After one of the most stressful, against the clock journeys from Southampton to London– it’s a relief when I finally find myself upstairs at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, catching my breath whilst Fenech-Soler‘s lead singer, Ben Duffy, makes himself a cup of tea.
“Do you want a tea? Or maybe you need some water after that?” Ben Duffy, Fenech-Soler’s lead-singer asks me after recounting the tale. “We have fancy bottled water if you’d like?” With water (for moi) and tea (for Ben) in hand we headed next door to get talking Fenech-Soler’s journey from the pub circuit, to our first meeting in 2010, to tonight—their headline show at Shepherds’ Bush Empire.
When you guys started out did you ever expect to make it to a headline show at Shepherds’ Bush?
Probably not, no. We’ve always set our sights quite high but I guess we were just taking it gig by gig—especially with things like the festivals which are just insane. It’s never been an overnight thing with this band—it has been a slow and steady incline. With releasing this album and playing this gig and this whole tour… it’s just happened to us at the right time and yeah we’re all really pleased to be here.
Would you say things have changed within the band since you first started?
I guess we just got better at what we do—we became better musicians and producers and stuff. We’ve probably also grown in some ways closer and in some ways further apart as a band. I think with this album and the transition from album one and album two it has been an experience—I guess we have become more comfortable with the space that we occupy musically now. I still think though that at the heart of it we’re the same… I mean obviously Ross is my brother so we always have the same outlook but we [the band] all grew up in the same area and have a mutual love for the same sort of music and all of those things are still the same and bind us. I think we’re a lot stronger as a group now and are just comfortable within it.
You toured pretty extensively with your debut album—do you think that served to hone in on what did and didn’t work hence influencing the way you write and perform these days?
Yeah, I think so. It’s all the experiences that go with travelling and being part of a band and then playing alongside other bands… I think we’ve always regarded our performance and live shows quite highly especially considering it is electronic music and you have to make it sound good live—it’s a bit clinical. It can be quite tricky, especially when you’re not a DJ or on a laptop and have live instruments and to have the real band element. But we quite enjoy it, and we like getting that balance right. The bands we have toured with, we’ve really looked up has made us kind of like—well in Australia we did a tour with Miike Snow and Friendly Fires and Phoenix— which were like our three bands we’ve always found amazing and it was incredible every night. And we came back from that and ended up rethinking about the way we did our thing.
I think certainly touring with that first album has given us a real insight into the world and I think right from the start it’s been trial and error with this band—it hasn’t been something that has happened overnight. It is something we’ve chipped away at and it’s something we’ve tried to stay loyal to and when something went wrong, we looked at what went wrong and worked out how not to do it in future—that’s both recording and with regards to our business heads and trusting our gut instincts… And just like everything else that comes along with a band. Yes, so definitely it shaped how we’ve worked out.
When it comes to the musical process of writing and recording an album—how do you guys go about it? And has that changed between your self titled debut and ‘Rituals’?
Well there are two ways that we work… Myself and Ross we do majority of the songwriting, we’ll work as a unit and basically sketch stuff out which is completely different to the way of Andrew and Dan. Andrew is the real kind of production whiz and he has incredible patience and knowledge of production; he’s really good at taking it all on and figuring out which bits are good and which bits are bad or need more work—and it’s good for us, as songwriters to get that opinion. Then we kind of go back and forth between us to flesh it out. With this album we essentially wanted to do the same as in the first album—in the first we did the whole first album in Andrew’s bedroom… This time though we build a studio right by Andrew’s bedroom—like right outside. We built that from scratch and put in everything that Andrew has built up and everything we needed and we pretty much recorded the entire album there. Yeah, it’s been good. This time though we worked with a few different people which is something we’ve never done before and that was quite good for us—it was therapeutic as recording can get a little claustrophobic.
This is the final night of the UK stretch of the tour—how has it been for you all?
This tour has been incredible, we’ve been really, really lucky and we’re feeling really good about it.
We weren’t supposed to really be doing that many festivals this year but it turned out we ended up doing quite a lot. They let us open our minds again after being locked in one room and yeah, they were great. When you play a festival though you’re not only playing to your fanbase so you have to work a lot harder and your setlists are really different, contain more of the singles to make up a set.
But it’s really nice now, in contrast to get back into building a show around an album and getting to play the slower tracks and make it flow a little bit more. So the last few weeks have been really nice to just start doing that again. And it is nice when you have an album out to go out there and play it and to play it to an audience that know it—because at a festival, yeah, not a lot of people know it.
You’re playing at bigger venues now; has that changed the touring experience for you?
Yeah, I guess… It tends to be a lot more… Well I guess we have more people on the road with us—which kind of makes the experience more fun and funnier. Of course, the venues mean we’re playing to more people and that’s always nice. I guess it hasn’t changed in some respects; we’re still bombing around in vans and still got those sorts of elements to it. So yeah, it’s changed somewhat but then a lot has stayed the same—a lot of the people we have in our tour has stayed the same which has been great fun for all of us involved.
Previously I read that you guys knew you would’ve made it once you get hummus in your rider—has that happened?
*Laughing* Oh we did say that once! Yeah, we get more than one variety now… It’s like a band touring staple. I saw a tweet once off Metronomy and they had a reference to hummus being on every single rider for all the bands and it’s so true. When you think of it—it’s something you don’t actually see outside of this very often but any sort of gigging environment with a rider it’s always there. It’s great, we get every flavour imaginable these days…
Now that you have a back-catalogue, does that alter the way you construct a setlist and do you ever change it around?
We’d really like to play around with it, but we don’t really unfortunately. We have certain parameters we have to play to and so that’s how we construct our setlist. With electronic music it’s pretty difficult to do some of the things live—but to make our music work all of us are always doing something and you come off stage feeling like you’ve worked for it. So yeah, we have parameters and you can’t go absolutely crazy. It sometimes would be nice to be in a rock band where you can just decide to do that chorus over and over for like five minutes. *Laughs*
It is quite set, but we enjoy doing it—we have a little rehearsal space back in the village where Ross and I grew up and we just go in to there. We just come together and decide and whittle them down to give us what we’re going to play. And it’s quite nice to now have two albums to choose from and it’s only really in the last month or so we’ve had such a choice—so now we don’t have to play the weaker ones from our first and just play our best songs, that’s been nice. And having a mix of albums one and two has been great for us too.
So, ultimately what is it you want to achieve as part of Fenech-Soler?
We all feel that there’s a lot more to be done around this album. We made sure that the album had a lot of releasable tracks, and now, looking back a lot of those on the album that we didn’t think could be released as singles—we probably could now. I think ultimately it is to tour as much as possible—we haven’t really done a lot in America yet. We toured with Groove Armada out there but after Christmas we’re going to head over there and start stuff going and put out a single and just see how it goes; that’s our immediate future. I guess, long term, we just want to keep going and get bigger and get more people to our shows—isn’t that the whole point of a band? If anyone told you that that’s not their aim, then they’re lying… That’s the purpose of being a band, getting more well known. That’s always been our goal—but for us it’s always been a steady progression. We’ve had some things that have been good luck for the band and helped us out, and, at the same time, we’ve had some things happen to us that hindered us. But if you make the music good and you’re always true to that and yourself and go out play shows that, eventually things will rise to the top. We’re just going to concentrate on making our music good and giving stuff back to our fans and that’s our plan.
And to finish, a little bit of an odd one… If your band was turned into a biography—what would you call it?
Oh god. I just thought of the shittest answer—oh god… If we were a rock and roll band it’d be ‘life through a bottom of a glass’ but that’s pretty cliché and I’m pretty sure that I knicked it from something I read yesterday… There has to be some sort of pun with the band name—oh, I know, how about ‘how to be in a band with a really stupid name: Ben Duffy; The Biography’? That would be it, yeah, the experience of weathering through a band with such a stupid name.
A name that no one can really pronounce?
Yeah, I think if we could all change the name, we probably would; although it has become such a running joke within the band now. We picked it so long ago, back in the days when we were still on the pub circuit as a joke… We were playing electronic music and so… Yeah, we should’ve gone with something else. Although I can’t say too much about it because it is Dan’s surname—but I think even he’s like ‘ugh, we should’ve picked something else’ now too.
Surely it must be a bit weird for him to be playing in the band that’s sort of named after him?
Funny thing was, this morning we were laughing over all this and we said it would’ve been typical for us to turn up outside of Shepherd’s Bush and see Fenech-Soler spelt wrong—with it as ‘solar’. It would’ve been awful but so typically us. So yes, it would have to be ‘How to be in a Band with a shit name’.
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