What made you decide to do a solo album?
It just kind of happened really, I mean I’d always thought I’d do something at some point and I’d written a lot of songs in 2008. Some of them were just really acoustic and they didn’t seem like the kind of thing to do with the band anyway, so I just booked five days in the studio just before Christmas with my friend Adam. We thought let’s just try and record and let’s not try and get perfect versions, just demo them basically, and we really liked the sound of the demos and just thought ‘lets use these’.
So the album was all done in five days?
Well six tracks on the record we did in those first five days, and certainly half of them we just left as they were. For Barricade we did it that week but added the strings later, and yeah, it was really fun to work that quickly. On Red we recorded on and off for like nine months, not continuous I mean people were moving house and stuff, so it was really nice just doing something so quick, and this year I thought I’ll spend a couple of months and see if I can write some more songs, then did a bit more recording and then we had a record.
You recorded twenty-five songs – how do you whittle that down to an album?
It’s difficult. The idea was to do the whole thing quite acoustically and then it ended up becoming quite mixed. There were tracks like She Needs Me where it needed the kick, so it’s ended up a bit like Red in a way, an album that really flits around, but I don’t really see it that way. I know a lot of people are like ‘oh there lots of different styles’ but I just hear it as music. So it was really just about getting an order that, for me at least, works, and so there are songs on the bonus album that I’m probably a lot more fond of than on the record.
Is there anything you miss?
Yeah there’s one or two that I’ve been playing on the tour, but sometimes the ones I prefer I don’t perceive them as good songs, there’s just something about them that I really like. On this record I get to try and put forward the best songs, that’s what I was going for not the sound so much.
It must have been really different recording process for you?
Yeah very different, certainly a lot quicker that recording with The Guillemots, and it’s not that I’m down on the guys at all, they’re a few of my biggest musical interests in way. It’s just that it’s nice to say alright let’s call up Jamie, let’s call up Matt, you know it was very quick. It was definitely quite liberating.
And the touring must be different too?
Well this is my third gig and I don’t know if I’ll do that many. Not unless the record suddenly takes off for some reason. It’s just a fairly low-key thing, these may be the only gigs I really do and I’m generally just happy that the records out. I think that’s the main thing, and She Needs Me has been doing really well on the radio. I think it’s the only song on the record that would do well, but it’s nice that it has.
The album shows a different side to your vocals – was that a conscious decision?
That was partially conscious but it was partly just the way that it was recorded. A few people have said that there’s this really close vocal sound. I don’t remember really talking about doing that, I think it was just a combination of the mic we used and whatever the recording did to it. I like that about it because I love to drench my voice in reverb, and I was trying to push myself go differently about it. On Barricade especially I had a really reverb heavy vocal and Adam was like ‘it sounds much nicer without it’.
Do you get the ‘classically trained musican’ fact thrown at you a lot?
[laughs] Yeah that makes me sound really pretentious. But I mean yeah, I really love classical music but pop music is what I’ve always loved.
So is there a new Guillemots record on the way?
We’ve been writing loads but we haven’t started recording yet. You know I think we just need to take our time and really make sure we can dream something up. We’ve been largely just playing as a band and waiting for songs to come out of that but I’m trying to write apart from that too so we’ll just see what happens.
Does the solo work feed into that?
Yeah I think that what I want to do is changing. When I started this record I really wanted to do something acoustic and now I want to really do something, to make something really original. I’m in a funny position in my life, you know I’m proud of the stuff I’ve done but still I feel that I haven’t done anything like what I feel I’m capable of. I really want to just push myself a bit harder. It’s that thing where you’re not old, but I’m never going to be someone like, I don’t know, like Alex Turner, someone that just somehow connected with his generation. It’s just that thing where I feel like I’ve done so much already but I’ve probably missed that chance to really just have that big moment, so I feel like I’ve missed the boat on that. I get really worried sometimes, it really scares me you know, I mean even with this album some people have been slagging it off for being really straightforward, which is fair enough, but kind of missing the point. It’s not that I didn’t have any ideas it’s just that I wanted it to be quite stripped down. I mean it’s easy to start freaking out and thinking ‘what if they’re right, what if I’ve already used all my best ideas’ but all you can do is try harder and I think naturally as a creative person you go in ebbs and flows and you never quite know when you’re going to come into a golden stage. You just have to keep slogging away.
Interview: Alastair Mitchell backstage @ ABC
Pic: Euan Anderson
