Music > Interviews

Turin Brakes

21/01/16

How do you manage to remain successful and release seven brilliantly written albums these days? Turin Brakes have been putting out their own music, plus writing for the likes of Take That, for many years, and it all started back with Olly and Gale met when they were just kids in London. After adding a couple collaborators along the way and playing hundreds of live shows, their new album Lost Property is out this month. I chatted with Olly about how seeing Transvision Vamp at Brixton Academy when they were 11 changed everything for them.

When did you and Gale decide you wanted to make music together initially?

The first ever gig we went to was at Brixton Academy, it was Transvision Vamp. We were about 11 and far too small to be watching a fairly adult gig and the security guards took pity on us and let us go up into the private balcony and watch the whole thing from there. That was the beginning of it all, we thought “we’ll have some of this!” Years and years we spent going there all through our teens as well as other venues and we were in awe of the live music scene really.

How come you’re called Turin Brakes?

The reasons are many! It’s pretty abstract. When we first started making music seriously in our teens out music was very escapist, it sounded like it was coming from somewhere else. It wasn’t particularly London-centric or even UK-centric. Someone came up with Turin Brakes and we really liked it ‘cos it sounded like a different place, and interesting and intriguing. The best part about being called Turin Brakes is if you type the name into Google it only goes to stuff to do with the band, there’s nothing else out there! We have our very own sound so we figured we needed our very own name as well.

I was just looking at the sleeve for your new album, which is a futuristic abstract landscape with an alien in a deckchair. Have you maintained this feeling of wanting your music to feel like it’s from elsewhere?

Yeah, something that we’ve always played around with is mixing the surreal with the domestic and making the familiar feel strange or vice versa. We’re always refining that idea. Some artists do something new every time they record something so you wouldn’t know it’s from the same people and some people have a certain sound that they refine, and I think we’re that kind of a band. We’ve got our ways and out grand themes that we like and we’re just trying to make it better every time.

Gale went to Canada to start a band and you went to art school for a while in the 90’s. What was it that made you come back together to be a full time band?

Somebody randomly heard a mixtape we’d made in the back of a friend’s car and he’d just started a record label and decided he wanted to put our music out as his very first release. He got in contact with Gale while he was in a space rock band in Canada. I was just about to graduate from doing my Fine Art degree at St Martins in London. It was perfect timing and we had this project to do which had some validity to it. We were 19 going on 20 where we were young enough to get away with doing it for a while without anyone giving us any hassle and the stars aligned. Obviously there was talent there but there was also timing and luck, and we got snapped up by a label who put a lot of money behind us. Here we are 17 years later still doing it as our living which is wonderful.

The Optimist LP came out in 2001 and was nominated for Mercury. What do you think it was that the judges heard in your music that got you nominated?

It was very fresh. We’d come off the back of Britpop and then there was the sports metal from America, stuff like Limp Bizkit which was huge at the time. And then suddenly here come two guys who sound like The Everly Brothers crossed with Radiohead, or some weird combination like that and I think it just sounded very fresh, it didn’t sound like anyone else. Lyrically we were pretty deep and musically there was a 70’s Americana, Laurel Canyon feel mixed up with an edgy emotional feel, and that combination hadn’t been heard at that time. We were the first of that particular wave.

Ether Song, which came out in 2003, was more electric, darker and epic compared to your previous work. You re-released that album a few times…how come?

That is the life of being on a major label. You’ve got to work with these people, you can’t just be telling people to stick it constantly. That was us being quite young and assuming that the people around us knew what they were doing. We did feel it was a bit of a mistake to rerelease that record, a bit of a strange move, but you live and learn. Luckily we’ve made up for it by bringing out artistically credible work ever since. It was a bump on an otherwise smooth road.

Your seventh album is out this month, called Lost Property. How come you decided to call it that?

The ‘Lost’ part is the really important part for them. If there is any theme running through this album it is that of loss. I think that it is probably one of biggest human battles, we’re all dealing with loss constantly whether you’re aware of it or not, it’s happening around you all the time. Just by being alive you’re dealing with things ending, things going, people disappearing, and it’s a big subject, one that I find inspirational. One of the reasons I write songs is as a big “f*ck you” to loss and bad fortune and upsetting things. It’s a way to make something beautiful and delightful out of something that can drive some people insane. It’s something I’ve been interested in since I was a kid, subverting the negative of loss.

I’ve had a listen to the album and it feels very confident and also feels like a mix of all your previous sounds within one collection. Would you say that’s true?

Hopefully that’s true cos if it is we’ve really nailed it! We’re really at the stage where we can cherry pick our best moments and allow some of that back into the mix. We know how to get to point B now in the studio without going to point Z first and how to work as a band together. I think that we feel very confident as a four piece band as we’ve been together a long time and have played a tonne of gigs together and that’s influenced the sound and it’s allowed us to present ourselves in a confident way. We’ve cut the fat out; we’re not beating around the bush, we get straight to the point of what we’re trying to make now. If you do something for long enough it can come out pretty strong in the end. We’ve certainly put in our 10,000 hours of practice!

How does your songwriting partnership work? Do you have a tried and tested process?

It’s similar to how it’s always been 95% of the time; I’ll start the ball rolling with the start of a song. I like to spend time alone coming up with ideas. That’s an important part of what Turin Brakes is. It needs to feel like it’s coming from someone. When I’ve got a bunch of stuff that I feel in my waters might be the beginning of a good record I show it all to Gale first who’s the oldest member of the band apart from me, and then we bring in Rob and Eddie and start jamming out ideas in the little studio at the bottom of my garden. We work stuff out and spend at least two months playing through all the ideas for this album and slowly picked out songs that we all thought were good. Sometimes ideas that I have have to be abandoned because the other guys don’t get them, but that’s fine, that’s my job. Things get put aside for a rainy day. The eleven songs that ended up on the album were ones we all felt very strongly about.

You worked with Take That before, right? What’s it like working with such a well known songwriter as Gary Barlow?

Yeah we wrote a song for them for their album The Circus. It was interesting. When it comes to making music for Take That he’s extremely business-like. He knows what he wants and what he needs for the band. It was really cool to experience that because generally we work with people who are a bit more open to exploration. He was very much after a specific thing and we were glad to go through that and succeed at the end. We brought in a song we thought they might like, and then me, Gary, Gale and Howard worked on it for three days. Howard is a big fan of Turin Brakes, which is how we got the initial contact. Making that song with them helped to fund our album Outbursts..I’m quite happy to write things for other people if it’s going to help me to keep making art.

What would say is the secret to your longevity in the music industry?

Probably that we’ve stayed pretty much outside the industry! We’ve remained a little bit isolated from it all and in the early days people around us would criticise us for not networking as heavily as we should but we were never any good at that sort of thing. We were our own private little army. In a weird way that’s been why we’re still here as that’s how we still are now. Now, the Internet has forced everything into becoming niche apart from the most mainstream of pop, but we’ve always been a niche band so it suits us very well.

Are you playing any festivals this summer? Who would you like to catch live?

I know we are playing a load of festivals but I can’t actually say it! It’s going to be the busiest festival season for us in about a decade. Who would I like to see? Probably Tame Impala. I saw them years ago when they were in a very embryonic state. They showed a lot of promise but they weren’t perfect yet. Then I saw a clip of them playing live the other day and they blew my mind. So I’d love to see them live because sonically it’s a bit like being taken to outer space and back which is, at the minute, my favourite thing to do!

Turin Brakes play at Open on 21st February. Tickets are available from ueaticketbookings.co.uk