Born Ruffians Interview May '08 (and live at Amersham Arms)

Born Ruffians. The name does sum them up pretty well doesn’t it? For the Toronto band’s debut album, Red, Yellow and Blue, is one brimming with youthful rushes of adrenalin, precocious nursery rhyme-like ditties and, more importantly, effortlessly infectious tunes. Bloody loads of ‘em. One of Warp Records’ few forays away from their clean, clinical, electronic habitat into a more chaotic, guitar-based world, it is also an album that barely puts a foot wrong from beginning to end, joyous twisted pop gem following joyous twisted pop gem.

Sickeningly enough for those of us that have tried and failed at the whole ‘making music’ thing, it sounds like these three young men might have just stumbled upon this formula through sheer dumb luck, that they are simply having a good time making throwaway music without thinking too much about the fact that they manage to create perfect scruffy pop in the process. Mixing jerking guitar rhythms with clashing verses and choruses to concoct songs that sound like they shouldn’t work but fit together flawlessly; naïve-adolescent-meets-teen-slacker lines like “The sun is shining but we stay inside, oh but we go out at night” (‘I Need A Life’) or “I get told to never get old” (‘Little Garcon’); the feral yelps of the backing vocals; the simple pop melodies at the heart of the album: all these things hint that the band’s modus operandi may have been tripped over rather than sought out.

Desperate to get to the bottom of Born Ruffians’ success in making an album that had laid siege their ears, Rockfeedback went to meet singer/guitarist and alliterator’s dream Luke LaLonde and drummer Steve Hamelin at Warp’s offices in Kentish Town. In the course of discussing such topics as the stresses of recording and touring, incest with your sister, not knowing how to touch your girlfriend, who does Canada’s PR and the mating habits of a variety of species of animal, these affable young Canadians come across as a lot more earnest than expected, older than their years perhaps – at least as far as the way they feel about their music. What is certain is that this was no accident – they take this whole ‘making music’ thing very seriously.

The band was formed while the three were at high school, with the added connection of Mitch being Luke’s cousin. However, beginning by playing Strokes, Hives and Constantines covers there seemed to be no burning desire for fame or to just be in a band to be ‘cool’.

“I’d been playing guitar since I was 11 and I can’t remember ever greatly wanting to be in a band”, Luke says. “It wasn’t until we started playing together that I thought, ‘Hey this could be cool’, and it just started to be something that we did as a hobby. None of us were really into what a lot of other kids were doing at the time, we weren’t getting drunk every weekend and we didn’t play sports or anything so [being in a band] was just something to do I guess, and it turned into this obsession throughout high school and we took it really seriously. Steve did learn drums as the band was starting to play together, but yeah I’d been taking lessons since I was 11 and Mitch learned the bass in high school music class on my suggestion. I said to him ‘you should play bass in music class’ and he was like ‘OK’ – he just didn’t know better I guess.”

Like many musicians who have emerged in the years since and undoubtedly many more in the years to come, 2001, The Strokes and the release of Is This It was ‘year zero’ for Born Ruffians, and though certainly not a traditional garage rock band the influence of the New Yorkers can be felt on Red, Yellow & Blue. Steve emphasises how important the Strokes’ debut was for them in their formative years, coming out when the three were “just turning 15 or 16”, while Luke admits ”We probably did take some stuff from them. I mean, we don’t really try and sound like them, but just because we listened to that record so much at such a critical age it couldn’t not have an effect on our band. One thing we did take away from the Strokes was listening to their songs and then seeing them live – all their parts are ‘real’ parts that are the same every time and there’s no meandering solos. Those solos are guitar ‘parts’: it has a melody and a reason to it. Everything they did seemed to have a reason to it and there wasn’t any filler in their songs. So we definitely took that away: ‘Let’s make sure that every instrument is ‘doing’ something and cut the fat out of our songs.’”

As with The Strokes, where Julian Casablancas’ singing is often low in the mix, giving it virtually an equal billing with each of the other instruments at work, Luke’s vocals frequently do the same, and, rather than overpowering a song, a drum or guitar part regularly demands at least equal interest with the vocal melody. He is quick to point out, tongue firmly in cheek, that “I don’t think I take much vocally from Julian Casablancas, except maybe his cool swagger…”

There is no one clear influence on the band, though, who – if you really want to look for it – can be reminiscent variously of Animal Collective (‘Red, Yellow & Blue’), Vampire Weekend (‘Hummingbird’), Modest Mouse and even the likes of Devendra Banhart on quaint anti-folk ditty ‘Little Garçon’. In fact, the album is all over the place musically. Luke explains that this is probably down to the slight divergences in taste and personality of the band: “We all started to spread out and listen to more music after [2001] trying to find out what else is out there, what music had we missed out on in the 80s and the 70s and started to go back and find older stuff that was cool. And still we’re still finding new music all the time. We all share similar music tastes but we all went off in slightly different directions and maybe one person’s more into one thing at the time. That added to the sound and diversity of the record.”

There can be little denying that Born Ruffians have a pop heart, with songs like ‘Hummingbird’, ‘Badonkadonkey’ and ‘I Need A Life’ among the catchiest you’ll hear this year. However, their real success is in keeping the edges rough – the clumsily metaphorical room of choice is definitely the garage rather than the lounge. This is largely due to the band themselves and the songs that they have written, but it is also thanks to Rusty Santos (producer of Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs) who lent his knob-twiddling talents to the album. “Yeah there’s definitely pop songs on the album,” acknowledges Steve, “but he [Santos] does some interesting things with the production, with reverbs and mic placements.” Despite being a three-piece, Red, Yellow & Blue generally sounds like there is one big party going on in the studio and at times you can’t believe that Luke, Steve and Mitch can be making this racket on their own. “Some songs he recorded with just two sets of mics and built it from there, and, for example, we positioned ourselves in different spots around the room one instrument at a time, so it came out like there’s a six-piece band or something though it’s just us. So there’s things like that he added that were a step up from our EP [self-titled in the US, released in the UK last year as ‘This Sentence Will Ruin/Save Your Life’], but he’s not a ‘slick’ producer and he wasn’t making sure everything was technically correct with a click track or anything so I guess that’s what keeps the ‘garagey’ sound.”

Talking of animals… whatever people say about the impact of global warming, deforestation and other nasty human endeavours, they are at least thriving in the music industry. And we’re not talking ‘House Of The Rising Sun’. The zoology of the musical cutting edge includes the aforementioned Collective and its own Panda Bear, Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, Band Of Horses, Sam Sparro, the list goes on (without even mentioning a certain band from Sheffield). And this is also something that ties Red, Yellow and Blue together: a bit of an animal fixation. A quick glance through the song titles alone reveals ‘Barnacle Goose’, ‘Hummingbird’, ‘Badonkadonkey’, ‘Red Elephant’ and ‘Foxes Mate For Life’. After being warned to “answer carefully” about this obsession by Steve, Luke [ahem] sheepishly admits:

“I guess it’s just because I have an interest in animal documentaries and stuff like that. There were a few songs that just had animal names in them and then there was a time where I think I was trying to get a reference into every song to just try and have a theme in these songs that had been written over such a long period of time. It’s kind of hard to link [the songs] together, so maybe it was a way to try and keep them cohesive as a marking of when they were written. Some of [the animal references] actually have a point, like ‘Red Elephant’ – that’s actually in the song and that metaphor is what the song is actually about – but then some of them were just given animal names for no good reason! It’s actually true that foxes mate for life, in most species anyway, there are one or two that don’t. There is a species of bird that does it too…something like the blue-breasted titty or red-breasted booby or something weird like that”, he adds with his own brand of Canada Dry humour.

If you were to do some market research on Born Ruffians and you got YouGov to ask a cross-section of the population to listen to their music and sum it up in no more than five words, I would like to think that at least 78.2% of those surveyed would say ‘fun’ in there somewhere. The songs just have a streak of youthful energy running through them, with the playful titles, erratic rhythms and ubiquitous shrieks and yells. It sounds like it must have been rather entertaining to record. Steve, however, tells another story:

“It was pretty stressful actually! We had 14 days for recording, but for some reason we decided to record the whole thing in seven and mix for seven. We did 14 tracks in total, so we were recording two tracks a day, which doesn’t sound like a lot but was pretty stressful! Things like the backing vocals, though, we had a pretty good time doing - lot’s of shouting and laughing, usually at my expense with me not hitting this one note 200 times.”

“Anytime we were all in a room together doing something it was fun”, Luke agrees, “but recording is funny because there’s a lot of waiting around watching Rusty turning knobs or doing something on a computer, and you end up just reading a lot and I just played the piano a whole lot. That’s my main memory of recording, just playing the piano in a big room for two weeks! But it was a great experience.”

However stressful the week of recording was, there can be no doubt that the music that emerged from it was in the main as joyous as it comes. But frivolity aside there is certainly something more cerebral about Born Ruffians than you might expect from band who has a song called ‘Badonkadonkey’ that for the most part consists of the repeated child-like line “I’ll put you in my pocket for when I get home”. Another song on Red, Yellow and Blue is named after cult satirical novelist Kurt Vonnegut, a man the band clearly admire: “It was written before he died so it wasn’t like a tribute song or anything”, says Luke, “but I quoted [Vonnegut’s 1963 work] Cat’s Cradle and didn’t change it all so I just wanted to credit him in some way. It’s one of my favourite books.” This combination of playfulness and seriousness is probably one of the reasons that the band is so appealing. They have the scruffy, hip pop songs to satisfy the Skins crowd (a show they have already appeared on, that Steve calls “our first experience being in a ‘dramatic performance’… and probably our last” and that the band describe variously as “interesting”, “strange” and “weird”) but it is clear that this is backed up by a real industriousness towards their music. You are hearing this, too, both live and on record – though you might not be aware of it – and when they talk about the (now year-old to them) album it is clear that they are desperate to get it into people’s ears.

Born Ruffians have two more things going for them: they are a band from Toronto and they are band that is signed to Warp. The band clearly see the Warp signing as flattering, but deserved: “It’s a huge compliment”, beams Steve, “And especially as the guitar bands they have are so amazing, like Battles and Grizzly Bear, it’s crazy. It’s intimidating though, I feel like the kid brother sometimes, like they were just ‘sign one of those nee-ner nee-ner bands’. But I think they actually like us, they seem to.”

Being from Toronto, or Canada in general has never harmed a band, especially in the UK. From the outside it seems to be such a vibrant, downright ‘cool’ place to make music where surely everyone just hangs out with members of Broken Social Scene all day? “I think it is a great place to make music”, says Luke. “Sometimes, though, it’s hard to feel like a band from Toronto. Especially recently with so much travelling around, you start to feel like you don’t have a home! And when we were there we weren’t really part of a tight-knit scene, we have friends in bands but we kind of just do our own thing. Broken Social Scene are kind of a generation older than us and we don’t really know any of them unfortunately, but there are younger bands like Tokyo Police Club that we’re friends with and other bands that I don’t know at all, like Crystal Castles who apparently are doing really well over here. I didn’t even know they were from Toronto! But there is a lot of great music coming from Toronto and Canada in general. It’s funny on some people’s Myspaces or whatever they say ‘I like Canadian indie rock’ – I don’t know why you’d ever limit yourself to that! I don’t know how to view it, maybe it’s just seen by some people as a really ‘cool’ scene to be into, like maybe Canadian music is cool right now or something.”

Steve offers some thoughts on the prevalence of successful Canadian indie bands. “We do have music programmes in high school and the government subsidises music so maybe that has something to do with it. And we have healthcare. So maybe that allows people to just lay around.”

“It’s a little less stressful to be a musician in Canada!” agrees Luke. “I always wonder if it’s a social thing too: there’s just more people bumming around just playing music...

However laid back the Canadians are, touring – as well as recording – has its unglamorous side, as Luke explains. “There’s definitely fun parts and there’s definitely hard work. We’ve been touring with really good bands [currently fellow Canadians, the also animal-monikered Caribou] so we’ve been pretty lucky in that way cos they’re really nice guys.”

“The hardest part is you’ll get home and home will feel so good and you’ll just get used to ‘I’m home’”, Steve continues, “and then you’re like ‘Oh I leave tomorrow for 5 weeks’. And you’ll just get used to being on tour and then it’s time to go home. Every time I go home my reunion with my girlfriend is kinda awkward. It’s like I forget how to interact. It’s pretty abnormal to leave someone for 6 weeks, come home for a week and then leave for another 6 weeks. But being in a band with a bunch of guys or girls or whatever, there’s certainly nothing to complain about!”

“You do find it’s weird when you get back to your girlfriend or whatever. You’re like ‘Am I allowed to touch you?’ – you feel nervous again...” agrees Luke regarding the strain prolonged travel can have on a relationship:

“I slept with my brother for 6 weeks on the last tour, so I wasn’t allowed to touch then” responds Steve. “For so many reasons.”

Still, playing live remains an integral part of the Born Ruffians experience. A show at the Amersham Arms the night after our interview highlights all the above. Luke is right – they don’t waste anything in their songs. Each one is related with just the same organised chaos as on record, while anxiousness over guitar troubles indicates a real concern for crowd pleasing rather than carefree abandon. That’s not to say it does not look like fun on stage, with Mitch in particular enjoying his role as bass player/a capella shouter. It does seem a bit more fun for the hollering rhythm section than it does for Luke, who clearly relishes the challenge of writing songs as much as the pressure of playing live. “There’s definitely different perks to different bits [of being in a band] and each one feels a bit different. Live I’ve actually been learning to have more fun recently actually. I feel like this past tour is the most fun I’ve actually had playing shows. Maybe because the writing hasn’t been going so well! It’s definitely really fun when you’re writing and you play a new song for the first time – that’s one of the best feelings you can have.”

Touring and recording stresses aside, Born Ruffians do show glimpses of the riotous fun that comes across so strongly on record and during the live show and the interview descends into a comical discussion of incest and racism. The opening track to Red, Yellow and Blue is actually a typically child-like rumination on what colours they would choose for the national flag if they started their own country, settling on the eponymous primary colours. But what of this brave new world of Born Ruffians Land – what would that be like? And more importantly, what would the immigration policy be?

Luke: “Definitely only incestual reproduction. No outsiders allowed unless we could brainwash them. It would be like a cult.”

Steve: [clearly worried by this] “Who does it start with, if it’s incestual?”

Luke: “Me.”

Steve: “So it’s just you and your sister?”

Luke: “No...”

Steve: “But you said it’s incestual relations”

Luke: “I meant, like, within the colony. I didn’t mean incestual literally, incestual within the group... and me and my sister.”

Steve: “I might have to get my own country. I won’t be racist or xenophobic. Anyone can come in! And no incest. I’ll call it Canada. Although we [Canada] are racist... everybody’s racist somewhere.”

Luke: “Haha. ‘Everybody’s racist somewhere.’”

Steve: “No... We’re not, like, ‘We’re Canada, we love everybody’, but people think we are.”

Rockfeedback: “Canada does get a good press.”

Steve: “We do get a good press. We have good PR!”

Rockfeedback: “Who is doing your PR?”

Steve: “Warp Records.”


First published on rockfeedback.com. See it here.


Listen to two of the highlights from Red, Yellow and Blue here:

The Strange Death Of Liberal England - London, Summer 2007

The Strange Death Of Liberal England are not, they tell me, as we sit in Soho Square before their headlining, balloon-filled show at Oxford Street’s Metro, a political band. Despite the distinctive mouthful of a name, songs about ‘Good Old Fashioned War’ and a debut mini-album entitled ‘Forward March!’, it is very clear that whatever their political views may be it is solely the music that governs this peculiar slice of England. Nor are they a band that is afraid to be different, stating early on in tonight’s opening number ‘Modern Folk Song’: “Thanks but I think I’ll go my own way”. It’s in everything they do, from their music and the emotion they put into it (a rare commodity these days), to their stage show, to that name again – an opinion former before you’ve even heard the band. Is all this meant to be as provocative as it might seem?

“Andy suggested the name after a history book he was reading and it just seemed to fit from the start” Adam Woolway, the mop of hair of a frontman explains, “But I do think it is a provocative name that stands out – something we try and do with our music too. All that that name suggests is also quite apt given the climate we are living in at the moment, including our own political standing, though I for one would never call us a political band. Everyone’s got a political view whether they realise it or not and that’s going to come across if you’re in a band on a stage”. Andy Wright, strummer and basher of a variety of instruments, continues: “Unless what you do is a very conscious performance, which ours isn’t. We’re just ‘how we are’ on stage and you and your personality is going to come out. It’s not like we’re Rage Against The Machine or Billy Bragg or anything. We didn’t set out with a communist agenda or anything!”

Anyone witnessing the Metro performance would surely be convinced of how much this band cares about the music they are making. As they power their way through most of their outstanding debut mini-album ‘Forward March!’, the walls of this underground club are virtually dripping in the raw emotion of the songs and their delivery. They hover between several genres, but perhaps take more from post-rock than any other. In the landscape of ‘rock’ music, it is a genre that commands more presence than almost any other, basing itself around the dichotomy between violence and beauty. Yet despite the increased emphasis on vocals (these are at their heart ‘rock’, or even ‘modern folk’, songs after all) The Strange Death more than match this level of power. That they are able to carry this off is thanks in part to the arrangement and instrumentation of the songs, in particular the quiet/loud divide symptomatic of post-rock, but perhaps most of all it’s down to Adam’s voice. At times tonight and throughout the album, like the start of ‘Modern Folk Song’ or the delicate beginning to ‘A Day, Another Day’, it is the epitome of fragility, almost at cracking point. Yet when necessary, it transforms to a tortured wail or the bile-spitting anger of ‘An Old Fashioned War’ or ‘God Damn Broke and Broken Hearted’.

Adam is undoubtedly the centre of attention on stage, both from his role as frontman and the presence he inspires from his performance, but you get the impression that in this band everyone is as important as everyone else. This is something reinforced not just by the continual swapping of instruments between each other, but also the way that each individual member of the band gets so emotionally invested in the performance – whether their role at that time is banging the drums, attacking the guitar or bashing some percussion, they are all equally caught up in that one moment. The odd a capella break where they all sing as one, or any of the number of sing and shout along choruses that mark the most exhilarating moments in their music, confirm this feeling of a band that is addressing the audience as one entity.

The Strange Death first came to many people’s attention because of another thing for which they stand out: the eccentric nature of their stage show, during which no member speaks to the audience and any dialogue is replaced with large placards bearing firstly the name of the band and subsequently the titles of, or lines from, the next song. It is something Brecht used to do in his ‘epic theatre’ and I wonder whether this was an influence on the bands decision to use the technique? “It’s actually something that never crossed our minds when we were doing it”, Adam admits, “but it’s been mentioned before and when it was first mentioned we thought ‘Oh that’s quite fun, we can use that in interviews!’, so for the sake of the interview: yes! In all honesty though, I think we use them for the reverse of why Brecht did. He used them to distance what’s on stage from the audience, whereas we are trying to keep an atmosphere going, we’re trying to keep something going and actually trying to draw people in with it. It’s more like the signs that come up in silent movies in actual fact. We hope people will get something more from it rather than distancing ourselves from them. I think if we were to stop what we were doing after a hugely emotional piece of music, and stop and have a bit of banter with the audience, I think that would be more akin to what Brecht was doing than the reason we use [placards]. So ‘yes’ for the sake of pretentiousness and ‘no’ for the sake of truth!” Andy continues, “Our motivation was always to communicate with the audience without having to talk so it is the reverse of Brecht: instead of alienation hopefully people can connect more between songs.”

They do, though, seem to be a band that treats music as a true art form, as an expression of themselves that is almost redemptive in nature. When asked how the six members of the band came about playing in a band together, Adam replies “Mostly just out of dead-ends and desperation I think. Andy and I both went away to Uni, got home and found we didn’t have much to do, all of a sudden our lives were shit and we were unemployed or working shit jobs. We all knew each other anyway and came together to play music without any grandiose aims or anything. It was just a way to express yourself and just something to focus your energy on. And now it’s two years later and we’re sitting here with a record deal.”

As well as being named after a book, The Strange Death’s songs reference several literary figures, including Arturo Bandini (the hero of John Fante’s masterly novels) and Keats, and I ask whether they see themselves as being influenced as much by literature and other art forms as they do music? After careful thought Adam explains: “I’d say it’s all art forms really. When you write music you express yourself – those feelings come from somewhere and are feelings which are emanated from other things, whether it’s an art form or just looking at a tree on a certain beautiful evening or whatever. I don’t think I ever have written a song about that, but it might come! Art is a passing emotional expression and people pick up on that, like the way you interact with a certain painting. And that’s how you become influenced by it and it gives you the desire to express yourself. I think you’d be hard pushed to find original emotional expression or original ideas, it’s just a kind of interpretation of ideas.” Amongst other things, it is the purity of this approach and the commitment to their own way of doing things that gives The Strange Death’s music such emotional resonance.

The band deliver an undeniably powerful and captivating performance at Metro, and if you take the time to look around almost all of this gathered London audience has their gaze fixed on the six-piece throughout, soaring away with them and their harmonies. With songs like ‘A Day, Another Day’ with its communal “We are Bandini!” refrain, and the call to arms of ‘I Saw Evil’s “Is this all you care about?” create a real sense of this being more than just a performance by a rock band. It’s as if this strange group of figures on stage are preaching some sort of gospel. This kind of group experience, both between themselves on stage, and by dragging the audience along for the ride with them, is something the band seems to revel in. When questioned about a possible military theme running through the album (due to the title, artwork, a song called ‘An Old Fashioned War’, and lots of military style drumming) they dismiss this as, at best, a subconscious indicator of the times we are living in, preferring to see it as “Having a rallying call, creating an army almost, followers, people who won’t just look at you and think “Oh that’s nice music” but will feel something emotionally and want to come and join in. It’s certainly not a concept album about war, it’s more a general sense of having an army. There’s nothing more beautiful than a group of people coming together, not necessarily as an army to go and kill people, but to fight for a cause.”

Most people witnessing a performance by The Strange Death would find it difficult not to want to join this eccentric army after being thoroughly absorbed by the power of the music and magnetism of those on stage. There are, though, a few ‘after work’ types in suits in the Metro crowd that occasionally afford each other a curious glance at the noises that come from this motley crew, particularly the almost indescribable voice of this frontman with his orange candy floss hair that sprays out above a face that contorts into a variety of pained expressions throughout the show. This is nothing new to a band that developed playing the pubs and clubs of Portsmouth. As Andy freely admits, it wasn’t an easy place to cut their teeth: “People didn’t really get us straight away in Portsmouth. We’ve always kind of polarised people but in Portsmouth it was never the most open-minded of music places so to start off with, so quite a lot of people didn’t like us, but we always had confidence in what we were doing”. Adam chips in with some support for those on the South Coast: “I think certain people ‘got it’ and are still really supportive of us today, and we’ll never forget those people but I don’t know if it was the majority of people or just the loud ones [that] really, really didn’t dig it. And I think that was one of the first and probably the most important lesson we learned as a band: not to listen to those people. Even now as a band we certainly get bad reviews, but if we’d listened to bad reviews or bad press we would never have played a second gig. In some respects it was difficult at first, but if you’re not prepared to fight your corner, what are you doing here?”

As is entirely palpable, both on and off-stage, the band are loving being afforded this opportunity to parade their art in front of other people and as Adam confesses “We’re quite an ostentatious band – we’ve got the stupidly long name, we move about on stage, we want people to look at us”. They also seem to be enjoying all the things being in a band comes with. When asked what their favourite part about it is, Andy gives a very considered answer: “If you play a really good show that’s a real exhilarating feeling. But then also that creative spark of when a song really comes alive, that’s also great”, before Adam chips in with a far more honest assessment: “Getting drunk every night!” In fact, though, it seems clear that Adam and the rest of the band believe in the importance of music: “I think it’s just having an outlet or a vent for your own expression. And to have people listen to you, whether you’re political like Billy Bragg or whether you’re talking about wearing the same jeans for two weeks or whatever, the fact that people stand and listen to you is great – I think the best bit about being in a band has got to be the audience. And we did this thing called ‘Jail Guitar Doors’ organised by My Luminaries recently, the aim of which is to buy prisoners musical instruments to help them rehabilitate and give them some other way to vent their anger or frustration or whatever it is, and that just goes to show how important it can be to have something in your life, a medium to express yourself, rather than kicking a bus shelter or whatever.”

While this chaotic mob are still just starting out, they are already excited about the prospect of developing further. Speaking about the decision for a mini-album, rather than the full-blown version, Adam says: “Well we do think of it like one piece of work, but on the other hand because we’re such a young band and we recorded it quite quickly after signing a deal it’s also a way of us tying up the loose ends – this is the band from its beginning up to now. Now we can get on, and we’re all looking forward to the future and writing and recording again. That’s us established now [musically-speaking], and by the time you get to the end of track 8, ‘that’s the band’, that’s everything you need to know.” Andy rounds things off nicely: “Next time we go to write something we’ll be able to write it all from the beginning…”, and that’s a new beginning I, for one, can’t wait for.

As Adam says at the end of our interview, it’s nice to get things off his chest – “’Repent, repent!’ and all that” (referring to the slogan on one of the placards and the specially printed balloons that litter Metro tonight) – and “it feels a bit like being Catholic and going to confession”. You get the impression that each performance is the same for this band such is the emotional intensity, and it is a feeling shared by the audience. For, just like a band they are often compared to – Arcade Fire – watching The Strange Death Of Liberal England at the top of their game, like tonight, has the feeling of a religious experience. It took the Canadian band a while to gain the universal acclaim they now hold, and on this evidence there’s nothing to say that our own British incarnation won’t be worshipped just as much.

First published on rockfeedback.com. See it here.

Nine Black Alps interview - London, 05/07/07

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!

First published on rockfeedback.com. See it here.

Super Furry Animals interview, London 19/06/05

I was lucky enough to interview Guto from Super Furry Animals for rockfeedback.com. Here's what we chatted about...

Super Furry Animals bassist Guto is far from super today. Fresh from a drive to London from Cardiff he is struggling with flu. Still he manages to spare a couple of minutes to answer a few questions from rockfeedback before he tries manfully to sweat the illness out at the band’s low key gig at the ICA.

RFB: You’ve just played 4 nights in Cardiff, how did that go? A good reception from your home crowd I imagine?

SFA: Absolutely. That’s why we did the gigs really. We haven’t played together since August so we wanted a receptive audience to play to. And we were playing in a club I drink in every weekend so that was brilliant – walking to work every day and then walking home again was nice!

RFB: And now you’re back in London, known for its somewhat cold crowds – is that something you’ve found playing here over the years?

SFA: At the start definitely. Any capital city in the world you will get that really. Generally they’ve been alright though. Once you can fill a venue with your fans its great and you don’t see that anymore – playing places like Brixton Academy have been fantastic experiences for us. Though we’ve never played here [the ICA] before so this is a new experience.

RFB: This is also a warm up show for Glastonbury and you’re playing End Of The Road Festival – with so many festivals around these days is it still special playing Glastonbury?

SFA: Yeah, it means you get a ticket! I’ve always been one of these people that just go to Glastonbury anyway, so playing is a bonus really. There’s some terrible bands that play as well as some good ones so I tend to be found watching someone in a circus field rather than watching up and coming bands. I’d much rather stumble across something I’d not normally go and see. I haven’t been to Glastonbury for the weekend for probably about ten years so I hope it hasn’t changed too much – I think the clientele might be different. To get a ticket now you need an internet connection and a credit card, the people I used to go with didn’t even have a home you know? But less scallies and yardies has got to be a good thing – there were shootings last time I went!

RFB: So is it good to be back together playing some shows after your various solo projects – you still get on well after all these years?

SFA: Yeah it’s great. Of course we all still get on!

RFB: Is this part of releasing a new record still exciting for you – playing the songs live for people for the first time and seeing what people think to them?

SFA: Oh yeah. I wish we could bring out more records quicker, that’s the only downside. You finish a record and you have 6 months of all the other stuff that goes with it before it comes out. It would be nice just put it out and move on. With playing new songs live it’s a fine line. We’d love to play a set of obscure b-sides and brand new songs just to keep ourselves happy but I don’t think the crowd would appreciate that too much, apart from the real hardcore fan base.

RFB: So lets talk about the new album ‘Hey Venus!’. How’s it sounding?

SFA: Yep it’s sounding good, we’re really pleased with it.

RFB: As a band you tend not to do the same thing twice, especially consecutively, is it a departure from ‘Love Kraft’?

SFA: Yeah. Love Kraft was more mellow, Hey Venus is more of an in your face pop/rock album. It’s 11 songs, 37 minutes, none of the songs are over 4 minutes. They’re all straight to the point…

RFB: I heard a rumour that it might have started life as a concept album about a girl called Venus? Is this true?

SFA: Err no. It kind of became apparent that there was a thread running through the songs but concept album is a horrible word because it immediately puts a constraint on the songs and you have to stick to one idea. And that’s just not he way we are as a band. But there is definitely a thread…

RFB: When you went into the studio did you already have the songs in mind that went on to the record?

SFA: We did know the songs this time yes. In the past we have gone into the studio with maybe 20 songs and whittled it down but this time we went to a house in the countryside and rehearsed it. We chose the songs that were going to make the album there, before we went into the studio, so we had a pretty good idea. There’s always a couple of wild cards that come up though.

RFB: You say that ‘Hey Venus!’ is a bit more in your face than the last album. Was this a conscious decision to make an album? Do you tend to know what sound you’re going for before you make an album or is it more of an organic process?

SFA: No I wouldn’t say it was a conscious decision, I think we just chose the more upbeat, shorter songs. It’s not a ‘brash’ record. It’s not a death metal record by any means! It’s just a bit more upbeat!

RFB: ‘Love Kraft’ was recorded in Spain and Brazil, this one was recorded in the south of France. Does the place you’re recording have any bearing on how the record turns out.

SFA: No, not at all. We did a record in Brazil but the last thing we wanted to do was make a Brazilian record. There’s a lot of Brazilians doing Brazilian music very well already. I don’t want to be like Paul Simon and go to Africa and do an African record! We just went to Brazil because it’s a nice place to go. We went to France for this album because it was on a vineyard and it was during the harvest so we got to see the whole wine-making process at the same time as making an album.

RFB: Has that found its way on to ‘Hey Venus!’? Any lyrics about stamping on grapes?

SFA: No, but the wine from the vineyard won a gold medal as a champion wine so it was good quality wine! We got involved in that quite heavily…

RFB: We’re here at the ICA where there’s the first itunes festival coming up. Is the revolution/evolution the music industry is undergoing something you take interest as a band? You are known, for example, for being one of the first band’s to put out a record on DVD – does the impact of new technology interest you?

SFA: Definitely, because it’s the consumer’s choice at the end of the day. The internet came about not through the record companies forcing it on the public for a change. This time the record companies have had to adapt to what the public are doing.

RFB: Ash have just said that they’re not going to release any more albums, just singles on download. Would Super Furry Animals ever consider something like that?

SFA: I’d be gutted if we don’t have a record on vinyl, just because I like listening to vinyl. You can roll a joint on an album – you can’t roll a joint on an mp3! Mp3s are compressed to fuck too so they don’t sound as good. But at the end of the day, if people want to listen to songs like that through their headphones it’s their choice.

RFB: You’re not necessarily a political band but there’s always an undercurrent of political or cultural commentary running through your records – could you see any of the band doing a Dave Rowntree and going into politics?

SFA: I’d say we’re more political people in a band than a political band. But I doubt it. I can’t really see any of us joining a political party for a start.

RFB: Journalists have a knack of pigeonholing bands and using unnecessary adjectives to describe them, which is probably quite hard to do with Super Furry Animals. Have you ever seen or read the band described as something particularly funny or that you really didn’t agree with?

SFA: Well we’ve outlived a lot of things. In Europe when were on Sony they plugged us as a Britpop band and that’s been a big weight around our necks. Where we come from doesn’t make us any better as a band – and the whole Britpop thing was pretty horrible and dated anyway. But when we were pushed as that we’ve had to live up to it which was never ideal.

RFB: Last question – are Cardiff City going to get promoted next year?

SFA: No. I’d love it, but no. I’ll still get my season ticket though.

First published on rockfeedback.com. See it here.