MUSIC INTERVIEW: ELBOW

Going Back to the Future in a New Kind of Musical 'Rocket'

By: Team Buzzine

July 14, 2011

“I think I can, I think I can…” Manchester, England’s Elbow has always been the little band that could. From finally releasing their debut album, Asleep in the Back, after more than a decade of playing together, to having masses of people join them in chanting their belief in love on its follow-up, Cast of Thousands, to seeing their fifth record, The Seldom Seen Kid, go supernova around the world and win "all the awards," Elbow sat with the world at their feet and an air of quiet excitement surrounding the recordings of their new record, Build A Rocket, Boys! Buzzine’s Stefan Goldby sat down on squeaky chairs with the band’s Guy Garvey and Pete Turner on a breezy rooftop in the Hollywood Hills to talk about awards, family, lost loves, and the value of staying true to your roots amidst a windstorm of adulation…

Stefan Goldby: After the massive success of your last record, how did you go about reassembling the troops and started to take another run at things?

Guy Garvey: We were really pleasantly astonished by the success of The Seldom Seen Kid. We’ve been together for almost 20 years, and we’ve been living off music for 10 of those, and we thought that’s how it was going to stay, if I’m honest. And then The Seldom Seen Kid started winning awards, and then we won all of the awards, and everyone was really happy for us as well. Nobody got angsty in the British press about it, so it was just an astonishing year really.

Pete Turner: It’s a lot of touring. I think we probably did about another six, seven, or eight months touring than we actually would have done, but it was great – it kind of felt like a bit of a victory lap.

GG: Yeah, and I suppose, with that in mind…because we could have carried on touring – we could have done another arena tour on the back of that album, but we realized that, because of how much more time we’d spent on the road, if we left any longer, it was going to be four or five years between that record and the next one, so we made a decision to come off the road, go up to Scotland, where we start all of our albums traditionally – this remote house on the Island of Mull – and decide what to do next.

And, from talking to people since, I think everybody, maybe, was worried we’d do something to try to maintain the level of success that we’ve achieved back home – something more stadium-friendly than we’ve written before – but none of us wanted to do that. We just saw it as an opportunity to let more people know what we’ve already been doing for quite some time.

SG: It would seem there’s kind of only one place to start talking about your new album, and that’s with a girl called Kath.

So, relatively quickly, we made this album, starting with a song called “Jesus Is a Rochdale Girl,” which is a really simple list of a very specific time in our lives, when we’d been a band for six or seven years, and the music we were making was working in little clubs for groups of friends, but it wasn’t really what we wanted to listen to. I know that sounds strange, but it’s almost like we were using different kinds of music to learn our instruments and really enjoying playing live, so it was all up-tempo stuff. But at the same time, we’d been developing this thread of music which was a bit more introverted and, we thought at the time, less likely to get us any recognition.

It was around this time I was living in a house with no heating, black mold all over the kitchen in the winter…the doors would seize closed in the winter. You had to leave through a window in the kitchen. I met a lot of my friends in that house because it was somewhere to hang out, but that’s where writing in earnest became important to us, and we realized you could achieve a bit more if you paid attention to little things like words. And throughout this period, I was in love with a girl called Kath, who…God knows what she was doing with me.

She was absolutely beautiful. She still is beautiful – she’s not dead. She’s very beautiful, and she would come over from her father’s restaurant and she’d bring me food and we’d listen to music. I don’t know — it’s like we all decided, at that time, what we wanted to do and what we definitely didn’t want to do. So this song, “Jesus Is a Rochdale Girl,” was about the past. It had a real quiet intensity to it, especially compared to some of the songs that were on The Seldom Seen Kid. And it became the blueprint for the record. We decided it was all going to be about the past, and we were going to try this stripped-back, intense thing, as opposed to throwing the kitchen sink on every tune like we did with The Seldom Seen Kid.

SG: Putting yourself back in that mindset of being 21, or 22 - already several years into the band but still two or three years away from having your first album see the light of day - you had to think a little bit about the differences between where you were and where you are now. What do you think are the biggest key differences in Elbow as a band, from there to here, having lived in that headspace again for a while?

GG: I have a feeling that we’ve written the same album five times. If you decide to write honestly about things that have actually happened to you, there are not that many themes that you can write about. You can only write about your own environment – your own experiences. We all appreciate music and songs that ring true, so the conscious decision to write about what we knew meant admiring the same scenes, going over the same themes, and all of our records deal with small-town frustrations, wanting to see the world, and then really appreciating home when you come back to it, which is basically our lives. So half the time we’re on the road, finding ourselves in amazing locations like this; the rest of the time, we can get on with a normal life, which has got different values all its own. So the ‘home and back again…’ [Laughs] …isn’t that a chapter in The Hobbit, actually? The home and back again thing, looking for love, mourning the loss of love and friendship – that’s pretty much all we’d written about so far.

SG: Talking of home…Elbow has always been a Manchester band through and through... You’ve never left – you still record and rent space from a hometown studio and made it your own. Is that environment and the city you come from as much a part of Elbow as you guys…what was it about Manchester that you never needed to leave?

PT: I think our environment – coming from Manchester and deciding to stay there – for me, has never been an issue I’ve had to think about. It’s where we make music; it’s where our best friends that we’ve known since school and college live and our families live, and for 18 months we get to travel the world and see all these different places. And our studio, Blueprint Studios, is in Salford – on one side, it looks out across Salford and Strangeways Prison – and what some people might see as quite a grim-looking environment, I think it really shapes our music…

GG: I think that’s it – introspection is a big part of the way we write music. No more notes in a chord than are necessary for what you want to do; no more words in a line than are necessary, and I think that’s, again, because we focus on one small part of the world and the everyday dramas that happen there, which are huge.

We’d like to think that pointing out the extraordinary in the ordinary is one of the best gifts that our music gives to us – the fact that we can take a negative situation, whether it’s a heartbreak or whether it’s losing someone – and that we can make something that anybody in the world would appreciate. The fact that it’s grown in Manchester is because that’s where the people and the things we love are. It’s been incredibly tempting to come to places like Los Angeles and work here for long periods of time, or to move to New York… we used to talk about it when we were young, but everybody wanted families as well, and to uproot children and things like that, it’s not really an option. Nothing we do is so important that we’d allow it to affect our family lives.

PT: I think it would be strange as well. I’ve thought about this: When we were doing Leaders of the Free World, we came out to mix with Tom Rothrock, who lives here, and that was amazing. It was like a mixing process but [to do] an actual writing process – I don’t know how honest it would be to this music that we play really.

GG: We couldn’t make a convincing album about California soul, could we? It would be rubbish.

PT: It would be sh*t.

SG: We’re definitely relieved that you didn’t make the “I’m rich and having servants sucks” album or the “Oh woe is me, I’m the biggest star on the planet” album [laughs]…but how was it to return to your own studio in Salford to record this new album?

GG: I think, this time around, there was a real peaceful confidence, working in the studio. In fact, whereas we’ve always worked five days a week and a couple of evenings when writing a record or recording a record, this time we went three days a week, and we said at the beginning – we all know and we all trust each other enough to say, “The record is being made here three days a week. If you’d rather be at home with the family or doing something, whatever it is, go and do it.” And of course everybody turned up every day, but every record before this one, something was hanging in the balance.

Either we didn’t have a record company, or the one we had was shrinking, and that was a contributing factor to the music we were writing, if I’m totally honest, and this time it wasn’t the case. We had more ears than we’ve ever had before. Just on the back of the success of The Seldom Seen Kid, there’s going to be at least three or four times more people listening to this next record. Let’s make it something that we want to hear. And I suppose looking after the people who bought all our albums as well – that was a massive consideration.

PT: It’s always disappointing when a band that you love has a major success and then just takes it over there where it’s really crap. So it was really good – I was really proud that no one even considered doing that in the band. It was good.

SG: What are you happiest with about this new record?

PT: I’m happy that we’ve been able to keep somewhere to start and somewhere to finish in this journey, and that it works coherently from start to finish, and I think it makes a lot of sense. I like that it’s a little bit rough around the edges. The Seldom Seen Kid was very polished, and about two years into it, I would assume that we were right at the end of recording it, and I’d go in one day and I’d think, “That’s a really familiar beat,” and Richard [Jupp] would be re-doing a beat because him and Craig [Potter] would see this little something in it that, for them, wasn’t quite right, but I probably hadn’t noticed. So Craig producing this album was a lot more “throw things at the wall” than he ever has been, I think.

GG: Less to prove all around, I think.

PT: Totally. So original recordings and original sessions where we got a line down first – a lot of those we kept…

GG: We’ve always acknowledged that there’s an energy in your first performances – on demos or wherever – where you’re arriving spontaneously on things. There’s an energy there that, if you re-perform them and polish them, you can totally write the song better in many different ways… but you lose that very raw, initial energy. We wanted it, as much as possible, to sound almost straight from the bedroom, if that makes any sense. Straight from the idea to the recording, and most of the vocals were first takes. You can hear me turning the pages of my book, if you’ve got it on headphones, quite a lot. And again, back to what Pete was just saying then, where we would expect…because we have to give Craig an awful lot of room to do his job.

We get to have him produce us and not have anybody coming in, and as well as charging him, we thought we’ve got to give him room to do what he wants, and he didn’t want to re-record things 20 times, and he didn’t want to perfect performances. He was about grabbing the environment and grabbing the mood, and grabbing the excitement of each tune, I think. And because so many of the songs on the album are subtle, getting that little crackling energy in the background, I think, helps keep your attention throughout the record.

SG: Do you think it’s also that the five of you have not just evolved into roles, but also trust each other in those roles? Is that musical maturity, for want of a better word?

GG: I’m sure the fact that we’ve been together for as long as we have, and that we’re all comfortable in our lives, not really wanting for anything, that breeds a relaxed atmosphere, and we certainly trust each other as musicians. Actually, beyond that, we’re all eagerly trying to impress each other as musicians all the time. It’s still really important to me that the last thing I’m doing is the best thing I’m capable of, and you see that with everybody in the band, and from a personal point of view, everybody in the band still astonishes me musically, after 20 years – Mark [Potter] particularly, recently.

Actually, since we finished the record, Mark’s guitar work live – I don’t know, I can’t describe it – it’s like he’s pole-vaulted into another place with his playing. He’s always been meticulous, and he’s always gone over his sound over and over again, but he suddenly let go of something that was always there, and maybe it’s that little bit more confidence. I’m forgetting my words on stage because I’m listening to what he’s doing and I’m like, “Where the fuck did that come from?” And he’s very very happy. That happens with everybody.

Craig jumps out, joins The Seldom Seen Kid as a producer, and then on this record, he’s back to really original ways of using very traditional instruments. What he’s doing with the organ on “The Birds” is this really crazy beepy electronic thing, and then the electric piano on “Jesus Is a Rochdale Girl,” which sounds like excitement spilling over the edge of somebody. Everybody is constantly amazing each other, so that makes you want to not miss a rehearsal. [Laughs] It doesn’t belong to any of us, this thing. It’s something that we’re all really proud to be a part of.

SG: But you did break away from the group to work on your lyrics alone at Peter Gabriel’s studios in the countryside near Bath - What was it that you thought that separation could bring into the mix?

GG: I’ve always gone away to concentrate on lyrics. We recorded at Real World – Peter Gabriel’s place… we did the first album there, or a version of it. It’s partly just hours in the day spent on my own at the desk. If I’m away somewhere without any distractions, I get more work done. And also because that was the start of our recording career, it has a lot of memories for me, with everything that was attached at the time. So “The Birds,” for instance, is a nostalgic love song: It’s looking back to the last encounter of a doomed love affair. I was tempted to write about that because I think, in that situation, which is very common, when you know you’re with somebody for the last time, that can often be the most passionate, the simplest time of that whole love affair – the most intense period. That happened to me, and it happened to me there, so it was a reason to go back and have a look.

SG: With such a personal, inward-looking album in a lot of ways, albeit at arm’s length, how do you go about turning that vision over to other people? The first music video for this album is a performance in a studio. But the second, animated clip couldn’t be more different. How do you go about setting the band’s music free and letting someone else bring another artistic vision into your world?

GG: We’ve known the Soup Collective, who have made all the [live performance] videos in the room, for a long time. Leaders of the Free World had an accompanying DVD for every song on the album, and they actually shot loads and loads of the footage, while we were writing and recording the album, in the same room. It was a great atmosphere. There were six or seven of them making little animations, and they were making films for songs that weren’t finished yet, so it was a real symbiotic process. So we know them inside out and they know us inside out; we know that we can trust them enough to let them into the space where we are where we’re working. So making films with them is a very natural thing. They’re just really old friends.

PT: It’s easy doing stuff like that with a bunch of people that we’ve become very good friends with, so it’s just really good fun.

GG: The second video was made by Oliver East, who has done the album artwork for the last two records. Oli has got a really specific way of working. He writes these beautiful graphic novels which are about these walks along train lines. He chooses train lines and stays as close to them as he possibly can so that his journey is already established – he doesn’t have to think about where he’s going. And then he writes notes on everything he sees, and all the memories that kicks up and feelings it kicks up, and then he writes these really lush graphic novels called Trains Are Mint.

So in preparing for the sleeve for this record, Build a Rocket, Boys! – because he knew so much of this stuff was about growing up in Bury and Prestwich – all these routes were down these places, down these train lines, and for the video that he made for us, he actually researched St. Bernadette Social Center Whitefield, which is where all my crew get married and baptized – it’s where I used to wear out my good trousers sliding on my knees as a kid on the parquet floor, and he went and had a look at that place, and the video is very simply us lot going back there and being welcomed home by our families.

SG: Outside of you all being lovely people and grounded, which is fantastic cos we are always up for a talk about music in very realistic and authentic ways – Elbow is not quite all about loading in and Grimsby in the snow, right? Can we end our chat today on a bit of an up-note. Can you think for a moment about what has been the best, shiny rock star moment in Elbow for each of you so far?

GG: There’s been quite a few of them.

PT: Yeah, there’s been a lot of moments where we’ve taken advantage of the life that we’ve been afforded… [Laughs] …but I think that, certainly earlier tours, when we were a bit younger, I think Asleep in the Back tour over here with Doves in the States was just very little sleep, lots of…excess, and lots of fun. 

GG: I don’t remember most of that tour, and God bless the bootleggers, because it did happen and I was there, but I only know this because I’ve heard recordings afterwards. We’ve seen some amazing things; we’ve been some amazing places… I’ve dueted with Frank Black in Tennessee.

Frank Black asked me if I would like to do a Pixies number with him that evening, and I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “Which one is your favorite?” And I said, “Cactus,” and he said, “Oh great, I love that one.” And if you would have told me that was going to happen when I was 16, I wouldn’t have believed you. It’s ridiculous.  Winning the Mercury – if you have a look at the footage of us winning the Mercury, it’s quite obvious what we were feeling.

PT: You can really see it. I love watching that. If I’m feeling a bit miserable or whatever, I can go onto YouTube and put that on… And then what went on after there was probably about four or five hours of interviews. We really thought we had the world there, so it was like, “Let’s make the most of this.” But doing it with lots of booze, you can just see the interviews, the later on the night, just go absolutely downhill. We probably shouldn’t have done a lot of interviews and just stuck to a few.

GG: Yeah, it was ridiculous.

PT: We like to drink.

GG: We’re very good at it, actually. We do our celebrating behind closed doors. We’ve got a chant that we always chant when everything goes right: We huddle quietly and go, “We were right and they were wrong, doo-dah, doo-dah…”

And that can get quite raucous.

Elbow’s sixth album, ‘Build A Rocket, Boys!' is out now on Fiction/Polydor/Geffen Records.

Get tickets for Elbow's upcoming US Tour by clicking on the 'Tickets' button in this article