Eight Legs

Despite being either 21 (singer and guitarist Sam Jolly, drummer Jack Garside) or 22 (bassist Adam Neil and guitarist Jack Wharton), there is a melancholy to Eight Legs that evokes experience rather than innocence. Songs like Climb the Walls and These Grey Days speak of parties that ended in drunken disaster, text message arguments between estranged young couples, and even that perennial rock and roll topic, boredom. Yet somehow the music lifts the mundane teenage neuroses into something strangely grand, beautiful, and universal. Thats why Eight Legs found itself sound-tracking the Dior Homme Winter 06 show, despite being unsigned and having previously done nothing more high-profile than support minor U.K. rock heroes the Cribs. After being recommended the music by a model he cast on the street in London, Hedi Slimane fell under the spell of Eight Legs chiming, classically English romantic rock. The Dior show saw the two and a half minute These Grey Days reworked into a fifteen-minute elegy, drawing out a mood that perfectly suited the monochrome, aristocratic clothes. The gig pictured here, which took place two weeks later, saw Eight Legs, which is from Stratford-Upon-Avon, play in the much more conventional setting of a dive-y indie rock club. But the sense of otherworldly beauty remained, even in a sweatbox 20 feet below Oxford Street.