66 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
CLA
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uos have a way of coming back again and again. The
latest wave (in Classic Rock’s lifetime) kicked off in the
early 00s when the White Stripes and The Black Keys
dominated playlists and made blues rock sexy again.
The Kills added indie-chic shades to the mix, while
Drenge came bearing heavier matter, before Royal Blood crashed in
and went massive in what seemed like a heartbeat.
Now there’s The Picturebooks. You may have come across the
German blues-rock duo before, photographed sitting astride
motorcycles somewhere rugged, beards and biker bling in check.
So far so standard.
Or perhaps not. For a start, that biker schtick is totally real. The
Picturebooks have been building, fixing up and riding motorbikes
their whole adult lives, earning them happy connections with Harley-
Davidson and a memory bank of epic sunrises, sunsets and dramatic
landscapes across Europe and America. And while their songs are
catchy – as displayed on melodiously throat-grabbing new album The
Hands Of Time – their approach is genuinely unconventional. Their
studio back home on a farm in Gütersloh, North Germany, effectively
doubles as a workshop, with chains, bells and other accoutrements
filtering into their heavy vignettes of
primal rock noise, hooky garage-
blues and dark Stooges vibes. But
their biggest influences aren’t other
bands, they’re films, art and life
experiences distilled through
brainstorming conversations and out
into song form.
“Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch,
these are people that influence us
a lot,” vocalist/guitarist Fynn Claus
Grabke explains. “The visuals these guys created, we love this work
ethic... We don’t want to sound like a band that’s already out there,
we don’t want people to just listen to five seconds or even two seconds
and immediately hear: ‘Oh, that’s The Picturebooks.’ Always the first
thing that we say is: ‘Is this us?’ ‘Is this unique enough?’ ‘Is this
something we’ve heard before?’”W
hatever it is, people like it. Last year The Picturebooks
tore off roofs and battered eardrums while supporting
Clutch, Grabke all howling, head-throwing fire, drummer
Philipp Mirtschink pounding his cymbal-less kit like a man possessed.
The Hands Of Time (which Chrissie Hynde guests on) is a more layered,
studio-honed beast compared to 2017’s improvisation-heavy Home Is
A Heartache, complete with new instruments such as tubular bells and
pianos, without losing the “first take feel”.
And they’re not really ‘just’ a German duo, both coming from
mixed-nationality backgrounds. And with Orange County as their
second home they’re also West Coast bohemians – two millennial
vegans with a network of local arty friends, who’ll go running on the
beach at six in the morning as readily as they would fix up a chopper.
And they don’t jam, surely a cornerstone for most bluesy bands.“We never jam,” Grabke says. “We never go: ‘Oh I just feel like
playing music. Let’s do a little blues session.’ We don’t even know how
to do that. Both of us have never learned how to play an instrument.
Music is just a creative outlet that we’ve chosen because it felt right to
us to do it that way, but it could also have been a camera, it could have
been anything else that you could do artistically, whatever’s going on
in your heart.”
Despite their mid-Atlantic accents and globe-trotting lives, The
Picturebooks have small-town roots. Grabke grew up in Gütersloh,
home to a large British military garrison and not a great deal else. He
and Mirtschink, who moved over from the former East Germany, had
a regular turnover of British friends as their army parents moved
around. Combined with their own eclectic family trees, it sowed the
seeds for their global, open outlook.
“My mum is half-Serbian half-Italian, a little more Serbian, and the
German comes from my dad,” Grabke explains. “Philipp is a mix of
everything you could possibly imagine... And you know what?
Travelling so much and having that background, we’re all the frickin’
same. We don’t really like the idea of borders.”
So where did it all start? With skateboarding. Their teens were spent
watching skateboard videos and
absorbing the music in them.
“I remember getting a lot into The
Cure and The Clash and The Stooges
and all that stuff,” Grabke says. “I was
running around in a Roxy Music
T-shirt when I was twelve. People
were looking at me like: ‘Something’s
wrong with that kid.’ And
I remember Philipp coming into the
skatepark. I can’t remember if it was
a Ramones shirt or a Black Flag shirt he was wearing, but I knew: ‘Oh,
this is my guy!’”
Indeed for all the familiar grooviness in their songs there’s a DIY
spirit and a punk ethic to what The Picturebooks do, in refreshing
contrast to the more typical ‘bluesy two-piece’ dynamic.
“Yes, that’s all from skateboarding,” Grabke enthuses. “When you’re
a skateboarder you see the world so differently. You don’t just see
a staircase, you see what you can make with that staircase – you can
do tricks or come from this direction or that direction. And then you
translate that to everything you see. You try to see it from all these
different angles, what you could do with it, how you could reshape it.
“The way we build bikes is the same way we play music. It’s the
same way we skate. We make it until it’s the way we want it to be,” he
continues. “We don’t know how to weld, we don’t know how to do
shit, we just have something in our minds and a lot of duct tape and
failed tries. And when you start it and it barks and you sit on it and go
full-throttle and ride it around the block... it’s the most adventurous
and best feeling you could possibly have.”The Hands Of Time is out on March 8 via Century. The
Picturebooks tour the U K in May.Keeping all avenues open, German blues-rock duo The Picturebooks make music the
same way they build bikes and the way they skate: “Until it’s the way we want it to be.”“I remember getting into The
Cure, The Clash, The Stooges...
I was wearing a Roxy Music
T-shirt when I was twelve.”
Fynn Grabke
Words: Polly Glass