Music > Interviews
You Me At Six
29/05/15
Over 1 million Facebook fans can’t be wrong. Surrey rock band You Me at Six sell our arenas worldwide, and their number one album Cavalier Youth came out last year. This band started out when they were just 15, and now at the grand old age of 25 have chosen UEA for a warm up show ahead of their performance at the Isle of Wight Festival. I spoke to guitarist Max about how they’ve grown in the last decade and why they’ve picked Norwich for this very special performance.
So you’ve been together for 10 years. What have you learnt about each other in that time?
We’ve learnt how to wind each other up, but also how to look after each other. When you spend a lot of time on the road you’re like a family, away from your usual family at home. We’ve learnt when to have a chat with someone or when someone needs to be with someone and to help them out. We’re there for each other. We also have had a lot of fun together, and we all know each other’s best and worst sides.
Will you be having a special party to celebrate having been together 10 years?
Yeah, we’ve got things up our sleeves…I don’t want to ruin the surprise though! You’re gonna have to hold on and see what’s coming.
You’ve kind of almost grown up in public. How does it make you feel when you look back at your performances and videos through the years?
I don’t think we really ever expected this to happen to us. I started at 15, and at that age all you care about is going out and playing music and having a fun time. We didn’t expect it to turn into a career that has lasted for 10 years so far. If we hadn’t grown up in the public eye we would be very different as a band; people aged from 12, 13, 14 right up to our age now are able to relate to our music as result. We’ve all made mistakes in the band; there are things I can look back on and wish I hadn’t done that but that’s developed us as humans and artists as we’ve worked out how to do things as we’ve gone along. We’re just a normal bunch of lads who are lucky enough to go out round the world together playing music and having a good time.
Why are you called You Me at Six, by the way?
It’s a terrible story! We just didn’t have a name for our first gig and we had to have something on the flyer to say we were playing. It was just something we used to say on a Saturday night; “You, me, at six we’ll meet up here and we’ll go there”.
I was listening to your most recent album Cavalier Youth. The first sentence from the album is “We’re not young anymore”. Is the theme of the album. about you guys maturing?
That lyric reflects that at that point in our career we were trying to take a step forwards. We tried to do a few different things with this album that broke us out of our comfort zone; we wanted to experiment a bit, because that is how many of the greatest artists formed. Like The Beatles went from Love Me Do to Come Together, or Something, that sounds so different from their earlier work. So, yeah, the lyric introduces the shape of the album. It’s a bit of a different listen; we wanted to make people think and listen and realise that it wasn’t the same as it was before. Our tastes have changed and we’ve grown up musically and matured. We take influences from a much wider range of places from when we were 15 or 16. We sit around and listen to music and if it has a good hook and a good melody and is memorable, that makes a great song, no matter what.
You’re from near Weybridge in Surrey, which is pretty posh. What was it about growing up in that environment that made you want to make rock music in particular?
We recently got involved in Independent Venue Week, which was to raise awareness of local communities that have music venues closing down. When I was young I used to go Woking, Kingston, Reading all the time to see my friends playing music, but those places are disappearing now. They’re places for people to go to on a Friday or Saturday night that give this generation a way to grow. These days if you want to be a band you’ve got to go down the X Factor or The Voice route…its good for some, but for us as a band, we had to suck when we started, we had to practice and find our feet as artists. It’s quite a worrying factor that these venues are disappearing. We played rock music because we listened to rock music. I grew up with Pink Floyd and The Police around me, and other members of the band were into Led Zeppelin, the Chilli Peppers, The Beatles, T.Rex and Fleetwood Mac, so many of those classic bands. When we first started as a band, in 2005/2006, we idolised American music because that was big at the time and we wanted to be the UK band making that same sound. It was labelled as pop/punk, or emo, but I think as you develop as an artist you don’t want to be labelled as this or that, you just want to do what you want. We’re a live rock band that plays its instruments live. We’re not a machine; we do make mistakes live.
You have 1.2 million fans on Facebook and half a million followers on Twitter. Do you enjoy the interaction between your fans and yourselves?
I think it’s a good thing! Social media has brought a lot to artists, they can have a connection to their fan bases that they could never had before. You could never have had that level of interaction with your audience. If it weren’t for our fans we wouldn’t have a job! So we pay respect to it for sure. There are definitely times I would like to be a bit more mysterious and wish people didn’t know what was going on all the time, but that’s the generation that we’re growing up in. It’s so important for us a band to keep in touch with our fans…there could be people from South America where we’ve never been who listen to our music and who want to talk to us online, and we can change peoples lives by doing that. It’s just five or ten minutes of our time but it could change someone else’s life.
Your show in Norwich is a one off headline show before you play the Isle of Wight Festival and there’s a lot of excitement that you’re coming here! Do you know why Norwich was chosen and how do you feel about coming and playing at such a relatively small venue for you?
We chose Norwich because we hadn’t played at UEA for a really long time. We do play big venues now but it’s going to be a great gig. For us it’s about going back to a great venue that we loved playing when we were coming up the ranks. You guys have had the BBC Big Weekend there recently…it’s giving back to communities and venues along the way, and giving them something they wouldn’t normally expect. I mean, who would thought that You Me at Six would, at this point in their career be playing the UEA? We’re playing homage to where we came from…playing decent venues around the world.
You Me at Six play The Nick Rayns LCR on 11th June.