26/02/11
The three piece band from West London that you’ll know, or will soon know as White Lies started out as indie hopefuls Fear of Flying and have made a journey that saw them change their style, both physically and musically to become the band they are now, with the integral winning formula of three people that together create music that is far bigger and more intense than the sum of all its parts, that harks back to an Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division epicness, with maturity and not a modicum of over-appreciation, or conversely, self loathing. What we have here is a benchmark band in the making and what we have today is 20 minutes on the phone with the band’s drummer, the uniquely successful Chess Club promoter-on-the-side, Jack Brown to tell us the truth behind those little White Lies…
So where are you right now Jack?I’m just walking to our practice studios in West London; it’s a bit out of the way, but it’s kinda cool. To get there we have to walk from the station, and between the station and the studio there’s an alleyway, which kind of goes along next to the train tracks and cuts through a graveyard – it’s pretty fun.
See that sounds like the location of a future video of yours maybe…Haha, yeah maybe – it’s not very glamorous though, I’m not gonna lie.
Desolate chic, I imagine.Yep!
So Jack, you played your first gig on February 27th of this year and now on the brink of a national tour, are you taken aback at how far you’ve come?Yeah, I think as a band we had our own personal goals and our own personal targets that we wanted to meet, and this is really a lot further along that we expected to be only 7 months on. It’s pretty crazy for us, but at the same time it’s felt like quite a natural progression; we knew the things that we had to prepare ourselves for and overcome. I mean, the live thing is really the biggest challenge for us, because going from doing that first show, to doing a headline show in a small amount of months, off the back of one release, is going to kind of challenge us and push us to see how we can deal with that and make sure that we feel we’ve given audiences everything they want from a show.
So I read a quote that said you wanted to prevent too much premature buzz and keep it secretive, you said, “We don’t want people to know what we eat for breakfast”. Have you managed to retain that level of distance?I think we have; I think it’s something we were really, really conscious of from the beginning, even, to a certain point, now. It’s kinda hard to be in a band nowadays and not have everyone know everything about you, and that’s not really an appealing thing for us. The way we started this band was with one song on a MySpace page with no pictures and all of the buzz that we got – and I suppose we weren’t successful in controlling that, because we did get quite a lot of hype, which isn’t always productive for a band – was off the basis of this one track on MySpace; we didn’t release any photos of ourselves, we didn’t put any more tracks up, we just kept our cards close to our chest. Even now, we’ve only ever put three tracks up and now we’ve got a remix too, but it’s kinda nice to know that people are interested in you just on your musical ability and the quality of your songs. We kinda feel that by not over-exposing yourself too much to people who wanna get stuck into you, we’ve kept a level of mystery that’s hard to maintain these days, ‘cause usually you do just know everything about every band too soon, so where’s the mystery in that. Especially for us, I mean, we’ve only released two singles, so we don’t want everyone knowing everything; we want people to not know what to expect with the album, and what to expect from our live show yet. We’re pretty happy with the way we’ve done that too.
I think it’s very commendable, and I’m not going to ask you what you had for breakfast, so you still hold those cards! So, you were all previously known as Fear of Flying – as White Lies is the formation of the same three members, what was the reason for the reincarnation?Erm, I think it’s slightly harder for people to understand now, because we’re getting so many people that are mentioning Fear of Flying now, and y’know, at that time, no-one was interested in us! It was a band that really did nothing…
It’s ironic isn’t it?!Yeah, I can understand it, because obviously we’re getting attention now, so people are going to try to find out stuff about us, and that’s definitely part of our history, but I think the point with that band is that we were doing that band when we were kids; people try to compare White Lies songs and there’s not really any point, ‘cause you do a lot of growing up between the age of 16 and 20, and in that time we were maturing musically, and although lots of people know us for our later Fear of Flying stuff, it was getting closer to what White Lies is anyway. It was something that happened naturally for us – we didn’t really force the change, we just we felt we needed a clean break from it. We wrote Unfinished Business and immediately we were like, “this is just head and shoulders above anything we’d done with Fear of Flying”, so it was unfair for us to put it out as Fear of Flying, because people have preconceptions of it, people won’t give it a proper chance, and we didn’t want that. We wanted to make sure that as a track, it got a fresh start and a clean slate. We thought that we didn’t really have much to lose at that point, so I think it was probably the most sensible decision we made, because in the end, we gave ourselves that chance that we wanted.
We’ve been really enjoying Death and Unfinished Business in the office – I even keep trying to sing like Harry – but what can we expect from the album?We finished the album about 3 weeks ago, I mean, it only just got mixed and mastered and everything, so we’ve now got a finished disk, which is exciting for us. It’s quite a versatile album – it varies a lot; we kept the same kind of sound throughout but we didn’t decide to write just one kind of song on it. It’s pretty uplifting in places, and also quite an epic album, I mean, there’s only one song on there that clocks under four minutes, so they’re quite long tracks. We kept the same kind of idea that we wanted to concentrate on building the tracks up as they go along, not jumping straight into a really fast track and keeping it the same the whole way through; we like to structure our songs slightly differently from that. The album is a really, really good representation of where we were as a band when we wrote it, because the album was essentially written and recorded in 6-7 months, and for any band, that’s a really insane time schedule. It’s immediate, I mean, you can sense the urgency that was there when we were writing and recording that album and yeah, it’s something we’re very proud of I think.
Is it a painful wait for you before it comes out – are you burning to get it released?It is and it isn’t, because we want to get it out there, but at the same time we did it somewhat fast, as in the recording and writing of it, so we want to give it the best chance that it has of being a success, and that’s not easy these days, so we want to make sure that we fully tour it, and put out a few singles before it comes out so that people are aware of us and have a better idea of our music as a whole. I think the only way you can do that is to get out and tour and we’re doing everything we can on the live front to get people excited about it, and if that takes a few months, then you know, I think it’s worth the wait because we want to make sure it does what we want it to do and that it lets everyone know we’re here and what we’re about.
Your video for Death is really haunting and epic – is this cinematic quality something you want to run through all of your music? Erm, the video for Death was really fun for us; it was a chance for somebody else to interpret our music and do what they wanted and I think we got pretty lucky with the guy we chose to direct it, ‘cause he’s a really good director. Something we’ve always pushed is the cinematic quality of our music; some of the best music in the world is music you can listen to that sounds like it’s sound-tracking something – it’s not just an aural experience, it’s kind of a visual thing as well and if you can push that, it’s a really cool thing to have in your music. With our album, we put a lot of time and effort into recording a really big string session for a lot of the tracks and there’s a lot of orchestral sections on the album which feature heavily aside from the bits that people have heard already and I think that’s another really exciting thing for people, to hear that side of it because that’s something that we were really aware of and that’s something we wanted to get across – something that was pleasing for all the senses, not just on your ears and I think if you can do that, you’re on to a really good thing. It also helps people to connect to it if you have something that people can immediately respond to because it stimulates them emotionally – if you can do that then people really take an interest in your music because it’s something they can relate to much quicker.
So your songs are quite dark – is this a reflection of your own personas or the stories of other people?It’s a bit of a combination; Charles, our bass player writes the lyrics to the songs and musically it’s a kind of collaboration between the three of us as to what we’re influenced by. As a band, we’re not influenced generally by one type of music; we don’t listen to one type of music as individuals, so I think the music we write is a kind of combination of all our different influences and they’re all pretty diverse. So musically that’s just something we arrived at by chance, I’d say, it’s just kind of how we feel music should sound. We wanted to keep it ethereal, quite earthy music; we didn’t want it to sound too synthesised in places, more that you could always hear people playing the instruments in the tracks. Again, I’d say that was more of an emotional thing. In terms of the lyrics, Charles writes probably 50% about his own life and 50% are just stories, so that’s something that we’ve all been in to – stories. That’s something that we’ve always found quite interesting, when people tell stories in music. It may be made up, but it’s still a nice way of connecting with people, not necessarily telling them everything about your life, but telling them something about other people’s lives, or something you’ve just imagined – that’s kind of a nice thing to share with other people.
So, you played the NME New Noise tour with Friendly Fires, Team Waterpolo and Crystal Castles earlier this year – how was it that you fell under the NME radar so quickly after your first gig?I don’t really know actually, to be honest. I think they got hold of ‘Death’ and ‘Unfinished Business’ as soon as they were released to the internet world – they were quite quick on that – and it’s a relationship that I don’t think we’ve tried that hard to push, but it’s something that they’ve really picked up on and as soon as they invited us on that tour, that put us on their map and that meant that we were kind of gonna follow us in terms of what we were doing musically. But obviously it’s a good thing to be part of ‘cause that’s one of the ways that we hope to get our music to as many people as possible, but it doesn’t mean that we have any deep affiliations with anyone there.
So what was that tour like for you?It was cool! It was really strange for us though ‘cause we started that tour on only about our 6th or 7th show ever, so we had to do a lot of learning to play a lot of shows in a row very quickly, but it kind of set us up for the festivals and touring that we had to do over the summer and I think that ‘cause we did that tour right before we went to record the album, we went into recording the album feeling very confident as a band ‘cause we’d been playing these shows together. We got quite a lot from that; obviously we ended up having quite a good relationship with Crystal Castles, then they asked to remix Death for us, which was an obvious “yes” from us. I mean, Crystal Castles were one of those bands that really divide opinion in a huge way – some people love them and some people despise them and for us, it was just like, if anyone’s gonna do a different version of one of our songs, it’s gonna be them, ‘cause they’re gonna do something completely different with it and there’s not gonna be anybody sitting on the fence with that one. We love it as well, so we were really happy with it.
You’ve had some famous spectators to date – Mark Ronson, Morrissey, Nick Cave and Glasvegas to name a few, but who are the bands that you’d be seen at the front of the crowd watching?Erm, it’s funny, ‘cause probably a few of those. I know we’d love to go and watch Nick Cave and Glasvegas are a band that we only met this summer, but they came to watch us when we did our show and they’re an amazing live band; they’re a band that have grown on us a lot ‘cause at first, they were a band that we found quite hard to listen to on MySpace and stuff, but as soon as you see them live, it all starts to make sense, so when you listen again, you start to reminisce about when you saw them and it’s all pretty amazing, so yeah, they’re a band we’re all pretty in to at the moment. I am still very much into Yeasayer, who I’ve seen play loads of times now, but would still go and see them again and again when they’re around ‘cause they’re a really exciting band.
You’ve promoted them through Chess Club in the past haven’t you? Yeah that’s right and that’s how I’ve come to know many of the bands I like now actually, through promoting them on the label. We put them on last April and it was an amazing show; probably the best show they’ve ever done, but erm, y’know, it’s a good way of me getting into watching music live, because it’s really hard to see some of the bands I like live, so if I put them on through Chess Club, at least I get to see them! I can enjoy them myself and then get to know them as friends.
So, the press can speculate and predict, but you know yourselves better than anybody, so what is your one shining light as a band and what’s your one Achilles’ Heel… so what’s gonna make you and what’s gonna break you?Erm, I think what we really have in terms of something exciting at the moment is obviously this album which we have under our belts, which obviously we’re really happy with, but maybe 12 or so people in the world have heard it, so it’s really exciting for us to have that and we feel we have a bit of power with that. I think really, the thing that’s got us really excited this week is playing and learning the new songs, because when we wrote the album, we recorded a lot of the songs in the studio; we wrote them and recorded them and never really sat down and tried to play them live, so we’ve been learning the songs in the last week in preparation for this tour and we’ve just kind of felt collectively that the more and more we’ve done it we’ve thought ‘do you know what, the tracks on the album sound great, but in a live setting, if we get the production of the show right, I think that possibly we’re gonna be a band that people see live and think “yeah”, and that’s something I can really appreciate. I think that we’re sometimes better live than on a recording, so that’s something I’m looking forward to – seeing how people react to us live. As for Achilles’ Heels, I think as a band, we tend to take criticism very personally and I think that’s probably something I shouldn’t tell people, ‘cause now they’ll all criticise us and we’ll cry, but that’s just something we’ve always had, but at the same time, it’s something we’ll probably grow to deal with over time, in a year or so when the album’s released, ‘cause we’re gonna have some people who love it and some people who hate it, so I think we’ll grow to understand what that is.
So finally, you played Norwich before as part of the New Noise Tour – any memories of our fine city?I have memories of Norwich because we played them as Fear of Flying before as well supporting the Maccabees and we ended up sharing a bus with them and the first night that we shared the tour bus with them we woke up in Norwich – it’s a very strange experience waking up in a different place – but I have a memory of going down to the market place maybe and there was some strange juggling going on in front of it with knives and stuff…
Wow – they usually only sell fish…Well, that’s my lasting memory – a man throwing knives around.
I guess that IS better than fish.Exactly.
Emma Roberts
Catch White Lies at their headline gig at the Norwich Arts Centre on the 2nd of October. To book tickets, go to www.norwichartscentre.co.uk