We’re doing this interview in honour of your Latitude appearance next month. You’re headlining the 6Music Stage, which is quite a prestigious spot – how did you feel when you got the call? Erm, very honoured! We’re doing Latitude, headlining that stage and then we’re also doing Reading and Leeds and headlining those stages, so it’s a bit, erm, bit scary actually, ‘cause we only have one album! Tose slots tend to be a bit longer, so we’ve got to work hard on making more of a headline set. Up until this year, you had the pressures of being a ‘new band’, but not the pressures of being an established band, so it’s quite different.
It’s a hell of an achievement in the time; it must be crazy... Yeah, it’s so new to us so we’re still sort of looking at other bands that are headlining and seeing what a headline band really does! What constitutes a good headline performance as a kind of art form? If you’re playing a club show, your audience is there, they’ve all paid for a ticket and they’re all pretty much gonna be in that room regardless of whether it feels like the set’s lost energy or not. It’s just a completely different atmosphere; they’re there to listen and to absorb it, whereas at a festival you’ve got this transient crowd, who are completely nomadic.
So the last time we interviewed you, we were very aware of the momentum of your career, but there’ve been some significant game-changers since. Now you’ve had a bit of time to digest it and reflect on it, tell us about the whole Mercury prize experience… Really, I haven’t had chance to digest, or come to terms with it yet. It’s such a strange thing because it was
such a massive, massive thing for us – really the only prize that we ever paid attention to. It was never really about who won it – I’m not sure what winning it really means – but it was about that shortlist, those nominations. Tat’s what it was really about, so getting a nomination, that was really the big thing – we were gonna stick on our CDs, ‘Mercury Prize Nominated’ and we probably would have got a different arrangement or something in HMV. So that was really nice, and winning it was really strange, really, really strange.
Gus ended up going back to Ted Danson’s house for some Prosecco! He became aware that Ted Danson was aware of alt-J and he likes the album!
I read a really pointless and unnecessarily negative article by Neil McCormick of Te Telegraph who suggested the Prize was irrelevant now, and he even suggested, “won by a band no-one really loves.” It may be a crass measure of endorsement, but 425K Facebook Likes would say otherwise. How are you at brushing off that kind of rare, but negative press? I think it depends on the journalist, really. Some of us in the band, we read a lot, you know, we read a lot of newspapers and we’re fairly familiar with most journalists, so sometimes when one journalist disses you, you just kinda go, “oh well, it’s them!’ I think sometimes if you find out someone you really like, doesn’t like you, then that
can be really gutting – that can be nasty – but it doesn’t really happen very much. And most of the time, we get things that are really incredible happening that are just completely bizarre, I mean, a couple of weeks ago Gus was meeting up with Johnny Flynn and they ended up going back to Ted Danson’s house for some Prosecco! So you get stuff like that; he became aware that Ted Danson was aware of alt-J and he likes the album…
Tat’s amazing! Just today, we had a tweet – I don’t know, do you watch Breaking Bad?
I LOVE Breaking Bad, yeah. You love it? Well today Jesse from Breaking Bad tweeted us asking us to play at his house!
Noooo!! Tat’s the BEST! So you get stuff like that where you’re like, “actually, if this person likes us then it doesn’t really matter”. I find that like-minded people tend to like our music, so it usually works out better.
‘Dissolve Me’, you’ve just released as a single – by listening to it on its own, benefitting from a bit of spotlight, it’s my new favourite track from the album. Do you think it’s important that songs get to breathe on their own? Interesting – I think so; I think it’s something you worry about a little bit, you know? You wonder how much you should push things to radio but singles are the way you do that. So I think a lot of it is about making different tracks from the album have their own time within public awareness, really, that’s what the radio us. It’s an interesting
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