together and we’d been talking to this producer, who recorded it, for years going ‘at some point, when we’re in America, we’ll take a couple of days out and just try recording’. We thought, ‘OK, let’s try and record them with him and try and do something really spontaneous, do it in a really short time and try and make it as fucked up sounding as possible.’
‘In Time to Voices’ was such an accomplished album, and something different for you guys. Tere’s a lot of space in it, which kinda takes confidence, to allow that space to creep in… Do you feel like more accomplished musicians now? Yeah, yeah, I hate using words like that, like maturity or accomplished and things like that, but we are; we’ve been playing for 8 years, if we hadn’t got better then it’d be fucking wrong! I do, I feel like we’re better at writing songs and that record was a real songwriter-y record and the focus on that was about the songs working really well and about vocal parts.
You weren’t playing it safe either; I read a quote, which said you wanted to create an album that was only limited by your imaginations. Tat makes me think, translating that to a live show – has that been a headache for you? Yeah, we can’t play half the songs live, so we don’t! [LAUGHS] Tat might be a little drawback but that doesn’t bother me really, because we didn’t want to be restricted in the studio. We’ve got three records do draw on for what we’re gonna play live and we’re not gonna play for two and a half hours, because we’re not Bruce Springsteen. Some people got really pissed off that we didn’t just make a punk record, you know.
I’ve taken a quote kind of out of context, but I read that you felt you’d kinda fucked the first album up, but surely you must attach a lot of pride to that album? Yeah, you know we think we’ve fucked every album up, as soon as we’ve made it. We see flaws in everything immediately after finishing it, that’s the only way we know how to progress. I think if we ever make a record and we sit there and we’re completely satisfied with it, then I’ll want to break the band up, because otherwise what are you going to do then?
Well I like it, ‘cause your unrest is clearly keeping you creative. For me, that’san absolutely essential part of creativity, being able to pull apart all the shit you’ve done and see what’s wrong with it.
I was really excited when I watched Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and ‘It’s Getting Boring by the Sea’ was featured on it. Moments like that, they’re not ever ones that you can really plan, are they? Yeah, that is just a cool thing; you get this email through from your manager saying they’re gonna put you in a film and blah, blah, blah and you’re like, ‘that’s fucking cool!’ It’s especially cool for a band like us because we don’t have an American label or some huge management company. With us, the director really likes our band and he really wanted us to be in the movie.
When we spoke last, you were telling me how you and Laura always write together, but the track ‘In Time to Voices’, Laura wrote almost entirely on her own when you nipped out to buy wine! Is it sometimes good to give each other that space now? Yeah, that’s exactly what happened, and that’s true; you said it’s like a sign of confidence and I think that’s true. Now it’s like, if Laura’s writing a song, I don’t feel the need, like I did in the past, to put a bit of my stamp on it. We both allow each other to explore whatever the fuck we want and we don’t feel like everything on the record has to be exactly 50/50. You know, if Laura’s got a great idea for a song, and she doesn’t want to keep it for herself, then just put it on the record, you know. Sometimes I’ll bring something to a song that Laura’s writing and it’ll be better, but other times it’ll just restrain her ideas, you know; it’ll compromise where she’s gonna go. It kinda makes things more intense if we give each other a bit of space.
So looking at ‘Lost Kids’, it’s not a song that’s necessarily about the London riots, but it was written in the midst of them, during that hot, angry summer… Yeah, it’s just not as limited as that, as direct as that; it’s not supposed to be as direct as that, but we were just drawing on the themes of it and tying them in with how we were
feeling at the time. We were fighting, at the time, ‘cause we’d put all this pressure on ourselves to come up with this album. We were really beating ourselves up, trying to come up with these things and we got stressed out and we were fighting. It was weird ‘cause we were arguing and falling out and then all around us, everyone else was fighting and there was all this stuff on fire, and weird aggression hanging in the air. I felt like it was kinda directionless, like, that’s what the line in the song, ‘we’re not fighting to be heard, we just wanna watch it burn’, was about. It’s kind of just a directionless frustration, and I kinda felt like at that point, our band was like that; we were fighting for no reason.
Now Stephen, to finish on a light note, you’ve always been a good one for tour stories, having once told me you lost a shoe in a Subway in Norwich – - Oh shit yeah, that’s true! I did yeah; that’s when we got really ruined and couldn’t find our hotel and we were lying down in this subway and we were like, ‘we’re never gonna find this fucking hotel’, and both of our phones were dead and then we were right fucking outside it! I don’t know what we drank that night! Tere’s been a lot of that on this tour!
Was Germany involved? Germany is place that seems like it could absolutely ruin you… Yep, Germany – most of Europe really. Spain can be a dangerous place too!
Emma Garwood
Blood Red Shoes come to the Norwich Arts Centre on January 21st. For tickets, go to
www.norwichartscentre.co.uk. Read the uncut interview at
Outlineonline.co.uk
outlineonline.co.uk / January 2013 / 13
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