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You mentioned visuals in some of the songs you listed, the album like you said paints a Blue Sky in Your Head, is it all about the mood? P: That’s what I think about Vangelis, and Nils Frahm- it’s very visual. It’s emotional music, and there’s not a lot of music that you can listen to that is emotional that still works to do that job. I must have listened to the Blade Runner soundtrack about one hundred times when making the record. I suppose familiarity as well, it really centers you. Something you know that you can listen to over and over again, you’re all over the place so you put it on and it will anchor me and settle me down.
T: I totally agree because I’m the same. I’d actually say I swing the other way, the formation of 5 records that he listens to; I don’t listen to any records. It doesn’t mean I’m away from music but what I do, and I’m very aware of this, is I practice and play the piano a lot. Just the feel and mood for music, I let it all come from that. When you make your own music, if you’re not careful, subconsciously you take on board something else when you listen. Before making anything, you listen to things you normally would, but the moment you get to creating, I switch it all off, I don’t listen to anything at all.
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The tour isn’t until November, but have you started to think about how you’re going to be taking it to the stage? Will you create a Blue Sky in Your Head world on tour? P: The record would have been out for about six months by then, so you could if you wanted to weight it heavily in favour of Blue Sky in Your Head, but what I think we will end up doing is playing all of the big tunes from Ocean Drive, Postcards from Heaven, Whatever Gets You Through The Day, and this one. We’ll play three or four from this one, ‘Lifted’, ‘Ocean Drive’, ‘Loving Every Minute’, ‘Goodbye Heartbreak’, ‘High’, ‘Lost in Space’, ‘Raincloud’, ‘Question of Faith’, ‘Postcards from Heaven’, ‘(I wish I knew How It Would Feel to Be) Free/ One’, ‘Run’, ‘Happy’, ‘Clouds’, ‘Live Again’, ‘My Salvation’, maybe a couple others from the new album. Then you’ve got to think, when you’re playing it, you’ve got to practice it as a live set, you’ve got to start thinking about it. It’s going to be fun. When we were touring Ocean Drive, there’s ten tracks on that album, we probably only had about 13 songs in total. It was difficult to do; you couldn’t play for an hour and 20 minutes because you didn’t have the tunes.
Is it going to be just the pair of you on stage? T: We’re hoping to have a big band with us, probably a 7-piece.
What was the reaction like from your fans to the announcement of the new album and ‘My Salvation’? T: To be honest, I stay away from social media. The little bit that I have seen, it’s like nobody saw it coming. So it’s bang out of nowhere for something that I suppose in the back of people’s mind they were hoping and thinking maybe it will happen one day. All of a sudden, for it to happen is a nice surprise. So far nobody has heard the album yet but they’ve heard the single. Not everybody’s going to love what you do, that’s the truth of it, but generally they can hear that it is Lighthouse Family but it’s also new. Which is what you want.
You’ve been doing lots of promo, does it feel weird doing it after so long? Or does it feel like old times?
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P: I think it’s been good. A lot of the time going through this process helps you understand what’s going on, it helps you be able to work out what it is that you’re doing, you’re talking about it for the first time. I love being in the studio, you do the writing, recording, the mix and master, promo, and then live. You stop being a songwriter when you’re touring and you stop doing promo when you’re playing live, you’ve only got space on your head for one hat. You can’t ride two horses with one ass.
Has it been nice getting out and talking to people about the new music that you’ve been working on for years? P: There have been so many things we’ve been hearing over and over again in just the space of four or five days, it’s bizarre. We’ve had about three or four different people tell us that ‘Higher’ was the first song at their wedding. Three different people- one in Miami, one in Hawaii, and one somewhere else have told us they were in this car and ‘Ocean Drive’ was on the radio. It’s almost like it belongs to the song that story, it’s a part of it. I was in Miami once, I was sitting on a bench, and this white convertible car drove past with four people in it singing ‘Ocean Drive’.
T: It’s great doing this and talking about it but talking too much about it can be weird because you spend so much time getting to grips inside, going within to do this, and you smuggle some of this stuff across the borders to bring it out and write a song; it’s not easy. The reason you do that is because you want the song to speak for itself so when hear those stories like about ‘Ocean Drive’, that’s the song speaking for itself. There’s nothing else that you can say that is going to match that.
P: Playing live is going to be a buzz. The thing about Lighthouse Family live shows, I can remember Neil Warnock came to the Hammersmith Apollo show and I think it blew his head off really. He’s the manager of Cardiff City, he used to be the manager of QPR, and he came to that show and he said it was just crazy. It was insane.
Tunde this’ll be the first time your kids will be able to see you play and appreciate what you do? That’ll be special. T: The only time I remember my kids have come to see me was when I did one of these festivals and they were in the crowd, but they were only little. I remember seeing their faces and it was funny, they couldn’t look me in the eye. But this will be the first time really that they’ll see me play.
The new album is out 3rd May and catch the Lighthouse Family in Birmingham on 11th November.
CE L EBRIT Y INTERVI EW THE L IGHTHOUS E FAMI LY
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