The Rakes Make Their Own Breaks

“I thought our album was so good we were going to headline Glastonbury, but Springsteen beat us to it. He’s always getting in the way...”

It’s late afternoon and Alan Donohoe, lead singer with indie-punk mainstays The Rakes has a sharp adrenalised twang in his voice. Maybe it’s because he lives his band's manifesto of Work, Work, Work (Pub, Club, Sleep) with a low priority on sleep. Or maybe it’s because The Rakes have finally released new album "Klang!” and he couldn’t be more effusive.

It’s fair to say The Rakes haven’t sustained the mass critical acclaim they once enjoyed. They’ve been persistently adored by some, persistently derided by others. Furthermore, there are those in between who felt let down by the second album - backtrack through The Skinny archives and you'll find one disheartened scribe calling them a “witless parody of themselves.” Suffice it to say, Donohoe felt the intense pressure: “I’d like to pretend I’m Woody Allen who hasn’t read a word about himself for 35 years, but it’s hard to avoid it sometimes.”

However, though most bands might fall into a pit of despair as their fragile self-esteem is gnawed away by fickle critics. album by album, Donohoe knows he can learn. “Second albums are funny because it’s the first time you’re going to be writing for an album proper, and as such we had a lot of ideas, maybe too many. We wanted to write something deeper.”

What with concepts extending to hip-hop collaborations discussing racial prejudice, Ten New Messages was certainly a departure from their 2006 debut. It took some serious reflection on Donohoe’s part to decide the third album’s direction: Do they ignore press rallies and carry along the same trajectory, or do they take the criticism on the chin and learn?

A man of self-conviction, Donohoe found the solution on his own terms. “I listened to albums that I found stood out for me: David Bowie in his avant-garde Berlin phase and the first Alabama 3 album. They were playful, they were all over the place.” The Rakes then went about setting limits, recording the album in Berlin since London is “not that exciting at the moment.”

Allowing themselves only two weeks to record it, there would be no indulgences. “You can forget string sections or horns or anything daft like that,” quips Donohoe. And most importantly, it would capture the “live excitement” the Rakes are renowned for. But what about content? Listening to those Bowie albums clearly made Donohoe’s creative juices flow. “Playfulness is very important when you’re trying to create something new, to connect two separate things," he suggests. "Playful and schizophrenic, those are the key terms.”

No other song on “Klang!” epitomises this more than The Loneliness of the Outdoor Smoker, an amusing tune about that pesky blight to a society of puffers, the smoking ban. Though Donohoe uses this as a vehicle for deeper meaning: “You're in a pub or a club, its party time, then you want to have a cigarette and it’s cold, your on your own, and it forces you to reflect.”

This balance between the seriousness of the second album and the frantic debauchery of the first surely represents a band that has matured through adversity. Of course, once recording finished, the pertinent question was left lingering: Can it be pulled off live? “With this new album, because we road tested it, we knew it worked. With the second album, since it was a studio album it was a bit like Bloc Party playing their new album live with so many samples you can’t replicate. For us that falls a little flat.”

It seems The Rakes' renewed, stripped back sound will make the transition from that Berlin studio to the live arena on their forthcoming tour, in light of a recent epiphany for Donohoe. “I remember reading that men throughout their lives define themselves by what their job is. When you go into retirement it’s like 'what do I do?'. So it was great to get back gigging, I remembered that this is what I do. I am a songsmith.”

Donohoe relates this with the glint of giddy excitement that comes with the knowledge that you’ve excelled yourself. This is the fervour of a man desperate to show off his wares and apparently unable to conceal his verve, “ready to kick arse again.” Whether it’s hungover adrenaline or pent up eagerness is in some ways irrelevant, because Donohoe for one can’t wait to rake you back in.