Music > Interviews

Interview with Wild Beasts

28/02/12

The difference between album a) ‘Two Dancers’ and follow-up album b) ‘Smother’ is sociology and psychology. Wild Beasts took us on a guided tour of sexualised Britain with ‘Two Dancers’, narrations of “on your left you’ll see…” filtered through their stylistic interpretations, eschewing the default language of pop music, forcing us to listen anew, to spectacular, Mercury nomination-affording affect. With ‘Smother’, the observations are taken indoors; micro-situations, fetish and regret are the bookmarks of this body of work, the music being taken to an all the more intimate affair. We caught up with lead singer Hayden Thorpe to inspect it all…

What’s your schedule like at the moment? What have you guys been up to? We’re actually having quite a lot of downtime at the moment, which is pretty essential I think because the last six months of last year were pretty much non-stop, and we, I think, covered all bases that we possibly could for the last album. We were determined to do everything we could; I think it was important to feel that we’d done everything we could do. It felt almost like we’d earnt the right to now take more time and be a bit kinder to ourselves in terms of our working schedule because we spent the last couple of years touring mostly. It’s not what we do it for – we do it to make albums and to create work, that’s what really gets us out of bed in the morning, and when you don’t do that, it’s easy to sort of become submerged and lose your train of thought. We thought it was really important to refocus and we feel anyway that the next album we release is gonna be important for us in terms of that we don’t want this to be our ceiling, in a way, both creatively, and in terms of our audience. It’s our firm belief that creative work, and work that dares to be different and dares to strive for originality deserves an audience, you know.

We spoke last time about the original name for the band [Les Fauves] and Fauvism itself, being prepared to shock; three albums in, is it more difficult to shock? Well it becomes less necessary to shock, you know. There’s nothing more boring than keeping on making records like that – it’s like John Lydon trying to carry on being a punk, or The Fall trying to stay rebellious. You’ve made the point, and it was important, but you don’t need to keep making the point. We’re in a beautiful position where there’s endless doors, and you walk through one and you discover that there’s another one, you know, so there’s no excuse at all for settling in a stylistic place; we could easily shock, you know, but challenging is the more rewarding thing to do. It would be the easiest thing to be more sexual and pornographic…

But then it becomes more obvious than shocking anyway, doesn’t it? Yeah, exactly.

It’s ten years in for you guys on this musical journey… Ten years in? God, that sounds absolutely devastating in some ways, yeah.

Does the life of the band worry you then? Has it been too long a time? No, not at all, but I’m 26 and it just means it’s a vast proportion of my life, and it is a life choice in so many ways, it’s a brilliant life choice and in some ways we feel really lucky to be in this position, but that’s the key thing, it is a life choice. I don’t believe you get in this position and stay in this position very long unless you’ve decided that that’s what you want and you take all the gremlins and the goodness with it.

It’s funny to see Bon Iver win a Grammy for being a new artist; there’s often that impression that people appear over night – if that was the case with you, that people only started taking notice on this album, would you feel a resentment towards that, or would you take it as it comes? Not at all, I find the prospect of that really exciting! I think pop music, and music generally thrives on the right to reinvention. The prospect of being allowed to reinvent yourself and have fresh ears is really so liberating as a songwriter, because people bring such different expectations to that song, and it means you have to keep wiping the slate, which is so important. You have to be really careful of getting bogged down too heavily in your own history, you know. I think with songs, I really don’t feel much ownership at all over our last songs or albums, you just sort of give them away, you share them with people, so in that sense, no, it doesn’t worry me at all.

Talking about you feeling no ownership over your songs, I read an interview where one of you said, “If you can’t remember why you wrote it, don’t play it” – what’s the implication of that on your live show? Well obviously we can’t be that totalitarian because really, a song exists outside of you and sometimes it’ll let you in and let you embody it, and sometimes it’ll sort of lock you out and you’ll have to try and get a look in and do your best to do it justice really for the people who have made the commitment to come and see you. It is a real challenge, playing the same songs night after night after night, and not letting those songs die a slow death because for instance, in the last six months of last year, we played 100 shows in what was about 150 days. People move on quicker than they realise, you know, people’s consciousness moves on at a quicker pace than what touring allows, you know, so by the time you come to the end of the tour, you’re in a different place psychologically, and personally from which most of the songs describe. They’re mostly places that you don’t want to go back to anyway; when you make songs that are cathartic on a personal level, it’s kind of a way of moving on, it’s a full stop, so it kinda feels like you keep hitting the full stop and have to go back to the beginning of that sentence again, rather than start a new paragraph. I think that was another reason why it was necessary for us to now maybe not tour so heavily for a while, to establish some sort of consistent consciousness, I suppose. I think a lot of peoples’ consciousness is made up of familiarity, those things that give a framework to your day, to hang yourself on… That’s a bad way of putting it, but they have a framework to hang their day upon. When everyday you’re in a new country and it’s a new start, new language, new culture and all of yesterday was completely useless to today, then your consciousness becomes a bit of grey matter, and my memory becomes really fragmented from that whole period; there can be months and months and months between different periods, and trying to recall them, it would literally feel like half an hour.

You’ve obviously got a completely different relationship to the songs then, than we have – your connotations will be different to ours; the songs might remind us of events, places we were, relationships we had, so do you have to find the resolution between those differing relationships pulling at each other? No, absolutely not; I think other people’s relationships with the songs often invigorate your own, you know, and re-inspire you to see the meaning in that song, and feel fulfilled by that song again, and maybe enjoy them as a spectator again. Sometimes songs are like the back of your head – you can never see it yourself, you need someone else to describe a different angle of it to you, and that can sometimes really help.

Thinking about the new album, ‘Smother’, it has the same quality in the way it effects me as Devotchka does as well; the instrumentation creates a beautiful dreamscape that lulls me into a false sense of security, then the lyrics act like a silent assassin, whereas I think music and lyrics both had their brutal moments on ‘Two Dancers’ – was it your plan to attack quietly on this one? Yeah, I think we’ve said this before, but I think the ultimate goal for a creative person is to beautify something that is ugly, and that’s something that can be forever a challenge. There’s something that feels really important about that, about taking something that is supposedly difficult and ugly and creating something of beauty, and again I think that’s the real joy about creative work, to perhaps create something of worth out of difficult circumstances, you know. On a personal level, I find that really essential to everyday life, to sort of sweep all those difficult things up and create something beautiful, because everyday life and everyday conversation doesn’t often allow you to really untangle a lot of the underlying politics of our lives. I think that’s really important, and why we’ve come to rely on songs because they do sort of clear the mist a little, and allow you to put a face to a name, to apply to these feelings that you’re feeling.

You guys have always maintained an honest flirtation with pop music, because you’re not afraid of it, and you understand how clever it is. I read an interview with you recently where you said you’d like to be on Radio 1 – is that about connecting with a bigger audience, or proving a point? It’s both, it’s absolutely both, yeah; it’s about proving the point that you don’t have to be a great mimic, or have great marketing teams to be open to the masses and also a point that the masses aren’t this homogenised, faceless group, the masses are this intelligent group of people who thrive on stimulation. People have imagination and people have depth; everyone has a depth of feeling, because that’s how people are built and I suppose I just feel surely so many people in the world are left unsatisfied by the depths of the art they’re exposed to, you know, and I think that’s a real tragedy.

I remember talking last time about people’s relationship with sex, and how sex is presented to us so basely in pop – we got talking about Lady Gaga, and since then you had the opportunity to remix ‘You and I’ on her remixes album, which seems like an funny full circle to me… You know what, it’s kinda mysterious to me how it came about; I imagine she’s got a really clever marketing team who are sort of looking out for surprises and niche artists to maybe give what is quite a right wing, conservative song, a bit of a left twist, if you see what I mean. Yeah, there was something really magnetising about taking on – in some ways – your enemy, you know, not saying that very strongly, but someone that embodies what you feel you kinda represent the alternative of, in a way. It’s almost like if you don’t know what you want to be, you know exactly what you don’t want to be and I think she maybe represents that in some ways to us. Again, it was about beautifying something which is ugly, and I’m not saying in any way that what she does is ugly, or the song is ugly, but it’s important to shed old skins, and old gripes. Life’s too short for that, you know. And again, the whole thing is that this woman has a mailing list of over 2 million people, or maybe it’s 3 million or more, so there could be some girl, some girl who lives in Nevada who follows these breadcrumbs and hears one of our songs and for us, that just felt like what a wonderful opportunity to open up our world a little.

Now Haydn, you’re coming to Norwich next month, which we’re hugely excited about – you’ve got Katie Harkin joining you, is that right? Yes, yes.

What’s she done to the live show? What’s her role? Erm, I think Katie brings the atmosphere, brings the ambience, because ‘Smother’ was such an atmospheric record and relied heavily on the tone of it, we felt it would be sort of disingenuous of us to not try and replicate that, and Katy sort of broadens our palate really. On a personal level, she has really re-energised us, in the sense that someone that enters your world and sees things with new eyes can make you enjoy things that you took for granted earlier. For the four of us, we’ve spent an awful lot of time together, and for someone else to come into that world would obviously have been difficult, but she’s slipped in, in such a compatible manner, it’s actually ridiculous, you know. So yeah, I’m just so happy that we did that and I think she enables us to bring atmosphere into the shows, which surely is what people go to see. 

You will all imbue the venue with so much atmosphere, I’m sure, but what can we, as an audience, bring for you? I think we’re really lucky with our audiences in general; people come and they listen and in general we have really respectful and enjoyable audiences, which is such a great position to be in. It’s actually meant that we can make albums like ‘Smother’ because we need people to listen, so it meant we could be subtle, look at the small scale and be detailed. I think a gig is somewhere where people can step out of the real world and do whatever they want, so I’m happy for people to do whatever they want to do…

Emma Garwood

Wild Beasts hit Norwich on their tour when they come to The Waterfront on March 12th. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk.