Interesting Wallpaper
Rockpools
CD | DL
Out: 16 January 2026
What ever happened to charming indie? Dan O’Farrell finds it in abundance in the first album by Southampton stalwart Pete Harvey’s latest combo, Interesting Wallpaper.
The genre-description of ‘indie’ differs greatly depending on the age of the person you’re talking to – the definition shifting by almost imperceptible degrees according to their month of birth. There’s the spiky post-punk bus – coming round into ‘almost mainstream’ fashion every 7 or 8 years or so. There’s the ‘buzzy pop-punk’ flavoured moped – looping the circuit more quickly but generally making less of an impression. There are others – I don’t want to exhaust the metaphor or your patience – but the most delicate vehicle on our imagined ‘indie-cycle’ wacky-racer track is the C-86ish/Go-Betweensy-TallulahGoshy-Felty-jalopy: a CND-sticker-adorned 2CV with wheel-rims missing? Or maybe the bicycle that Morrissey wheeled home at the start of ‘This Charming Man’? All of which is a very long-winded way of introducing the charm of Southampton’s wonderful Interesting Wallpaper, whose debut album is released on 16th January with a launch-gig at the city’s bijou (and also charming!) Heartbreakers venue.
Interesting Wallpaper have a name that deliberately seems to prod at notions of blandness – just how interesting can wallpaper be? – and their current promotional campaign features an IKEA-based-poster design, an image that the band enjoy so much they’ve added an umlaut to their name. The band sucker the listener in with this promise of soft-furnishings and Swedish-design comfort but – fortunately for all listeners – then display a much more playful sense of fun going on underneath the cushions.
Interesting Wallpaper are built around the voice and song-writing of Southampton legend Pete Harvey. A constant mover-and-shaker on the Southampton scene for more years than any of us care to count, Harvey has brought his ‘Fonz-like cool’ ((c) Richard Barrett) from formative band Up Balloon Up, through a brush with Hollywood-endorsed fame as bassist in Trip (Winchester groove-merchants who had a song in Terry Gilliam’s ‘The Fisher King’ a mega claim-to-fame) and, more recently, with the harder-edged Neko Roshi. His songs have always come laden with that scuffed indie charm – the vibe I was attempting to summon earlier, redolent of Brilliant Corners drinking Orange Juice at The Pastel’s house – and, with the help of his latest band, he’s found a way to refresh his song-writing chops and widen his canvas without losing the louche cheekiness that has always lent his best material its USP.
‘Rockpools’ is the band’s first full-length release and comprises recordings from across the three years that they’ve been together. The core band – Harvey on all manner of guitars and ever-buoyant vocals, Leyanne Coombs on sparkling co-vocal duties (harmonies, call and response lines and lead vocals on several tracks) and French raconteur Alex Parent on fluid bass – are joined by three different drummers (Charlie Brown on most of the tracks, Isaac Beer on a couple and, charmingly, Alex’s daughter Ruby Parent on two more) and a range of brass-players – notably Pip Borthwick on sax – assorted keyboard-warriors and another Southampton legend – Chris Townshend – on violin and recorder. The expansive line-up adds colour and variety and, despite its piecemeal origins, the whole album hangs with a pleasingly coherent ‘vibe’.
Part of this might also be down to Harvey’s recent song-writing process. He first convened the band to help him flesh out the first batch of songs he’d written for FAWM (February Album Writing Month) – a highly recommended online song-writing community where initiates encourage one-another to write 14 songs – that’s one every two days, maths fans! – throughout, well, February (the clue was in the title). This discipline has obviously suited Harvey well: all the Interesting Wallpaper songs contained on the ‘Rockpools’ CD have come from these annual bursts of creativity, and the band have managed to retain that fresh-feeling in their interpretations of the tunes.
Highlights? There is much to love here for any listener with an indie-flavoured heart, but of special noteworthiness is opener ’51 Western Road’, which borrows a ‘leaving the shared-house of youthful exuberance’ wistfulness from Grant Hart’s classic ‘2541’ – Harvey pays homage with several Husker Du references in the lyrics – and peppers the narrative with references to real-life friends, former band-mates and the music on rotation in those formative years. It’s a charming tale with an ear-worm hook – a great opener.
Special mention too for some of the more twisted left-turns the band take. ‘Rabbit’ features the first Coombs lead-vocal – smoky and spirited by turns – and a sax-driven, jazzy feel. ‘Tokio Express’ takes a humorously folk-some turn: sounding like an 18th Century ‘shipwreck’ ballad, the song actually recounts a far more recent sinking – the freak wave that hit the aforementioned Tokio Express in 1997, washing 62 containers of lego into the sea. Harvey’s lyrics have great fun with the lego-brick ‘cutlasses’ and ‘octopuses’ churning in the sea, as well as the ‘plastic daisies growing on the beach’. Elsewhere, another Coombs’ lead-vocal – ‘Window’ – featuring lyrics by another local-legend, Alan Gibson – grows into a proper country-rock ballad, building steadily to a soaringly fulsome chorus.
The brass-section kicks up a gear in the closing pair of songs – ‘Righteous Sound’ and ’40 Days’ – which both hit a pleasingly Dexy’s-ish stomp, but not before the prettiest tune on the album ‘Sunny Side Up’ shimmers along on a lovely chord-sequence to deliver a list of earthly pleasures: ‘numbers and minerals and chewing gum…micro-biomes – mortality – bike-wheel turning round/ ocean-liners – entropy – what you’ve lost is found’. A delight.
All in all then, a lovely listen and a vibrant way to escape the horrors of 2026 for 40 minutes or so.
The band are launching this album on Friday 16th January at Heartbreakers in Southampton, supported by two other fine local acts: Pegasuses and Watching The Buzzards – all bands worth the price of entry on their own. Tickets can be found here.
Follow Interesting Wallpaper via their website, instagram and facebook, and pre-order ‘Rockpools’ from Bandcamp here.
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All words by Dan O’Farrell. More writing by Dan can be found at his author’s archive. Dan is also on Instagram as @DOF_AND_THE_DIFFERENCE_ENGINE
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