Interview with The Wombats

What can music college teach you that will actually prepare you for life as a British sensation? They can sharpen your flats and add construct to creativity, but when you’re miles from home, racing through time zones and buffeting excess adulation and interest, the lessons in modern band behaviour are only just starting. For three lads bound together by their higher education, the real learning started after their landslide emergence into the music biz via their lapped-up debt album, ‘A Guide to Love, Loss and Sepearation’. The comedown from the momentum of that album was hard to resolve, and only now do we see the re-emergence of the wombat. We talked to Dan ahead of the second album release and UK Tour…

How are you doing this morning? Not bad, just literally jumped out the shower, so I’m good to go. I just came back from Paris yesterday actually. I missed my flight and didn’t get back ‘til really late, so it was a bit of a waste of a day yesterday.

What are you looking out on at the moment?Well I’m in Liverpool and it’s kind of a hazy grey; the sun’s trying to get through and it doesn’t look like it’s that cold outside – it’s obviously been raining last night. The birds are singing so I guess all’s good. I’m looking at a holly hedge and the remnants of my Dad’s bathroom; there’s been a flood so there’s just heaps of rotten wood as well.

I want to take it back a few years, probably about five or six, for you to tell us for anyone that doesn’t know, how you guys got together…That’d be seven years, believe it or not, but we met in Liverpool in a music college called LIPA. It’s a good school – I went there for a year and met Murph and he carried on and did a three-year course and Tord came in from Norway. Me and Murph started playing together, then we needed an extra person in the band; Murph and Tord were in the bar talking one day and Tord was in like eight bands to start with, so for the first couple of years it wasn’t like we were putting everything into it, but we’d meet up for a practice every couple of weeks and playing a gig once a month or something, then little by little we got more and more into it. Our sound started coming out over those two or three years, then we tried to gig as much as we possibly could, and did that for about a year and a half. In fact, included in the view I’m looking out on is the car that we used to just drive around in for years and years – a nice little Vauxhall. We’d just play Tetris, pack all the stuff in as tightly as possible and Tord would sit there with an amp on his knee, then we’d drive off round the country doing gigs anywhere that people would have us, sleeping on promoters’ floors. Little by little, we got a few lucky breaks here and there, like we got a gig in China through the school, LIPA, like an international exchange thing, which led to a bit more press interest in the UK, and then we did gigs in Paris and Norway, just through MySpace really. Eventually we started to do our own little nights in Liverpool; we did a weekly night for a month and at the end of it we were getting, like, pretty decent crowds because between 16 and 20 year olds, the word had started to spread, or whatever. We did a show in the Carling Academy Unsigned, and by that stage a few record labels were sniffing round and they took the bait and signed us.

Were you aware of the potential of the band? Did you realise quickly what you were working towards?Not really, I mean when you’re in a band, obviously to start with – and even now – it’s as much a therapy thing as a job, you know, it’s more of a thing where we just have to do it. This is what we did and we didn’t make any money for several years, but after a while you kinda think, ‘well, maybe we never will’, but you carry on anyway because as a band we still have great times. People often ask you what’s your advice for new bands, or whatever, but I think that that’s one to think about, that you may never get there, so enjoy the journey as much as the getting there, kind of thing. Towards the end I think we were getting a little frustrated, thinking ‘is this ever going to happen?’ and we had some songs that we were playing that all our family and friends and everything were really in to – ‘Moving to New York’ was one of them and ‘Lost in the Post’ were songs that we played quite a while before getting signed, and my brother, for example, was like fifteen at the time and he was well into it, and all of his friends, so we did realise there was definitely some potential. We were always really proud of what we’d done, but it always seemed like a bit of a lottery whether we’d get signed or not. You just don’t know how it works really, when you’re younger.

I think for Liverpool bands, you’ve got two choices – to adopt that Liverpool sound, or not, and you guys don’t, but has the city’s weight had any influence on you?It’s always a really hard one, because I guess subconsciously it probably has, but obviously the sound you’re referring to is more like The Coral or the Zutons, so in that respect we never started out with any kind of Liverpool band mentality; we weren’t all just mad Beatles fans, you know, we never set out to do that. We just wanted to make as wonky pop as we could, you know. I think because Tord’s from Norway as well, he’s got various hardcore electronic tastes and I’m a lot more into, like, folk stuff a lot of the time. We all share a love for like Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead, so I don’t think we came from Liverpool bands, but obviously the Beatles, we all love them. The Beatles and the Beach Boys, you know, just their harmonies and melodies, we are influenced by, and also they’ve influenced so many artists over the years that you can’t help but think it’s trickled down through the years, hasn’t it.     

I heard one Australian fan say she couldn’t wait to see you play live because you sound like such a British band – do you feel ‘Made in the UK’?I think most people from the UK or the States – where I guess 99% of all our music we listen to comes from – I guess you can say easily that they’re American, or they must be British and with us, maybe it’s just the accent, or maybe it’s because when a British band starts doing well internationally people feel proud, it’s straight away more important that they’re British. It’s maybe a sense of belonging, or ownership. I think you can hear in our accents when we sing that we’re not from the States, or whatever.

There’s mention of New York, there’s talk of Tokyo in your songs, so would you move away from the UK?I’ve actually already technically moved to Paris. I moved there in January, yeah, because my girlfriend lives there and is from there and I’ve lived in Liverpool all my life and I’ve just turned 27, so I was like ‘right, I think it’s time for me to live somewhere else for a bit and see how it goes’.