The Sunshine Underground: A Little Bit Darker
Anna Dobbie catches up with lead singer and guitarist Craig Wellington.
The Sunshine Underground broke into mainstream consciousness in 2006 with their debut album, 'Raise The Alarm'. However, due to their energetic performances they were quickly swept up in the boggle-eyed, fluorescent Nu Rave bracket which (as with any genre prefixed with a misspelt Nu) promptly collapsed under its own hype. We haven’t heard much from the Sunshine Underground until now, as they embark on a national tour and the release of their second studio album, 'Nobody’s Coming To Save You'. Anna Dobbie catches up with lead singer and guitarist Craig Wellington to find out what they’ve been up to in the years in between, and whether they’re keeping the Nu Rave flame alight.
So Craig, have you had a good day?
Yes busy, just rehearsing with the band for the tour. It’s quite exciting to be touring again.
So what part of the tour are you most excited about?
I don’t know, I think I’m just generally excited about being on tour. We toured a lot with the first album but we’ve taken our time getting the second one together so now just getting on the road is exciting really. There are some good places to go that we’ve never been before like Coventry and Sunderland and Derby and then there’s the more familiar London, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester types of places as well.
But you have been gigging since you released your debut, right?
Yeah, we road tested a lot of new material in May of last year to see how it went down and to get gigging again because there was a big gap of over a year where we didn’t play any gigs at all.
You released a couple of demos in 2008 but said they would never make the album – what was the point of them?
That was just because we thought they were good and they weren’t the chosen few for the album but they still had something about them, maybe just in their demo quality, that people should hear because we didn’t really want to carry them on to album three. We want to start again with a completely new focus and direction so all the demos from this writing session either made it onto the album or they wouldn’t see the light of day and we decided that we’d release the best so they had a chance to be heard.
You wrote your new album in a secluded cottage in Scotland…
The first writing session was in Dumfries, Scotland where we rented a really small cottage. We took all the furniture out of the living room and put it in the garage, then we turned the living room into our rehearsal room for about two or three weeks. All the early tracks from the album came from there. I don’t think the environment really influenced our music except that we had nothing else to do so we had to concentrate on writing. When you’re just at home it’s pretty easy to do anything but focus sometimes so when there are no pubs, no friends and no shops for miles and miles for weeks and weeks you can get stuck in to what you’re doing.
How is your style on the new album different?
I think it’s a lot darker because the first one was quite energetic. It’s still quite energetic but it was more poppy on the first album and this is a little bit more guitar heavy. I think we just wanted to write better songs than we had before. The first album was really easy because it’s the first fifteen songs we’d written, that we’d spent our whole life writing.
So your new album, 'Nobody’s Coming To Save You', has a very bleak title. If no one will save us, how can we save ourselves in the current climate?
Oh right... I don’t know! The idea of the album title was that it had a kind of vagueness to it – it could be political or religious, it could be a lot of things really. It was a line from one of the first tracks on the record that sums up the album really and I thought that was a good title. I thought it was quite apt for the general feelings at the moment. I wouldn’t say that there’s no hope!
So how do you write your songs?
We always write the music first. If you write the melody and the lyrics at the same time you compromise the melody. I’ve done it before where I’ve written a whole sheet of words and I tried to fit it to music and I ended up really trying to cram the lyrics in. I just sing what naturally comes into my head over due course. All our demo recordings are always just gibberish. You’ve already got a theme then – you’ll be thinking ‘I don’t know where that came from but it stuck’. Writing is a bit of a group effort. All four of us individually write songs and then we’ll bring little bits and pieces to our band meetings. We’d probably make completely different sounding albums if there was just one person in charge.
You released a track for free download with FC Kahuna…
He’s a friend of ours, he did the last track on our first album and we have worked with him quite a lot on and off over the years. We’ve never got round to making a proper record with him, it’s just something we were doing getting ready to go into the studio. It’s a bit of a collaboration – it doesn’t really sound like him, it doesn’t really sound like us but it’s always fun to do things like that. I think it’s something we’d like to do more of. I don’t know who we would collaborate with, maybe a really famous pop star.
Would you collaborate with any of your tour mates (Klaxons, CSS, New Young Pony Club) from the 2007 NME Rave Tour?
Definitely, I love all their bands. I’d be up for that, it was a great time. We did all jump on stage together at the end of the tour. We watched the romance between Lovefoxx and Simon from Klaxons unfold, it was funny. She’s crazy.
Would you say your music falls into the bracket of ‘rave’?
It was quite obvious that we never were a rave band. We could’ve gone away and come back sounding like a typical nu rave band which is what everyone is expecting really. That would just be horrible but I think anyone who came to our gigs knows that that wasn’t really us. I think it’s just that high energy sets feel like they’re party music.
We supported LCD Soundsystem who are a big influence on me and Stu in the band, they’re definitely one of our favourites. We also supported Happy Mondays who are good in an old time classic sort of way – it was good fun supporting them.
You took your band name from a song by The Chemical Brothers. Do you think a band would take their name from any of your songs?
You couldn’t really have a band called No One’s Coming To Save You, could you? It might be a bit doom and gloom. I always have problems titling things. We had a year playing gigs where we didn’t even have a band name, then we just had to pick one. It’s difficult to pick song names, everything’s just ‘Song One’, ‘Song Two’, ‘New song in G with weird bit’. It’s weird because even now we refer to songs that are on the album that we’ve been playing for a year that way. I have to remind people of the titles because no one really knows what they are. Names are not a good thing for me – I can write songs and stuff but I can’t title things.
What are your ambitions for 2010?
I just want to get out and play everywhere really. Play the festivals in the summer after the tour and get straight back into writing. We’ve already written three or four tracks for the next record just so there are no more gaps. Hopefully by the end of the year we’ll have enough stuff to go and record.
Any advice for up and coming bands?
We learned as we went along, you need to experience things to be able to tell whether they’re right or they’re wrong for you. Only work with the people you trust and get a good manager.
The Sunshine Underground will be heading out on tour next month, check here for dates and tickets.
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