the sound and the whole package, with those previous bands? No, I couldn’t have done what I’ve done now, or what we’ve done, no. I always wanted to do music and I’m sure if I hadn’t have met the guys I would have kept trying and hopefully had some success in some way, but the way that Greig and Magrao and Arista play, and more importantly the kind of connection we all felt when we played together was something that none of us had experienced before. It awakened us all in terms of ideas and sounds, so I definitely wouldn’t have done [it].
I read a lovely quote from an old Telegraph article about the band saying, “Few British contemporary artists are so cheerfully maverick” – do you think that’s because you’re not tied down to one musical heritage? Yeah, I don’t know really; I don’t even think we are really maverick, I don’t know… it’s a lovely thing for them to say but there are loads more bands that are more avant garde than us. I just think there are a lot of bands who come along who are very clued up on who their audience is, their social scene and the whole thing goes together and there’s just a very definite stamp of ‘we make this sound, these people like us, we dress this way…’, which is great, but I don’t know, we’re from all over the world, we all like different stuff, we’re all really different kinds of people, although our sense of humour ties us together – that’s what bonds us as friends. Te thing is, to me it’s natural, but maybe that’s indicative of the kind of person I am. I mean as a person, one minute I’ll be incredibly positive and full of energy and bright and then the next minute I can be down… maybe it’s inevitable that if you’re like that as a person, you’ll be like that creatively as well. I just get bored easily and I wanna express
YOU CAN SEE A TREE, OR HAVE A CONVERSATION WITH SOMEONE, OR BUMP INTO A WALL, OR WHATEVER AND ALL OF THEM SET OFF TRIGGERS THAT MIGHT THEN GIVE YOU AN IDEA MUSICALLY
different things. It’s weird because I can definitely see that if I was a businessman – especially with the Billy Joel cover that happened last year; commercially it was the most successful thing I’ve done, which is weird. I mean, I love doing that, but if I was doing that and going on tour for nine months of the year, sitting
at a piano singing songs, I’d be bored out of my mind! I think we’re exploring those limits of what we do even more now with this new album we’re recording at the moment. We had a fortnight in Norway a couple of weeks ago to record this new stuff and it’s great, it feels like more than ever we’re putting more and more of our real extremes of taste in to what we do and it’s just such fun.
I imagine you’re a marketing nightmare! But having said that, I think the one thing that I do feel more and more is that we want to make music that makes people happy. I don’t mean we’ll write songs that are all happy because some of my favourite songs are ones that you listen to when you’re down to give you comfort. I want it to be something that gives people pleasure, you know.
We’ve talked a little about your explorative side, which always works so well in a live environment, but in recording for this record, you brought in an external producer – did you need someone who could reign you in, or let you go? Erm, I think on this record it was a little bit of both, I think. It’s something that we felt we had to do on this record that we’re not going to be doing on the next one. When it came to the third one it maybe felt like we just needed someone to almost step in who wasn’t biased and so on, and just be like, ‘I think you should concentrate on this side of yourself’. We’d write a record and
then be like, ‘no, we should do something else’, and then be like, ‘fuckin’ hell, it should sound like this… ’ I think we felt like as a reaction to ‘Red’ maybe, we wanted to do something that was very much played as one thing, rather than jump around as we did on the last record. Again, you change though, I mean right now we’re working on our new stuff and it feels like it’d be crazy to have a producer there. It just varies from thing to thing really. With ‘Walk the River’ we felt we needed to work with someone we hadn’t been friendly with before just so we were out of our comfort zone a bit.
We’re very much looking to having you back in Norwich; it was a while ago you were here, but do you have any memories of our wee city? Not specifically the city because we probably didn’t get much time to see it, but I know Norfolk very well because I’ve been on a lot of holidays to the north coast with my family bird watching because it’s an amazing area around Cley and Blakeney and all that. Also when me and my photographer friend David did our photos for my solo record, I had this idea of it being in a rape field and he said, ‘well, I know some great places in Norfolk’, so we did the same thing and drove around north Norfolk for a day and found fields! So I’ve been to the area a lot, but I have vague memories of the gig; when you mentioned it I had one or two things in my head.
Emma Garwood
Guillemots come to the
Waterfront on November 15th. For tickets go to
www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk. Read the uncut version of our chat with Fyfe at
Outlineonline.co.uk
outlineonline.co.uk /November 2011 / 41
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