The Little Million are the world’s first hyperlink band; a band ergonomically designed for the 2010s, streamed and interwebbed for the Net Generation. They take the DIY art-rock craft of The Maccabees and Good Shoes to its up-to-the-minute technological conclusion. Click on their website and you’re immersed in a TV network complete with their own biography, news and interview channels and red button links to ‘remote content’; a similar system is also live on Youtube. Check out their press snaps and they’re strung up in shooting ranges like hanging targets in post-post-post-modern statements on the disposability of the rock band. And watch their viral video for first single ‘You And Me Against The Universe’ and you’re thrown into one of the very first examples of a Choose Your Own Adventure video at the cutting edge of internet streaming possibilities.

“It’s a story shot from first person and your decisions change the story,” says singer and guitarist Jim Pinder. “Up to the first chorus it’s a girl and a boy’s story mixed together, then you get to choose whether you follow the girl’s story or the boy’s story using the annotation buttons on Youtube. Then that splits off into two, then four and there’s eight different endings.”

Crucially, all of these ideas were conceived, designed, programmed, shot and edited by the band themselves. The Little Million, it turns out, are ‘hands on’ in the same way that Ronnie Wood is ‘unconcerned by the age gap’.

“We’re quite controlling,” says Jim. “With the exception of the album cover we’ve tried to do everything in a way that’s just us. We take all that other side of it very seriously. Suddenly being a band isn’t just about writing good songs, the whole thing’s creative, every single aspect of it, so to take yourself out of it seems like a strange thing to do. Because we create everything ourselves it’s like we’ve got our own little world. All of your videos, your website and everything represents you as much as your music does. So why let anyone else do that when it’s you that’s got to wear it?”

Bassist Ross Bannister agrees. “No-one’s gonna care as much as we do.”

 

 

 

This culture of autonomous ingenuity has driven The Little Million since the very start, when Jim and Ross met at the age of fourteen in technology class in Sheffield, the only two kids in their year with long hair and Nirvana t-shirts and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the work of Reeves & Mortimer. Recruiting Jez Dennis - another long-hair from the year above – on drums, the three-piece jammed Green Day, Wildhearts and Nirvana tunes at lunchtimes in Jim’s house next door to the school on his parents’ equipment (Jim’s dad was in a band who turned down a deal by Apple in the 60s).

By the age of fifteen they were playing their first pop-punk gigs around Sheffield as Mybe and would soon be playing 150 shows a year as stalwarts of the Yorkshire guitar rock scene. “Driving ourselves there in a crappy van that was falling to pieces,” Ross recalls, “playing tiny little venues, sometimes to people, sometimes to absolutely no-one. I wouldn’t change it, it was fun.”

By the time Arctic Monkeys and Kaiser Chiefs kick-started the New Yorkshire scene, Mybe had released several self-funded singles and an album on the independent On The Road label and were drifting away from the fizzling US-style pop punk genre. In 2006 Jim renovated a house and used the profits to buy a home studio and take a year and a half off to write songs every day, knocking out five a week in a tune-penning frenzy of Prince-staggering proportions.

“I started writing whatever I fancied writing. When you know you’ve got a year to write it doesn’t matter if the song you write today is a blues song because you can just write another one tomorrow anyway, so we ended up doing a lot of stuff that was nothing like what we’d done in the past. It broadened our horizons a lot.”

These new songs were grander, bolder, markedly more ambitious; a three-piece wouldn’t cut it anymore. So a new guitarist Andy Dickinson was added to the ranks and The Little Million were born, named after a vat of almost one million pints of beer built by a London brewery in 1814, which exploded killing hundreds of people - either in the explosion itself or because they drank themselves to death on the free lager.

The Little Million also found themselves thrust into a world of explosive good fortune. Within a month of Andy joining, a mysterious benefactor invested enough cash to record their debut album and The Little Million suddenly seemed as charmed as a Dickensian child hero. Within three months they’d recorded the 13-track first version of their debut in 2007 with Carl Brown (producer of the last two Fightstar albums) co-producing with Jim.

“We were trying to make a sound as big as possible,” says Ross. “Something that someone would hear and think ‘I’ve got to hear that really really loud on a stage’. We were taking a lot of pop punk and indie influence and try to make it sound bigger.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jim: “It’s about the home life of a young girl, an uncomfortable home life that she’s had and works towards her leaving home. ‘Walk Away’ takes it from where she’s at the train station about to leave home, she’s gonna leave with her boyfriend and her boyfriend doesn’t show up.”

A flirtation period with a new manager in 2008 came to nothing but left Jim with another new batch of songs of even more lush scale. They recorded these – again with Carl Bown – that summer with added multi-tracked orchestration, replaced the heavier bits of the album with these sumptuous new songs and emerged at the start of 2009 with a completed debut, ‘Satellite’. An accomplished and impressive Big Rock record, tracks such as ‘Finger On The Trigger’, ‘Bring Out The Blues’ and ‘Too Little Too Late’ boast all the finesse of Biffy Clyro’s recent orchestral period with added QOTSA melodic crunch and My Chemical Romance pop edge.

But it’s so much more than even that. ‘The Long Goodbye’ is all catchy Weezer gang chanting wrapped in warp-speed chug riffs. ‘The Best You’ve Got’ is the savage/soft middle-ground between Muse and Mew. ‘Wait In Line’ and ‘Falling Apart’ are breezy strumaramas topped with adorable Ben Folds harmonies and first single ‘You And Me Against The Universe’ is a blaze of meteoric thrash pop that feels like being caught in the middle of a turbo-speed game of Asteroid, blasting away at huge, hurtling chunks of space rock. Fittingly, since it’s about going out with the girlfriend equivalent of the Star Wars project.

“It’s about having a girlfriend who’s… hard, stern,” laughs Jim. “It’s a ridiculous idea for a song, if aliens were to come down that she’d be sent as the first line of defence.” The brilliantly lo-budget, alien-drenched official video by Scratch Films (concept by Jim) is equally evocative: “It’s done with a B-movie black and white Ed Wood kind of feel to it. It looks amazing. In B-movies they didn’t try to make it look terrible, they tried their best, they just didn’t have the money to do it. They’ve done it in a similar way, they’ve put a lot of love and time into it. It works so nicely. It’s got a little bit of humour in and it’s very British.”

The mixing session at Abbey Road studios didn’t pass without incident: “Alex Turner was mastering next door with the Last Shadow Puppets and Ringo was in the building, so to be in Abbey Road at the same time as a Beatle is pretty good. Panic At The Disco were downstairs in Studio One – they kicked Andy off the roof. Not literally. Our guitarist had gone out on the roof for a fag and Panic At The Disco wanted to go out for one so their management told him to get off.”

Album in the bag and a deal with Seraphina Record secured, things moved fast for The Little Million in 2009. They signed a deal with Japanese label Fabtone, got tipped on the Record Of The Day mail-out, sold out Sheffield’s 400-capacity Boardwalk venue and wrote another two full albums. “Jim wrote two more full albums, ordered and everything,” says Ross. “We’d have happily gone in and recorded the whole album again.”

“The last two that I’ve done were over two months,” adds Jim, “and we were pleased with all the songs in each batch. It used to be one in ten but as you go on you don’t have to make quite as many mistakes to get there.”

Their management want The Little Million to record and release a second album in 2010. But that would be too unfair on the world, it’ll still be reeling from the sucker-punch of ‘Satellite’. And besides, it’ll take technology at least twelve months to catch up with them.