We grabbed Lexi after the gig at the Pav Tav for a quick chat about the band, future and what it’s like being on Alcopop Records
Hey, how are you guys doing?
Everyone is fine, everyone is safely in a cheap rental van back to Birmingham and I’m stuck here.
Why have you stayed here when they’ve gone back to Birmingham, do you just enjoy Great Escape that much?
It’s nice just to spend time in Brighton, and we had the opportunity this year to rent a house like real human beings, so me and my girlfriend and Jack Alcopop and a few other people went together and we’re being civilised.
You’ve recently announced yourself as becoming a four piece, have you thought about that for a while, or is it just something that happened unexpectedly?
We thought about it forever, but there’s such a small circle of people in Birmingham who know the band and know our songs that we’d trust to have couped up in a van twenty-four-seven with us. Louis, the guy who’s doing it has done our artwork forever.
He’s pretty much always been a member of the band anyway.
Yeah, he’s so used to it. We begged him for two years, and he cracked a few weeks ago.
I have to ask, did he play guitar or did you just make him play guitar?
He did, he’s an amazing musician; he played guitar kind of writing soundtracks for the art stuff that he did. His last ever show was supporting us at our first single release and then his band kind of gave up, so it’s pretty good to have him.
Have you spent your time on new material, or have you been getting the old stuff ready for the new lineup?
We’ve been pretty democratic about it. Everybody has had a say on what songs they want to play and everyone has just learned the songs. I think as it gets more into festival season we’re going to start learning more obvious songs and doing a more “greatest hits” set, but right now everyone has their say in the set, so everyone’s getting an equal share, we’re very democratic.
You released an EP not long ago on a Frisbee, do you think interesting releases like this is the way forward for single releases?
I don’t know so much about that, I just think single releases are kind of boring in nature, nothing really happens and it’s a song you’ve already heard with some b-sides. It’s fun, now we have Jack and we have the resources to do that. What would be more fun, releasing a CD, or releasing a sticker, Frisbee, whatever random crap comes into our heads first and tagging some music onto it? It’s a lot more fun way to operate. I don’t really know how we’ll top the Frisbee, I think we’re going for super soakers next.
The last album you released with extras like the book, the tshirt, was that an attempt at combating piracy, or did you just do it because you wanted to?
From a practical sense obviously, people are a lot more liable to buy something if it comes attached with something fun that isn’t just a piece of plastic with some data encoded on it. But I think that’s the Alcopop mindset, they never want to release just a standard CD of something so boring and mundane.
I agree with that, I mean, I had the songs to review, but I still felt the need to order it because, well it had the comic book, something different…
It was a bit of a mammoth task, obviously none of us had made a comic book before, so how exactly do we go about it?
How long did it take you?
Probably about 4 or 5 months of me and Louis collating people’s photos and sticking them together and then ripping it apart and starting again. It came together in the end. We asked loads of people to take photos for us, and Patty’s photos were fucking incredible and we had the same kind of buzz off her photos that we did off Louis when he does drawing for us, it was like ‘that fits what we’re trying to do so well’. So we got more in touch with her, and it was like a really awkward e-mail three way for about three months and then we settled down. It probably only took a couple of weeks to put it together in the end once we had the basic format, but so much prep, so much dropbox, it was unbelievable.
I felt that with the last album you had a good mixture of the normal fun dance along songs and also some quite calm songs, is that a sign of how you’ve progressed as a band?
*laughs* yeah, we’re totally mature now; do slow songs… When the band started out there was a proper divide – we had two setlists, there was the set we’d go and play in the pub where we’d be all loud and bring amps and stuff, and we had the set when we’d go around people’s houses where we’d just dick around with loops and stuff. And then when we signed a deal and we were on tour that’s really conducive to playing stuff loud and being noisy and obnoxious as we were in real life. The record took like a year in gestations, there was so much time of us just sitting around each other’s houses with four tracks just messing about that we got the slow stuff back again. It was so much fun to be able to work on stuff like that and then take it to a proper producer; like, how do we make this sound good like the other stuff? It feels like we’ve matured, I don’t know if we matured or we just had enough space to reflect and get into ourselves – that sounds so bad *laughs* – we just got into ourselves a bit more!
When you go to write new material, what’s your process for that, do you write the songs, or, erm, who writes the songs?!
I guess it’s getting more like Jr. does stuff on loops; Jr. pisses about with Fruity Loops.
Surely that’s weird, the drummer writing the songs?
Yeah, well Jr.’s written like all of our songs that are famous and people know, that’s mostly Jr.’s stuff, I just write the filler inbetween. It’s so much more fun working like this, we have two separate environments, it’s a lot more conducive to everyone being involved if you’re just sitting around someone’s bedroom than if you’re in a studio where everyone’s like ‘okay, shit, we have like ten hours left; you do this and you do this and you do this, and I’ll do that’, where as this time we have like three months, let’s just all listen to everything and chill out a bit.
Are you guys working on anything new at the minute, or are just getting yourselves together as a four piece?
Yeah, that’s the plan at the moment. We never plan more than a few months in advance because we’re just terrible at planning.
It’s probably inevitable that as a four piece you’re going to end up writing some new stuff, surely?
Yeah, totally. We’ve never really talked about it; Louis joined the band, and he’s such a good guitarist and it’s just pretty much learned all the parts before we’d started practing.
He’s the most modest person I’ve met; I tapped him on the shoulder earlier and said “hey, you really added something to the band” and he just seemed so shocked that I was giving him praise
Yeah, he’s amazing! Someone was like “oh, he’s so underrated” and I was like “he’s not underrated because everyone that hears what he does or anyone who sees what he draws is like “oh my god, you’re amazing!”, he’s just under appreciated.
One last question; when I last saw you, which was Southsea Festival last year, if I remember rightly you’d had a break down or crashed into a bird half way back and someone actually sent their parents to collect you; did you ever expect that fans would be that dedicated?
We thought that gig was such a write-off, and that was such a bad year. We were so in debt and every little festival we did clawed…we were like a million grand in debt and every little festival would claw like a hundred pounds back and we’d end up getting slowly closer to the black. We were doing it on the cheap to start with because it was an Alcopop thing so everyone gets paid a few pence, and we didn’t hire a van, we arranged to borrow amps so we did it in our tour managers car but he’d just arranged to sell his car, and it was like “it’ll be fine, we’ll just take it out for one last drive” and then we were at this service station three hours before we were supposed to be on picking bits of dead pheasant out the outside of a radiator. But yeah, it came through; Alcopop seems to have that weird magical thing where shit just works out in the end.
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