BCR: A bit more chin stroking back to the table.
Jonny Dawe: That’s it, you know what theatre sorts are like.
BCR: So how does it all feed back into itself, does it… I mean it sounds like you take a lot of the disciplines from both your worlds.
Jonny Dawe: It is, on this album, there is an element of performance about things.
BCR: Well there’s the spoken word…
Jonny Dawe: Erm yeah, that’s called Some Song. The vocals on that came from a friend of ours who is a performance artist, Sharon Smith. And yeah, that’s probably the most performancy part. There is a definite sort of theatrical – even what she’s talking about, going on stage and theatre and I think that we even get to do some booing in it which is nice.
BCR: But then you’re booing your own…
Jonny Dawe: We booed at our own vocalist, yeah. But it was encouraged.
BCR: I haven’t seen you live, so how does it translate to live shows, is there a lot of improvisation?
Jonny Dawe: No, live is… well it’s not improvised, really at all, we are, it’s… songs are pretty much how you hear them. But you will hear them quite differently. It’s quite complicated. It’s a monster, live. There’s six or seven people involved and lots of instrument changing, some backing tracks, some triggers from drummers, you know.
BCR: Six or seven people?
Jonny Dawe: Yeah.
BCR: Oh of course, to get that kind of layering…
Jonny Dawe: Yeah. Not everyone’s onstage at the same time though, so it’s kind of… I guess the main interesting point is visually as well as sonically, it’s a lot of changing going on in between tracks and different instrumentation. It’s good but it’s quite… if we were asked tonight to go and play down the road, we wouldn’t be able to do it, it’s quite…complicated.
BCR: That sounds like quite a feat – to take that on the road.
Jonny Dawe: Yeah, well we have done shows with just two of us, where we use a lot more backing, and slim it right down. Which is good as well, but it’s a different thing. Also, I mean, live the tracks are different as well. Because it’s very much, like a lot of bands I guess, you write in the studio, then you learn how to do a version of it live, which will be different.
BCR: I was trying to figure out how… because I didn’t realise that you’d play with six or seven when you did it live. Because I couldn’t figure out how you’d be able to pare that down really.
The starting point when changing what you hear now to live is try and take as much out as possible before you put it back in, because it is impossible – if you kept layering and layering it would just sound shit. At least in the studio you’ve got much more control of different layers and stuff. I don’t think we’ll be doing any shows till after summer but when we start rehearsing that will be how we approach it, we’ll look at things and we’ll take out as much as we can and then start working bits in. Things like some guitar lines might get played on a cello instead, so you know, we’re quite ruthless when it comes to that I think. We need to realise that it could be quite a mess.
BCR: So how do you approach actually writing the songs because it seems, and you’ve said there does seem to be this connect between… you’ve got these really long, sparse abstract tracks interspersed with things that are quite performance based and then you’ve got those three or so tracks that are quite sort of… they’re very pop. So how did you, obviously five years in the making, don’t know if you can… can you recall?
Jonny Dawe: Well…
BCR: Would you say you had a kick-starter?
Jonny Dawe: Well, Nick brought a couple of things to the table, which he’d been involved in with his theatre work, that he thought… all these kind of ideas. Nick had written that piano line for a theatre piece, and he’d written and embellished that. Sanitorio as well, that was a similar tale – he brought some stuff to the table. On Air Conditioning, we were bringing sounds, we’d recorded a lot of fans and telephone sounds and just etc etc. And they would be our starting point, whereas this was more…
BCR: Physical maybe?
Jonny Dawe: Um… yeah, more… less just an abstract sound, it had some kind of content to it as well.
BCR: So it started with an idea…
Jonny Dawe: Yeah there’s always… we tend to pick up on different things and that… one of us will carry it through one way and another will carry it through another way.
BCR: That’s perfect.
Jonny Dawe: We’re very different people which is kind of weird but we do have a similar aesthetic, and we’re both coming from different directions really. And somehow, well we think it works and we’re happy, and that’s good.
BCR: It does work, that’s the point I mean…
Jonny Dawe: Strangely enough I was talking to Nick the other day about swimming and I was just saying ‘I just can’t do the front crawl’, whenever I go swimming, all I can do is breaststroke, and Nick’s like ‘I’m exactly the opposite, I can’t do breaststroke!’ and that sums it up really.
BCR: That sounds like serendipity really, to me.
Jonny Dawe: If I remind myself about specific tracks, have you got any specific track questions? Then I could tell you, sort of… I could try and remember back to how…
BCR: Reichenbach Falls.
Jonny Dawe: Reichenbach Falls was sort of, how that derived from that… because erm, Reichenbach Falls is where Sherlock Holmes finally met his nemesis, Moriarty, who died there. Yeah, I just thought of the track musically was sort of like a metaphor for meeting your nemesis and what would happen, I don’t know why, but it became like a journey like that. Things that tend to get a bit more mountainous and I’m thinking – landscapey. Reichenbach’s in Austria and there was a definite Teutonic thing going on there, slightly Kroutrocky synth line that was actually played on a cello. That’s how these sort of things go forward, different ideas about how a song’s working.
BCR: So you each have an interpretation…
Jonny Dawe: Yeah but sometimes we don’t tell each other what we’re thinking and we just use it to kind of make judgements on the sounds.
BCR: It sounds quite fun, it sounds like you work independently while you work together.
Jonny Dawe: There is a little bit of that yeah, I think we all have different ideas of where things are going… sometimes. And then the final thing, it somehow… it needs bits of beauty and ugliness somehow. I’m talking about the album, obviously there’s a lot that we do that… there are tracks that we’ve struggled on for months and months like any band, ‘there is a good song in there, there is’ you know… ‘it’s long dead, it died months ago’.
BCR: I was going to ask you if you thought that your music was happy, because, the immediate is obviously melancholia, and it’s quite a sort of gentle, you mentioned sorrow and it’s quite dark and whatnot, but there is also quite a lot lilting influences, there are some really, really fun, playful songs.
Jonny Dawe: Well there is a fun side to us as well, you know, it’s not all po faced, I think melancholy is a good… is the right word, that’s good, but I think that it’s more to do with the the notes we use. In the music, the keys and I think some of our ideas, they’re not silly because they’re considered but there is a sort of foolishness, maybe about things that we’re trying to do, which amuses us, I mean you’ve seen the cover and I think that’s quite funny.
BCR: I quite like that, ‘let’s grow some beans’.
Jonny Dawe: That came about just because we thought ‘what’s the least rock and roll thing we can think of?’ ‘well… gardening.’ So that’s what started it all, you know, we were like a band but in an allotments kind of setting and it’s… it’s very painterly I really like that, it’s like a pose for a painting.
BCR: In terms of the stuff that you’ve curated, I know you do your own stuff but I couldn’t find any of it online, and obviously I haven’t been able to go to any. Are they the same? is it the same sort of sparsity?
Jonny Dawe: The thing we did in Glasgow was me and Nick together, which we don’t often do for visual art. I might do bits of visual art on my own but what we do together, it was sort of musical.
BCR: Oh right the one in Glasgow was you together?
Jonny Dawe: We did it together and it was perfect really because it was an exhibition about art and theatricality. It was quite a musical thing that we had, even though it was only really a few sounds, it was all about different phases and it was basically made like an automated scene changer so it’s a huge 10 foot frame. It had false perspective in it and it had two large roller blinds at the top that were automated and different scenes of this door came down at different rates with pauses at the bottom and pauses at the top, quite a weird one really. Because it had different pauses, it was never the same, it was quite flowing, and they had a facsimile of the door behind it, so sometimes you did actually see the real door and sometimes you didn’t. And we miked up the motors that drove it and it had a really orchestral but very, very slight sound element to it.
BCR: The first thing that comes to mind is deceit though.
Jonny Dawe: Deceit? Why deceit?
BCR: Well you know, you never really get to see the real door,
Jonny Dawe: Yeah, well that sort of thing was a theatrical question, you know, ‘what is the real door?’ and obviously everyone… the door was such an icon of philosophy as well isn’t it? Going through different existences.
