The Boy Least Likely To - Biography
The self-professed “Winnie the Pooh of indie pop,” The Boy Least Likely To is a UK-based indie duo comprised of childhood friends, Pete Hobbs (instruments) and Jof Owen (lyricist/vocals). With a nursery gentleness, inherent necrophobia and left-field innovation—throwing a disco beat behind a fiddle and banjo, for instance—they have carved out a niche in pop music based on encapsulated childhood innocence, a sound that has over time whispered its way from the underground to the surface.
Having grown up together in the hill-covered village of Wendover in Buckinghamshire, England, the tandem gained a head of momentum with a DIY work ethic in releasing their flittering pop album The Best Party Ever on their own record label, called Too Young To Die. Via word of mouth and rampant blogging, the news of The Boy Least Likely To spread throughout the cyberworld and, in 2005, they became Rough Trade Shop’s eighth best-selling artist out of 100 that year. Since then, they have released a second LP called The Law of the Playground (2009 Too Young To Die) along with numerous singles, and they have toured Europe and North America using a host of childhood friends on the instruments that Hobbs plays in the recordings.
As chums growing up in the rural countryside some 40 miles northwest of London, Hobbs and Owen began writing songs while still in school together, inspired by the twee pop movement of the 1980s. Bands from NME’s seminal C-86 compilation of artists like The Pastels and Talulah Gosh were early influences, as well as Fieldmice, The Smiths and Orange Juice. They also cite Belle & Sebastian, The Go-Betweens and Dexy’s Midnight Runners as bands that built kindling fires for their own brand of “country disco,” as they would call their music years later. After playing in sundry groups together in college, they formed TBLLT in 2002, with a strict dynamic of multi-instrumentalist Hobbs writing the music and Owen adding the lyrics. They wrote flickering songs like their first ever single “Paper Cuts” and “Hugging My Grudge”—prototypical numbers that embody the idea of “all your childhood stuffed animals getting together and starting a band,” as they described it to Rolling Stone in 2006—in a bedroom using an eight-track machine. As they’ve maintained over the years, the writing process is experimental, with Hobbs philosophizing on instruments and Owen conjuring.
After a very slow and deliberate process of songwriting and marinating, The Boy Least Likely To recorded The Best Party Ever over the course of a year. Not wanting to be hassled with the major labels, they started their own specifically to release their material, and they put out the inaugural single “Paper Cuts,” followed by “Be Gentle With Me” and others. In 2005, they finally released The Best Party Ever, which featured the imaginative cartoon-figure cover artwork by Tim Owen, Jof’s brother. The album was produced by Bobby Charm, and it surprised everybody from the band members on, receiving tremendous boost from Internet media such as Pitchfork, which rated it in the Top 50 records of 2005. It sold so well in England that it was released in the United States in early 2006.
Later in 2006, TBLLT toured the UK with the likes of Razorlight, as a seven-piece using childhood friends on a variety of rural instruments, such as Adam Chetwood on banjo and Rob Jones on glockenspiel. While some of their singles climbed the UK charts—“Be Gentle With Me” went to #62, and “Hugging My Grudge” to #66—they also began the slow process of writing songs for the follow-up album, The Law of the Playground (2009 Too Young To Die). After two years of primer, the duo posted to new songs on their MySpace page as a teaser, as well as “I Box Up All the Butterflies” as a free table-setting download. To go along with the new album, the Boy’s released limited edition collection of songs that missed the cut on The Best Party Ever, called The Best B Sides Ever (2009 Too Young To Die). To commemorate the spirit of the album, they used artwork that was rejected the first go round too. The sophomore album—The Law of the Playground—came out in the spring of 2009.
In 2010, The Boy Least Likely To put out an EP titled A Fairytale Ending, which features four tracks, including two new tracks and “The Summer of a Dormouse,” which they’d released as a 7” a year prior. Their song “Stringing Up Conkers” from the latest album was featured in an Apple iPhone commercial. That same year they released a full length called Christmas Special.