Guillemots

Posted 28th Oct 2008 in Interviews | Written by Andrew Grillo | 0 comments
Guillemots We speak to Guillemots frontman extraordinaire Fyfe Dangerfield about the creative process, a musician's relationship with the music press, how he feels about this year's album 'Red', and an upcoming tour that'll take in a number of unusual and downright bizarre venues.

Hi Fyfe, how and where do we find you today?
I'm just at home, there's a possible soundtrack thing we might be doing that I've been working on.

What's that for, or can't you say?
I'm not going to say, it's nothing major anyway. I always talk about these things and then we never get them.

So whose idea was this tour of unusual venues?
It was kind of ours, we just wanted to get out of the academy circuit really, y'know. I've always liked it when you see other bands doing unusual tours and so we just wanted to do that ourselves really, just get to places we don’t normally get to and play in more interesting buildings, otherwise it just ends up becoming a bit generic and every venue in every town you play ends up looking kind of the same. I'm really pleased with them, I think it looks really good - it's a real mix.

I can see that playing Academies might get monotonous are they can be depressingly similar.
Yeah, they are alright. I don't hate them - at the Manchester Academy we actually had one of our best gigs there, but they are all quite samey and we just wanted this tour to feel different. It doesn't feel like we're particularly promoting 'Red', as that's been out for quite a few months now, it feels more like a tour to put an end to the era of the first two records really. We just wanted it to be something more memorable as it's going to be the last tour we're going to do for quite a while. We just wanted to do something interesting rather than playing the same places we played six months ago.

You've always been a band who value the performance aspect of playing live, not ever going to just go and play the songs as they are on record. Is this just a kind of extension of this?
Well you've got to do anything you can to keep it fresh for you really. I think if it seems like that to you it's going to seem like that to the audience. It's a cliché but it's true.

How do you feel about 'Red' now it's been out for a while and has had time to settle? Did it end up as you wanted it to or was there anything you might have changed?
I think the record came out how we wanted. I think it was a challenge we set ourselves and I haven't listened to it loads really. It's weird, when you're working on something you're listening to it non-stop and then when you're finished with it then you don't really ever listen to it again - though you might occasionally come back to it. It's a funny one because I think that with the first record it was something that had been in my head for years so it was much easier to know what I was aiming at and I felt I got it completely. Whereas with 'Red' we all had a lot of ideas about what we wanted it to be and none of us quite knew how to get there, so it was a lot harder to make and we were all very, very involved. I suppose there's things on there, tracks or elements, that each of us would have done differently but that was part of what made it fun to make.

So for the most part I think I'm really proud of it. Even listening to songs from 'Windowpane' and songs from 'Red' I think that there was this perception that they were very different, but they're actually not as far apart as people think. You can never really guess what people are going to think about stuff and for us, when we were making it, we were just trying to make a big pop record and I think we did that. I think people will listen to it in years to come and maybe the people who it didn't make sense to now, it'll make more sense to in the future.

You mention it being more of a pop record than 'Through The Windowpane', do you think that came about as you approached it in a different way, it being more of a collaborative songwriting effort whereas the first record was maybe more your vision?
Well the first record, from the songs to the way that it sounded, was something I'd been getting together in my head for ages and it's always easier to do that with the first record. It's not a conscious decision, we just seem as a band to do things in a strange order; the normal thing to have done would have been to rehearsed loads of songs for ages and then recorded them quite live, but I think that that is now what we want to do on the next record. It was a weird process because we were writing songs but before we'd even finished writing them we were trying to record them. It was almost like we treated it as four producers rather than a band but I think that that kind of makes it what it is. I've always felt like I wanted every record to be different - I'd hate to repeat ourselves and I don't think there's any way we could have done something like the first record again, I wouldn't have wanted to and I think it's the same with this one. It's kind of like they're two sides of the same coin; 'Windowpane' is very soft and dreamy and 'Red' is a lot more hard and punchy, but to us they're both pop records but in a different way. They're both quite produced and have a lot going on, and the more distance I've got from 'Red' the more I see it as the flip side to 'Windowpane'. I think for our next record we're very unified about what we want to do, which is basically rehearse and write for ages and get loads of songs together and just really capture the sound of a band playing in a room.

I think that initially for me, 'Red' did sound very different but after a few listens you can start to see elements which are common to both records.
It's strange, you always try and get an idea of what people are going to think but you can never really get your head around it. On the first record we kind of got this thing where for us on that record we were just trying to make a really dreamy pop record. We got a lot of positive reviews about it but even the positive ones were focusing on how "quirky" it was and that was never the intention. Then with 'Red' there were quite a few thing things implying that we were trying to do some kind of 80s thing and again that was not the intention at all. Maybe it came out unintentionally because I certainly grew up listening to music in the 80s, it's when I was born, but it certainly wasn't an attempt to do anything retro, because I think there are quite a few people doing that at the moment, but I've never really been into that. People seem to be afraid of making big sounding pop music at the moment; it's all about understatement and knowingness and I've never really been able to get my head around that. I'm just not like that as a person really so I don't think we're ever going to be like that as a band.

What have you been listening to in the band recently - anything that might shape how the next record will sound?
It's never a constant, all of us are into all kinds of music, there's not really one thing that one of us is particularly into. At the moment I really feel like I want to hear something that just knocks me over - I haven't quite found it but I'm looking. For a while now I've been listening to a lot of acoustic music but now I'm finding myself wanting to go back to a lot of electronic stuff. It's weird with electronic music - I'll put something on and then I just seem to get bored after about ten minutes, but I think that's more to do with my attention span, than the music. I suppose that's why you make music in a way, because nothing that you've got quite satisfies what you want to hear.

So will there be much of a break before the next record or are you eager to start working soon?
We're going to start writing in January, that's the plan. We've got this tour in November and will just do our own thing in December and then get to the New Year and lock ourselves away really. It's been nice that even over the summer we've had quite a lot of time off; we've been playing festivals but we've had enough time to meet up and just play for fun, which is great. It sounds obvious but when you're doing this all the time it's not something that you get to do all that often because if you get a day off you just want to relax. I think that's totally what we're into doing next year, just getting back to that mentality of how things were before we had a record contract, just meeting up every day and playing. None of us really know how long it's going to take - it could take a couple of years to get stuff together or it could take a couple of months, but we're not going to put any huge pressure on ourselves to finish a record by a certain time.

It was interesting to hear you speak about how the two records you've done so far were perceived by the music press. Do you actively seek out reviews or do they just find their way through to you via your record company?
It's funny with reviews because if they're positive or negative it's always a different way of listening to music - there's always an angle in some way. Also when something is the first thing you've heard by an artist you treat it differently because you haven't really got much perception of what it should sound like. But once you've heard one record, the next one is always going to be judged against that, and it'll be the same with the next record - that'll be compared against the one before, and when we're making music we're not really seeing it in terms of "this is our second album and this is how it follows on from our first", it's more just another chance to make some music. There was a point when I tried to read everything but I don't think it's particularly good for you. It's just kind of human nature to want to know what people think, but you have to be really careful with that or you'll just start obsessing about what people think. You know you'll read a good review and you'll feel great, and then you'll read a bad review and you'll feel shit, but it kind of distracts you from what you're doing really, so I'm learning to not seek them out at all.

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