Semaphore

Camden, London · duo — Theo Vane (b. 2001) & Margot Avery (b. 2003) · FARA Records

Semaphore are Theo Vane and Margot Avery, both Camden Londoners — markets and late buses, the canal, the smell of vinyl in second-hand shops, the ghost of every band that ever played the Electric Ballroom. Theo is the cool half: watchful, stylish, a little guarded, raised on his parents' Roxy Music, Bowie and Talk Talk records, and he writes the way he talks — sharp, oblique, withholding, saying everything by saying almost nothing. Margot is the warm half: classically-trained-then-happily-bored, in love with old analogue synths and the big emotional choruses of The Human League, Kate Bush and Eurythmics.

Theo was filling notebooks with lyrics and singing them too coolly for any band that would have him; Margot was building shimmering synth worlds with nowhere to put them. The first time her harmony lifted one of his withheld choruses, Semaphore existed. As she puts it, her job is to mean everything he won't say out loud — to be the warmth that cracks his cool open right when the chorus hits. Their influences run the elegant, art-pop, new-romantic end of new wave: Roxy Music, Bowie, Talk Talk, The Human League, Japan and Eurythmics — cool frontpeople who turned restraint into glamour, with a lush synth architecture underneath.

On stage they are the song's dynamic made visible: Theo still, cool, half-smiling, saying only what has to be said; Margot leaning in behind glowing keys, singing the answer, opening the room out on every chorus. Sharp and stylish, always charged, rarely resolved — glamorous but restless. Theo: cool, articulate, withheld. Margot: warm, expressive, magnetic.