When we asked audiobooks if they had any ideas of where they’d like to be photographed for this cover story, an email came back that said: “Would an alpaca farm in Norwich be out of the question? Or astroturf?” An alpaca farm in Norwich was absolutely not out of the question, but eventually a lot more Covid-impossible than a deserted Crystal Palace athletics stadium in south London.
I met Ling and Wrench nearby for dinner, who both greeted me like an old friend. Later, we walked to the stadium, where the video for their new single, ‘The Doll’, was partly shot, and where Wrench had visited from Wales as a boy in the ’80s with his father (a weightlifter turned track teacher) to watch Daley Thompson compete. Aged eight, Ling had run here herself, in a disastrous 200-metre sprint, a few steps into which she tripped over. She picked herself up just in time to watch the other kids running across the finishing line. Then she started a long walk after them – it’s a story she enjoys telling as much as Wrench and I enjoy hearing it.
“Well, I never in a million years expected I’d be back here doing a photo shoot,” she laughs as we step onto the track. “In heels!” And definitely not with audiobooks – a project that both of its creators predominantly consider an accident. “I was living in the moment when I was with David and just going with the flow,” she says. “I didn’t for one minute think it would progress into a serious thing, just that I was going to learn a lot from this guy, and, y’know, he’s got all the gear!”
Painting was Ling’s thing, and “is still the goal in my head,” she says. When she met Wrench, she had just started a degree in fine art at Goldsmiths, and today she works as an artist’s assistant, to painter Alastair Mackinven. The cover of audiobooks’ new album, Astro Tough, has been painted by Ling too, in the style of hangover TV hero Bob Ross and his ‘happy little trees’. The record’s vinyl package will come with a further ten works – one for each song – in case anyone mistakes Ling for a straight-up singer from now on. The same applies to her successful modelling career, which has seen her follow in the footsteps of her elder sister, Bip Ling, since 2014.
And yet something compels Ling to explore the possibilities (and frivolities) of music. When she first knocked on Wrench’s door, she was already in one unconventional band, no wave group Gentle Stranger. They remain a deeply experimental outfit today, yet Ling still longed for fewer rules and more freedom; to be able to scream we’re going to get our vaginas waxed. “All the ideas I wanted to do [in the band] before, David was just like, ‘Yeah, yeah, just go with it.’”
She started writing short stories documenting her dreams, only to grow frustrated by how boring they were. “I got so cross about it this other side of my brain said, ‘you know what, Evangeline, you can write whatever you like.’”
Her stories became her lyrics. Strange stories. Seedy stories. Absurd stories. Funny stories. Definitely funny stories. It’s a brave band that uses humour as much as audiobooks do, and it helps that they don’t take themselves too seriously. (“If I was an animal I’d be an alpaca,” Ling tells me when I ask my burning question, “so I had this fantasy of putting me next to one on the cover of a magazine to show the resemblance. They’re slightly goony and awkward, and I feel this is me.”)
“But it’s a fine line,” says Wrench, “and we have to continually question if we’re stepping over that line. Maybe there’ll be a track where we write a lyric and we’re rolling around laughing, but then three or four listens in, you realise it doesn’t stand up for very long.”
You could call it good, honest, grubby fun – for the everyday grottiness that coats a majority of Ling’s tales. Especially the ones that are preoccupied with sex, like Astro Tough’s toe-curling peak, ‘Blue Tits’, which starts with the verse: “Heaven / When I’m on the sand, I don’t see sand, I see many tits / When I’m on the cloud, I don’t see clouds, I see tits / When I’m on a boat, I don’t see the sea, I see blue tits / When I’m on the plane, I don’t see people, I see tits / When I’m on the cloud, I see clouds again, but this time they’re bigger, bigger, bigger… tits.” Wrench is a one-man Doors, and Ling a Jim Morrison who no longer believes in metaphors. Morphing into Art Brut’s Eddie Argos, she goes on to disgust herself: “I saw you / Grabbing her mighty bum, near your thumb / And you want to finger her / Urgh / Yuck.”
“You know those thoughts of, shall I go there? Shall I say that thought that’s just come through my head, or should I keep it back because it’s rude and uncomfortable? I’ve always been someone to verbally process that thought, and I’ve gone there,” she says. “It’s put me in lots of bad situations, socially, but in music it’s got a power to it.”
“You can see it in the audience, because we play that song live quite a lot,” says Wrench. “I can see it – people are thinking, ‘what the fuck is she on about?’, and then they’ll be like, ‘urgh!’, and then they’ll start laughing. It’s quite weird. And by the end they’re on board.”
‘Blue Tits’ is even too much for its lyricist most of the time. “That’s the one song on the record I have to skip by,” says Ling, “because I’m not necessarily ready to go there, mentally. I can’t even handle it myself.”
Perhaps no one really wants to hear their own voice yelp: “Come on baby, give it to me! / Give it to me raw!”