HEAD TO BALLS
I think that in a lot of modern pop music there’s this weird dichotomy between music that is intended for general mass consumption, for like, people to dance to, and enjoy in public like Britney Spears or Kaiser Chiefs, and then there’s music for people to geek out to in their own privacy and enjoy in their own heads; stuff like Tom Waits or Radiohead. It’s very rare for one of those artists to be successful. Someone like David Bowie, one of the most popular artists of all time who simultaneously just made absolute head music. I do enjoy both kinds of music and my goal is to make music that does both. Music that gets you by the balls and the brains. That’s what I’m trying, but failing to do.
The labels ‘folk’ and even ‘folktronica’ get thrown around an awful lot. How do you react to these labels? Do you reject labels in general?
I don’t give a damn, people can call it what they want, as long as they don’t call it to my face. What critics find difficult is that I tend to make music that is different from track to track. Like I’ll have a heavy chorus and a cheesy R n B verse and then a critic will try to put a label on it. Or I’ll just get thrown in with the London scene of singer songwriters like Laura Marling and Noah and The Whale, and I love those bands but musically we’re so different. So that’s why its so hard for critics because I’m always striving to throw different influences into the mix. It’s very easy to just pick one of the things that I’m doing and try to apply that label to me, which I don’t think is correct but I don’t really have a problem with.
When we spoke to Lightspeed Champion he said it wrote this grunge record and in production it went through this sort of pop machine and the end result wasn’t what he expected at all. Do you ever feel the same way about your records?
On this new record I’d say 10 of them are so are essentially the same as the demos except a few technical and production details. Except for ‘Lose My Cool’, that changed completely throughout the whole process. I’m not the kind of person who fannies about with 100 different ideas for a song. If I have the right song then I have a really clear idea of the direction that I want to take it. I don’t ever find that difficult.
So it’s just sort of a practical evolution?
Yeah, this is gunna sound wanky and pretentious but I think one of my philosophies of the way I approach my own creativity is that I’m a real pragmatist. I try and do things based around the effect that they’re going to have on the people who are listening, and often but not always, the best way to do that is just to express that true emotion that you were first gripped by. Sometimes the best way to effect someone is to work backwards from the emotion you were feeling. If you write very direct lyrics like in track like ‘if it breaks your heart’ which is very clear what the songs about, and those kinds of songs draw more from experience than others. Songs like that are very easy to write because it’s just about being in love with a girl who goes off with someone else and its all just about expressing those feelings of pure hatred and abject violence. It’s really easy to get that out because we’ve all been there. It’s just a matter of writing it down. Then there’s a song like ‘How We Became’ which is the exact opposite, it’s about feeling so vague and whispy that trying to explain what it’s about gets me tongue twisted. The only way to understand is to like, take it line by line, like a jigsaw puzzle of an expressionist painting. You have these little bits, none of them make sense on their own but when you put them all together it’s still not their but you’ve got something interesting.
How would you best describe/define your own music?
I think that in a lot of modern pop music there’s this weird dichotomy between music that is intended for general mass consumption, for like, people to dance to, and enjoy in public like Britney Spears or Kaiser Chiefs, and then there’s music for people to geek out to in their own privacy and enjoy in their own heads; stuff like Tom Waits or Radiohead. It’s very rare for one of those artists to be successful. Someone like David Bowie, one of the most popular artists of all time who simultaneously just made absolute head music. I do enjoy both kinds of music and my goal is to make music that does both. Music that gets you by the balls and the brains. That’s what I’m trying, but failing to do.
The labels ‘folk’ and even ‘folktronica’ get thrown around an awful lot. How do you react to these labels? Do you reject labels in general?
I don’t give a damn, people can call it what they want, as long as they don’t call it to my face. What critics find difficult is that I tend to make music that is different from track to track. Like I’ll have a heavy chorus and a cheesy R n B verse and then a critic will try to put a label on it. Or I’ll just get thrown in with the London scene of singer songwriters like Laura Marling and Noah and The Whale, and I love those bands but musically we’re so different. So that’s why its so hard for critics because I’m always striving to throw different influences into the mix. It’s very easy to just pick one of the things that I’m doing and try to apply that label to me, which I don’t think is correct but I don’t really have a problem with.
When we spoke to Lightspeed Champion he said it wrote this grunge record and in production it went through this sort of pop machine and the end result wasn’t what he expected at all. Do you ever feel the same way about your records?
On this new record I’d say 10 of them are so are essentially the same as the demos except a few technical and production details. Except for ‘Lose My Cool’, that changed completely throughout the whole process. I’m not the kind of person who fannies about with 100 different ideas for a song. If I have the right song then I have a really clear idea of the direction that I want to take it. I don’t ever find that difficult.
So it’s just sort of a practical evolution?
Yeah, this is gunna sound wanky and pretentious but I think one of my philosophies of the way I approach my own creativity is that I’m a real pragmatist. I try and do things based around the effect that they’re going to have on the people who are listening, and often but not always, the best way to do that is just to express that true emotion that you were first gripped by. Sometimes the best way to effect someone is to work backwards from the emotion you were feeling. If you write very direct lyrics like in track like ‘if it breaks your heart’ which is very clear what the songs about, and those kinds of songs draw more from experience than others. Songs like that are very easy to write because it’s just about being in love with a girl who goes off with someone else and its all just about expressing those feelings of pure hatred and abject violence. It’s really easy to get that out because we’ve all been there. It’s just a matter of writing it down. Then there’s a song like ‘How We Became’ which is the exact opposite, it’s about feeling so vague and whispy that trying to explain what it’s about gets me tongue twisted. The only way to understand is to like, take it line by line, like a jigsaw puzzle of an expressionist painting. You have these little bits, none of them make sense on their own but when you put them all together it’s still not their but you’ve got something interesting.
How do you translate the electronic elements from songs into a live environment?
I’ve got through a lot of permutations live. I used to think that my job was to try and challenge the audience when playing live. I used to want to make people think abut what they’ve done and question their values! All of this ridiculous and preposterous stuff that was never going to happen. Now my aim is just to leave people feeling like they’ve had a damn good time. Fuck it man, we all need a good time. We don’t make any effort at all to translate the electronic elements because life is too short, we just play the songs. I think it’s just boring to watch a band playing to a backing track realising that half of what you’re hearing is coming from a little chip. So we just play the songs and have a good time. There’s also no soul of character. A laptop might not understand that you want to play the 2nd verse twice or whatever for whatever reason. If you’re going to do an electronic show then you need to have someone that’s really really good at it as well as taking advantage of all aspects of technology. The set up we have is so wonderfully precise. We can fit everything we’re doing into one Range Rover. All of our guitars and amps and everything. In the current musical climate no one is spending any money; the labels have all locked up their piggy banks and the venues are halving everyone’s’ fees and doing it this way I’m only losing like £10 a gig. I know that’s a very everyday pragmatic thing that shouldn’t effect art, but if I wanted to put on an amazing show with like lights blazing and fireworks going off, that would be amazing, but let’s be realistic that’s not going to happen when I’m playing to about forty people at the Bodega. The important thing is to play the songs as well as you can fucking play them, and leave people with a warm feeling at the root of their spine. Which I could achieve by blowing gently but that’s not very practical and I’m a very practical person.
Would you say being half French is at all intrinsic to your identity as a musician?
No.
What role would you say narrative structure plays in your songs?
I’d say about 30% of my songs are stories with a beginning, a middle and an end, and you know 70% of them aren’t. Stories in songs are great but it would just be boring if all of your songs were stories, well it wouldn’t be boring but I couldn’t do it. I mean, one day I might do an acoustic album where every song is a story but not now. I think it’s a shame that more people don’t write songs where you can actually follow what’s going on. I mean, if you listen to an Oasis song, it’s literally just a bunch of words that rhyme. I admire artists like Joanna Newsom, you’re induced and you dive in and absorb the lyrics and there’s always a story there. There’s always something happening and that’s great. Then there’s a band like Radiohead, who aren’t doing that, they’re just expressing a feeling or intangibles and that’s great too, and I love doing both.
I’ve got through a lot of permutations live. I used to think that my job was to try and challenge the audience when playing live. I used to want to make people think abut what they’ve done and question their values! All of this ridiculous and preposterous stuff that was never going to happen. Now my aim is just to leave people feeling like they’ve had a damn good time. Fuck it man, we all need a good time. We don’t make any effort at all to translate the electronic elements because life is too short, we just play the songs. I think it’s just boring to watch a band playing to a backing track realising that half of what you’re hearing is coming from a little chip. So we just play the songs and have a good time. There’s also no soul of character. A laptop might not understand that you want to play the 2nd verse twice or whatever for whatever reason. If you’re going to do an electronic show then you need to have someone that’s really really good at it as well as taking advantage of all aspects of technology. The set up we have is so wonderfully precise. We can fit everything we’re doing into one Range Rover. All of our guitars and amps and everything. In the current musical climate no one is spending any money; the labels have all locked up their piggy banks and the venues are halving everyone’s’ fees and doing it this way I’m only losing like £10 a gig. I know that’s a very everyday pragmatic thing that shouldn’t effect art, but if I wanted to put on an amazing show with like lights blazing and fireworks going off, that would be amazing, but let’s be realistic that’s not going to happen when I’m playing to about forty people at the Bodega. The important thing is to play the songs as well as you can fucking play them, and leave people with a warm feeling at the root of their spine. Which I could achieve by blowing gently but that’s not very practical and I’m a very practical person.
Would you say being half French is at all intrinsic to your identity as a musician?
No.
What role would you say narrative structure plays in your songs?
I’d say about 30% of my songs are stories with a beginning, a middle and an end, and you know 70% of them aren’t. Stories in songs are great but it would just be boring if all of your songs were stories, well it wouldn’t be boring but I couldn’t do it. I mean, one day I might do an acoustic album where every song is a story but not now. I think it’s a shame that more people don’t write songs where you can actually follow what’s going on. I mean, if you listen to an Oasis song, it’s literally just a bunch of words that rhyme. I admire artists like Joanna Newsom, you’re induced and you dive in and absorb the lyrics and there’s always a story there. There’s always something happening and that’s great. Then there’s a band like Radiohead, who aren’t doing that, they’re just expressing a feeling or intangibles and that’s great too, and I love doing both.
When you do write songs of a narrative nature is it largely instinctual or do you draw much influence from other great narrative song writers like Tom Waits, Nick Cave etc.?
I don’t directly draw inspiration. The way I write those songs is always accidental. I write a song that I’d like to hear in a song, then another, then I realise that say these three lines go together like this, where’s it going to go from here? A story is like a mathematical formula, there’s only one way to connect it and that’s with an equals sign. I write the more emotive songs in the exact same way. A song like ‘Crane Flies’ I knew exactly what I was trying to express and I just happened to have the right words.
What did you learn from playing with Daniel Johnston?
I didn’t learn anything that I can apply to my own music. It was a wonderful experience but it wasn’t in any way a learning experience. The guy’s just a performer you know, he does what he does and he can’t control it. He’s a wonderful human being but a mentor.
Your recent single ‘Boat Song’, is a duet with Emmy The Great, how did you come to work with her? She’s also recorded with Lightspeed Champion among others. Is there some kind of relationship/network of British singer songwriters like Lightspeed Champion, Patrick Wolf, Laura Marling etc?
We’re old friends, we’ve known each other since we were both unsigned. I recorded a single with her back in 2004 and then last year we recorded a Christmas EP over at my house. Then, I think on the new album, I did the string arrangements for a few songs, but I’m not even sure if they made it onto the album. She was all over my first album as well, she did a lot of backing vocals. She’s a great songwriter, a great performer and another wonderful human being. I’d love to work with her again. For the single, I was round at her house and she had a verse and we strung something together and I recorded it for a laugh, thinking it would be a B-side then the label wanted it as a single and that’s how it happened. We’ve got another song we wrote together about sloths but that was kind of a joke.
Emmy and I are great friends, Johnny Flynn and I used to live together, I’ve known Mystery Jets and Noah And The Whale for yonks, Slow Club are good friends. Etc. etc. I know all these guys and I love what they’re doing and I’m proud to be counted among them, but I see that something most of them have in common is that they’re all based around acoustic guitars and all serve a pretty strong folk element, I occasionally do a bit of that but I don’t really see those elements as being integral to my music, it’s just another part of my musical palette. So I don’t really see myself as part of it, although I do love everything that’s going on in that scene at the moment. One of my favourite bands that might be counted among them at the moment is a band called Gossamer Albatross (http://www.myspace.com/gossameralbatross) who are a bunch of eighteen year olds from Hereford.
Any other bands you’d recommend?
There’s a band called Three Trapped Tigers (www.myspace.com/threetrappedtigers)– they make the most fucked up electronica imaginable. You listen to them and you think it’s all synthesizers and drum machines but they actually use piano and live drum kits to make most of their sound. There’s a band called Akira – they’re this really crazy glitch-pop band, really funny, really out there, just great melodies. House of Strange are a great psychedelic-prog band from East London.
Interview by Andy Trendell Photos by Lucy Bridger(
www.flickr.com/lucybridger)
www.flickr.com/lucybridger)
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