After two long years touring much-lauded debut album ‘Everything Is’ in the UK, Europe and beyond – in the face of a lot of largely unwarranted and certainly unwanted ‘new Nirvana’ rhetoric – Manchester’s Nine Black Alps are finally back out on the road in anticipation of the follow up ‘Love/Hate’.
Slightly worse for wear after the previous night’s ICA performance alongside Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, the band’s vocalist/guitarist Sam Forrest, bass player Martin Cohen and drummer James Galley took some time out over breakfast to talk candidly with rockfeedback about everything from kazoos, to the dark heart of the music industry, to talking bollocks in interviews. And what lovely fellas they were too.
Rockfeedback: You played with BRMC at the ICA last night – it must be nice to be playing some new songs after touring the last album for 2 years! You must have had these new songs ready for a while by now?
Nine Black Alps (Sam unless otherwise indicated): Yes! It felt like we were going to play that set forever almost. The songs on this album have been building up since we started touring the first record but we had never played a lot of them live much before this round of touring so that part of it is strange.
RFB: How has the reaction been to the new material?
NBA: We get people singing along to key words of some of the songs which is weird, but it’s hard to tell really. Whenever other bands play new songs live I don’t really know what do with myself! We are doing half and half old and new at the moment – you can’t try and impress people with new stuff, you just have to know what sounds good to you as a band.
RFB: Is playing live still the bit you like best out of being in a band?
NBA: Even after we’ve been on tour for a while it’s just fun to get out there and play. When you’ve been sitting in the van all day it’s always the bit you look forward to and the focus of your day.
RFB: You spent a lot of time touring in America last year, what was that experience like?
NBA: There’ are lots of really long drives between shows! You tend to play a show, drive for a 3 or 4 hours through the night to a hotel in Nebraska or somewhere, then get up early and drive for another 8 or 9 hours to get to the gig, usually end up there late, panickingly set everything up and there’ll be nobody there! Then you pack down and do the whole thing again… We did that for about two months. It was a good experience though, but definitely not easy. In the UK things seem to happen very fast, whereas over there nothing happens – everything’s very slow. It was character building, though, and we got to see lots of places that I’d never dreamed of seeing, which is usually my favourite part of touring abroad: going to places like Japan or America – I’d never be able to go to places like that if I wasn’t in a band.
RFB: Are you excited about finally releasing your second album (‘Love/Hate’)?
NBA: Yeah, it just keeps getting pushed back! We finished recording it at the end of February and I wrote the last song for it last June [2006] so I just want to get the f**ker out really. It’s kind of frustrating but I guess that’s the mechanism that the industry works in so there’s not much we can do about it. But I much prefer the sound of this one to the last record.
RFB: Was that a conscious decision or just something that happened organically? Did [‘Love/Hate’ producer] Dave Sardy have much input?
NBA: We just tried to give the songs more dynamics rather than just going flat out the whole way through, and just tried to make it more interesting from start to finish. It’s got a crisper sound with less saturation and lots of technical nonsense that I’ve forgotten already! It sounds harder. It was very much a collaborative thing [with Sardy] with lots of searching for weird sounds to make it more exciting. Whether it’s drums in an echo chamber or approaching the vocals in a really different style –lying down on the floor singing or just anything to get more atmosphere around it than just a straight out rock record. That’s what we aimed for with the first record, a straight rock record. There was sort of an unwritten rule on that one that “we can’t use pianos”, “we can’t use tambourines” and we kept the harmonies to an absolute minimum. This time we’d be like “stick three harmomies there” and “bash a tambourine there” and we’ve got the odd bit of organ, the odd kazoo in there too…
RFB: The first album seems very much concerned with being an outsider, both in terms of the subject matter of the songs and externally the way you were determined to follow your own path as a band rather than fit in with any kind of ‘scene’. Has that changed with time and success? Has the subject matter of the lyrics changed with that success and different lifestyle?
NBA: I don’t think it’s necessarily anything to do with being outsiders as such. With the first album it was about just making a noise, a real aggressive sound, so that’s obviously going to come across as more of an outsider thing than a tender personal thing. I wrote the words to the first one [‘Everything Is’] just to fill up the songs because I had the melodies already, and it was just pretty much whatever came into my head. I honestly didn’t realise that it was going to be released or that I’d ever be interviewed about my lyrics! A lot of stuff on there is overly dramatic in a way, but it’s very pure which I think is good. Whereas this one I think I probably was more aware that people would be hearing it so a lot more care went into it. I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing but I think it’s just something that I don’t want to be embarrassed about. On the first one there’s lines like “I’ll take my life” and “Not everyone can turn you on” and they’re not really things that I feel that good about singing necessarily – I think some of it makes me sound like some sort of loony! The songs on ‘Love/Hate’ are more conversational as opposed to a madman sitting in the corner talking bollocks like ‘Everything Is’!
RFB: Is there any reason behind the title ‘Love/Hate’?
NBA: A lot of bullshit theories keep coming up as to why we chose that one – maybe it’s because the first album was all ‘hate’, this one is kind of in the middle of ‘love’ and ‘hate’ and the third one will be all ‘love’. That could be complete bollocks though. It sounds cool and it looks good written down, that’s probably the main thing.
RFB: When you first got into the band was it because you just wanted to have a laugh just making some music rather than any pretensions of fame and fortune?
NBA (James): Absolutely. We had no ambition or goals to get a record deal or anything, we just wanted to play some songs...
(Martin): …and play some gigs. That was pretty much our one ambition – just to play a gig.
(Sam): That’s not to sound naïve or anything, we just thought if we could get a set of songs, maybe we could play a gig – that was the only dream at the time.
RFB: So how have you reacted to it all kicking off for you over the last couple of years then? Do you like the glamorous (or not!) side of things like interviews, videos, photo shoots etc?
NBA: We just turn up to things! We just turned up to this interview. For one I don’t think there’s any way of coming out of an interview without feeling like a tosser. You can either say the same thing every time, try and go for something deep and insightful or you can just take the piss and talk absolute bollocks.
(James): Whatever happens you never feel like you’ve said the right thing.
[At this point I point out that I generally feel like an idiot when interviewing a band – it’s good to know that the feeling is mutual.]
RFB: Many of the best bands through history have always recorded songs with a pop melody at their heart, however they’re dressed up. This is something that also seems to come through in your music, is that just the way you write songs or is it more of a planned decision?
NBA: Good songs are just good songs. There’s something about a well balanced song that… I think there is almost a science to it. But it always has to have some kind of twist or it just becomes kind of formulated generic chart pop. But ‘pop’ is undeniable and every year there’ll be at least one song that you don’t want to like but it gets you and moves you. Even Motorhead write pop songs – they write better pop songs than Celine Dion does. I think you can stretch pop into as many different directions as you want, from Beach Boys on ‘Smile’ when they just completely exploded everything – like Flaming Lips on ‘Soft Bulletin’, that’s still pop music to me, but they took it to its maximum limit. A lot of the time, though, it is very safe ‘verse, chorus, verse, middle 8’ which can be very hard to get out of. It’s about testing yourself, but a good melody will always rule all.
RFB: Are you all still big music fans? Do you follow new bands?
NBA: We don’t really read the press or listen to the radio – once you’re inside the mechanism you end up just thinking things like “Oh, they’ve got that photographer” or “Oh, they’re getting interviewed for that magazine”, it’s kind of horrible. I’m still a music fan but I find modern bands hard to get your head around. Once you’ve seen the puppet master…
RFB: Has seeing inside the industry changed the way you feel about being in a band then?
NBA (Sam):I think it definitely has, yeah. Without wanting to sound ungrateful, playing things like gigs with corporate sponsors end up having a very strange atmosphere.
(James): It ends up becoming that the performance is the least important part of the night, the promotion and the advertising becomes much more important.
(Sam): You end up thinking, “is anyone actually enjoying themselves”? I’m sure they are but… I don’t know if that’s just the way things are going, with things like [independent record shop chain] Fopp closing down as well – you seem to need much more these days than just music. We get asked to do a million things, like Bluetooth video downloads – it just seems like they try and make you do as much as possible to cover every medium because no-one knows what the hell is going on! I’m kind of envious of bands from the 70s because they just played gigs, made records, occasional photo shoots and that’s it. Now it’s videos and web chats and you end up doing so many events that you don’t know why or who it’s for. I think eventually the performance is going to suffer because you end up diluting it and spreading it too thin. But also you don’t want to turn anything down because you want to do this, to make music is what you’re here for. I think it’s probably all just evolving really…
RFB: Do you have any views on the way the industry is evolving: moving towards downloads etc?
NBA (Martin): I think when you make a record you actually want something to show for it, a material possession, so I hope physical formats like vinyl never go away. It’s really unsatisfying when you get emailed your album…
(Sam): Yeah that’s weird. I’m sure everything will be digital soon though, I’m sure books will be burned and turned into digital media files that broadcast themselves to you and turn their pages automatically and things. It’s the future – it’s undeniable!
RFB: Another thing with the changing nature of music and the internet is that bands are somewhat obliged to have a dialogue with their fans through MySpace and forums. Is that something you like, or would you like to keep your distance from that side of things? Some fans can get quite obsessive…
NBA: It’s kind of a love/hate thing. Sometimes it can be fun, sometimes not. Luckily I don’t think many of our fans are that hardcore, but also I do like the mystique of rock bands.
(James): I think those days have gone because it is now so easy for bands and fans to interact via digital means, so there’s really no escaping it. And if you don’t do it fans can get pissed off because you’re maybe perceived to not be ‘giving’ enough. We do look after our own MySpace and do a lot of the website stuff ourselves and we’ve done that from the start so it’s been great to keep that going.
RFB: So it’s two years down the line [after looks of horror from the band, this is quickly changed to one year] and you’re done with ‘Love/Hate’ and everything has gone great – where do you see Nine Black Alps going next? Your ‘love’ album?
NBA: I don’t know, you can never tell. One thing I’ve learned is the minute you plan something it doesn’t happen – as soon as you say “I’m definitely not doing that”, you find yourself doing it. So we won’t tempt fate!
1 comment:
Great interview and a nice read. Love Nine Black Alps, cant wait for album 3 in December!
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