Music > Interviews

Eagulls

21/01/16

It’s been a couple years since Leeds outfit Eagulls released their swaggering debut LP, and since then they’ve played on David Letterman’s show in the States and written a brand new collection of tracks, due for release later this year. Their music is edgy without being hardcore, opinionated without being aggressive, and is all round downright great. I spoke to drummer Henry about pig’s brains and ginnels ahead of their gig at Norwich Arts Centre this month.

How did you get together? Were you in a band beforehand?

Weirdly I used to play in my garage with George’s older brother. But basically it was that all of us moved away from home, met like minded people who liked similar music and it stemmed from there. It was like “you play guitar, you play drums,” and then we had to find a frontman. I grew up with George who sings in the band; we’ve known each other pretty much our whole lives and I knew he was always very interesting. He hadn’t been in a band before but I knew him as a personality and mostly through his art; he’s an illustrator as well. From seeing how good his illustrations were I knew he’d have something. I was living in Leeds and he was in Lincoln, so we convinced him to come across cos we had these songs we’d put together, and it happened like that really, the rest is history.

What’s the music scene like in Leeds at the moment?

We’ve been here for eight years now. It’s good, I think it dominates quite a lot in the North, it’s really strong and diverse. There are certain areas of town where you’d go to see a punk or hardcore show, or a psych show, but the community is so strong in Leeds and it’s not the biggest of places but a lot of the bands know each other and are friends. You often get mixed bills which is always amazing; in one night you could see a singer/songwriter with 50 pedals making weird noises, then a post punk band with 80’s influences followed by a hardcore band. It’s a real melting pot, and obviously the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds is regarded as one of the best venues in the country.

You have a track called Council Flat Blues and the covers of your recordings often show run down urban landscapes. Is part of Eagulls’ remit to try to represent the working class?

Yeah definitely, but none of it consciously. George writes the lyrics and it’s his own pessimistic view of British life. Having that very British identity as a band, which is what we’ve always wanted, we’ve always said we would write about what you know. When we first started the band I wondered what George would write about because he’d never done it before and neither had I. A lot of it’s to do with his surroundings and I think we provide a bleak outlook on how mundane life can be. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re unhappy, it’s just an observation on first world British problems.

What do you think of Sleaford Mods who do a similar thing with their songwriting?

They’re great, absolutely amazing. They couldn’t be more relevant at the moment could they? We saw them ages ago and they were talking about really real things and it’s struck a chord with everyone hasn’t it. It’s so important..a lot of people say they are brave to talk about the things they do but I think it’s more honesty than bravery. It’s really good what they do, and I hope they never change. The latest lyrics we’ve been writing are very similar to theirs but the Mods are less direct. Jason does it in more of a cryptic way.

Your music’s quite indescribable in terms of genre, maybe post punk or garage rock? Which acts have influenced your sound?

The single most difficult question ever! It’s hard, I think we’re definitely influenced by the period from the late 70’s til the end of the 80’s. Punk’s such a broad term, even post punk is broad and it can really mean anything. I think people think because we’re a guitar band and we’re abrasive it doesn’t necessarily make us a punk band. There’s nothing wrong with that; I listen to a lot of post punk myself Once you’re under the banner of being in a punk band people expect certain things about your attitude and your writing process, like a loudmouth who hates the world, burn it all down sort of thing, but we could be backstage listening to Mazzy Star before we go on! Which happens quite a lot actually. Our new album will probably take us out of that punk pigeonhole.

Are you happy with the new album? Will we hear some tracks from it at the gig?

Yeah it’s all ready to go! We’re not going to hammer people with the new tracks too much cos the album’s not out yet. We’ll play loads of old ones and maybe four or five of the new ones. We’re putting a single out at the end of January and one in March.

I read that on this new album you have moved away from a personal point of view and more towards the collective experience?

It’s still all from George’s viewpoint but whereas on the last album it was his own personal outlook, this time we tried to step away from that a bit and look outwards and how he gets on with other people. It feels like it’s more to do with relationships, not in a romantic way, but more as in your relationship with the person you might bump into on the street, or the person you work with..very brief encounters and how odd they can be.

How do you manage to make your records sound so ‘live’?

We recorded the last one live but this new one we haven’t. Without giving too much away we like to play quite loud and like to get ourselves in the right space when we record. We like to play together until we’re satisfied that the emotion’s there. I think that’s what makes the difference.

I wanted to ask you about the video for Nerve Endings off your last album…it won an NME award.  It’s quite an incredible video of a pig’s brain rotting. How did you come up with that concept?

Lyrically it’s about George suffering from anxiety, which he struggles with, and we wanted something that portrayed that. There are all sorts of thing going on in his head that he can’t necessarily control and one day he said it felt like his brain was deteriorating and he felt like he couldn’t do anything about it. So we thought the best way to do that would be show a brain deteriorating. We went to the local market and asked a butcher if we could have a pig’s brain..they looked at us in horror and told us to get out the shop! He calmed down a bit and let us have it in the end, we stuck it in our basement and put a timed camera over it. It came out way better than we expected ourselves actually!

Did you go back to the butcher and tell him his pig’s head had won an NME award?

I don’t think he wanted us to go back, to be honest!

You performed Possessed on David Letterman’s Show. What was that experience like?

It was great! At the time we didn’t really understand the gravity of what it meant to be on there, looking back we were pretty blasé about it. We were so removed from our comfort zone that we only way we could deal with it was to be as normal as we could about it. Our record company are based in Brooklyn. When we went across to meet them for the first time we took a walk past the building where they film it and they said “you’ll play there one day” and we laughed, and then two months later they emailed us to say we were booked in for January! We just treated it like a normal gig I suppose, and when we got there we didn’t think about how we looked or what we wanted to do. Bill Murray was on the same show as us so I have no idea how many millions of people watched it. Over in America it’s a huge show; we met loads of American bands who said “how did you get to go on Letterman? We’re American and we haven’t even been on it!” and we were like “oh yeah, we did didn’t we”. We didn’t really understand what we’d done!

This tour is called the Ginnels, Alleys, Jitties and Snickets tour. What does that mean?

Basically we wanted to do some warm up shows before the album but we wanted to go out and play some good independent places we hadn’t been to before. We wanted to do something a bit more interesting than playing all the same old venues that you would always play on that sort of circuit. It turned out a lot of them are back alley spaces, off the beaten track places. They’re all Yorkshire terms.

I imagine you’ll be playing some festivals this summer? Who would you like to catch live?

We should be pretty much doing the lot, hopefully, Glastonbury and all the rest which is a real dream come true for all of us. In terms of who I’d like to see, The Cure. I saw them in 2014 and it was one of the best shows I’d seen in ages. Suede too, I really like their new album.

Eagulls play Norwich Arts Centre on 4th March. Tickets from ueaticketbookings.co.uk