Young Fathers Tell Two Truths and a Lie

Tell us which of these stories about Young Fathers isn’t true for a chance to win tickets to the EB Festival in Bratislava.

This Friday, Electronic Beats will descend upon the Slovakian capital for another EB Festival starring Scottish alternative hip-hop unit Young Fathers. Ahead of their show, we asked the trio to indulge us in a round of “two truths and a lie,” and we’re inviting EB readers to wager a bet as to which of the three stories below is pure fiction. If you post a correct guess in the comments section below, you could win one of ten pairs of tickets to the EB Festival in Bratislava on March 6, where Young Fathers will perform alongside Archive and Son Lux. Enter your comment under this post by Wednesday, March 4 at 18h CET.

True or false: The BBC has banned our song “Queen Is Dead.”

We were recording a session for BBC radio that included the track—which, by the way is about many things but NOT Queen Elizabeth II. It’s not that we’re royalists; on the contrary, we could give a flying fuck about the Queen and the flag. But anyway, after we finished recording, the producers came to the studio to speak to our manager. They said they couldn’t broadcast the track “in case the queen actually dies on the day of broadcast.” So, presumably, it would have been OK to sing “John Doe is dead,” but disrespectful to say “Queen.” Or perhaps they thought our powerful voodoo might cause a royal fatality. Either way, “Queen Is Dead” remains banned by the BBC, just in case.

True or false: We threatened to beat up a guy who stole our laptops.
When we played SXSW last year, someone snuck backstage and nicked our gear, including two laptops and an external hard drive that contained all our unreleased material. We reported the theft, but the computers were powered down and offline, so they couldn’t be traced. We gave up hope and trotted off to another party to drown our sorrows, and as we mingled in the crowd Kayus overheard some guy bragging about how he’d jacked a bunch of gear from several venues earlier that day. We confronted him, and apparently having all three of us surround him was sufficiently intimidating, so he ended up returning it all.

True or false: We saw lightning in Cannes that spelled the letters “Y” and “F.”
Last summer, we went to Cannes for a festival appearance. It was a beautiful day. Down the Rue D’Antibes flashy cars with Dubais registration were parked nose to tail, and out in the bay, huge yachts bathed languidly in the sun. We were scheduled to perform in a round hall situated on top of a large concert complex next to the sea. During sound check, we found that the system was a particularly loud one with a tons of sub bass. The sound guy knew that we expected to feel our toes vibrate, so he pumped up the low end. Outside, the sky darkened and a humid sea storm descended. Everyone broke a sweat as the air was sucked into the atmosphere.

Once we finished sound checking, we went outside to the balcony surrounding the concert hall. The sound system emitted a low rumble, or perhaps an echo, of low end. Suddenly, lightning flashed. In the dark blue sky, miles out in the Mediterranean, the lightning spelled the character Y…and then F. It was a message from Thor, tonight belongs to Young Fathers. Or, at least, that’s what we thought at the time.

Electronic Beats’ spring festival season will hit Bratislava, Prague, and Cologne in the next few months.

Published March 03, 2015. Words by EB Team.