First of all, welcome back to the North.
Isn’t this technically the midlands?
Yeah but we’re north of many places. Welcome back to the East Midlands. How does it feel to be back? Full of East Midlands soul?
It feels great. Nottingham is always really good fun. We’ve done some of my favourite gigs here actually, at Stealth and the Social back in the day. Nottingham has always been an important date on our tour. I like Liars Club and Rescue. I like Rock City because its so wide and wherever you are you can see.
You’re known as being a band of myriad ever-fluctuating influences. What’s influencing you right now?
At the moment we’re all starting to think about our second album so we’re all dipping our wicks in different areas of music. I think disco is definitely something we’ve all been thinking about, especially after working with Erol (Alkan, electronic super-producer who produced the band’s second album). I don’t think we are going to go down that disco road but I think it’s always quite fun and interesting to borrow production values from an area of music which is quite alien to you. Disco is one of those things that people always joke about and people always associate it with hen nights and YMCA, but there’s also loads of amazing Italo-Disco and some good underground disco some from the eighties which has never really been celebrated very much.
So, having previously lived and worked with Erol Alkan, would you say that you’ve learned anything from him which you’ll carry forward on to the next record?
Yeah, I think so. When we first thought about working with Erol our thoughts were about that we’ve never really been a dance band, we’ve never thought our songs could do that, they were just pop songs with a beat that would compliment the song whereas when we started working with Erol we started thinking a lot more consciously about what would work on a dance floor. I came out of the other side realising that beneath that layer of a dance orientated song there needs to be a melody and something memorable. You can dance to anything if you try as long as its got that solid foundation. So I think establishing that on our next record is going to be at the top of our agenda. Just those songs which at their core are the best songs we’ve ever written, whether or not they fall into a dance category.
There’s a great deal of growth between your first album and your most recent release. How would you say the band is growing towards the next album?
When we started off we were very stuck in our minds on being this pastiche-y prog rock band on the lead up to our first album, then on our first album we found we had all these messages and influences and by the second album we realised that there were probably too many. We realised that sometimes its much better to say one thing really well rather than ten things not so well. You can say them in a sentence which is five words long but it may not really say as much as a sentence which is one word. And we realised that its often harder to work with less words to say the same message. We do wanna puish the boundaries of what can be called a pop song, we do what put ourselves outside of our comfort zones as well. To me the most exciting bands around at the moment are those like MGMT, Foals and Vampire Weekend. It’s definitely pop music but it isn’t pop music which is at the top of that charts, it’s resculpting the idea of pop music. They can still sell loads of records and sell out massive venues but they don’t have to sound like a Kylie record; it can sound like whatever the f*ck they want. Foals and Vampire Weekend are very influenced by African music and I think it’s amazing that they can use that foreign influence. I think its fun to bring back these forgotten influences into pop music. Vampire Weekend for example, I wouldn’t say that what they’re doing is completely new but they have the nerve and the talent to bring that influence back into pop music and lots of people are doing that, like Beirut can whack Eastern folk music into the mix and make an amazing record.
Do you think you’ll ever become satisfied in trying to find that perfect edgy pop song?
I think we’re satisfied in between writing the song, when you think it’s the best thing you’ve ever written, and then you put the record out and you find that you’ll probably never listen to the song again. And then after touring it for a year you’ll find that you’ll probably f*cking hate it. The rating of that song in your mind goes from quite high to really low in the course of a year. I don’t think that means that the song is shit, just imagine if you were an author and you had to read a passage of your back to audiences around the world over and over again, you’d get f*cking sick of it. So I don’t that that speaks for the song I think that speaks for you getting tired of stuff which I think anybody would. Radiohead only started playing ‘Creep’ again after ten years of not playing it. Good questions by the way, good questions. We’ve had a lot of the same old shitty ones recently.
How would you say that always having been such a tight knit unit effects you as a band and the way you write etc?
When we started we wrote as a unit a lot more, like William would come a long with a guitar part and we’d embellish it, whereas now we write a lot more on our own. I don’t think that’s a bad thing I think its good that we’ve all grown into songwriters which we didn’t really known how to do before. We’ve grown separately as songwriters because we’ve become more mature as people and more confident as people. Individually we’ve come a lot closer to what we want to say, when I write a song I want t say something – I wouldn’t feel fulfilled if I was just throwing some keyboard parts over the top of a guitar line. I don’t think I’d be doing justice to what the other guys are doing either because I don’t think that would be me at my best. To be at our best is for us all to sit down and actually do some songwriting, because we’re all songwriters, that’s what makes our albums fun to play, rather than just playing awful songs with a backing band.
So it’s symbiotic?
Yeah, good word.
It’s one of my favourite words. So do you know what each other is thinking when you’re in the studio?
No, we’re actually quite secretive about how we write. Well, me and my dad are quite honest and up front with each other and we write a lot of lyrics together, or he’ll write a complete song and I’ll help him with his lyrics. Generally speaking we are quite secretive but I think that’s quite cool because you don’t want to know what each other is thinking because then there are no surprises when you do get into the studio. I think that creative, not jealousy but, creative competition and curiosity is what drives this band. When I know that whatever he’s working on is quite interesting but I may not hear it for a couple of weeks, I’m always waiting for the moment when he invites me to listen to it and vice versa. It does get very competitive because me, William and Kai have all been friends since we were young so it’s always quite competitive but still cool.
We were talking to Jeremy Warmsley the other week and he was quite quick to dismiss himself as part of any kind of London songwriting scene. How would you describe the scene?
Jeremy is someone who we’ve been friends with for a very long time and I’m surprised he’d say that because we played on one of his songs about three months ago. I don’t think I’d call it a ‘scene’ as such. We used to do parties and invite a bunch of our friends down, and that’s probably the closest we’ve been to being part of a scene. I quite enjoy not feeling part of a scene because when you think back to Britpop you always think of the main Britpop bands, you never think of great bands like Sleeper and Shed 7. In twenty years time people aren’t going to realise that they were this huge bands that sold thousands of records, just because they’re buried and overshadowed by the bigger bands on the scene. Being part of a scene but not as successful as the other bands on the scene is quite detrimental so we’ve always tried to distance ourselves from other bands. My favourite bands are always outsider bands, Late of The Pier for example. They don’t sound like anything else, people will say “Oh this is like, the second wave of new rave”, but new rave is just a fashion term, not of those bands actually sounded alike. Late of The Pier are the modern day Roxy Music, they’re like musical chameleons. Bless them, they’ll probably never have a single in the top 40 but who gives a shit? The Ramones never had a record in the top 100, it doesn’t matter, they’ll still be remembered. So, scenes aren’t really that important, only to those bands who need to ride on other bands’ coattails but we’ve never done that.
Interview and photos by Andy Trendell
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