There was an actual grease trap. When Steve Myles first moved into the place where it sat, he and his partner’s dad had to empty it. Buckets of foul water went up and down the corridor while both of them were “boaking” from the smell. The box had one fairly boring job: sit between a sink and a drain, catch the fat and food before it entered the pipes, and keep everything moving.
Leave one alone for long enough and the thing designed to prevent a blockage becomes another source of filth. That memory ended up giving Pleb their debut EP its name.
“A grease trap is a box that you stuff in between the sink and the drain which is supposed to stop fat and bits of food from gumming up the pipes,” Steve says. “It’s a protective measure that works fine so long as it’s maintained. Without due care it’ll become clogged and start overflowing with foulness.”
For Steve, “Grease Trap” is the same problem on a much bigger scale. “We had a bunch of safeguards in place that were supposed to keep the rot from stinking up the well but they’ve fallen into disrepair so now it feels like the world’s sinking into the murk.”
He pictures the record as a cartoon of a leaky pipe, with somebody running up and down its length trying to plug one hole while another bursts open. The subjects blur into one another because he does not see much point in separating the damage happening inside a person from the damage happening around them.
“To me it’s kind of impossible to draw a line in between personal anxiety and societal collapse because the two are intrinsically linked,” he says. “As we get dragged further into the mire we get more self destructive and it’s easy for folks to become apathetic, angry and unwilling to help people that need it. That in turn is probably why the far right are having an easy time warping people to their own purposes at the moment.”
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
That connection runs through the words on “Grease Trap” without turning the EP into a tidy manifesto. Steve is angry about Trump, policing, technology, fascism and the growing ease with which people can be pushed towards cruelty or indifference. He is just as willing to point the same attention back at himself. Anxiety, shame, exhaustion and the damage people carry into their own relationships belong to the same mess. One moment the lyrics are looking outward at a political system, the next they are stuck inside a head trying to work out what has already been broken.
Even the bleakest parts keep coming back to other people. “Belly Up” contains the line “we are chained together”, and that is about as close as the record gets to an answer. Steve is not pretending Pleb have a solution. His argument is smaller and harder to dodge: people are stuck with one another, and giving up on that makes everything easier for the people already benefiting from the rot.
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
Leeds is where that argument gets practical. Steve calls the city “amoebic”, a place where scenes expand until they split into smaller groups, then those groups grow and break apart again. He has watched that happen repeatedly, and his favourite point has usually come just before the split.
“There’ll be a bunch of different but relevant bands playing on the same bill, folks from different walks exposed to things they wouldn’t normally get into,” he says. Those temporary overlaps are important to him. Leeds has a whole bunch of grass roots spots now, and enough crossover between them that he remains optimistic about what can keep happening there.
It was harder to find a way in when he was younger. “When I were a nipper coming up it were near impossible to glom onto anything here so we just had to make our own spaces and crews.” He would like to think that collective work has made things easier for the young ens arriving now, but he is not interested in pretending one generation fixed the mistakes of the previous one. “You spend so much time trying not to make the same mistakes your elders made that you make a bunch of new ones yourself.”
Pleb came out of that same loose network almost by accident. A few years ago Delia Fraser drafted Steve into Give over, their sludge violence band with a couple of other old heads. Last year their drummer Dan had a nipper, so Steve and Delia started Pleb to fill the empty space. It was supposed to be temporary. They proper enjoyed doing it, so they kept going.
The pair already shared a taste for slow, ugly bands such as Corrupted, Meth Drinker, Gawthrop, Moloch, Pale Horse, Dystopia, White Horse and Grief. Steve points to that common ground when he talks about why Pleb ended up as grotty as they did.
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
For Steve, there was also a long personal route into it. He has been mucking about on drums since he was 12 and says there has been at least one band on the hob ever since. Cattle, Groak, Khuda, Clenstch and Grub nap all fed into the sludgier end of what he does now. Grub nap was cut short when guitarist Dan Barter moved away to fulfil his commitment to Dvne.
He has also spent plenty of time in two-piece bands, including Khuda, Clenstch and Grub nap, and likes how quickly two people can get things done without sending every decision through half a room. There is another reason Pleb suits him. “There’s not many styles of drumming that can be done at the same time as shouting at everyone so this feels comfortable and familiar.”
Delia arrived with her own trail of noise and death metal behind her. Steve describes her time in Dreadful monkey machine as involving contact mics being smacked with a hammer. She has also played guitar in Mortuary spawn and Obnoxious concoction, and, in Steve’s words, put her “expert level rock skills to the test” in her biggest band Legal food. Recording skills and technical ingenuity came with all of that.
The place where “Grease Trap” was made suits the history around it. Their practice room sits in a warehouse next to an old asbestos factory in north-east Leeds. About 40 punks of different flavours use the space. Pleb share their room with Thank, Give over and Solderer, and Delia recorded the whole EP there herself.
Skreg were jamming in the room next door when Pleb tracked it. Nobody stopped the session to chase perfect isolation. Steve says they simply decided that if Skreg bled through onto the recording, “it’d just add to the chaos of it.” Drums went down against a ghost guitar track. Guitars and vocals were added afterwards. The live recording itself took two fairly short sessions.
They put two 4×12 guitar cabs, an 8×10 bass cab and a 2×15 bass cab to work in the room. Steve describes “countless hellish layers of squealing feedback and harsh noise” running across the whole thing, “as a punishment to anyone daft enough to listen to it.”
The guitar Delia uses has become its own little piece of Pleb engineering. It is a Fender Squier tuned to drop F#, with three outputs, two of which can switch to contact mics. She bought it unmodified from an odd guitar man who, according to Steve, seemed to lure people into his house with cheap guitars so he could blag them into buying his cigar-box ones.
Joe Kerry from Pest Control did the dirty work of modifying it. Delia had already ruined soldering for herself after repeatedly repairing contact mics she destroyed during noise sets, so that particular job went elsewhere.
The instruments were done long before the vocals. Steve took ages settling on the words because, as he puts it, “it felt there was allot to say in a small amount of time”. He kept cutting until the pile became something he could actually get through.
“If you’ve got the curse of a brain the fires off in multiple directions at once it can be difficult to build a cohesive argument but there are a bunch of things that I needed to get off my chest,” he says.
Once the vocals were finally there, Delia mixed and mastered the EP herself. Steve wrote the lyrics. The rest grew out of what the two of them could do in their own room with the gear and people already around them.
Politics sit openly inside that work. Steve knows there is a strain of punk culture currently pretending that caring about anything is embarrassing, and he has little patience for the idea that this is some return to a better, tougher period.
“In the midst of this “let’s pretend it’s the early 90s, you wouldn’t catch me caring about stuff, woke is dead” hellscape it probably seems loserly to be banging on about political stuff in punk songs. I was there in the 90s and it was shite the first time round so I’m happy cracking on, it feels too important to atleast acknowledge the shit storm we’re all wallowing about in.”
For him, “Grease Trap” is a pressure valve. He describes it as “art as catharsis, pure shrieking anguish, hitting things as hard as my body will allow, turning up as loud as our ears will take and hoping beyond sensibility that something sinks in for someone somewhere.” Pleb are also explicit about opposing fascism, supporting Palestine and backing LGBTQIA+ rights, women’s rights, disabled people’s rights and animal rights. Those are the band’s stated positions, and Steve does not soften them when he talks about why the record exists.
The same directness carries into their DIY heart. “The DIY ethos is precious and needs protecting with everything we’ve got,” he says. The threat, in his view, is the “corporate en-shittening of every aspect of art and music” stripping away people’s enthusiasm to keep making things. “Every tiny aspect is under threat of being snuffled up by the capitalist death engine but there’s one thing they can’t have.”
What they cannot have, he says, is the time spent in grotty rooms behind old pubs or between garages, where people play the same thing hundreds of times before doing it again for thirty people in a piss-stinking office block or mill building somewhere.
“They can’t have that because they don’t want it, they don’t want it because it’s got no worth to them. By being deliberately commercially unviable then folks can maintain control of their own brain treasures and say what they want when they want to say it.”
Steve takes that argument all the way to: “capitalism leads to fascism and fascism wants us all dead.” He also knows complete separation from the industry is difficult once a band exists online. “We try and avoid the industry as much as possible, it’s difficult in the digital age but we try our best to give it a miss.”
Human Worth makes sense to Pleb because Owen is somebody they already know from the same sort of rooms. They have seen him out playing with his own bands. “There’s no predatory relationship there because we’re all on the same sinking ship trying to heft the dead weight overboard and hoping for the best.”
Steve’s rule is uncomplicated: “If you can do it yourself then get it did!” That does not mean Pleb are going to turn down a bigger gig. They open the Saturday at ArcTanGent this year. It means, in his words, “we will never soften our edges or compromise on our content because it’s no one else’s business.”
View this post on Instagram
Human Worth also take a wedge of their profit and send it to a charity chosen by the band, something Steve calls “a proper nice thing”. Pleb chose Trans Leeds because, as he puts it, “the trans community is getting a right pasting at the moment and there’s important work that needs supporting.”
The same circle of people runs through the physical side of the release. Steve took the photographs used for the artwork outside a local food gaff, and he is deffo not naming the place. Their good pal XPosterBoyX edited and formatted them. Nothing about that part of the record needed a stranger brought in to make it look more legitimate.
Delia made the video for “You and Me Baby Ain’t Nothing But Cannibals” on the Nintendo 3DS she is obsessed with. Steve says the camera is “pure shite but it’s got loads of character to it.” That is a better explanation for its presence than any attempt to turn the choice into an aesthetic exercise.
“We haven’t just done it this way as a protest (which it is) we’ve done this because the end result is no less legit than the one we’d have gotten from getting caught in the spokes of the music industry death wheel. We’d like to show folks that swerving that thing is an option.”
“Grease Trap” came out digitally through Human Worth on August 7, with the limited cassette following on August 21. Pleb are not particularly interested in making any of this bigger than it needs to be.
Steve is happy enough with that scale.
“We’re happy existing within the pockets that we exist within and we’ll keep making everyone miserable until we don’t anymore.”
🔔 IDIOTEQ is ad-free, independent, and runs on one person’s time. If you want it to stay that way: DONATE via PayPal or SUPPORT via Patreon.
NEW: IDIOTEQ Explore 🗺️ Browse 15+ years of our archive by city, country, and style. Find artists on the world map or trace related sounds through the styles map.
Stay connected via Newsletter · Instagram · Facebook · X (Twitter) · Threads · Bluesky · Messenger · WhatsApp.
