Tom fleming wild beasts poster

One True Pairing – aka Tom Fleming, formerly of Wild Beasts – has released a new single.

‘Be Strong’ once again sees the songwriter, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist working with producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy, following their earlier collabs ‘Frozen Food Centre’ and ‘Mid-Life Crisis’.

“You search the streets, trying every door. All locked,” says Tom. “The cold night stretches out ahead, utterly indifferent to you. Everything has fallen silent and everyone has gone. To gather up all the things that led here would take forever, but you have to do it.

“This song is for Jenny, who showed me that true strength is in tenderness and brute force is worthless. It’s a gentler song for sure but it’s heartfelt and means a lot to me. A love song. Things can change.”

Check out the new single below.

Discover the future of pop nonsense.

For over a decade, Wild Beasts, the Kendal quartet of Benny Little, Chris Talbot, Hayden Thorpe, and Tom Fleming released a set of albums that prevailed against the currents of musical orthodoxy. Instead, the quartet created a bespoke sound world, one in which the band’s instruments and the voices of Thorpe and Fleming were given free rein to explore their lyrical themes of lust, masculinity, hedonism, and their consequences. These were universal subjects given fresh impetus and meaning with each successive Wild Beasts release, most notably on the Mercury-nominated Two Dancers. Having decided to amicably cease working together in 2017, these records can now be heard as poetic commentary on the era in which they were created, from a group with a rare talent for making distinctive music accessible and popular. 

It’s not his best album but it’s my favourite, and definitely the biggest influence on what I’m doing now. He’s gone in for that big 80s land sound, he’s got a LinnDrum and all the big synths, but it’s a personal record, and lyrically it’s got as much teeth as Nebraska. I think it was quite a controversial record because it didn’t have the E Street Band – it didn’t have Clarence Clemons, for fucks sake! – and there are a couple of experiments that don’t quite work. But I think the core of it, especially songs like ‘Brilliant Disguise’ or ‘Two Faces’, are top-end Springsteen in terms of what he’s talking about, all that macho guilt and trying to be a better man. They’re more grown-up concerns, which I like, and they helped to guide the One True Pairing stuff to where it needed to be.

I’ve got an old friend who almost literally listens only to Springsteen who kept saying I had to listen to Tunnel Of Love. Eventually I did, and thought ‘Okay, now I see.’ It’s not a cool record – you can get away with Darkness On The Edge Of Town, that’s cool, and maybe these days you can just about get away with Born In The USA – but this isn’t one of the cool ones. But it’s a true record of where he was at the time, with a willingness to do something different even when he was the biggest artist in the world. There are things you have to have a reckoning with when you listen to Springsteen, a lot of end-of-the-pier America references you’ve got to get used to. But if you dig past that there’s a lot of stuff about manly pain, which I like. And I think where I am now in terms of my own [coughs] career – excuse me, I nearly vomited – but he’s coming to this as an older man, wrestling with what he does musically and in his life, and I find that quite resonant. He’s obviously got bored of slogans and big sounds – although it’s still Springsteen, he’s not made a Jandek record – and it has a personalness and a smallness to it.