Hi Chris, how are you? I’m alright. I’m in Nashville right now; we’re on tour doing a little thing to get ready for Latitude. It’s pretty mellow, it’s not like full tilt touring; not too long drives, pretty relaxed. It’s super hot here down in the south.
Quite the opposite from the British summer then. You’ve mentioned in various places that you’re reworking older material for your new set? Yeah we change stuff around all the time. It’s funny, we’ll play like 30 seconds of a song before anybody realises the song that they’re hearing. It’s not a drastic change, we’re not turning it into ambient music, we just structure it in a different way that makes is more exciting for us. I always like it when bands do that, not water it down, but flip the song a little bit
Your new material has divided opinions online, how does that make you feel? Oh yeah, I mean I don’t give a fuck what people say online, there’s so much shit-talking, but that excites me that half the people wouldn’t like it and half the people are excited, that’s much better than a lukewarm reaction. To me it’s the most exciting stuff that we’ve done, it’s very in line with the way I’ve always wanted to make music, it’s bridging the gap between my interest in soul music and psychedelic music. We’ve tried very hard over the past few years to walk a line between different genres and to mix analogue and digital technology, and I think finally we’re finding that place. Hopefully people who understood what we were all about in the first place can appreciate that, and if not then that’s tough [laughs].
It took until your second album [Odd Blood, 2010] for you get any
mainstream recognition, why do you think that was? I just think that when a band first starts out, if they’re worth their salt, it takes them a while to get attention. I don’t really trust any of these bands that have attention from the start, especially when it’s from mainstream media; it feels like such a flash in the pan, it’s a lake that’s three miles wide but only an inch deep. It’s fine for me if there’s a certain amount of mainstream attention now, because we’ve never gone to any means to sell out or try to placate the mainstream media culture, we just make what we like and hope other people like it too. I think the more people that can hear it the better, so something like being on mainstream radio is a positive thing, as long as I don’t have to have a song that’s produced by David Guetta [laughs] You know what I mean? I don’t want to have to adopt a sound that is supposed to be hip to sell records; we don’t sell many records, we’re not playing stadiums, we can literally do whatever we want.
Buying physical records is a dying art, it’s no longer cost effective, which is such a shame, but that’s also why I love your band so much, because you still produce videos and art work and make it more
generation now.
So would I be correct in thinking you’re carrying on the projection of the past two albums and are going more electronic on this record? Erm, yes and no, I don’t really know. I mean the first album was honestly not fully analogue or organic, we used a lot of samples and synths, I think there was a certain kind of rootsy, folk quality that we were trying to reference, but not necessarily trying to fully embrace. People thought we were jamming around a campfire with some banjos or something, but we were actually sampling the banjos.Te new album is a nice mix of analogue technology and broken, cool drum machines and also new software type stuff; it’s kind of all over the place, but to me it’s exciting.
SOMETHING LIKE BEING ON MAINSTREAM RADIO IS A POSITIVE THING, AS LONG AS I DON’T HAVE TO HAVE A SONG THAT’S PRODUCED BY DAVID GUETTA.
immersive than just the music. Yeah, I think trying to embrace the Internet to put out music is an interesting way to do it. I mean I love the way old records look and I love doing the artwork for them, it’s a nice object, but you can’t just limit yourself to that, you have to put yourself into the YouTube
It must be good to release something that you know you haven’t had to compromise over? Yeah, we don’t really have any labels coming in, or any A&R people telling us what to do ever, they don’t even tell us their opinion half the time. One of the fortunate things about being on an independent label is getting to play the music that you like, and nobody really talks about how it’s going to sell. It’s one of the biggest things we were scared of, having some random A&R person saying, “You need to shorten the chorus” or “Do that this way”, it just sounds like a fucking nightmare.
Tere are some interesting titles on the next record; Fragrant World is pretty evocative, can you tell me about the themes of the album? I think the new album has a little more of a dystopian, anti- authoritarian feel to it. I think the second album was like our love
outlineonline.co.uk / July 2012 / 13
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64