Hi Chris, where are you today and what are you doing? We are in Lille, France and right now we have the afternoon off and a show tonight.


And I’m taking up all your time off! I can’t believe it.


You’re headlining Latitude this year! Are you excited? Very much so, in a couple of ways; it’s like a big combination for us because it’s our first big headlining slot in a UK festival, and also even more practically it’s the last date of this tour that we’re on. We’re doing a lot of cool shows including Glastonbury leading up to it. But we’re looking forward to doing this big headline slot on the last date of the tour; I think it will be really fun.


How does your music go down at festivals? Yeah, well - hopefully our music is suitable for a few festival environments, like, we’ve been here for a little more than a week and we’ve played the Isle Of White, which was very sunny, very bright, and people seemed to enjoy it. We played a festival in Germany on Sunday, which was just like pouring rain, but people also seemed to enjoy it. Hopefully people are into it in every festival environment that it can work in. Definitely I think the UK festivals specifically, everyone seems to be down to have a good time, and everyone is there to have fun, and if that’s the case, then usually it goes pretty well.


Vampire Weekend formed at Columbia University, but where did you come from individually? We all came from different parts of the East coast of the United States. Ezra and I are from New Jersey. Our bassist, Chris Baio is from above the City Of New York state, and Rostam is from DC. And then we all kind of went to college in Columbia without knowing each other, and met each other in different ways, and eventually that’s how we formed the band.


Do you think your different backgrounds have informed your sound much?


I would say maybe more that because of the type of people that would want to go to a school like that. That has informed our sound more. We’re inquisitive. We like to think about things and analyse things, and think about things from all over the place. Columbia is a liberal arts school, so you go there and study anything; it’s not really like a specific vocation. Yeah, I think being the type of people that would go to that college, and more specifically going to a school in New York City probably informs our sound more than Columbia itself.


Music seems to have been a big part of those University studies for you all, was there ever a time you wanted to quit studying for the band? Well, Rostam and I studied music, so it was kind of part of them I guess. I think ultimately, we all studied things that interested us. Rostam and me with music, Ezra with English, and Baio with Russian and Eurasian Regional Studies. I think we always felt that we could balance it, and it certainly wasn’t like we were touring or people knew the hell we were. Only after school did it become apparent that people were getting excited and we thought that maybe we can tour, maybe we can buy a van and tour across the United States and we can break even. So it wasn’t till after school that it came apparent, and from there, we quit our jobs.


In that way, I think a lot of your acclaim and the hype that you stirred up came before you released your debut album. Was that a lot of pressure, or did you ride that wave and go with it? It’s interesting because that’s kind of true, that’s true in terms of the


official release with XL. For the most part, that album was done about a year before the official release date. We recorded 10 of the 11 songs on our own in friends’ apartments, our apartments, whatever. So in a way I think that’s what people got excited about; it was the fact that we had 10 songs - it wasn’t just like 2 mp3s and then, ‘shit, how do we make more of these?’ We had this full album in our back pocket, and I think that in that way, we were touring and playing shows, but we knew that we had a full album of material, and that’s what people got excited about, and when it finally got released it took it to a different state, but we felt great about what we had done way before the record officially came out.


We’ve kind of adopted you in the UK (I hope you don’t mind!), both of your albums reached number 1 in the UK charts; does UK success mean a lot to you? Definitely, I think early on, or even before the band when we were friends, we would play music to each other and obviously have this image of the UK having awesome bands. Obviously shit bands too, but I would say the same for America; we’ve got good bands and bad bands. But thinking about Elvis Costello or The Beatles, any number of bands… Bowie. Thinking about the UK and playing London or Manchester or Glasgow, you know that was all things that you have this image of in things that you hope that you could do. And I remember very well flying to London and playing our first show and being really excited and I thought it went really well. Success in the UK feels


“Success in the UK feels great because there’s so many people that we would inspire to become from there.”


outlineonline.co.uk / JULY 2010 / 17


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