The Doves

Jimi Goodwin, the affable, bearded bassist/singer with Mancunian trio the Doves, leans forward in his seat for an endearing moment of honesty. “We were looking for a frontman like Morrissey, and we just couldn’t find one,” he says. “So it was like, ‘Jimi, you might not be the greatest-looking kid on the block, but you can sing. And this is about the music.’”

Goodwin is recalling the fateful decision made in 1998 with his bandmates—brothers Jez and Andy Williams—to remain a trio and cease searching for the mythical lead singer who’d eluded them for so long. “Once we realized that,” he says, “no one could f—in’ hold us back.”

And almost nothing has held the Doves back since they released their debut, Lost Souls, in 2000. The band is one of the most fêted to come out of England since the demise of Britpop in the late ’90s. Its passionate, atmospheric music has also brought an ardent following in the United States, where the Doves third album, Some Cities, is slated for an April release.

“We’ve got a bit of a fan base in America,” Goodwin says. “We can go to the big cities and play to 2,000 people.”

The Doves rode in on a wave of unapologetically emotive rock triggered by Radiohead and Jeff Buckley. Like Thom Yorke and friends, they resurrected rock’s passion. Lost Souls was about transcendence—reaching for redemption, reminiscent of that post-punk period of “rockism” epitomized in the early ’80s by Echo & the Bunnymen.

“We’re glad we sidestepped Britpop because we weren’t ready,” says Goodwin. “Britpop was a bit detached and aren’t-we-clever-clever. We were quite aware that we would never have fitted into that [scene]. If we’d put out Lost Souls a couple of years before, it would probably have got lost.”

The Doves were part of a wider resistance to the paralyzing pop-culture irony that had undone epic rock as Britain had once known it. Lost Souls had a quintessential Englishness: the shiver of yearning, the self-doubt and introversion of grown men weeping over liquid guitars.

What set the group apart from Coldplay, Muse, Six By Seven, JJ72 and other Radiohead wannabes was the depth of its sound—the use of beats and textures that drew on its early love of hip-hop and cool movie soundtracks. “We’ve always had that sampling, cut-and-paste aesthetic,” Goodwin says. “We’ve never been a straight-ahead plug-in-and-play band, and we never wanted to be.”