An Interview with We Were Promised Jetpacks
Where are you at the moment Mike?
I’m just at my house in Edinburgh actually.
Very good – are you having a couple of days off?
Yeah, a couple of weeks; we don’t go on tour ‘til the 6th, so I’m enjoying being home.
I saw on your MySpace actually that you were supposed to be playing a gig in Cardiff tonight, but it had been cancelled, so what’s your favourite thing to do on an unexpected night off?
Oh, absolutely nothing, completely! We’re all surprisingly a little bit jetlagged because we’ve just come back from the States like a week ago, so we’re all just trying to get back into our sleep patterns, as exciting as that is!
That tour of the US was with your label mates, wasn’t it? The Twilight Sad, The Brakes and Frightened Rabbit, is that right? How did you all go down out there?
Really well actually, I mean, both Frightened Rabbit and The Twilight Sad do a lot better out there than they do in the UK. I guess this place is just smaller; there’s probably the same percentage of fans here as in the US, but over there there’s just a lot more of them, so it was kinda the same – the crowds were really good and there was loads of them every night, so it was great.
What was it like being with all the other bands? Was there a fair amount of hijinx going on?
Erm, a little, because we were all on the same tour bus, like, there was about 15 of us on there, which was a little claustrophobic, but quite fun at the same time.
Actually I was hoping I could blame you guys, because we did an interview with The Twilight Sad while they were on that tour and we tried a few times, but it was impossible to wake them when they were on the tour bus… We talked to a guy with a Spanish name…
Yeah, Esteban! He’s great!
That’s it! We spoke to him a lot… So I can blame you, can I?
Yeah, absolutely! Well it was really difficult, because we’d drive on the tour bus all through the night and it was impossible to get up before the bus actually stopped moving, like, it was psychologically impossible to get yourself up, because we had no idea of what the time was or anything, so we’d be asleep until the bus stopped, which sometimes was like, one in the afternoon, sometimes it was four, sometimes it was earlier. But Esteban’s the nicest man in the world, so it can’t have been that bad, surely?!
If I go back a little bit, I’ve read that you formed in 2003 as school friends – was your initial sound similar to what we here now?
Oh no, it was really bad! I mean, it wasn’t even really a band – it was just us guys playing together. It wasn’t until a few of us moved to Glasgow for uni that we didn’t practice ever, we just played sometimes, so it wasn’t until a couple of years after we moved that we started being a real band, so we have been playing together since then, but it’s only been about two years that we’ve been doing it properly, which I think is the way to do it – we’ve all got this musical bond, like, we all know what we were up to before we even really started.
You must have had a hard slog balancing gigging presumably with jobs and uni work – was there ever a time you thought about throwing the towel in?
It was really relaxed… We didn’t really care; it was just something to do that all your friends could come along to for a while, so we just really played whenever, like every couple of months and just made a night out of it. It wasn’t ever really a proper band, so we never thought anything of it until it started going well, like, there was suddenly a few times that we played that we realised there were some people there that we didn’t know, so it was kind of going well before we even considered it as a possibility. We never really found it a problem…
So that was the turning point – getting people at the gig that weren’t your Mum and your best mate…
Yeah, they were there too of course, because they always are, but it was when we started writing songs that we realised were kinda better than we thought, do you know what I mean? I mean, we always liked the songs we were playing, but it got to the point when we were writing them and we realised they were quite good!
You kind of owe Frightened Rabbit a little bit for your signing to FatCat Records, don’t you?
Yeah, Frightened Rabbit actually told them to look at our MySpace page. We get a lot of press saying that they sort of stumbled across our MySpace, but it was more like Frightened Rabbit said, “You need to listen to them”, and they said, “OK, how do I do that?”
Is there a strong bond of help between the bands on the circuit that you know?
I don’t know, I mean, our only experience is the Frightened Rabbit thing kind of helping us out, but there’s a really good community now in Glasgow, of, really of just a bunch of friends who’ll help each other out and play together… it’s not the whole scene, but it’s just our perspective, like, it’s just our group of friends basically. I can’t really comment on the whole thing, but for the bands we know, everyone hangs out and helps each other and there’s a real community feel to it.
I interviewed Malcolm Middleton the other day, who played a part in The Reindeer Collective, the body of Scottish musicians headed up by Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody – can you see that happening again? Can you see yourselves all forming one conglomerate of a band?
Ha, I don’t know because it’s hard to get everyone together, but Frightened Rabbit did that Christmas single and there was a choir version that was basically that – it was just a bunch of local bands, I mean, it wasn’t advertised as that as such, but that’s essentially what it was. Basically, that group of bands that I was talking about earlier, like, that group of friends all singing in this choir, so I mean, that’s happened so I can’t see why it wouldn’t happen again.
If you had to curate your own collective, who’d be in it?
Ooh, that’s a big one; I don’t know… I’ve just realised that Panda Bear from Animal Collective is the best musician in the world – I’ve just had a sudden realisation about that – so I don’t know whether I’d just like to get him in on his own… that’d be enough for me!
Wasn’t he featured on your Spotify playlist?
Yes he was, because I think he’s just the best man ever.
I was really appreciating listening to your Spotify playlist actually, but what to you makes the perfect mix of songs?
Oh, there’s that great scene in high fidelity where he talks through making the perfect compilation and like, it starts off great, then it gets even greater but it’s still not done yet… I really like that scene.
There’s only two of your tunes on Spotify though, isn’t there?
Yeah, I don’t really know what’s going on with that. We thought that when the album was released it was gonna be on Spotify soon and we’re still just kinda waiting – I don’t know what’s going on.
Who sorts that out – the label?
Yeah, the label I think, but like, my Dad’s got a band and he said you just send something to Spotify and it just appears in its own time, because obviously they’ve got so much to put up there, so we were expecting it to take a while, but maybe not as long as this!
You were included on a FatCat sampler that was on the front of Plan B magazine long before you were even signed to the label – did you know at the time that you were going to be a signing of theirs?
It was about March time when our drummer went to Germany for four months to study for uni, like, we played two shows and then he left two days later, and it was after the Glasgow show that Frightened Rabbit said to Fat Cat, “these guys are quite good, you should listen to them”, but then there were about four or five months where we just couldn’t do anything. They were saying that they’d like to sign us, but they’d kind of like to see us live first, and we agreed, y’know, I don’t think we’d like to sign with a babel that hadn’t seen us play live, so we were just putting it off. But then again, FatCat being FatCat, they kind of get really excited about stuff and it was like they were planning it without really telling us. We had to wait ‘til the end of August, I think it was, for him to get back and play; we played on August 31st when Alex from FatCat came to see us, then from the 1st of September, we were booked in the studio ‘til the 5th, then on the 5th, we had a tour – all planned by FatCat who were assuming we wouldn’t be awful! We were so nervous for that performance…
Did it give you a new level of vigour for your performance though?
I dunno… I was horribly nervous; I’m usually OK, but for that one, knowing that it was kind of quite big, I was so excited and it was all I thought about for the four months, just playing again. We sold out for that gig as well – it was the first time we’d sold out anything live, so that helped!
You released your debut album, ‘These Four Walls’, in June of this year, but with you having been together for so long, had some of the tracks been written for a long time?
Sort of, like, a couple of them like ‘Quiet Little Voices’ and ‘Moving Clocks Run Slow’, we’d had for quite a while, maybe three years at the time and then the rest was kind of written about 10 months before recording, because what we did was we played so many sets that we’d drop a song every set and add another one up until we realised we’d have an album to do. There was one we wrote in the studio and a couple we wrote a couple of months before – it was quite drawn out in a good way.
It must have been quite a wait for you – is it a hard wait?
Yeah, the album was supposed to be out in May I think, so it was hard getting a bit of press to build it up, then we had problems mixing it, so it was put back and put back and put back, so all those plans to kind of hype it up happened, then there was no album for two months, so I think we were really lucky that it didn’t all die down – it was pure luck!
I was really amused reading your MySpace blog that was a message about you winning Best Live Act for the Is This Music Yearly Poll, simply entitled, ‘You’re Crazy’ – is the positive reaction hard to believe sometimes?
Yeah, that was stupid, I mean, there were millions better bands in that competition that us! There really was! It’s totally difficult to understand, like, we kinda tend to read a lot of the reviews and only really agree with the average ones – the ones that say, ‘yeah, it’s quite good; they did their best’, we think ‘yeah, that’s right, we did our best’! Any kind of extreme good praise we can’t really deal with, I guess because we’re Scottish – that kinda happens! We don’t know what to do with praise, but we get a lot of bad reviews as well, which again we understand as well. There was a single review for ‘Quiet Little Voices’ in Pitchfork which was given a five out of ten, and it kind of read like a bad review, but we all met up the next day by coincidence and realised it was exactly right – we agreed with the entire bad review! It was really well written though, I mean, if it’s well written and makes some good points, then it’s hard to disagree with – it’s the lazy ones we don’t like.
So you’re coming to Norwich next month – you haven’t played here before, so what can we expect from your live show?
Erm, I dunno… mostly, hopefully, to leave you with sore ears, that’s all we really hope for – to be loud! Loud and energetic…
You want us to be aurally ravaged?
Yeah, as long as you’re in a little bit of pain when you leave, we’ve done our job!
Emma Roberts
Catch We Were Promised Jetpacks when they come to B2 on November 11th, supported by local faves, The Brownies and The Barlights. For tickets, buy on the door, or get them in advance from www.crowdsurge.com Read the uncut version of
