(First published in Issue 123 of Electronic Sound magazine, March 2025)

FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS

Kingsley Hall and Robbie Major are North-eastern duo BENEFITS. Combining a torrent of poetic spoken word with slick retro beats, their second album Constant Noise seeks beauty amid the “incessant barking” of the modern media landscape. Also: hobbits, dumplings and Pete Doherty’s massive dog

Words: Bob Fischer

“We’ve never had any expectation of anything,” says Kingsley Hall. “Benefits was a bedroom project, something to do in lockdown to prevent us from going bananas. But when we put the songs online, they got a bit of traction and they were heard by people we could never have dreamed about. Frank Black, Sleaford Mods, Steve Albini and Frodo from Lord Of The Rings. So that elevated us to something we weren’t really prepared for.”

“I went to Manchester to see Arab Strap and met up with on old mate,” adds Robbie Major. “And the night got a bit carried away. I woke up on a tiny sofa in his living room, and I was scrolling through my phone. Embarrassingly, I was searching for ‘Benefits’ to see if anyone had said anything horrible about us. And it came up with Elijah Wood. I thought ‘I recognise that name!’”

So what did Frodo from Lord Of The Rings actually say about Teesside’s newest agit-punk combo?  

“I can’t remember,” lies Kingsley. 

“I think he just tweeted the video for ‘Flag’ and said ‘Flag’,” shrugs Robbie.

“No he didn’t,” says Kingsley. “It was ‘Empire’.”

It’s grim up north. Actually, no it’s not, it’s really nice. We’re in a hushed corner of The Waiting Room, a cosy vegetarian restaurant in one of the leafier suburbs of Stockton-on-Tees. There’s a school piano in the corner, vintage maps on every wall, and long-term friends Kingsley and Robbie are sipping lemon tea and black coffee respectively.

The story of Benefits, they insist, is one of accidental success. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder alongside that burgeoning hobbit fanbase was Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, who heard the same lockdown recordings and pursued them to sign to his label, Invada Records. The result? Acclaimed 2023 debut album NAILS.

“He came to meet us in Bristol,” remembers Kingsley. “It was ‘Send the guy from Portishead, that’ll impress them’ – and it did! We said ‘If you want us to make an album, we’re going to have to write ten new songs’. And he said ‘No, just put out what you’ve got and fill in the gaps’.

“But the second album has been much more about actually making a record.”

So are they saying Constant Noise is a more cohesive collection? It feels that way, I tell them. A unified piece, with Kingsley’s state-of-the-nation monologues bound together by Robbie’s glossy soundscapes. Second albums are traditionally “difficult”, but this one feels slick and effortless, a smooth progression from the noisy fury of NAILS.

“I dunno yet,” says Robbie, modestly. “I don’t really listen to it much! It takes years before you can hear anything objectively and say either ‘That’s much better than I remember’ or ‘Wow, that’s really embarrassing – how can I delete it from the internet?’”

“Whereas I’ve listened to it so much that I don’t know whether it’s good or bad any more,” says Kingsley. “So I’m the opposite to Robbie. We’re the yin and the yang. The fire and the ice.”

“It’s like being on an aeroplane,” shrugs Robbie. “There’s nothing I can do to change things now, so I might as well just sit back and get drunk”.

These are complex times. If you’re remotely engaged in everyday 2025 existence, then a raft of vacuous influencers and sinister bots are constantly deluging you with a ceaseless tide of reductive bilge. In theory, the internet should have transformed us into enlightened beings, with the accumulated wisdom of human civilisation available at a swipe. In reality, has our surrender to the agitators and the algorithms made us more small-minded than ever? This concern seems to be the overriding theme of Constant Noise. The album’s opening line says it all: “I’m looking up in awe at a mountain of shit”.

They are both nodding.

“It’s like when you log into Netflix to watch a crime documentary,” says Robbie. “It thinks ‘Right, this guy likes crime documentaries – so we’ll only ever show him more crime documentaries’. Which is why algorithms are bullshit. It’s like telling a relative that you’ve enjoyed a glass of whiskey, and then every single present for the next five Christmases is whiskey-related. You think ‘I only mentioned it once!’”   

“I once told my nana that I liked dumplings,” adds Kingsley. “After that, every time I went round, I got more and more dumplings. My nana’s algorithm was very much dumpling-related.”

It’s not just whiskey and dumplings though, is it? Much of social media, it seems, now thrives on rabble-rousing and monetised discord. As Kingsley’s lyric eloquently puts it, “Each waking day a new fury / Each hour another scream”.

“That’s what all these fuckers are there for,” he nods. “Trump has amalgamated the worst, most money-hungry monsters on the planet, and he’s got them all onside. They’re all in this little club, and they all feed on hate. They’ve got so much power, and there’s so much they could actually do… but they’ve decided to do this instead. To destabilise governments and make the world a more miserable place.”

“In the earliest days of social media, only a small percentage of the population were actually using it,” adds Robbie. “So you’d get some headcases on there, but it didn’t reflect wider society. But then more people went on it, and the nastiness became amplified and now it’s easy for people to assume ‘It’s actually fine to think like that’.”

“But…” says Kingsley, pausing thoughtfully. “My mum is in her late seventies and she’s not on social media. So she has no idea who the Tate brothers are. And she couldn’t care less about Elon Musk, he’s just some weird guy who makes rockets. If you sat her down and tried to explain who any internet celebrity was, you’d be there for a billion years.

“So we’re hoodwinked by this incessant fucking barking on social media. But just put down your phone for a minute – or have the bravery to throw it into a lake – and go outside for a walk. Don’t look at Google maps, just walk away and find something. And you’ll realise that the world is actually beautiful. It’s not all hate-filled nonsense.”  

That quest for that beauty feels like an intrinsic part of the Benefits aesthetic. Kingsley’s lyrics are a poetic vision of a bittersweet Britain, echoing a lineage that stretches back to Larkin and Betjeman. The music is frequently gorgeous, with electronic maestros James Welsh and James Adrian Brown both now helping on production duties. Kingsley’s onstage persona boasts a balletic poise, halfway between Sunday morning Tai Chi and an evening with the Bolshoi. Their videos…

“Is this actually a question?” interrupts Robbie. “I’m enjoying it, mind. Please keep going.”

“No, we’ve tried to give everything a sheen of quality,” agrees Kingsley. “We’re in a weird, competitive market, and most labels aren’t going to throw hundreds of thousands of pounds at two radgie northerners who have no teen appeal and can’t work out how Spotify algorithms work. But we’ve tried to make things look and sound as beautiful as we can possibly make them.”

As I was saying, the videos. ‘Land Of The Tyrants’ in particular is genuinely stunning. Directed by Teesside film-maker John Kirkbride, it’s a moody tribute to the grainy British gangster flicks of their youth: A Long Good Friday for the Tik-Tok generation. Handsome buggers that they are, they both look like genuine film stars.

“We make sure he chops out the bits where we don’t look like film stars,” grimaces Kingsley. “But yes, that aesthetic was exactly what we wanted. And that reminiscing drips into the music as well. There are nods to the 1990s rave scene, to Faithless, Underworld and Leftfield. A lot of the songs are about looking back in a political sense – about people who want to take this country back thirty or forty years to some imagined utopia. You know, ‘There was no knife crime back then! You could walk the streets of London! Not like today…’”

“National Service,” shudders Robbie.

“And hanging. All the good stuff. So we’ve tried to reflect that, not just in the lyrics but by giving the music an old school aesthetic too.”  

Was it these accumulated interests – the quest for beauty amid the toxicity, the double-edged love of the alluringly vintage – that brought them to the attention of one of their formative heroes, I wonder? Contributing guest vocals to ‘Relentless’ is one-time scourge of the tabloids, Pete Doherty.  

“I think so,” nods Kingsley. “He’d heard us on 6 Music doing a poem about Stockton for Independent Venue Week. He was playing at [Teesside venue] Ku Bar, and Jimmy the owner texted me and said ‘Pete Doherty is here and he keeps talking about Benefits – do you want to come down and meet him?’ So I went, and he was really nice. He asked us to support The Libertines, but I thought ‘We can’t do that’. We were still in our noisy punk rock phase.”

“We’d just come off a tour with the drummer from Slayer,” laughs Robbie.

“Yes!” grins Kingsley. “Two weeks of shows with a band called Empire State Bastard, with Dave Lombardo from Slayer. Full-on metal and noise. But Pete was insistent, he said ‘There’s more common ground than you’d think’, and it was all the things that you’ve just mentioned.”

That Stockton-on-Tees support slot ultimately happened in January 2024 and led –  much to the duo’s delight – to further live dates with The Libertines.

“I had their posters on my wall when I was 14,” remembers Robbie. “And suddenly Pete was there in front of me with his massive dog saying ‘What’s all this hullaballoo?’”

“The Libertines couldn’t have helped us more,” adds Kingsley. “It’s interesting meeting people who are celebrities. They’ve been ripped apart by the media and managed to put themselves back together again, and it turns out they’re just normal, fragile human beings.”

They are both veterans of the Teesside music scene. Kingsley was once the frontman of post-punk outsiders The Chapman Family, Robbie was the violinist with dapper folk contrarians By Toutatis. They are keen to play down their credentials as a quintessentially Teesside band (“I think it’s more universal than that,” says Kingsley) but let’s face it – this isn’t a duo that could have come from Tunbridge Wells. ‘Land Of The Tyrants’ spells it out: “This bastard North, this stone faced shackle / And in the distance you hear that Etonian cackle.”

For Kingsley though, there’s an element of his Stockton upbringing that is woven more subtly throughout the album’s lyrics. In the autumn of 2022, he lost his dad. Suddenly, without warning. “You tell yourself it’s never too late / That there’ll always be a chance,” he murmurs softly on ‘Relentless’. “That thin layer of romance…”

The album, I suggest, frequently sounds like the work of a man who has suddenly realised he needs to get a shift on.

“Yeah,” he nods. “I think I’m still grieving. We were preparing for the funeral, so I was in a state of mourning and loss – and then the Queen died. That time between the death and the funeral is quite a weird time, and it can be amazing in its own way. I got to hear stories from my mum and my brother that I’d never heard before. But when I turned on the TV, everyone was just mourning for the Queen.

“And I know people were upset, but it felt like my loss was – in some way – insignificant and incomparable. I didn’t become hateful, but I felt like I couldn’t go through my own grief because everyone else was doing it at the same time. I wanted my moment, but I couldn’t even watch the telly. Or listen to the radio. Or look in a shop window, because all the mannequins were wearing black. So I think that made me pause my own grief.”

Has that loss, I wonder, given him an even greater perspective on the unexpected success of Benefits? Both Kingsley and Robbie, I dare to suggest, seem to be enjoying the experience with a degree of gratitude that was maybe missing from some of their earlier musical adventures. It’s really touching.  

“Definitely,” says Robbie. “100%. It’s hard work, but it’s something that loads of other people would love to be doing.”

“Totally,” nods Kingsley. “Obviously we’ve both been in bands before, and maybe I didn’t appreciate certain aspects of it. You know, ‘Of course I’ll be doing more brilliant festivals next summer as well’! And it doesn’t always happen. It can just crumble at any point. So you have to appreciate it at the time, and I think we do. Wherever we’re playing – whether it’s a 100-capacity venue in a new town or to 3000 people in France – it’s just brilliant.”

Constant Noise is out now on Invada Records

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