Luft splice British witticisms with Berlin structures on “The Punch and Judy Man”

If Kraftwerk covered The Kinks, and the music video was shot by Wim Wenders but written by Ken Loach, it wouldn’t be too far away from evoking the sound of “The Punch and Judy Man”. “Each song is a little story, stories about England and stories about being in Berlin,” former TOY member and Luft frontman Tom Dougall tells BEST FIT. “The album is kind of half of one and half the other.”

As its title suggests, “The Punch and Judy Man” is full of classic British witticisms and observations; Dougall sings, “Behind your back the song’s begun, hear the trickster play the fool”. The lyrics tell of an English seaside resort from which trouble broods. “Luke Haines told me that there’s a film called The Punch and Judy Man, which I didn’t know about at the time,” Dougall explains. “He said it was the most depressing film ever made... there is a snippet just at the end of the song.”

The union between Haines (of The Auteurs) and Luft is one that makes so much sense, given their shared interests in new wave and anecdotal references to suburban English life: “Working with Luke Haines was great, we’ve got very similar tastes which makes it very easy when we were mixing and recording. I hope we work with him more in the future. We didn’t have specific references, we just said ‘let’s make it heavy and weird.’ We know it’s a given that we and Luke like the same kind of bands.”

After the quiet dissolution of cult-favourite TOY, Dougall moved to Berlin with his girlfriend Annie, who plays synths and provides backing vocals in Luft. The city provoked a new creative intrigue for Dougall which quickly translated into a batch of songs. “It was a really productive period,” he shares. “TOY had just broken up in 2020, and for the first time I was writing songs on my own rather than collaborating.” The rest of the band arrived in Germany a couple of years later before Dougall’s songs were developed into the work of Luft.

The climate of Berlin is clear in the off-kilter songwriting style and angular instrumentation of the track. “I think there’s something to do with the way Berlin looks and the atmosphere it has that you can hear in the sound of the music,” says Dougall. “I can’t quite figure out what that is but there’s a different atmosphere.” Like TOY, the influence of Krautrock is also apparent in Luft; the band play industrial-sounding riffs behind Dougall’s vocals. “Sam Davies, who plays guitar in the band, came up with all these great psychedelic guitar lines for the track when I got him involved.”

“The Punch and Judy Man” is a taste of what’s to come from Luft, with plans for an as yet unscheduled album to follow. “I wrote the song first and demoed it before getting the rest of the band involved, most of the songs on the album were written like that.” Dougall’s final comments tease Haines’ involvement in the recording process for the whole album, giving plenty of reasons extra to feel excited.