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Interview: Toby Rogers

“Brilliant Mind has five members, who play guitar, bass, drums, keyboards and the vocals,” explains bookish front man Calum Lynn. “We formed earlier this year out of the dying embers of naff twee poppers New Vinyls. We aim to displease!” Despite only having a handful of gigs and a two-track demo under their belts, the Tyneside-based quintet are already being talked about as potential ‘next big things’ among the region’s taste makers.

Ditching the multi-instrumental approach of their earlier incarnation, Brilliant Mind emerge as literate indie-poppers in the mould of The Smiths or Pulp . “We’d been New Vinyls for over four years and felt we’d outgrown the songs,” Lynn explains. “We used to use a massive amount of instruments which was exciting for a while, but sometimes the songs and melodies got lost by too much steel pan, stylophone, micro-Korg, flute, trumpet…And when our multi-instrumentalists quit to go to uni we had no option but to downsize. We really felt like a different band when we started practicing as a five-piece, and I was sick of the name New Vinyls anyway.”

Stripped down to Britrock’s bare essentials, Brilliant Mind are a tighter, leaner proposition than their predecessor. Marrying wry lyrics and sharp melodies, Lynn comes to the fore as a front man. Indebted in equal measure to Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker , putting the guitar down allows his instinctive stage persona to shine. “Well, I do really like both The Smiths and Pulp ,” he continues. “Especially their rejection of traditional English culture, as opposed to The Kinks and the like with the nauseating ‘cup of tea, red phone box, bowler hat’ stuff. But I don’t think we fit into that category and we’re certainly not trying to. We’ve been surrounded by The Smiths , Pulp and the like so the British indie format was obviously going to come most naturally to us.”

An outfit oozing creative talent, there’ll be a host of labels chasing their signatures before too long. “I thought the name Brilliant Mind perfectly summed up our immense collective intellect,” Lynn reveals. “It’s not actually a reference to the classic eighties hit by Furniture . Although that is an ace song.”

Check myspace.com/brilliantmindmusic