“You’re just what England needs / You’re going to change us,” Florence Shaw intones on Dry Cleaning’s 2019 track Magic of Meghan. It’s a song she’s been thinking about “quite a bit” since the Oprah interview with the Duchess of Sussex aired. “I was just interested in her and trying to forget about a breakup. But I did have an ominous feeling about Meghan – a sense that it was going to go horribly wrong.”
The south London-based quartet’s songs are often eerily prophetic – creating something surreal, touching and hilarious that captures the absurdity of modern life. Their sound marries agitated post-punk with Shaw’s sardonic spoken-word lyrics – think Magazine fronted by a Beat poet who talks about phone scams and Travelodges.
The story goes – according to early interviews – that long-term friends guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard and drummer Nick Buxton decided to form the band in 2017 after a drunken karaoke session. “Do you want us to stick to that?” asks Dowse. “Because it isn’t really true. We sang Minerva by Deftones together, which was a bonding experience, but I don’t know if it really ignited the desire to be in a band … ”