We’ve been enjoying your second album since the beginning of the year; it’s been really positively received by us, but what are your feelings on how it’s nestled into this year’s soundtrack? I think it’s good; I think when we first came out, there was a bit of a buzz about the band, but a lot of the time I think the UK press get behind you – and they were behind us – but there comes a bit of a backlash from some people, not to do with our music, but to do with us, which apparently is a very classic thing for the UK press. We’re selling records, and people are coming to our shows and we’re connecting with our fans again, which is so cool. I think we still haven’t found what the sound is of Te Big Pink though; the nice thing about Te Big Pink is that we can always do different stuff – we can change and that’s something I’ve loved about us.
I LOOK AT BANDS LIKE TEARS FOR FEARS, OR EURHYTHMICS, POP BANDS FROM THE 80S – THEY WERE SO WEIRD AND WONDERFUL BUT YET THEY WERE TOP 10 ARTISTS
80s – they were so weird and wonderful but yet they were top 10 artists. Tey went off into so many different tangents and wrote really experimental music that was really out there, but it was pure pop. Yeah, we’re not so good at allowing the quirks to come through any more. Yeah, exactly.
You two, you know how to produce a record and you did it very well on the first one, but for this one you chose to hand over the reigns – what was the reason for letting go, and is it an easy thing to do? It’s quite hard when you write and record and produce a record, so I think we just wanted to try out a third set of ears and I think it’s really nice because although we’re not really precious about what we do, I find you can get lost in what’s important and what’s not, so it’s nice to have someone say, ‘that bit’s completely pointless’. A producer can just come in and go, ‘no, that’s crap.’ It’s a much healthier way of creating leaner songs, and I think Paul Epworth is really good because you’ll come in with a demo of the initial idea, and from there the demo should have the basics of the song, like the verse, chorus, the general sense of the song and what it’s about. Any
good pop song should do that, and it should do it in like 3 minutes, or whatever and you should do that as often as you can; that goes back to Te Beatles and any type of classic songwriting.
It’s very easy to connect to, very quickly and I think part of that comes down to the fact that you guys know how to write big hooks, and the ubiquity of ‘Dominoes’ is a testament to that. I think, in part, that comes down to you being able to embrace pop music and not see pop as a dirty word… Yeah, I think sometimes it can confuse people when we say we want to write a pop record, or sometimes people say they’re writing a record that could work on radio and stuff, but I hope people understand that what we’re meaning is that the idea of being a pop band as I see it is that I look at bands like Tears for Fears, or Eurhythmics, pop bands from the
on the first record, so we found this amazing drummer called Vicky Jean Smith, who’s one of the best drummers we’ve ever played with, she’s incredible; she used to play for M.I.A. and she played in a band called Ipso Facto. Ten we got in this other guy for the band who’s this like noise artist who I worked with when I played with Alec Empire. As for the live show though, we’ve become a kind of organic electronic band, so if you want to move a section, or speed a section up, you can do that live and react to the crowd live – almost like DJ the song live. We’ll click stuff to Vicky on drums and she’ll know we want to speed stuff up; we’re acting like we’re a four-piece acoustic band, but we’re doing it with samples. It just makes it far more exciting; it’s an amazing feeling.
Just to ask you a little about the live show a bit Robbie… We’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Akiko from Comanechi, who has drummed for you in the past, but now you have two new members – how does it work now? Yeah, with Keeks, she just wanted to go and do her own thing after the first record, to concentrate on Comanechi and I think we were so eager to write the new record and the drumming became a different thing than what it was
Emma Garwood
Te Big Pink are playing as part of the Playfest line-up on Saturday 2nd June of the festival weekend. For tickets go to
www.playfest.co.uk. Read the uncut version of this interview at
Outlineonline.co.uk
40 /May 2012 /
outlineonline.co.uk
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