Laurel Collective and hard work: A fantastic combination

Bob Laurel tells me that after this interview, he is off job hunting. Presumably not for an office job, as he sits in front of me in jeans and a long maroon cardie with threads hanging off the red buttons. He flicks his scruffy blond hair out of his eyes and rubs a hand over his beard. "I'm thinking I've got a head start on all those people who are about to lose their jobs. I'm not too fussed about what I do as long as it fits around recording. There's an understanding in the band that you can't take too much time off."

The 27-year-old is co-lead singer of London-based indie band Laurel Collective. No, it is not a coincidence - he has decided to change his surname from Tollast to Laurel for the purposes of this interview, he says, to promote the band. The "collective", comprising Bob and five other friends from school and university, has been compared to Bloc Party and Super Furry Animals ("Which I don't mind at all") and The Kooks ("if we find out who said that, we'll sue").

Bob Laurel performs with The Laurel Collective in Brighton in May 2008. Photo credit: Dale Harvey

As a spotty teen, Bob Tollast/Laurel would lie around and listen to John Peel on Radio 1 or play cassettes of Jimi Hendrix, Guns N' Roses and Led Zeppelin until the tape unravelled. He stumbled into his first band, Fat Man's Fridge, when he was at school. "They needed a bass player," is his only explanation for volunteering despite a complete lack of experience. "I have some self-taught musical knowledge; I learnt to play through listening to bands. I guess there's something to be said for musical naivety, for not quite knowing how to do it perfectly. That's how a lot of bands find their sound."

He picks up his coffee cup but stops before it reaches his mouth. "Apparently Franz Ferdinard's bassist couldn't play to begin with. Or Sid Vicious." The cup bangs back down as the words spill out, a nervous energy palpable.

Bob and his Fat Man's Fridge band mate Charlie, friends since they were 11, misspent many a happy day playing around with an old Akai sampler. Later at Royal Holloway, University of London, Bob joined a second band, Panacea. It was his idea to merge the two bands into a six-way collective. "I introduced Charlie to Martin and Olly [singer and guitarist in Panacea, respectively]. Martin had an amazing, charismatic talent. He was singing dark, morbid, soulful music and I thought it'd be so interesting to mix his sound. That required Charlie."

Martin commanded the role of Laurel Collective's lead singer, but Bob soon joined him at the front of the stage. He and Charlie were working on a song late one night, and realised they desperately needed some vocals. Bob stepped up to the microphone. "Ever since then I've been singing," he says. Now, he duets on most of the tracks with Martin: "Our voices are quite different, but I think we complement each other. You don't hear many male duets but then that's why we're a collective... It's not about ego-centric rock stars, it's about people trying to make interesting music."

When Laurel Collective finally signed to prestigious label Domino (Arctic Monkeys, The Kills, Franz Ferdinand) last year, it was a case of dropping a demo into the right hands. "We met the right person at Discovery - a talent showcase held at London's Soho Revue Bar - and that was it. We didn't know who she was, but she got us signed." She was Ruth Rothwell, formerly a senior A&R manager at Universal Music Publishing and now a consultant for Domino. She has developed some big names, including Basement Jaxx. "Much of it was down to luck. Ruth gets so many demos each week, she could have forgotten all about us. But she didn't."

Co-vocalist Martin Sakutu performs with The Laurel Collective in Brighton in May 2008. Photo credit: Dale Harvey

In the early days, Bob did not take the band as seriously as he does now. "Early gigs, I used to get hammered drunk. I remember being too drunk to really perform." Since then, Laurel Collective has made almost 200 appearances - most of which sober. Bob has been taking singing lessons for about a year and rehearses with the boys almost every night. "We've just spent the whole weekend in our studio recording new songs. The fact that we have the skills to record and mix our own stuff is very exciting."

Their plans for next year range from performing at Glastonbury again (they had a 30-minute slot on the BBC Introducing stage this year, watched by 300 people) to going on a UK tour in March. Bob likes doing the festival circuit because he could not afford tickets to anything other than Reading before.

Used to living on the breadline, Bob says that if Laurel Collective made any real money he'd plough it straight back into the band. "When you look at someone like Chris Martin with all his money and doing his bit for Fair Trade... it's great but he and Gwyneth Paltrow aren't very rock and roll. They're like a professional thirty-something couple living in Surrey." The coffee cup, contents now covered in a film of cooled milk, hovers an inch above the large saucer before clattering back down. He leans forward, grinning. "I'd like to do something more interesting if we got that big. I'd take the band to do some gigs in really off-the-beaten-track places, like Tibet. Or maybe we'd build a studio in the jungle. Of course humidity might be a problem, but we're Laurel Collective - we'd find a way to work round it."

Learn more about The Laurel Collective by visiting their MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/thelaurelcollective