LOOK Around You

Truth can be stranger than fiction, and that's something Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate embrace on their latest album, The Uncertainty Principle. Moving away from sci-fi and exploring themes of science and human interaction, Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland explain why they took a deep dive into the history books to uncover tales of scientists, spies and nuclear bombs.

- Words: Gary Mackenzie

The British-Polish mathematician and philosopher, Jacob Bronowski, said in his classic The Ascent Of Man: “Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty”.

While Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate’s musical duo of vocalist and guitarist Malcolm Galloway and bassist Mark Gatland may not primarily see themselves as adventurers and purveyors of knowledge, their albums take sometimes esoteric subjects and perspectives on the human condition, and invite the listener to learn some interesting titbits about the world around us, the tortuous paths of history and ourselves.

Settling down in a genteel hotel bar in north London, Galloway and Gatland expound on their eighth full-length release, The Uncertainty Principle.

“It follows the history of the idea of uncertainty, in both science and human relationships,” says Galloway.

Gatland explains further. “In science, for years it was thought that the more you dug into something, you would assume the more you would know about it, the smaller and smaller you got. But the opposite’s true...”

“At a certain scale,” Galloway continues, “things get very weird and the more you know about one aspect of a particle, the less you know about another. I realised that, for humans interacting, there are probably not quantum suppositions, like Schrödinger’s cat, but I think it’s a useful metaphor. Also, we're living in rather uncertain times and in uncertain times there’s a tendency to go with the most certain voices, and certainty can be simultaneously comforting, misleading and dangerous. On the science side, a lyric that says, ‘So it seems that small things are strange’ is probably a reasonable summary of quantum physics. And the lyric, ‘I might be wrong’ is the summary for the uncertainty on the human side.”