Hong Kong to get second taste of British garage rock band Toy, the London-based five-piece who love working with others
Bassist Maxim Barron says the band, whose growing list of collaborators include Bat for Lashes and Younghusband, is looking forward to catching up on local music trends ahead of September show at the Mom Livehouse
Talking to anyone from London-based garage rock band Toy feels like you are tapping into the beating heart of the British capital’s indie rock zeitgeist. The five-piece band combine multiple strands of a 1960s-inspired psychedelic scene that has helped shape the UK’s indie movement over the past decade.
In one form or another, Toy have had an impact on an impressively disparate array of artists. From collaborating with chart-topping techno-punks The Horrors to forming the alternative supergroup Sexwitch with operatic goth performer Bat for Lashes, they have become the garage rock scene’s go-to guys.
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“When we get an opportunity to do something else, we take it,” explains bassist Maxim Barron, who goes by the nickname Panda. The collaborations, he says, are born “when we have a fun idea to record something that’s not [part of our usual thing]. The band members are always working on various things.”
Of course, none of this would have happened had Toy not been responsible for some of the most compelling indie music of the past decade. This is something Hong Kong fans will be reminded of when the band comes to the city for a second time to play at the Mom Livehouse in North Point on September 21.
From their formation in 2010, the band – led by doe-eyed indie pin-up Tom Dougall – introduced a pop sensibility to a psychedelic scene that had begun to collapse under the weight of its own synth-drenched indulgence. They came together in the southern seaside town of Brighton from the ashes of the much-hyped, but ultimately unsuccessful, indie band Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong. They quickly established a reputation for pop-informed garage rock, borrowing heavily from bands such as Kraftwerk, Berlin-era David Bowie and the Velvet Underground.
