Hometown: Manchester.
The lineup: Joseph Louis Harland Manning (instruments), Jonathan Flanders (vocals), Craig Langton (electronics).
The background: Ménage à Trois have been described as “a Mancunian boy band”, although, given that one of them, Manning, used to be in Wu Lyf, and that another, Flanders, took the photograph of Wu surrounded by smoke that generated the mystique and made them the most notorious leftfield sensation that year bar Odd Future, they’re hardly going to be a bunch of dim, oleaginous clothes horses. No, they’re more like Take That, if Take That had worked with Durutti Column and been produced by Martin Hannett. Or think Wham! at their most typically tropical; only for sun, sea and sand read sad, sorrowful and glum. Concentrate hard while you’re listening to their budget-lush amalgam of lounge-funk, distressed R&B, airbrushed yacht rock and chillwave melancholia – try the Australia Parts I and II EPs or wait for their forthcoming debut album, Australia Part III – and you could be hearing demos of George Michael’s A Different Corner recorded in a dingy Manchester cellar while the band dream of exotic climes. There’s a track on the album called Paris and it really does have the slow, sinuous gait of Michael’s 1986 No 1, only it comes with a jarringly brusque lyric: “Wrap yourself around me and hold on tight / Punch me in the face and we’ll dance all night …”
You know you’re not dealing with a regular boy band as soon as you speak to the singer, who does the interview from the bath in his central Manchester flat and keeps teasing that he’s “sucking the steam out of my earpiece” so that he can hear the questions. His descriptions of his bandmates add weight to the theory that, if Ménage à Trois are a boy band, they’re a perverse, twisted one. “Joseph is the guru of the group,” he says. “I try and sing. And Craig is the come that holds us together.” Sorry, there’s steam in our ears now. He adds: “We don’t have an agenda to be a boy band, although we are three boys as far as I’ve seen when our clothes are off. We will do dance routines eventually when my confidence builds. I’d like Brian Friedman to do our choreography – he used to do Britney Spears, you know.”
Flanders moonlights as a photographer – an acclaimed one – and teaches image-making and styling at Salford University. Langton works at an LGBT foundation, and Manning “is all music”. Flanders comes up with the words for Ménage à Trois. “But I don’t really write them down,” he says. “I remember them like a photograph, like you remember a moment.” There’s a line in the song Bobby’s Prism, “It’s hard to let your feelings show”, and another on South Seas that goes, “I don’t wanna go losing you, baby.” Pop tropes are employed, but it’s hard not to conclude, given Flanders’ history of strategy and subversion, that he’s playing with the idea of meaning and sincerity.
“I’m definitely not playing with sincerity,” he says, still in the bath. “When we made that song, I’d met and fallen in love with somebody from Argentina, and he’d left and I was describing my feelings about him at the time.” The resultant sun-kissed requiems express his “longing to be together soon again”. Is Australia Part III a concept album, then, a sort of same-sex 808s and Heartbreak? “It’s definitely a gay album,” he says. “All the songs are about relationships and love, but it’s not a concept album.”
There is, however, a sense of coherence to the album, and a consistently plaintive tone. Ménage à Trois are mastering the art of synthadelic slow jams with layered harmonies – they know their aahs from their Elbow. Paris (“Drown me in the pool then set me free”) is almost creepy in its prettiness. Hey has a reggae beat, a steely pulse, recalling those other Manc art-pop renegades. There’s a song on the album called All Night Long – it’s not the Lionel Ritchie one, but who knows? They have, after all, done a cover of Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s Islands in the Stream. Closing the LP there is also a version of Kangaroo that makes the Big Star original sound more like Careless Whisper.
Ménage à Trois met at a karaoke bar in Manchester’s gay village where Flanders sang an Elton John song. Asked for his opinion about Manchester’s illustrious bands of the past, he says: “I don’t think about them, to be honest.” But he does concede: “Manchester is like a cold, wet desert. It’s harsh sometimes and maybe that’s why our music longs for sun and love and good times.”
The trio have escaped their grim environs to perform in Buenos Aires and tour across Europe (Paris, Berlin, Belgium and elsewhere). Flanders says audiences vary between “middle-aged women mouthing all the words to young gay kids dancing around and 20-year-old Australian hecklers”. What’s life like on the road? “Craig and I try and sample all the gay saunas,” he says. “Or we have fights over what’s the best Céline Dion song.”
Who’s their biggest celebrity fan? “Natasha Bedingfield sent me her underwear once because she thought a song we did – Be Right Back – was about her, after we met her in a Wetherspoons and I bought her a shot of Jägermeister.”
Where do they see themselves in a year? “In Peru.”
With their growing fanbase – one of their tracks has had 127,000 plays on SoundCloud – could Ménage à Trois be successful? “We are successful,” Flanders replies, somewhat tartly, finally getting out the bath. “I feel successful. I’m not biting my ass off to do this. It just happened. And I love it.”
The buzz: “Glimmering waves of yacht rock and sinuous funk”
The truth: They don’t like Argentina … they love it!
What to buy: Australia Part III is released on 31 March by Cracki Records.
File next to: Aldous RH, Ariel Pink, Wham!, Papooz.
Link: soundcloud.com/fourtreasure
Ones to watch: Vagabon, the Physics Band, Willie J Healey, Aadae, Tuvaband.
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