Music > Interviews
Interview with Guillemots
01/11/11
A body of work by the solo artist Fyfe Dangerfield last year sent alarm bells ringing with fans of Guillemots. Why? Fyfe is more than creative enough to stand alone, proficient in his own avenues and endlessly inventive. But if it signalled the end of Guillemots, we wouldn’t have that chaotic chemistry that only the four components of the band can bring together, the multi-national, sonically diverse quartet who aren’t afraid to colour over the lines. Relief was felt all round then, as a third album, ‘Walk the River’ materialised, and a full UK tour…
It’s been a few years since I saw you perform at the UEA – that was a really mesmerising gig. Oh yes, I remember that gig…
I was a Guillemots singles lover before the gig, but that night converted me into a full-blown album lover. Oh wow, thankyou!
So Fyfe, you’ve just been in Brazil; that was a brief trip, was it? Brief but really, really amazing, yeah. For whatever reason, we haven’t really toured the world as much as we’d like to and whenever we do, we’re just like ‘this is what we care about.’ We’ve never particularly seen ourselves as a British band, ‘cause I’m the actual only member of the band that’s English, certainly, I mean Greig’s Scottish and Magrao is Brazilian and Arista’s kind of Canadian / Japanese / Chinese, so we’re from all over the place really. It’s so brilliant when you get to go and play different countries and Brazil was so amazing. I think we’ve always felt – we’ve always known that there were a few people in South America and particularly Brazil who wanted to see us. We had no idea how many, but we got really good crowds and they were singing along to everything, you know, even album tracks from ‘Walk the River’, not just our more well-known songs. I think we’ve always felt some sort of link with Brazil, through Magrao and he named ‘Trains to Brazil’, like, it had a different title before and then we have the song ‘Sao Paolo’ as well, so we’ve always felt some sort of weird connection with the place. It couldn’t have gone better really – it was just a really positive trip, it was great.
Your musical influences are so wide – you seem like the kind of guy who would breath in other countries’ sights and sounds like osmosis. Do your travels creep into your creative psyche? Mmm, but I think generally everything… general experience creeps into creativity. I mean, I think your creative self is no different to your actual self in the sense that everyone would say that everything that happens in their lives forms the person they are, and I think that’s the same with the writing stuff. Like people always ask you what type of music influences you, but it’s weird, I don’t know if it’s ‘cause that’s how my brain works – but all of us in the band are like it – you could hear a piece of music and that could influence you, but you can see a tree, or have a conversation with someone, or bump into a wall, or whatever and all of them set off triggers that might then give you an idea musically. I think all of us, certainly in Guillemots, have a tendency to almost think in sonic terms sometimes. Maybe that’s our way of making sense of things. But yeah, definitely travels do, yeah; there are specific moments that I can definitely picture being sat somewhere with a view, and hearing something in my head. Just everything really, everything influences everything.
You’ve been a multi-instrumentalist from a young age, and your brother is musical too. You must come from musical stock… Yeah, it’s weird because not exactly; my brother loves music and has a great ear and he sings, but he doesn’t really play instruments, and both my parents love music and my Dad plays a bit of piano, but there’s not really any musical background, no. I don’t really know where the music side of things came from, but the whole multi-instrumentalist thing, I dunno, it’s one of those terms that sounds so precocious and I don’t play 20 different instruments! I think if you’re vaguely musically minded you can pick up different instruments and vaguely get something out of them, but it’s not like I could pick up a trumpet or a cello and start playing a concerto! I’ve just got an enthusiasm for it, I think; music’s always been the one thing that I’ve done since I was tiny. It was obvious that’s what I wanted to do, yeah.
You had previous musical incarnations before Guillemots, but could you never have achieved what you have now with Guillemots, like the sound and the whole package, with those previous bands? No, I couldn’t have done what I’ve done now, or what we’ve done, no. I always wanted to do music and I’m sure if I hadn’t have met the guys I would have kept trying and hopefully had some success in some way, but the way that Greig and Magrao and Arista play, and more importantly the kind of connection we all felt when we played together was something that none of us had experienced before. It awakened us all in terms of ideas and sounds, so I definitely wouldn’t have done – I mean, like, there were songs that I had written before I met them, but by the time we’d recorded them they’d transformed into something I could never have thought about myself. That’s what I really enjoy about playing with Guillemots – it’s such a fun process ‘cause even if it’s something I’ve written and brought it into the band, people will just be like, ‘oh, I’d never have thought of that,’ you know, it’s very open-ended.
I read a lovely quote from an old Telegraph article about the band saying, “Few British contemporary artists are so cheerfully maverick” – do you think that’s because you’re not tied down to one musical heritage? Yeah, I don’t know really; I don’t even think we are really maverick, I don’t know… it’s a lovely thing for them to say but there are loads more bands that are more avant garde than us. I just think there are a lot of bands who come along who are very clued up on who their audience is, their social scene and the whole thing goes together and there’s just a very definite stamp of ‘we make this sound, these people like us, we dress this way…’, which is great, but I don’t know, we’re from all over the world, we all like different stuff, we’re all really different kinds of people, although our sense of humour ties us together – that’s what bonds us as friends, so I don’t know, I think it’s ‘cause we just don’t wanna do the same thing twice. If you do something once and feel like you’ve done it successfully, then there’s no point really trying to go back to it, which isn’t to say you can’t sound like yourself. If you do something that then sounds like a thing you’ve done before because that’s the sound in your head that’s OK, not because you thought, ‘oh that was successful, I’ll do it again’. If you have a commercially successful first record, then it seems to make sense to build on that and do something similar, but maybe slightly more mainstream but with us, with every album we’ve done we’ve just wanted to do what’s in our heads and hearts. That’s what we’ll continue to do, I think. I think that the people that are really into the band do appreciate that they never quite know what they’re gonna get.
Yeah definitely, I don’t want to be able to pre-empt a band all the time – it doesn’t excite me to be proven right, in a way, so it that sense I love your explorative side. That’s definitely the idea; I want it to be an experience and different and an adventure because that’s just like the music I love and any artist I love. It feels like you’re sucked into this magical world, so I’ve always wanted it to be like that for our listeners. I don’t want it to be just a record that you listen to, I want it to be something you can dive into and go swimming in.
You don’t remind me of Goldfrapp sonically, but Goldfrapp seems to adopt that nature of change – - Yeah, they’ve really flitted around from record to record.
Yeah, you’ll never be able to guess what Alison Goldfrapp will do next, and that’s part of the excitement. The thing is, to me it’s natural, but maybe that’s indicative of the kind of person I am. I mean as a person, one minute I’ll be incredibly positive and full of energy and bright and then the next minute I can be down… maybe it’s inevitable that if you’re like that as a person, you’ll be like that creatively as well. I just get bored easily and I wanna express different things. It’s weird because I can definitely see that if I was a businessman – especially with the Billy Joel cover that happened last year; that was such a random thing to get asked to do, just someone saying do you want to cover a song that you like, and I was like, ‘yeah, why not?’ They wanted it really like the original though, so I didn’t even get to put my stamp on it, I literally just sat down at a piano and sang it. Commercially it was the most successful thing I’ve done, which is weird and you think ‘OK, if I just spent my life doing albums of covers on the piano, I’d be really successful’… well, I don’t know if I could be successful, but you’d probably have more chance of making money that way. I’d get no satisfaction out of doing it though, I mean, I love doing that, but if I was doing that and going on tour for nine months of the year, sitting at a piano singing songs, I’d be bored out of my mind! I just can’t do that; I love the extremes, I love sitting down at the piano and the intimacy of that, but once I’ve been doing that for three weeks, I want to go and play in a three-piece noise band! I think what’s nice about Guillemots is that we all like all these extremes, so it’s a band I can do that in, rather than be in twenty different bands, you know. I think we’re exploring those limits of what we do even more now with this new album we’re recording at the moment. We had a fortnight in Norway a couple of weeks ago to record this new stuff and it’s great, it feels like more than ever we’re putting more and more of our real extremes of taste in to what we do and it’s just such fun. I think you’re fed this idea, to some degree in our society, or certainly in the music business that it’s like, ‘right, what does this person do? We need to know what they do, then market it.’ I think it’s quite hard to do that with us, because it’s hard to go, ‘oh, this is exactly what this band do.’ I don’t think we do just do one thing.
I imagine you’re a marketing nightmare! But having said that, I think the one thing that I do feel more and more is that we want to make music that makes people happy. I don’t mean we’ll write songs that are all happy because some of my favourite songs are ones that you listen to when you’re down to give you comfort. I’ve felt a lot in the last year after talking to people after gigs and so on, after hearing more and more stories about stuff you’ve written being taken into someone’s life and you realise that that’s the loveliest part of doing something like this, you know. I know what music’s meant to me and if you can do that for some people that’s lovely, so I want to keep pushing ourselves, but also keep in mind that this is for other people to listen to as well, not just for us to think, ‘oh, we’ve written something else – we’ve done our job.’ I want it to be something that gives people pleasure, you know.
We’ve talked a little about your explorative side, which always works so well in a live environment, but in recording for this record, you brought in an external producer – did you need someone who could reign you in, or let you go? Erm, I think on this record it was a little bit of both, I think. It’s something that we felt we had to do on this record that we’re not going to be doing on the next one. I think at this point, the first album had been easy because I’d had that one in my head for years and then the band came together and I dunno, I didn’t really have to think about it. The second record kind of, ‘let’s try and pour all these mad ideas into something and make this mad schizophrenic pop record’, so when it came to the third one it maybe felt like we just needed someone to almost step in who wasn’t biased and so on, and just be like, ‘I think you should concentrate on this side of yourself’. We’d write a record and then be like, ‘no, we should do something else’, and then be like, ‘fuckin’ hell, it should sound like this…’ I think we felt like as a reaction to ‘Red’ maybe, we wanted to do something that was very much played as one thing, rather than jump around as we did on the last record. I think we just felt like we needed a bit of help, you know, even if someone could go, ‘well, I’m not one of you guys and I think this would work.’ David did an amazing job and I think for the kind of record we did, I can’t imagine working with someone better. Again, you change though, I mean right now we’re working on our new stuff and it feels like it’d be crazy to have a producer there. It just varies from thing to thing really. When I say producer, I mean outside producer because you know, whenever we work – like at the moment we’ve been working in Norway with a friend of ours who’s kind of producing it with us, but it’s completely different doing it with someone you know. With ‘Walk the River’ we felt we needed to work with someone we hadn’t been friendly with before just so we were out of our comfort zone a bit.
I’ve talked about your prolific live reputation – does that put a pressure on you to deliver a certain kind of performance, to keep inventing and pushing things forward? Erm, I wouldn’t call it a pressure; it’s a necessity really. I can’t imagine living without making music and trying to write and play, so it doesn’t feel like a pressure to keep moving forward, it’s just what I want to do and what we want to do.
We’re very much looking to having you back in Norwich; it was a while ago you were here, but do you have any memories of our wee city? Not specifically the city because we probably didn’t get much time to see it, but I know Norfolk very well because I’ve been on a lot of holidays to the north coast with my family bird watching because it’s an amazing area around Cley and Blakeney and all that. Also when me and my photographer friend David did our photos for my solo record, I had this idea of it being in a rape field and he said, ‘well, I know some great places in Norfolk’, so we did the same thing and drove around north Norfolk for a day and found fields! So I’ve been to the area a lot, but I have vague memories of the gig; when you mentioned it I had one or two things in my head.
Emma Garwood
Guillemots come to the Waterfront on November 15th. For tickets go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk. Read the uncut version of our chat with Fyfe at Outlineonline.co.uk