Divorce

It might seem as though things happened very quickly for Divorce. The Nottingham four-piece, who once described themselves as “Wilco meets Abba”, formed in the pandemic and played their first gig supporting TV Priest in October 2021. That led to them becoming labelmates at Hand in Hive (alongside the likes of Dama Scout and Tancred) who released their debut single in February 2022, the on-edge country-punk escape anthem Services. Their debut EP, Get Mean, arrived that December: less an intentionally curated collection than a breathless attempt at containing their first four singles, in and of itself a portrait of a band developing in real time – and one that earned them BBC Radio 6 playlisting and acclaim across the UK music press.

 

“We were kind of chasing our tails for the first few months,” says guitarist and joint songwriter Felix Mackenzie-Barrow, 26. “We didn’t expect to make another single so quickly after Services. We wanted to do all these things but the four of us were all working and didn’t have any money, we were funding it out of our pockets. We’d never been in a project before where people were like, ‘OK, what’s next?’ We were like, ‘Oh shit! OK – are we allowed? OK, really?’”

 

Part of the disbelief stemmed from the fact that Divorce have actually been at this quite a long time. Felix and fellow songwriter Tiger Cohen-Towell, 25, met as teenagers at Nottingham’s Television Workshop drama group. They were both playing music solo at the time – Felix a folkier project, Tiger often leading a group of their dad’s confused jazz mates through their self-written songs and singing solo at weddings – and discovered in each other kindred spirits and a shared taste for an inside joke. “I knew from the beginning that we were going to be friends for a really long time, and work together,” says Tiger.

 

They were both trying to make it as actors – Felix had bit parts in Vera and a television adaptation of Little Women starring Angela Lansbury and Maya Hawke – but felt frustrated at the way “being fulfilled creatively wasn’t really in my own hands. It led to me feeling really bad about myself a lot of the time.” Music, however, offered more instant gratification, and at 17 or so, the duo came together as Megatrain. They benefited from forming at a healthy time for the Nottingham DIY scene, with bands like Kagoule and Dog Is Dead finding some national acclaim, “but I think we were never totally immersed enough to be able to feel like we had any clue of how you would get to that point,” says Tiger.

 

On stage, they tried hard to make a sound greater than the sum of their parts, but were often left stressed by a lack of technical knowledge. “We’d turn up with equipment that was really cobbled together,” says Felix.

 

“We had a Bag for Life full of leads that were really important,” Tiger remembers. “And then we lost them all before a support show the next day.”

 

Just as Megatrain were getting going, the pandemic struck. Tiger was in Nottingham, Felix 200 miles away in Somerset, living with his girlfriend’s parents. Both were out of work – Felix’s acting dried up, and Tiger was furloughed for a year from their job at Nottingham’s beloved Broadway cinema. “I didn’t recognise at the time how lucky I was because everything was happening in real time,” they says, with the careful caveat that lockdown wasn’t as kind to many. “I had so much time to just sit and write and not get any perspective on it. But the sheer amount that I was working on songwriting muscle really helped hone those skills.” (they also did an access course that got they into uni, having dropped out of their A-levels.)

 

As part of a charity collaboration between their two respective projects, Kasper Sandstrøm (guitarist of Nottingham post-punk outfit Do Nothing) sent over an instrumental for Felix and Tiger to write lyrics over, and the  pair wrote the song John, about a couple struggling financially. It worked well, reigniting a spark they felt Megatrain had lost as momentum slowed. "It was a catalyst for us going: maybe Kasper would be a good person to talk to about a band because he was super involved and super enthusiastic," says Felix. He joined on drums and they drafted guitarist Adam Peter Smith, 32, who they knew from teenage drinking and gigging at Nottingham's legendary Bodega, and - after lots of long walks in that weird third lockdown - settled on the name Divorce