In an ongoing collaboration, fashion designer and part-time photographer Hedi Slimane teams up with music writer Alex Needham to bring the underground to center stage

Photography Hedi Slimane  Text Alex Needham, deputy editor at NME magazine

BLONDELLE

Get teenage kicks all through the night with four whisky-slugging schoolboys

“We’re going to be a great band of the 21st century—honest! Because if we don’t, then we have to go to university with a prospect of no job at the end and a fuck-off loan that we can’t pay off. And you know what? We don’t want to be like everyone else our age.” So says Will Cameron, guitarist and lead singer of Blondelle, a band of four teenagers from leafy Surrey, England, with great hair and songs called things like “Washed White,” “Too Too Much,” and “When You’re Young.” More than anything, though, they have a death-or-glory attitude that means even if they fail, they’ll go down heroically. Not that such gloomy subjects regularly cross the minds of Cameron and his comrades Mike Deegan (drums) and cousins Rory O’Donnell (bass) and Sam Stewart (guitars). They’re enthusiastic participants in good old fashioned rock debauchery, advising their listeners to “lock up your daughters and your fine single malts.” The music is as classically rock and roll as their attitude, a fizzing melange of Iggy aggression and Velvet Underground drone, with sparkling pop melodies rising up through the murk. This photograph was taken at an all-ages show in a converted cinema in South London on a sunny Saturday afternoon, where Blondelle whipped kids not legally old enough to drink into a communal celebration of raucous hedonism. It’s true—they’re not like everybody else.

PINK GREASE

These electro-glam misfits have always been five years ahead of their time - until now

Purveyors of glam punk sleaze since 2001, the wonderfully named Pink Grease has been unfairly marginalized as too rock for the electro set and too electro for the rock kids. Looks-wise, they look like Razorlight channelling the New York Dolls. Sound-wise they describe themselves (accurately) as “hi-NRG pedal-to-the-floor cerebral and visceral bodymusic rock!” They come from Sheffield, an industrial town in the North of England once famous for its steel industry, which has produced an unusually high number of twistedly glamorous bands, from Human League, Pulp, and Moloko all the way to today’s vintage-clad sex bombs the Long Blondes. Like its forebears, Pink Grease (singer Rory Lewarne; guitarist Steven Santa Cruz; keyboardist Nick Collier; sax, guitar, and synth player John Joseph Lynch; and drummer Marc Hoad) creates its own world—a luridly colored dystopia of sex, cars, drugs, partying, and, er, sex. Yet Pink Grease, photographed here playing a typically ribald gig in South London, is doing more than just rearranging rock clichés. The band is hugely influenced by art-rock gods Devo, while its forthcoming second album is produced by Arthur Baker, the ’80s electro pioneer who made, among other legendary tracks, “Confusion” by New Order. With new-rave bands like the Klaxons and Shitdisco starting an indie dance boom in the U.K., Pink Grease might just find the zeitgeist finally catching up with it.