of Eagulls’ remit to try to represent the working class? Yeah definitely, but none of it consciously. George writes the lyrics and it’s his own pessimistic view of British life. Having that very British identity as a band, which is what we’ve always wanted, we’ve always said we would write about what you know. When we first started the band I wondered what George would write about because he’d never done it before and neither had I. A lot of it’s to do with his surroundings and I think we provide a bleak outlook on how mundane life can be. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re unhappy, it’s just an observation on first world British problems. What do you think of Sleaford Mods who do a similar thing with their songwriting? Tey’re great, absolutely amazing. Tey couldn’t be more relevant at the moment could they? We saw them ages ago and they were talking about really real things and it’s struck a chord with everyone hasn’t it. It’s so important..a lot of people say they are brave to talk about the things they do but I think it’s more
p “Werovide ableakoutlook lifmon howundane
e can be”
honesty than bravery. It’s really good what they do, and I hope they never change. Te latest lyrics we’ve been writing are very similar to theirs but the Mods are less direct. Jason does it in more of a cryptic way. Your music’s quite indescribable in terms of genre, maybe post punk or garage rock? Which acts have influenced your sound? Te single most difficult question ever! It’s hard, I think we’re definitely influenced by the period from the late 70’s til the end of the 80’s. Punk’s such a broad term, even post punk is broad and it can really mean anything. I think people think because we’re a guitar band and we’re abrasive it doesn’t necessarily make us a punk band. Tere’s nothing wrong with that; I listen to a lot of post punk myself Once you’re under the banner of being in a punk band people expect certain things about your attitude and your writing process, like a loudmouth who hates the world, burn it all down sort of thing, but we could be backstage listening to Mazzy Star before we go on! Which happens quite a lot actually. Our new album will probably take us out of that punk pigeonhole. I read that on this new album you have moved away from a personal point of view and more towards the collective experience? It’s still all from George’s viewpoint but whereas on the last album it was his own personal outlook, this time we tried to step away from that a bit and look outwards and how he gets on with other people. It feels like it’s more to do with relationships, not in a romantic way, but more as in your relationship with the person you might bump into on the street, or the person you work
with..very brief encounters and how odd they can be. I wanted to ask you about the video for Nerve Endings off your last album…it won an NME award. It’s quite an incredible video of a pig’s brain rotting. How did you come up with that concept? Lyrically it’s about George suffering from anxiety, which he struggles with, and we wanted something that portrayed that. Tere are all sorts of thing going on in his head that he can’t necessarily control and one day he said it felt like his brain was deteriorating and he felt like he couldn’t do anything about it. So we thought the best way to do that would be show a brain deteriorating. We went to the local market and asked a butcher if we could
have a pig’s
brain..they looked at us in horror and told us to get out the shop! He calmed down a bit and let us have it in the end, we stuck it in our basement and put a timed camera over it. It came out way better than we expected ourselves actually! Did you go back to the butcher and tell him his pig’s head had won an NME award? I don’t think he wanted us to go back, to be honest! You performed Possessed on David Letterman’s Show. What was that experience like? It was great! At the time we didn’t really understand the gravity of what it meant to be on there, looking back we were pretty blasé about it. We were so removed from our comfort zone that we only way we could deal with it was to be as normal as we could about it. Our record company are based in Brooklyn. When we went across to meet them for the first time we took a walk past the building where they film it and they said “you’ll play there one day” and we laughed, and then two months later they emailed us to say we were booked in for January! We just treated it like a normal gig I suppose, and when we got there we didn’t think about how we looked or what we wanted to do. Bill Murray was on the same show as us so I have no idea how many millions of people watched it. Over in America it’s a huge show; we met loads of American bands who said “how did you get to go on Letterman? We’re American and we haven’t even been on it!” and we were like “oh yeah, we did didn’t we”. We didn’t really understand what we’d done! Tis tour is called the Ginnels, Alleys, Jitties and Snickets tour. What does that mean? Basically we wanted to do some warm up shows before the album but we wanted to go out and play some good independent places we hadn’t been to before. We wanted to do something a bit more interesting than playing all the same old venues that you would always play on that sort of circuit. It turned out a lot of them are back alley spaces, off the beaten track places. Tey’re all Yorkshire terms.
Lizz Page
INFORMATION Eagulls play Norwich Arts Centre on 4th March. Tickets from
ueaticketbookings.co.uk
outlineonline.co.uk / February 2016 / 21
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