Music > Interviews

East India Youth

27/04/15

Will Doyle is a master of making electronic tunes. From his Mercury-nominated debut album to his latest release, Culture of Volume, his music conjures up an awesome variety of moods and soundscapes. Brian Eno loves him, Jon Hopkins loves him and we love him. I caught up with him ahead of his intimate gig at Norwich Arts Centre to find out more about how surprised he is to find himself in the spotlight.

How did you get into music in the first place and go about creating your unique sound?

I started playing guitar when I was about 11 and started writing songs immediately and was in bands through my teens. I started making music on my computer when I was about 14 and I started making vaguely electronic stuff then even though I didn’t listen to much electronic music at the time. I was playing with the software that I had and ended up making electronic sounds by accident. As I got more into listening to electronic music I started making music properly. It’s been a process of about 10 years or learning how to use the computer to make music.

Your albums have such a wide range of styles of electronic styles on them. Who has influenced your sound, both when you were just starting out and now?

Brian Eno has been the biggest influence on the way I conduct myself as an artist as much as anything, and by extension the stuff he did in the late 70’s with Bowie. Scott Walker has been a big influence on my singing style but basically anything that I listen to more than once I absorb and it finds its way into my sound. It’s all within a certain strata, like I’m not going to make an Afrobeat or an abstract jazz album.

I know you met Brian Eno, one of your heroes, recently. What is it about his Music for Airports album that meant so much to you and what was it like to meet him?

That was the first Eno album I heard, when I was between 14 and 16, and it was really unlike anything I’d heard before at the time. In fact I wouldn’t have even liked the idea of listening to it at the time but something led me to it. I think I’d read something about him, and he’s so ubiquitous, like he composed the Windows 95 theme tune and his name is always around. I don’t think it blew my mind on the spot, I didn’t know I had the capacity for liking something like that, or the stamina for the length of the tracks. I knew he’d come to a gig of mine a couple years ago and I know a few people who had worked with him. I’d read so much about him and read all the books about him and the book he wrote so I had an image of who he was in my head and when I met him he was exactly how I had imagined! It was great. He invited me back to his studio just the other day actually. I can’t imagine what my self of three years ago would have thought of it! I wouldn’t have believed myself.

Total Strife Forever was your debut album and was nominated for Mercury last year. Did you expect it to do so well?

No, absolutely not. I knew I wanted to make music for life but I’d given up the band I was in before. I’d stopped caring about trying to make music that was successful and that freed me up in a way to make my first album with no holds barred. Because of that and the way it ended up sounding, I though it was going to end up more of a niche, leftfield thing and I was totally OK with that. All I cared about was that I was able to make music for my job. When it came out people were really getting it, to the point where it ended up on this massive mainstream scale that I never really considered as part of the plan! But it’s nice to get recognition and I was really happy; it was great that people got into it even though a lot of it was instrumental and it’s quite a lo-fi sounding thing. I never thought it was an easy listen but people thought it was great.

Your second album Culture of Volume is due out this month. The two covers are very different, and to me the music sounds happier and less tortured. Is that true and is that what you wanted to reflect with the covers?

Absolutely. There was some cross over in time between writing the two albums but it was impossible not to feel excited and in a much better place when I was making Culture of Volume as so many amazing things have happened to me in the last couple years. It was a lot busier, exciting and social and more outward looking than Total Strife Forever; not to say that the new album doesn’t have some introspective moments,  but it was written more with an audience in mind whereas the first album was made just for me. That’s reflected in the album covers for sure; I wanted it to be brighter and more of a present thing. The fact that I sing more on it makes for a different feel too.

I really like the video for Looking for Someone where you’re surrounded by an urban landscape. To what extent does your environment influence your music?

My environment is one of my biggest influences really. Total Strife Forever was written in suburban Southampton, which lent itself to more of an inward looking album, whereas this new album was made entirely in London, which really affected the choices I made, not only the sound but the sequencing of the sounds in terms of the order of the album. So yeah my environment is hugely important to me, the architecture, the multiculturalism of London…there are so many musical styles to delve into here.

When you go about starting to make a track, is the lyrics or the electronic sounds or the tunes that come first?

Every one is different. I can just messing around with a synthesiser sound and start to make a musical idea, or sometimes I sit out on my balcony and a melody starts to form in my head and I move on from there. Other times I could be making a beat and that starts something. There’s no one catalyst for making a song and I quite like that, it means it’s not a rigid process I have to repeat every time.

Did you find it nerve-wracking to be on stage on your own when you first started out?

Yeah, it was. I played solo in my teens at acoustic gigs, but then when I became the frontman in a band my confidence grew; then I decided to go solo again in a different style of music than I had been used to playing live as well. So for a while I was finding it hard to enjoy being on stage, but as more people started coming to my shows my confidence grew and I became a bit of a performer on stage. Nowadays I move around quite a lot; I give myself a lot to do, whether it’s playing bass, keyboards, drum pads which I play with sticks, and keeping it that exciting really works. I’ve got the laptop to the side of me now rather than me staring at it. I try to connect with the audience; sometimes things go wrong onstage, like your software crashed, and people quite like that, to show that the set is fallible!

East India Youth plays at Norwich Arts Centre on 25th May. Tickets from ueaticketbookings.co.uk

Win a pair of tickets to the gig and a free copy of his new album right here on our website.