Music > Interviews

Interview with The Leisure Society

30/01/12

The Leisure Society’s Nick Hemming, lead vocalist and songwriter has spun in the orbit of some very talented people for some time. Formerly in the band She Talks to Angels with Paddy Considine and Shane Meadows, no less, his trajectory moved him away, back to the day job and into the orbit of talented musician Christian Hardy. It was Christian’s belief in Nick, his love of his ditties and thoughts set to music that saw them form The Leisure Society, and got Nick spinning on his own axis finally, a worthy place to be…

How are you doing Nick? I’m alright, ta. I’ve just been doing interviews all day and everyone’s been perfectly on time, which is quite rare.

Time we can manage, but I can’t promise I’ll be hugely original. Yeah, I think it’s hard to be original after about the fourth, or fifth one.

I feel bad about that; it must be draining having the same conversation over and over again like Groundhog Day. It’s nice that people want to speak to me, so that’s cool.

I got to see you in Norwich recently when you supported Laura Marling at Norwich Cathedral – what an amazing gig that was… Yeah, the whole tour was just incredible. Just getting to play in those buildings was just awe inspiring.

And I imagine each building brought about its own drawbacks and challenges… Completely, I mean, every gig was completely different ‘cause the acoustics vary so much in those places. Norwich was one of the bigger ones, I think, but there were some that were just immense; York Minster and Liverpool Cathedral, which I think is the biggest cathedral in Europe, and the sound in there does create problems because the reverb goes on – you finish singing a note and the reverb goes on for another five or six seconds afterwards. It makes it difficult and it suited our stripped back line-up. I was quite glad we didn’t take a drummer in the end ‘cause it would’ve made it even more difficult in the end to get the sound together.

It was amazing from an audience’s perspective too; you were experiencing something from two angles – from the front and then from above as the sound travelled above your head, so it was really amazing… Yeah, there’s a certain atmosphere in those places too, so yeah, it was like going on a big history field trip for the whole three weeks, seeing all these incredible places.

Yes, I imagine you learnt as you have never learned before… Yeah, I did, I felt quite inspired by the whole experience.

You’re coming to Norwich and will play the Norwich Arts Centre, which is another church… Oh really? We’ve never played there, so we’re really looking forward to it. That show was originally supposed to be in October, but we got offered the Laura Marling tour and we’d never done a support tour before, so it was a hard one to turn down, getting the chance to play in these amazing venues, hence it being put back to February, so we’re really looking forward to coming in our own right.

It gives you an opportunity to tour the second album still though, which gives us the chance to already have a relationship with the songs… Yeah, definitely, definitely. It also allows us to draw that album to a close ‘cause we’ve just started work on the next album, so it’s a nice way to say goodbye to it, and start on the next one really.

I was going to ask whether you were drawing the curtain on what’s been and moving on to new material… Yeah, I’ve kind of half written about 20 songs, so there’s a lot of work – especially on lyrics – still to do, so I’m gonna have a couple of months to concentrate on writing. Then the plan is to go away, as a band, to bond and play music – just hire a house in the countryside and jump through the songs and try new ideas and stuff. It’s about starting something new, I mean, we released the album in May last year and we’ve been recording it and writing it and mixing it way before that, so it’s a long old process recording and then going on tour and festivals all summer, so I’m definitely ready to start working on new stuff.

And if – as a band – you go abroad, how much of a say do you have in where you’re going? No, it’s all a bit tainted by our budgets, which are incredibly small. Sorry, I didn’t mean abroad – I just mean we’re gonna go out into the countryside! It’d be nice if we were like The Rolling Stones and we could afford a chateau in the south of France, that would be perfect, or maybe the Caribbean or something, but unfortunately it’s gonna be the Lake District or something! We love it; we’ve done it a few times and it’s just really nice when you’re out in the middle of nowhere and you just concentrate on music and have all this really inspiring landscape around you. It’s my favourite way – I don’t really take holidays, so they serve as my holidays really, having these band trips away to work on new songs. So yeah, I really love it - especially living in London, I mean, you’re surrounded by motorways; I grew up in the Midlands, surrounded by countryside, so I love getting out into it. I’ve just actually got back – I’ve been writing a song for another project for this thing called The Boat Project and it’s this thing about fishing and boat builders in the 50s and 60s, so I spent the week after new year’s eve down in Brighton, visiting boat yards and fishing, and stuff like that, so that’s been really nice.

I imagine that’s really interesting; you’ve got the difference between the small individual fishing boats, and the big, industrial shipping industry that dominated some of the other towns, that made a real difference to the industry when they were thriving… Yeah, that’s kinda what the song’s about. On Hastings Beach, because it’s a pebbly beach and there’s no quay, they all landed their boats on to the shore, so they had these small wooden boats and it’s all kinda dying out now. It’s about this one specific boatyard in Newhaven that used to supply all the boats for Hastings and it’s dying out a bit now, and it’s all become a bit more industrialised, which is sad. I’ve always had a kinda, I don’t know, I’ve always loved the sea and I’ve always had the idea of going out on the sea fishing; I’m sure the reality’s a bit more grim, but it always seemed quite romantic to a Midlands boy like me.

So you’re doing the same thing for fishing and Hastings that Elvis Costello did for Shipbuilding in the North East?! Yes, of course. There’s something really inspiring about the coastline as well that I find inspiring as well. When I was writing ‘Into the Murky Water’, I spent a lot of time recording rough instrumental demos, then I’d drive down and have trips along the coastline, just walking down the beach and trying to think of lyrics, singing along to the CD of the tracks that I’d play in the car on the way down. There’s something inspiring about going to a new place and experiencing these big, open landscapes.

I’ve been reading about your ventures over the last couple of years; you must have had some real life-affirming moments in that time – one of the magical ones I read about was you getting to play with The Heritage Orchestra. What was that like? It was really, really incredible; quite emotional and terrifying as well! It’s what we’ve always wanted to do really, ‘cause the kind of music we record has lots of instruments involved and when you play live, you kind of have to change it a little bit, or sacrifice parts, but having forty musicians behind you was just… Oh, it was an amazing experience. We had one rehearsal the day before with the orchestra, and as soon as they started playing the intro to the first song, me and Christian just burst into tears and had to run out the room to save face… although I’m telling everyone now! I mean to hear an orchestra playing any instrument is emotional anyway, but with them playing songs we wrote, and recorded in our bedrooms, it’s hard to get your head around it. It was a really beautiful experience.  

I want to go back actually, to when you were writing your first album – it was a very personal and cathartic album for you, so it must have taken an immense amount of trust in Christian to offer that out to him… Yeah, it was always done by accident really; I’d write these songs and then keep them to myself for quite a while, then I might get drunk or something and I’d just let them slip out. I think if his reaction had been anything other than really, hugely enthusiastic, I don’t think they’d have made it out of the room because I didn’t really have much confidence in myself. It was his enthusiasm for them, just saying they were incredible songs that made me kind of start pushing them out there. I was playing in his band at the time and we’d start pushing odd songs of mine into there and I’d sing. It was a gradual building up of confidence when you’d start to see the reaction of other people. It was like, ‘maybe I am OK actually, maybe I can do this…’ It’s constantly happening really! I’m constantly building up my confidence really to a point where I feel comfortable singing my songs in front of people!

It’s stuff of folklore now that you were working in a fabric factory when you released the first album, but it seems to have been a really productive time for you while you were working. When you gave up the job, were you able to remain as prolific on the songwriting front? I dunno, it’s slightly different; you’re kind of concentrating solely on writing now and it’s a bit of a terrifying thing because you can’t force songs to come out, you just have to rely on inspiration. So it’s a little bit scary, but I’ve written more… it’s just been a more condensed period, I just sort of concentrate on it all the time, whereas before, it was odd songs coming here and there. They’d just come out, whereas now I’m constantly striving. I do other things as well, like I do a lot of reading and watching films and stuff like that, just visiting places, and there’s lots of admin to be done with the band, and driving and stuff, but yeah, I’d say that I probably write as many songs as I did then, but it’s more intensive and obsessive. Now I know we’ve got an audience as well, it adds pressure to it, because you don’t want to disappoint. I just want to write the best songs that I can really.

I know you’re a big Beach Boys fan and I wondered, after the eventual release of the ‘Smile Sessions’, Brian Wilson’s lost tracks, whether there are a lot of tracks that don’t see the light of day from you? There is, there is, yeah, but I’d never – I’d be mortified if half of that stuff was ever released! I’ve got a computer full of songs that have never quite made the grade, so I’ve never played them to anybody.

So you won’t be popping them in a boxset?! No, definitely not! It’s a bit different with the ‘Smile Session’, because he went a bit crazy, so I think that’s part of the reason they got lost, but he was at the height of his powers as well and doing it with some amazing musicians, whereas my cast-off ideas are not quite to that standard, haha! There’s a reason why they’ve been left on my computer!

But they may become incredibly sought after… Yeah, maybe, which is why I have to leave in my will that my computer and all my files must be destroyed!

I was wondering, I know you write the songs, but I’m sure that you’d say that Cristian runs through the core of The Leisure Society as well, so how are the duties split between you in the band? Well it kinda varies really, from song to song. With ‘Into the Murky Water’, we went away as a group, but I’d written a rough demo with guitar and vocals and a few little bits of instrumentation, but really rough. Then we went away and jammed through with the drummer, Baz, bass player Daz, Helen on flute and Mike on violin and we just jammed through ideas. Then on a few of the songs, Mike went away and did string quartet arrangements for them; he did them on his own, then brought them back and we’d rehearse them. That was all quite collaborative. Then Christian engineered all the drum sessions and once we got the base of the tracks down, I was working with lots of classical musicians who were coming in to my flat and just recording them and layering up ideas and orchestration, which kind of gave Christian’s ears a break, then he came back to mix it, so it was just the two of us mixing it together. It was good because by that point, I’d spent a year writing and months just playing over the same songs with musicians and I was going a bit crazy, so it was good to have Christian come in with fresher ears, being able to take the controls so that I could just relax and have a listen! So that’s the way we work; he’s definitely the hands-on person when it comes to the mixing, and I take more control when recording the arrangements. It’s the same when we play live really as well, because although I’m the main singer, Christian does a lot more talking and stuff – he’s a lot better at stuff like that than I am! I think we’ve both got strengths and weaknesses and we both go well together.

I was thinking about your song, ‘Notions of What is Right’ from your recent album. You probably understand infinitely better than me how music is put together, and especially your own. What is it about that song that manages to draw me in, without lyrics, as much as one with lyrics? It’s that gift that makes you great for film as well, I think… Yeah… I don’t know! I try not to analyse things too much because otherwise it can just take away the magic. Also, I don’t think there is any answer really – it can really vary. So yeah, I don’t know!

That’s a completely honest answer though, but it also means that you have no applied logic when you’re approaching a film soundtrack then? No, I don’t think you can do. Well I’m sure some people do, but I think personally, if I did have any formula to doing it, or anything, it’d probably take away what was special about it in the first place. I suppose I do think about it, but it’s best not to try and worry about it too much. It’s all about how emotions come out in music and it’s a hard thing to describe. There’s this classical piece, Bartok’s ‘Third Piano Concerto’, the second movement and it’s got these really slow piano chords and every time I hear it, I just well up and I haven’t got a clue way – it’s just a really simple bit of music! It’s a strange and beautiful thing, but actually, funnily enough, I just saw an advert for a programme about makes great art and there’s a series running on it about formulas for what makes a good pop song, or what makes a good drawing; I’m kind of interested – I might have to watch it, but I’m a bit sceptical of it as well, because I’m not really a religious person, but there’s definitely a soul to some songs that just kind of transcends the brain really. I don’t know, it’s a hard one to answer.

You’re very adept at telling your own stories – two Ivor Novello nominations stand as testament to that – but you’ve also risen to the challenge of telling other stories, your work on Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘Lullaby’ shows that. Is it a different set of skills, writing your own stories versus writing someone else’s? Yeah, definitely; I’m definitely better at writing from personal experience. Basically it’s all about transferring emotions to other people, making people want to dance, or making people cry, or whatever and I think that’s a lot easier for me to do from a personal perspective, but like I’ve been writing this song about the fisherman and the shipbuilders at the moment, it’s nice to try different things. I definitely feel more at home when I’m writing from the heart really.

So Nick, you’re coming to Norwich next month and we know you’re going to bring an awesome show to us, but as an audience, what can we bring for you? I don’t know, we’ve always had such responsive, genuine, friendly audiences so hopefully everybody will be there and up for a good night! We really enjoyed playing Norwich Cathedral, and that was largely to people who hadn’t heard of us, so hopefully there’ll be some people there who know the songs.

Emma Garwood

The Leisure Society come to the Norwich Arts Centre on February 15th. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk.