashed wheelie bin; vape shops, lottery counters and army ads on bus shelters.

Line for line, Hall can pinpoint the places they refer to. It’s a guided tour: “A couple of blocks of flats were being demolished and there were some lads hurtling past me in balaclavas on scramble bikes down the middle of the road doing wheelies. A guy in a van tried to knock them onto the other side of the road into oncoming traffic for jumping the queue. There are references to historic trees getting pulled down without permission and getting concreted over in Linthorpe, rows of vape shops and chippies in Ormesby. The north-east feels like the abandoned region of England, and Teesside feels like the abandoned part of the north-east.”

There is a particular line that lingers: “The future here always seems to disappear.” He tells me, “We were promised the world up here.” ‘Levelling Up’ was the most recent carrot dangled in front of the north by the last Conservative government, which aimed to address the economic imbalances in different regional areas of the country. “We’ve had factories destroyed and call centres built, then call centres put up for sale and half-arsed attempts to rebuild factories. In between the usual identikit any-town American bullshit, the high streets are littered with virtual shops – where the fronts have been plastered with graphic wraps of images of restaurants and florists. Anything to disguise the fact they’re boarded up.”

Hall continues, “Politicians of all parties will tell us to vote for them as if they’ll make everything better. Everything. Because, as they’re at regular pains to point out, it’s all a bit shit, isn’t it? They seem to love telling you how bad it all is to be the champion of something new, something better. We vote on promises of a better future but are left in a constant state of anticipation.” Major adds, “It just feels like it’s always been drilled into us that where we’re from is crap, and wherever you go will be better.”

Constant Noise, as a title, is a joke at Benefits' own expense. They earned a reputation from their pandemic experiments as a band who are seemingly all about extreme volume and noise, whether that be through Major’s pummelling electronics or Hall’s battle cries. “I don’t think promoters or the audience knew what band was going to turn up,” says Hall. “Was it going to be the one that sounds like they’re off 6Music, the one that Craig Charles might play? Or is it going to be one with the shouty skinhead in a vest doing these Rollins stances, doing hardcore punk stuff at rock and metal gigs? What is it?”

This record proposes another thing which goes against the grain of what they were performing to the public. The sonic backdrops behind Hall’s words are as vibrant as any other kind of storytelling: wormholes of raves long past; pummelling trance – and then a dream-like lightness, guitars and synthetic swirls. With producers James Welsh and James Adrian Brown, Constant Noise has newfound cohesion. “Whenever I’ve bought a new synth, I’d go on YouTube to try and learn how to use it. And invariably, the tutorials you find are people making music that’s the opposite to anything we’ve ever made – so I throw it all out of the window and try to make the machines produce terrifying noises,” explains Major.

He cites German producer Helena Hauff’s performance at Glastonbury as a blueprint for the reaction he wanted to inspire in a listener. “It’s dance music, but it’s aggressive,” he tells me. "And not aggressive in the way hard house or techno is aggressive – just in an analogue, nasty way that is evocative of a certain type of feeling. I can send something that’s twenty minutes, thinking, ‘Ah, this is funny, it’s so shit’, and then Kinglsey will chop it up and turn it into a song. It’s an incredible talent he has to encourage me to experiment. I like the idea of it being unsettling, of putting things within a frame that they don’t necessarily fit in.” But for all this electronic experimentation, there are still turns of hardcore punk for the original fans – “We’ve not gone soft,” Hall jokes.

There is a particular trick on the opening title track. In the The Wizard of Oz, there's a famous scene where Dorothy lands in the Land of Oz and the whole movie turns from black and white into dazzling technicolour. On “Constant Noise”, there is a moment where it changes from being mono to stereo halfway through the song – and there it is, a sonic full-bloom. For those acquainted with NAILS, this choice might be unimaginable. “The first album, for me, had this overwhelming sense of darkness,” Hall notes. “It painted such a grim picture. Everything was terrible. I’m not going to say it was one-note - there were a couple of notes either side of it which were interesting – but the predominant note down the middle was everything was shit. Whereas for me, this album is kind of the flip of that. There are more shoots of life coming out of it, and more… I suppose, a sense of hope.”

I ask them which forms this hope has presented itself in, so we know where to look for it ourselves. “I’ve not been asked that before. What a strange question…” Hall says, seemingly troubled by the asking of it. “Well, the obvious one is having a child, right? It changes everything. I quit smoking just as she was popping out, and then you make these life changes all a sudden. But it’s more interesting psychologically, what it does for you and how you view the world. It’s amazing, and it also creates a constant worry. You watch the world fall apart after the death of David Bowie and all of a sudden, the gates of hell start to open and all these monsters re-emerge and grow stronger than they used to be, or more amplified. Every news story is a worry. But you have to think the good will out. You have to think people are better than that. Otherwise, there’s no hope. And I want my little girl to have hope.”

For Major, those glimmers appear in community – even when it feels so atomised. Much of Constant Noise, and the title itself, rails against the way we have prioritised individualism and performance. But still, as a rash of far-right, anti-immigration protests and riots occurred last summer, there were unified acts of resistance. After the destruction hit Middlesbrough, with homes smashed in and cars torched, late at night he saw a member of the community rallying people to come in the early hours of the morning to help repair the damage.

“So I got in my car and went there, and there was a huge crowd of people,” Major recalls. “Because it all happened in the hours where people were mostly asleep, you didn’t have a chance to message people to see if they were going down to it. It was nice, bumping into people you knew who went there just because they wanted to help – like the guy who runs the noise night in Middlesbrough. I bumped into him while we were cleaning up some glass to repair someone’s window where it had been smashed in where their child had been sleeping. It was a nice moment, in something so relentlessly grim, to do something proactive and show up for the community where you live.”

What might be taken as anger with Benefits is, in fact, a passionate expression of vulnerability: a thing that typically sits with masculinity as oil does with water. “On stage, I’ve often talked directly to the audience about how scared I am to be standing there in front of them,” shares Hall. “The interesting thing is that no one has ever come up to me after a show and told me how useless I am for all this, but most concerts will result in someone coming to the merch table and telling me that they appreciated what I said because they have the same issues. More often than not, it’s big blokes who I have these conversations with – people that look like they wouldn’t have a problem with confidence or nerves. It’s fine and cool to be open about your mental health. All this cigar-chomping macho bullshit we’re seeing at the moment, it’s all charade and grift. I’m tired of the violence of it all, the amplified lack of empathy. Cheap plastic dullards. No charm, no wit, no style or grace.

“And it’s a concern that it’s implied that this is what victory looks like, this is what you need to be, these are the shitty attitudes you need to have to be a success, to be a winner. I hate it but I don’t find them terrifying or intimidating, just boring. It’s all one note, like a doll that when you pull the string, it endlessly repeats the same phrases over and over. Misogyny, power, supercars, greed, ill-informed takes on history, shit memes, misunderstanding Starship Troopers, fascism – squawk, squawk, squawk. That’s all they are, daft little dollies, but full of steroids and ketamine. We need to make decency exciting again. Replace shiny, tight-fitting suits with manners. That’d be a start.”

The past and the misremembering of it casts a long shadow not only across Constant Noise, but their entire discography. The way a lie is just a story we tell ourselves. On NAILS, this manifested in lampooning the right-wing nostalgia for empire, colonialism and “no foreigns”. Hall says, “It’s easy to mock and even easier to disprove that things weren’t always better in the old days. But that can get sneery, a little metropolitan elite. A bit ‘cockwomble’. And I fucking hate that shit.”

But the passing of his father and birth of his daughter complicated Hall’s relationship with his own past, how time is short and worth holding onto. “It’s easy to get sucked into it all,” he acknowledges. “I suppose it’s partly about yearning for youth when things seemed easier and more innocent. It’s in the ‘Victory Lap’ song, about speeding off your adolescent tits in a railway underpass at five o'clock in the morning. And I remember these incidents like they were yesterday. They knocked that underpass down about fifteen years ago, I’m not sure I’m over it. But you cherry pick your memories, you’ll think back to cool music, World Cups you loved or wild weekends in endless sunshine – but you’ll forget about the rampant misogyny, the homophobia, the terror.”

Exhibit A is the London 2012 Olympics, a recent marker in time for when Britain was last seen at its very best. But, Hall points out, we forget that it was not finished on time, that it was over budget; the scramble for volunteers and ugly sculptures, the riots and the sweeping of unsightly truths under the rug. “Relentless” captures this tangled relationship with the past, an indulgence. “It’s about yearning for a time when the world seemed full of opportunity and wonder. Dreams felt attainable and life had the potential to be an epic journey. The sheer thrill of it all. A daydream, really,” he explains. “Before reality hits and you find yourself being told off for not smiling enough in your minimum wage manual labour job, self-esteem shot to shit. Getting Peter Doherty on that track was helpful as he embodied that spirit of youth for me. I’ve got piles of magazines and records with this guy’s face on. The Libertines were absolute heroes for me and Robbie, I think, so to have him feature effectively as a Dickensian ghost on the song was incredible.”

The final vignette Benefits leave us with on Constant Noise is “Burnt Out Family Home”. A swell of an organ floods the thing with light, and Hall almost sings the album’s elegiac closer. Taking his dog for a morning walk through the winding streets of Redcar to the coast, one of the houses on his route had burned down overnight. There were melted kids toys, charred pieces of furniture scattered on the lawn. And some bouquets of flowers.

It all captures something about the truth of this band: “It’s an image that has stuck with me for years,” he says. “I love the coast and I love living by the sea. Even though I recognise the neglect and the problems these places have, there’s something very special about them. They feel like fortresses. And Redcar, even though it’s less than ten miles away from Middlesbrough, has an otherworldly atmosphere. A separation. I’d walk along the promenade next to the seafront after a night out and the only light would be the police cars flying by; the only noise from the sea. But wherever you are and whoever you might be, there’s always going to be moments in your life that kick you in the guts and remind you that you’re not infinite or invincible. And that moment can be joyous or traumatic. But it’s inevitable, and you can’t prepare yourself for it.”