You’ve supported Coldplay on this tour, is the experience of playing support to such a huge band completely different from doing your own gigs, audience-wise?
Jack WL: We’ve done similar kinds of gig in the past but it’s always much different to doing your own show. I think it’s a bit of a shock at quite how different it is ‘cos sometimes you go and play to an audience of like 40,000 people and really feel like no one is interested and you can try your hardest and push them to show some response and sometimes it just won’t happen and other times you can do a show and you feel like you’ve got everyone’s attention and that’s really great. There’s not really many opportunities for any band in the world to get to play to that many people and for that reason it’s something you have to just embrace and take it for what it is. It’s something you can definitely get better at and I think we are getting better at it as we go along. We’re coming to the end of the Coldplay tour now and these are the biggest shows, so hopefully we’ll see a reaction because if anywhere, these are the places where people may already know who we are. We’ve gone to places like Scandinavia where 99% of the people have no clue who we are, so it’s nice to be doing this as well.

You’ve been doing the festival circuit this year, I caught you at the Open’er Festival in Poland, it’s bizarre to think you do a constant round of gigs all summer. Is it completely faceless or do you gain anything from it?
Jack WL: I think, for me anyway, the festivals are a really great thing because this year it’s been us playing to a lot of people who don’t know who we are. Especially this year, it’s been a chance for us to do all of the festivals in one year, I think as a band you only really get one chance to do that because it’s your first year as a band. You go around the whole world doing all of the festivals and hopefully you’re at a stage the next year where you can’t really do that. So it’s been an incredibly tiring summer, and it doesn’t really stop in the summer, it goes through to the end of the year for us. There have been some amazing festivals, slightly weirder ones, like the one you were at in Poland was one of our favourites, even though we almost had to pull out of it because our bus broke down so we had to get a few people from the festival to drive five hours, pick us up in a car and drive us back, but it was such a good thing that we did that one. It’s the kinda thing where you don’t know, you genuinely have no idea what response you’re going to get somewhere you’ve never been before but we were really into it, it just clicked really well, that was a highlight of doing the festivals.

Was Glastonbury another highlight? Was it a big deal for you?
Harry WL: Glastonbury was probably another one of our other favourites, it’s the same for every other band that plays it, I think, it’s such a legendary festival. It’s certainly one of the biggest festivals in Europe, if not the world, so you’re guaranteed, no matter what kind of band or what kind of music, a big crowd. We had a huge crowd at Glastonbury so it was a really, really amazing show and a real eye-opener to us as to what’s possible.

You’re going on tour with Kings of Leon after this, and when you see how huge they’ve gotten over the past few years, do you think it’s something you personally aspire to, as a band?

Harry WL: Well, Kings of Leon have also just made it, on this record, in America as well, which is really great for them, ‘cos they’ve obviously been trying to do that for a long time. I think that’s a dream for any band, to be that size, and to be able to tour America the way they are. It’s a really cool place as well, we’re playing places we’ve never played before, never been to before, never heard of some of the places, so it’s gonna be really amazing. Kings of Leon are certainly a band we look up to a lot in terms of their career. They’ve really nailed their live shows, they really work hard and really work well together as a unit, they’re like a real family on tour, it’s something that I think a lot of bands aspire to.

UK bands tend to establish themselves in the UK before attempting to crack the US, whereas you’ve been touring there almost in juxtaposition with touring the UK. Is getting a grounding there important to you?

Harry WL: Yeah, it’s a lot easier, as a UK band, to make it in the UK, people respond to music from the UK a lot more easily. America’s somewhere you have to spend a lot of time, obviously because of the size of it. Also, the music-listening public in America are slightly more fickle and tend to switch off things a lot more quickly, you kind of have to keep driving it into them. I think our music could work in America, it’s just gonna take a little while and a lot more hard work.
You’ve obviously made some inroads into the market there, do you think you’re getting a positive reaction so far?

Harry WL: I think when we played Lollapalooza this year we saw the growth in the size of the crowd and the response to our music and how many people knew it. Coachella was one of the first festival we played this summer and there was a huge difference in between those two shows, so it’s working, slowly but surely, we’re getting there. We were discussing with our label and our management how well we’ve done in the last year and how good the foundations we’ve laid around the world are, not just America, but Japan and places like that. So we’ll just have to wait see what happens and build on that.

You were known as Fear of Flying previously, with the exact same line-up. What was the reason for the name change?
Jack WL: The band that we were playing under, from the ages of about 15 to 18 or 19 when we started White Lies, was the band we were doing in school and on the weekends. It was something we really enjoyed doing but it wasn’t something we took particularly seriously or dedicated much thought to, it was quite a throwaway, enjoyable thing for us to be doing at the time. When we got to the stage when we thought, we actually do want to make music properly and take it seriously and thought we’d concentrate on songwriting and we did actually write some really great songs, the songs we’d written previously didn’t really apply to what we really wanted to do. We would have felt a bit like we had this collection of songs attached to our name which were nothing really to do with us. With that in mind, we decided that the best way to give ourselves a clean slate, and we were in a position where we could do that, we had a gap year and we were going to go to university, and decided that the best way to do this is to throw everything out of the way and just start completely afresh. The old band never did anything commercially, we did two very limited edition singles which only sold out when White Lies became popular, so it was a long, steady learning process for us. White Lies is us doing what we actually always wanted to do once we were able to do it.

You worked with Stephen Street on those singles, which is amazing…
Jack WL: Yeah, he showed us a lot of good faith and really helped us out. Even when we started White Lies, we needed a place to demo our first track, which was ‘Unfinished Business’, he let us use his studio. He wasn’t actually producing, but he lent us his room and he’s always been good about stuff like that. I definitely think that we’ve learnt a lot from working with him in the past, if anything he was the first person we did proper recording with, so it’s a pretty good standard to go in at.

Is there anyone in particular you would like to work with, production-wise?
Jack WL: We’ve been discussing this recently, with the next record, and there’s a few people we’d like to work with, there’s one in particular…

Harry WL: On our first record, we’ve worked with some amazing producers, and obviously Alan Moulder mixed the record, and he’s a real genius, he’s someone we’d like to work with again in the future, if he’ll have us. I think we’d also like to get the producer on the first album involved in some way as well. It’s still a very open book at the moment, there are loads and loads of people we would love to work with, it’s just choosing them. I think the most important thing is that you get along with who you work with as best as possible ‘cos you have to spend a lot of time with them, so that’s the next step, really.

Are you planning on writing the ‘difficult’ second record whilst touring or will you take a break and get it down then?
Harry WL: We haven’t written anything while we’re touring so far ‘cos I think it is something we find very hard. But I think we’re planning to hack at that within the year, whether anything will come from it, I don’t know, probably not. But it’s something we’re gonna try and see what happens. We’ll probably start writing early next year.

Joy Division comparisons aside, who actually made you want to be in a band? Who has influenced you?
Harry WL: I think we all have very varying tastes in music, there are very few bands we truly agree on collectively. For me, the band who really made me want to be in a band, and to sing and play guitar, were Queens of the Stone Age, when I was growing up. You don’t necessarily hear that in White Lies’ music, but I always regarded Josh Homme as a bit of a hero. I really like the way he makes records, I really like the way they sound, the way he writes the songs and he’s an amazing guitar player. He was someone who definitely inspired me to want to make music.

Are there any of your contemporaries who you admire particularly?
Jack WL: Yeah, all the bands we tour with when we do headline tours are bands we have to respect and like their music in the first place. So usually a good way to measure what we’re into at the moment is by seeing who we’re touring with. The tour we’ve got at the end of the year, we’ve got a band from New York called Violens supporting, we’re big fans of them. They haven’t taken off yet, but if they do I think it will be a really great thing, they’re a brilliant band. Wild Beasts are doing a few dates with us, I really love their new album. There are bands people wouldn’t expect us to love, like Crystal Castles, who we’ve had the chance to tour with before, and have worked on songs with us, which is amazing. Same with M83 as well, who have also done us the honour of remixing one of our tracks. That’s another good way, actually, usually the people who do remixes for us are people we really love, you can always tell which ones we like the best.

We’re seeing bands become incredibly famous via their MySpace pages on a regular basis now, but how important do you think social networking is in how music is consumed?
Harry WL: I think MySpace is incredibly important for music nowadays, you can go on the Internet and find any band you’ve heard a whisper of. It’s great for new music, even those bands who don’t have a record out yet, you can go and find them straight away, that’s really cool. It’s also really great for communicating with your fans and that’s something that’s very important for us. Well, actually, Charles and Jack do, I’m not great with computers…

Your music videos are really interesting and, shall I say, arty? Is that an aspect of the band that you have much input in? Are you a visual band?
Jack WL: Yeah, it’s definitely something we really care about. I think, from the start, we were never prepared to just let someone make us a video and just do what they said or whatever. But I think at the same time we were never under any illusions that we had the time or mind to make something that would really be an exciting video. We wanted to make sure we did something that we thought was really great in terms of videos, they’re a great, great tool for every band, especially these days. It’s just such an interesting way of getting your songs across and it’s a real chance to add something different to it and be different from other bands. With that in mind, we were very selective over who we chose to direct the videos, and we used the same director for all three of the singles. We found this Swedish director [Andreas Nilsson] who’d done some work before with bands like The Knife, and he had the best ideas for us and the ones that really seemed like no one had done them before. We’re quite a visual band and we have quite a cinematic sound so I think we wanted to get that across in the videos. So we just said, here’s the money, just go and make whatever you feel suits us, because his style is something we really liked. It’s really been brilliant to see the videos, in my opinion they’re three of the best videos made in the last year. I think it’s really great that we did take the time to find someone we wanted to work with, we have now a continuity throughout the album.
They’re certainly really great to look at, very cinematic…

Jack WL: We’ve had some adventures doing them, like ‘Farewell to the Fairground’, we did in northern Russia and it took us over a day to get there, four flights, crossing Russian borders and all kinds of scary stuff. It’s the kind of stuff we never would have done if it had just been a regular big-name director, they wouldn’t have sent us to northern Russia to minus 15 degrees, so it was a good chance to do something like that.

Have you landed on a sound or vibe for the new album? Something quite different from the first?
Harry WL: I love the production on the first record, it’s very sleek and very smooth, but I think we might move away from that a little bit, maybe make it a little bit… I hate the word edgy, but a little bit rough around the edges. Have a little bit more feeling in it I suppose. I certainly think the songwriting and the musical direction will be a lot more accomplished. We’ve been playing together for a year and a half now, touring and playing our instruments, and I think we’ve improved so much in our performance and our ability to play our instruments and that will definitely be reflected on the next record. It will be different, I think it will just be a step up. The themes and the sounds of the band won’t radically change, but it will just be… better.

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The band kick off their European/World tour this Thursday in Dublin’s Tripod. State interrupted James McNew from his packing to discuss deadlines, tour buses and crazy teen sex comedies.

Tickets are €20/24.50 available from Ticketmaster, City Discs, Sound Cellar and usual outlets. Doors open at 8pm. Yo La Tengo will play a 2 hour show (no support).

As a band Yo La Tengo have twelve studio albums and you’ve been with them for nine of those, was there anything different about going to the studio with Popular Songs?
Yes there was. For the most part we had everything fairly ready to go when we began recording. Which is slightly unusual compared to previous records. I think we generally come up with ideas for songs and intentionally not finish them. We leave them open for further … in recording, we’re learning them and writing them at the same time the tape is rolling; which is also fun. But now that I think of it we had followed through a little more this time before we began recording. I don’t know why, it wasn’t intentional.

Do Matador give you guys deadlines?
Oh yeah sure. There are always deadlines and we always nearly miss them. There’s always a deadline that seems reasonable at first, that we always almost miss every single time. Them we pull together in the last second. Though it seems we have all the time in the world we never do.

Why did you take the Condo Fucks alias when releasing Fuckbook?
For no real exciting reason. That record came about because there was a bar in Brooklyn (Magnetic Field) that we liked very much and they were closing down forever. Our friends’ band the A-bones were going to play the final concert at the bar and we wanted to play too. So we offered to open for them; they’re like a really great, trashy, grunge rock band. So we put together a set of covers, a thirty minute set. Many of which we already knew and had done at Yo La Tengo shows or at practice. We didn’t want to use our name because we weren’t playing any of our songs and we were opening for our friends. The name is one we came up with many years ago (The band previously released Fakebook under this alias). I believe one of the Condo Fucks records appeared in the inner sleeve of advertisement for I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One. When I recorded our rehearsal, it came out pretty good. So we thought maybe we’d release it ourselves one day. But someone from Matador was at that concert and heard that we had a recording. When Matador offered to put it out and we thought they were crazy.

How involved are you in the local music scene, do you go to a lot of gigs?
Sure, yeah, the club Maxwell’s in Hobhoken is a fantastic place that has been having gigs for 25 years or more, definitely more, and we’ve been going there regularly or somehow regularly ever since we’ve lived here.

What kind of bands are you into?
I’m a huge fan of the band Lambchop from Nashville, Tennessee. Not a particularly new band but I they are amazing. I don’t think there’s anything like them.

I’m also a huge fan of a band from Tokyo called Yura Yura Teikoku, a spectacular, great kind of psychedelic pop-rock band. I also never heard anything like that either. We were lucky enough to play some shows with them in the States, it was an honour. I still can’t believe we got that co-ordinated. It just seems like an impossible thing.

I like the band WHY? from California. I think they are really terrific. We toured with them a lot when our last album came out. It was a pleasure to watch those guys play every night.

Have you toured with Popular Songs yet?
It was released in the middle of September and we’ve been around the United States and Canada so far. They [the shows] have been great. [It’s] fun, frustrating and challenging to learn how to play our new songs. I like figuring it out logistically, incorporating new instruments, new pedals, new song sections, set ways and transitions. It’s pretty fun. I’m enjoying this tour a lot. I like travelling too, so it’s good.

Your songs vary stylistically on this album a great deal, how has translated into your show?
The songs tended to change quite a bit, at least to our ears, from the time that we write them and then record them. Then we had to relearn them to play live they definitely changed. And they change from night to night. Some times the lengths vary. That’s just how our writing process works. Songs are always subject to change, whether its length, tempo or mood, no song is safe from that.

So you’ll be here later this week?
Yes, this tour starts in Dublin and ends in Japan. I’ve always liked coming to Dublin. It took us a long time to get there. ‘98 maybe or ‘97, it took us a while but we were really excited to get there.
I like touring. I think we all do. We’ve been doing it for such a long time that we’re fortunate to have friends in different places that we would really never see otherwise.

Has it changed much for you in the 20 odd years that you’ve been doing it?
Yeah. We have a tour bus. Which is great. Because we’re, uh, … old. (laughing a lot) It feels lovely to have that as an option. For many, many years we travelled in a sprinter van and that was back-breaking. But we still did it and we still enjoyed it. Ultimately. Maybe not as it was happening, but ultimately we enjoyed it. It’s not lost on me that during older tours we were crammed into a transport van like sardines and cursing big bands and their tour buses. I was imagining in my head this is much more punk rock. But there’s a lot to be said for a tour bus.

At what point did this happen for you?
I think we switched over, probably in the early 2000’s, that was the first time.

That was after the success of And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out?
Yeah, I mean it definitely had moments where it felt like a really vulgar display of power but eh, it’s pretty terrific. It certainly allows us to be more comfortable, which allows us to rest more and cover more ground and play more shows.

So what has been influencing you lately?
I can’t really answer that. I can’t really pinpoint any specific influences. Certainly not when we’re playing or writing songs. We listened to so much music during our lives and are such huge fans. We listen to records all the time. I’m sure everything that goes in comes out in ways we’re not aware of, which is for the best. We’re possibly our own influence.

Soundtracks are really becoming part of Yo La Tengo, can you tell us about that?
Yeah. We were always interested in trying it and the opportunity arose, I think it was 2003 when we first started working on movie soundtracks and we really took to it. We had always been aware of soundtrack music and would have a lot of soundtrack records in our collection anyway. It felt like a pretty natural approach to writing music and it has been fun, hard, confusing and challenging. It was really cool that after being in a band for 20 years we found a new way to work and a new way to make music. We really responded to that.

We’re not doing anything right now, we’re too busy touring. Soundtracks usually take a pretty committed block of time to just keep working on every day. Especially now with the miracle of the internet, you’re expected to keep the film production up to date on your daily work. Which would involve us recording and then me uploading files all night long, the glamour of show-business huh?

The most recent film we did was about, I guess the movie came out in America back in the Spring-time of this year and it was called Adventureland; which was our first Hollywood movie.

So you got a new boss?
Well yeah, because when you are working on a movie you are basically working for the director. Which is new to us as we are the director as far as Yo La Tengo is concerned. It’s a highly collaborative way of working and even if you are really convinced that you are right about something, really it comes down to the vision of the filmmaker. I thought it was a great movie too actually. It was directed by a guy named Greg Mottola who directed a movie a few summers ago called Superbad, which was a huge hit over here. This was his next movie after the huge hit and the studio really wanted it to be Superbad Part 2 and it just wasn’t. It was a much more emotional, thoughtful kind of movie. Which really took them [the studio] by surprise so it was advertised as a crazy teen sex comedy. That was unfortunate, because the people went to the movie were completely disappointed because it wasn’t a crazy teen sex comedy.

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He now lives in San Francisco with his French wife Isabelle, and John’s musical career is a long and successful one – as well as releasing eight solo albums since 2000, he owns and runs a studio, Tiny Telephone, which records mainly on analogue equipment. Bands like Death Cab for Cutie, Beulah, and Spoon have recorded there and when we speak he’s in the midst of recording an album with a member of Saddle Creek’s Two Gallants. So what got him started down this road? Well, it could only be a picture of David Bowie’s crotch.

“There were two records that I got when I was in 7th grade – they were both by David Bowie, one was Low and the other one was Ziggy Stardust,” he reminisces. “I remember my friends and I looking at the back of the Ziggy Stardust album, and he’s in a phone booth and he looks to be just incredibly well endowed, he had these really tight jeans on, you know. It seemed like the most dangerous and most otherworldly creature in this phone booth.” He laughs at the memory: “I just remember thinking, ‘OK, this guy [is] outside of the culture, he does not adhere to any of the rules that I give a fuck about’, and that was the first time that I ever felt that I wanted to be someone else.” That yearning feeling of wanting to be someone else, of wanting to step outside the humdrum routine of everyday life and stick a middle finger up at suburbia led to John picking up an instrument and trying to jam his way out.

“I guess I was maybe 12, you know when you first start picking up an instrument and you first start singing and you first start four-tracking and doing demos and rudimentary recording, it’s so euphoric,” he muses. “The initial discovery of an instrument and of multi tracking and the sound of your voice on tape, and the idea of doing a simple harmony in a song and figuring out what a bridge or a chorus means, these things will carry you through your severe and crippling lack of talent.” He laughs softly at this, his very succinct description of the joy that the early discovery of music-making brings. Like any artistic pursuits, your first stabs at writing, painting or playing guitar may be rudimentary at best, unpolished and meaningless to anyone but you – but it’s your work, and your heart bursts when you realise that you have created it.

John describes this as being “like a gestation period”, saying: “It takes years for anyone to learn how to sing and especially how to learn how to edit your own stuff – that really takes the longest.” It is, he says, “really the initial rush of discovery that carries someone to the point that they can figure out how to write songs”. He says he found his own voice after his band MK Ultra broke up and he went solo. “I was writing completely for my own amusement and I think that’s how it has to be, at least for me,” he says of that time. At first, he didn’t want to write about himself, or his life – and he still continues to find inspiration from outside of his own life. “I didn’t think that my own life was really that interesting compared to my own internal dialogue,” he says, adding that one of the first songs he wrote “was about a guy who places a bomb in his local post office”. He was fascinated by the duality of the life of American modernist poet Wallace Stevens, who by day was the vice-president of an insurance company. “That appealed to me, because I knew I was never going to be…I was not like Allan Ginsberg, or I wasn’t Burroughs,” says John earnestly, describing himself instead as a suburban guy who’s interested in gardening. Because of this, he says he is “all about the inner life.”

John’s quest to explore the notion of the inner life has led him to investigate a multitude of scenarios in his songs. Take his latest album, the fantastic Romanian Names, (released on Dead Oceans and which, notably, was the first of his solo albums recorded at home) for example. ‘Fetal Horses’ references the fact that in the womb, horses actually start galloping during their gestation period. He takes this metaphor and then applies it to romantic relationships, and “what’s really happening when people are in a room for five years together”, the “infantile, and let’s say hidden things, that are parts of that relationship”, and the “desire to run”. Using a narrator who is “obviously completely fucked up in his relationships”, John lets this man put “the blame on the kind of ticking time bomb inside of mammals, which is you have to run, you are a hunter, you have to range the plain to survive”.

Following on from this extraordinary idea, another song, ‘Forest Knolls’, looks at suburban developments that have encroached on the countryside, and their subsequent “strange relationship to nature”. After noticing ‘deer-proof’ plants for sale at his local gardening centre, John became fascinated, not so much with the problem with the deer, “but the problem with the human in that”. “He’s really stuck and we’ve kind of figured out what the suburbs are for and what they mean – and I grew up in the suburbs – but there’s an extra layer outside which I think is very questionable and damaging in general because you just have a bunch of jerks commuting with SUVs and whatnot; but I love the idea of the narrator really feeling horrendous guilt for being tethered in between the two worlds”.

As with any good songwriter, it’s not always obvious what or who it is that John Vanderslice is writing about – and this is something that he thinks is valuable. “Sometimes being confused by a song is its own power,” he says. Take the acronym D.I.A.L.O, from the song of the same name. He received hundreds of emails asking him about the meaning of the letters, and eventually had to admit the truth – that all he knew was “the initials hung over [the narrator’s] predicament”, but only the narrator knows what they stand for. This really is no surprise for a writer who loves other writers, and “being immersed in the arc of a story”; it’s as though he is able to author a work of ‘micro-literature’ with each of his own songs.

There’s a calmness about the Florida native, even though he’s a talker; it’s clear he is a deep thinker. And there’s patience, too – State’s first interview with him disappears from the recorder, so he offers to reschedule at a time that suits. He may be adept at writing fictional pieces but he’s open and honest about his own life, and how he has the same neuroses and worries as many of us. Take flying, for example, of which he was extremely afraid for around three or four years, even suffering the indignity of thinking that his last moments aboard a particularly frightening flight to Japan were to be spent watching a Sandra Bullock movie. (In the end, his desire to tour had to overcome his fear.)

He’s also open about how he loves the simplicity of working with analogue recording devices and using film to take photos, but without shunning digital means. “There’s something I think that I must really need with the linear aspect of analogue,” he says, adding that what interests him about film is the simple fact that you don’t see the image straight after you shoot it. “I think that is absolutely necessary for me,” he says.
He cannot see the image, but he can imagine it, and it is this fertile imagination that is perhaps his greatest gift. He may not have become the high-school English teacher that his young self believed he would be, but through his songs he is bringing his own form of literature to his listeners. His writing can interest, confuse and inspire them at every turn, and so perhaps in this way, John Vanderslice really has become a teacher after all.

Doolittle Presents John Vanderslice, Whelan’s, Friday 6th November. Tickets €13.00 plus booking fee from WAV Box-Office (Lo-Call 1890 200 078), City Discs, www.tickets.ie, Ticketmaster outlets nationwide.

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Somehow, though, he came through and the singer State finds on the other end of the phone is a confident and charismatic man; a man with an evident passion for what he does, who politely thanks us for our questions and answers them with substantial thought and insight, simultaneously bouncing his young baby on his knee throughout. Atias knows life has been kind to him, and he has every intention of being kind and courteous in return. No doubt he’s sick of being asked about Mr. Marley, but we couldn’t resist. “I’m not trying to be Bob” Elan’s quick to point out, “I’m just trying to keep the message going. I’m just another member of the band. The most intimidating thing to start with wasn’t ‘replacing Bob’; it was making sure I had all the lyrics. I wasn’t scared of the crowds, though The Wailers was the first band I ever sang with. But every fan knew word for word all the songs and the first shows we did together I did entirely from my memories of the records as a kid. We didn’t rehearse or even sound check together until after the first eight shows”.

Elan is actually one of several singers who’ve fronted The Wailers over the years, but having held the post for thirteen years now, he’s the longest standing since Marley. The Wailers’ message, according to Atias, is stronger than ever: “It’s all about one love, one aim, one destiny. Today there are more wars, more atrocities, more problems, than ever before. I think the music means more today than it did when it was first made. We started an organization called ‘I Went Hungry’, with the UN World Food Organization, after we realized that at every show we had so much food backstage, and there’s only so much room on the bus. We were wasting 80% of it every night, and thousands of people are dying of hunger every day. Every six seconds a child dies. So we started telling the promoters to take the money allocated to our rider and give it to the world food program. We persuaded some other artists, comedians, and actors with the same privilege as us to give up their riders as well. It’s been a year and a half, and we’ve saved 600,000 kids. I speak to the audience in the encore about it, and we sell these red wristbands, like the Live Strong ones. In Europe it would be for one Euro. We post up on the website how much money we raise at each show. It goes back to what ‘Wailers’ means: to cry out. This band was a voice to so many people, and this kind of thing is what I think it’s all about. The message is what made this band bigger than any one individual.”

As part of their ‘peace and love’ leanings, The Wailer’s have become well known for breaking down geographical boundaries to play in countries most artists wouldn’t even consider. Recent tours have taken them to India, Morocco, UAE and Brazil. Atias clearly loves the mystique of it: “These people don’t know the words or understand them, but they make the sound, phonetically, and you can see that they’re feeling it. On this tour we’re gong straight from Ireland to Abu Dhabi; from a place where drinking is a way of life to a place where you get put in jail for drinking publically. I’d really like to go to China, especially with their politics.”

Despite the loving international outlook, things haven’t always been plain sailing for the singer. When he first stepped out, for example, crowds struggled to take to a non-black front man. “Back when I started, there was no other white reggae artist. Well I’m not really white; I have a bit of everything in me. I’m like a world mutt. But back then, there was no Manu Diao, or Sean Paul – well he wasn’t famous anyway – and people’s jaws would drop. They’d think I was lip-synching, I could see the audience talking about it for the first 30 minutes of the show. And afterwards, they’d come up and be like ‘man, you had us for 20, 30 minutes, we thought you were faking’, you know. People would really say that. It’s faded over the years, but once there was a really negative reaction. I saw a commotion at the side of the stage at one gig, and after the show security told me that these two women had been talking a lot of sh*t early on. But by the end of the show, they were won over. Actually, Bob had so many kids, people often think I’m one of them. That’s kind of funny.”

Of course, the kind of attention The Wailers attract is always going to come with a certain number of odd experiences. Atias is being sued for the use of his first name. “This Mexican woman also calls herself Elan, and she tried to sue me for copyright breach. It was a waste of time. I’ve known of her for years, but I never even thought of doing anything. She’s a blonde girl from Mexico, so there’s no conflict, it’s not like you’re going to get mixed up. She sings rock music. And I’ve actually been around longer than her. If anything, I could have sued her, but why would I need to do that? It cost a lot of money, and took a lot of time and energy, and she ended up losing. The court found that I had been using the name first. It was a lot of wasted energy for something so negative.” For reggae singers, it seems, the worst thing about even a court case is the bad energy it throws up.

Atias and Aston ‘Familyman’ Barrett, The Wailers notorious Rastafarian bassist, have recently started their own record label, and have been pouring their hearts into the first record. “It’s a collaboration record” Atias explains, “The idea is to get in lots of different artists from different genres, and have them sing on top of a Wailers-sounding track. Familyman has a tape of unreleased drum tracks from his late brother Carly, from the 70s, outtakes from the Exodus album, that kind of stuff. We digitized them, and used them as the cornerstone of the new material. So all the new tracks have Carly Barrett on them, Familyman adding new bass lines, Tyrone Downie on the keyboards, Earl ‘Wire’ Lindo on the organ, it’s all the guys who are still alive from the old albums. And one of the dead ones. It sounds like the old Wailers. But it’s taken so long, as we’ve been chasing after these artists, who have their own schedules and their own priorities. They’re A-list artists from all around the world. I can’t mention any names yet as we’re still finishing up the paperwork, but we’re hoping it will be out towards the end of the first quarter (of 2010). We have all the songs, and we’re mixing it and working on the paperwork. It’s amazing; there are country, pop, hip-hop, rock, soul and R&B artists, singer songwriters… There’s no need to put things in categories, actually, it’s all music…”

On this particular tour, which comes to Ireland this week, The Wailers will be performing seminal album Exodus in full. “Time Magazine voted it album of the century, and ‘One Love’ was voted by the BBC as song of the century”, Atias explains, “so we thought, why not do it in its entirety, like it is on the record, and it’s been really great. We found it really worked live. In the beginning it was a bit weird, because ‘Exodus’ from the album was always one of our big finale songs, and now it comes in the middle of the set, like on the album. But the audience really respond to it.” The Wailers often follow ‘Exodus’ with a selection of Atias’ own material, tracks that the audience often mistake for old Marley era B-sides. “It’s such a compliment” he gushes, “I was inspired by The Wailers”.

It’s amazing, really, that a band that peaked in the 70s is still such a mammoth cultural force. Atias puts it down to their message: “The message of the band transcends everything else over the years. We’ve never been about any one member, there have been so many members in this band since its inception, we’re named after ‘to wail’, which is kind of the voice of the people. When I first started I was the same age as the majority of the audience. And now, ten years later, the audience is the same age and I got older. The majority of the audience is still 16-25, though there are people there aged 7-70. That is the difference between this band and other bands. Other bands that have been around for that long, like the Rolling Stones, for example, are playing largely to people the same age as they are. They play to 60 year olds. But our younger audiences are just finding out what life is about, what life is going to bring them, and what they’re going to choose. This music is that guide. It was a guide for me. I mean, I had no idea I was going to be the singer, but it was almost like a religion. It helped me find myself. It speaks through generations.”

You can’t help feeling that Atias still speaks as much as a fan of the band as a member. He’s not an outsider, not by any means, but he’s still in awe of the work those around him have produced, and extremely proud to contribute his own small part to an astonishing musical legacy. He’s not Bob’s replacement. He’s just here to spread peace, love and understanding through some sublime music, whilst standing alongside his childhood heroes, and save the lives of a whole lot of starving children along the way.

The Wailers play UCD, Dublin (tonight), Mandela Hall, Belfast (Tuesday), Olympia Theatre, Dublin (Wednesday) and Dolans, Limerick (Thursday).

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The sound is a mix of folk, country, blues and cabaret fronted by Rosemary’s strange but beguiling jazzy, bird-like vocals. They have some real moments of beauty. ‘Cottonflower’ could sit easily with any of The Be Good Tanyas’ bodies of work. ‘Jimmy’ is a country-blues number in which everyone’s name is Jimmy; and why not, remembering names can be bothersome.

So from that we can guess that they are either one big happy family or they just took the same surname to save on confusion, which would not be surprising. What they do have in common with the aforementioned Napoleon of Crime is that they too are just a bit mad… howling mad. Mad as a box of frogs to be honest. Their influences are many, including Thom Yorke, Ansel Adams, Steinbeck and Irish traditional ballads. This is even less straight forward than it sounds, ‘Loveliness’ finds Father O’Reilly breaking up with Tom Waits in a most peculiar manner.

Currently on tour with Andrew Bird, Moriarty have been peddling their brilliant debut album, Gee Whiz But This Is a Lonesome Town, since 2007. They have been winning fans over the old-school way, with rambunctious shows; steadily building a fan base in the UK and France. All aboard.

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The thing is, Bowling for Soup have no desire to be taken seriously. Most of their patter revolves around vodka, women or ‘that time your friends dad tried to hit me with a shovel’. They love life. They turn up somewhere, play a few songs to entertain the kids, and then slink off backstage to see where the night takes them (“it doesn’t matter where we are, we’ll make some kind of party”). Usually, as their comic lyrics attest, it takes them somewhere pretty silly. The lyrics for fan favorite ‘Running With Your Dad’, for example, really are based around a shovel assault: “there was this time we all got drunk, and somehow a friends dad found out another friend had a gun in his car. He was pretty angry. It ended with him chasing my friend down the road with a shovel”. Excellent.

The latest tour is entitled ‘The Party In Your Pants Tour’, and comes to Dublin at the insistence of Jaret himself. “The record label insisted nobody would come to see us in Ireland” he tells us, “but we wanted to play Dublin anyway. We don’t care if we lose money. There are a few people here who love our music, and we love Ireland. This was supposed to be our night off, but we wanted to come here”. Jaret also admits that Irish women are great, but doesn’t single our lasses out for special praise: “All women are great”. Except the one from ‘The Bitch Song’, perhaps? Indeed.

The Soup’s tour bus, surprisingly, is quite well organized, though the band insists that has more to do with the driver than them. You can spot ramshackle shoes discarded about the place, and a number of surplus bottles of vodka poking out from under various pieces of furniture. Jaret tells us that the band emphatically don’t want to grow up (“why?”), though he will admit that the drinking occasionally has to stop to take care of his record label, who are providing the support tonight. Bowling for Soup often brings along a ‘laptop rocker’ called MC Lars, and Jaret stresses the importance of variety. “We could bring another pop-punk band, but that’s not as interesting. He goes down well with our crowd. It’s all about having a good party, really. We can’t remember what time we went to bed last night.”

Of course, Bowling for Soup has a brief period of startling popularity behind them. ‘1985’ and ‘Girl All the Bad Guys Want’ bought them international acclaim, and even a Grammy Award nomination back in 2003. They’ve faded from the majority consciousness since the, but certainly not from their fans, who have their own favorites, like ‘The Bitch Song’ (“she might know it’s about her, we’re not sure, but we love that track, it’s the one that got us a record deal”) and ‘Girl All the Bad Guys Want’ (“it made us famous, so it’s a special song”). Not that Bowling for Soup cares all that much about fame. “We’ve always been a bit off the radar. We have our fans, and we have fun. Nothing else really matters”.

Life for these four, it seems, is a world where obscure pop culture, and excessive alcohol really are the only things that are actually important. Jaret tells us “50% of what the band say to each other is references to lyrics of music. Most of them John Hughes movies.” Yes, we did spot that Breakfast Club reference in 1985. “Most our lyrics come from something that happened to us, to one of our friends. Bowling for Soup basically go out, do stupid things, and write about it”. Nice work if you can get it.

We left Jaret contemplating the possibility of producing a song that “sounds like Radiohead”, for ironic purposes, right after he admitted “if we ever wanted to write something serious, we’d start another band.” The next step was a few beers, though not so many that guitarist Chris starts playing the wrong song, like early in the tour in Glasgow. “We had a word with him, but it was pretty funny. Maybe he should do it at every show”, Jaret suggests, before heading off to get tanked up for tonight himself, whilst listening to Nightmare Of You, a band he simply can’t get enough of. Later, he plans to get drunk and start a party. Fifteen years on, and not the slightest sense of lethargy, then. It’s all in the name of fun, so who’s to argue?

Bowling For Soup play the Academy, Dublin tonight.

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The Unicorns split up in 2004. Where have you been for the last five years?
Mostly I’ve been working in Montreal and doing stuff locally. And I’ve sort of been working at this band with Brendan [Reed]… We put out a 7” in 2005 and did a bit of touring in 2006. And I’ve also been doing some film music…

You soundtracked The Hamster Cage in 2005. What was that like?
It was my first experience doing a feature length, so I was kinda just going with what I thought film music should sound like.

Your score for that film struck me as being very ‘French’ sounding, which is a sound shared by some Clues songs (such as ‘Elope’)… is there some sort of French influence on your music?
I don’t have like a huge record collection or anything like that, but what I’ve heard definitely has an impact, including French music from the sixties…

Yé-Yé girls and all that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah… yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah! I remember a friend making me a mix CD of some music from that era, and really enjoying it. And of course… I grew up in Quebec and speak French, so maybe I have more of a disposition towards it because I know what’s been said. The whole aesthetic and dynamic and simplicity of that kind of rock and roll music is very appealing. That period of French music had a lot of different things going on in it… and cinema as well. The confluence of those is definitely appealing to me.

Your lyrics are cryptic, fantastic and image-laden, which means that the Clues album has a definite epicness about it, sort of like a video game adventure. But is there actually any narrative to it?
I think the narrative has been mostly sonic in a way: about how the songs sound next to one another. Lyrically, I think there’s a little bit more disconnect between the songs with regard to one another. A lot of them have parts from other poems and songs that have embedded themselves within these songs at one point or another. And once that happens, it’s kinda hard to get them out.

Speaking of which… an old Unicorns song (‘Hanz’) shared the lyric “suicide is a shame” with a Polyphonic Spree song (‘It’s The Sun’). Was there a connection there?
It’s an homage. At the time, we were touring and that was one of the songs we were listening to and really liked.

And I think, maybe to complete the cycle, the Islands song ‘The Arm’ has a similar melody to ‘Hanz’…
…and that’s also what’s really neat about this family tree that’s developing. Genetically, it’s inevitable that if a song means something to us, it’ll find its way into everything that we do. If you listen to old blues records, they literally took each other’s songs and put different words on, and it was a very valuable thing. There wasn’t such a rigidity of copyright or intellectual ownership over things, which I find really interesting. I think that’s really the greatest honour… to have something that you do influence someone else and be carried forward in another way.

If YOU were to listen to the Clues record, what kind of images or feelings would it evoke?
I don’t know. I think we set ourselves this goal of not listening to it for a year. For me to listen to it is very different from other people. And I’ve listened to it so much already using a critical ear that listening to it with pleasure is kinda difficult. That’s why I think it’s good to take a fast from it, and then listen to it with virgin ears that will inform me a little more objectively.

You sing a lyric on the album twice (”who here wants to sleep in the dragon’s mouth?”), which causes one to wonder if there’s a reason for the repetition. But does it make you feel awkward if you can’t say what a lyric might specifically mean?
It kind of does make me feel awkward. People are very used to talking about songs and articulating what they mean. I feel very anti-social or awkward not being able to explain things in the same way that other people do. I don’t know why that particular lyric occurs twice. I think that essentially I kinda ran out of material.

You can’t admit that!
I guess I just did! But it’s not a bad thing, because I sing it in two different ways.

I think that the second time you sing it, you seem more impatient and forceful, like you’re still waiting on your answer…

Yeah, and it’s not coming! And the differences in the attitude is like any poetry where you can have different meanings implied by a sentence being repeated, and repeated again any number of times. There’s something about getting beyond emotion with that.

Did you learn any lessons from the demise of the Unicorns that you can implement this time round, so that Clues could make more than one album?
Just not to take myself so seriously, and to be a little more patient with the process of interaction with other people.

I find it a little bit difficult to pin down any definite influences on your work… so what actually inspires you? What’s your favourite band?
For a long time, my favourite band was Fugazi. And I still really admire everything that they’ve done. That was just a band that really opened up possibilities with regards to bands being able to do things differently. What they were able to achieve musically, as well as their politics and stuff, was pretty inspiring at the time. A lot of bands that came out of hardcore were big influences on me. When I was first becoming involved in bands, I wasn’t in a punk band per se, but I was within that scene. I was kinda just the weird person who’d have a kind of funk rock band or something like that. I never felt like an insider to it, but that culture was definitely informing how I went about doing things. Right now, I’m really into this band Micachu and the Shapes.

If you could be in any band ever, who would it be? And how different would they be because of you?
Great question. I suppose that… wow… yeah! What band? I’d kinda like to just be a rhythm guitarist in a wedding band or something like that.

That’s pretty achievable.
Yeah, I feel like something fairly stripped-down and simple in that regard would be – like you said – achievable. Or something more challenging… like Islands maybe… I could play the harmonica in that group. I definitely imagine playing in a band that’s not necessarily rock music, and being challenged by the parameters. I just really like playing music with people and learning from them… not so much trying to bring or impose stuff of my own. I think that happens naturally.

The Unicorns had a song called ‘Let’s Get Known’, whereas Clues now have one with the lyric “so instead, let’s get strong”. Are these songs related?
Yeah. That song ‘Let’s Get Strong’ is an older one of mine. They both kinda date from the same period. In fact, it was a response, and so that relates to this inevitable continued narrative. It’s not necessarily a disagreement, but a refraining of the question. It’s sort of anachronistic to be presenting it now as if it was significantly relating to that. It was just part of the conversation that we were having at the time. It was a difference between our perspectives.

You seem to be more friendly about discussing The Unicorns than Nick was when he was releasing HIS first post-Unicorns album. Can you say why?
Well I don’t really know… friendliness is over-rated. (laughs) I think inevitably you can get really defensive about something that’s constantly being referred to as some standard that you’ve set for yourself. I understand that. I can definitely relate to that. I don’t know what to say about Nick with regards to that, but I think that there was a point where he was just really trying (and we both were, in a way) to distance ourselves from that, just because it was somewhat of an acrimonious split initially. It just seems like a lot less of a big deal now that I think about it.

You were also recently involved in the making of the Paper Heart soundtrack, where you collaborated with Michael Cera, an outspoken Unicorns fan. How did that come about?
Michael Cera contacted me… I think initially he wanted me to compose the music for this conceptual film that his friend Charlyne [Yi] was directing and writing. She and he were writing songs for it, and they wanted me to contribute in some sort of way. I was kinda failing to grasp what exactly was expected of me, so I was initially distant from the whole thing until it became a little more defined. I didn’t really write anything as much as just helped them with the recording process. I also played some instruments and did some additional recording back in Montréal after the initial recording in Los Angeles. It was a great thing actually. It was really fun and natural to work with both of them. I actually didn’t really know Michael Cera that well before, so it was a neat friendship to develop.

Tim Heidecker in CLUES – “You Have My Eyes Now” (dir. Matt Wells) from Matthew Wells on Vimeo.

A rather odd video for ‘You Have My Eyes Now’ showed up online last week. I think it claimed to be official at first, but then became unofficial… what’s up with the video?

Um… I don’t know. (laughs) I’ve only seen it on a very slow internet connection, so it’s all just fragmented or whatever. I kinda got the spirit of it though. I think we’d given verbal consent to the director of that film to make a video, but other than that we’d not been in touch or anything. So I dunno what’s up with it. They kinda took their own initiative with that.

I think the climax of that song could evoke and inspire a lot of things, but after seeing the video, it’s difficult to hear it without holding the image of Tim Heidecker groping and making love to a mannequin…
Yeah, and that’s actually been my problem with most music videos. You tend to really imbed a lot of meaning by shooting images with music. And that’s a pretty radical video in terms of imposing a narrative on a song that would not evoke that kind of imagery. And of course people are free to do that sort of thing, but I think that’s why it’s important to say that it’s unofficial. And it’s not that funny, I guess. But it’s interesting the amount of effort and the technical precision of this video…

I read that they did twenty different takes…
Wow.

But it’s in slow motion, so it’s probably actually around twenty seconds long altogether. Wait… is it in slow motion? Oh, I think it is…
That’s the thing… I had trouble determining if it was my slow internet connection. It COULD be in slow-mo, or it could just be my internet. (laughs)

You’re touring Europe next month. Have you been to Ireland before?
I haven’t actually. I’m really excited about it.

What kind of a view of Ireland do you have?
I really don’t have one.

Aren’t you excited about a pint of Guinness, and all that crap?
Not as much as just seeing the natural beauty of the land. (laughs)

Correct answer.

Clues play Whelan’s (Upstairs) on October 22nd. Their self-titled debut album is out now on Constellation Records. ‘Paper Heart’ (watch the trailer) will be released to cinemas on November 13th.

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BEAK> – I Know

[See post to listen to audio]

The band wrote the album in a single 12 day session and recorded in one room with no over-dubbing, just editing to create arrangements. Self-titled, BEAK> (the album) will be released next week on Invada Records UK, snippets of it can be heard here.

Anyone going to this Winter’s ATP in Mineshead will catch their debut show.

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Since then the girls have relocated from Lulea (Northen Sweden?) to Stockholm, where they recorded the fabulous Step Into The Light EP with Björn Yttling of, yeah you guessed right, Peter, Björn and John fame. Lead track ‘More Childish Than In A Long Time’ is instantly mesmeric and deeply heartbreaking; it’s hard to believe it was written by anyone born in the ‘90’s. Oddly attractive in a “belle laide” kind of way, the girls have the most wonderfully delicate harmonies. Their songs are minimalist in structure with gentle guitar, piano and sometimes accordion; displaying a melodic honesty which has found them covered by Peter Broderick.

MP3:Taxi Taxi! – More Childish than in a Long time

[See post to listen to audio]

The debut LP by Taxi, Taxi!, Still Standing At Your Back Door, has been released on Fierce Panda. It’s a further collection of vulnerable and bittersweet dark folk, perhaps a little fuller than the EP’s with additional strings and percussion. They are currently supporting Kings Of Convenience on a number of UK shows which is bound to garner a flurry of attention. Watch this space.

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Sim too is warmer and more exuberant in person than he appears on stage. Greeting us with a welcoming and bright smile, the six-foot plus 20-year-old arrives looking everything like the young Londoner that he is – hair slicked back and earring neatly in place. “I haven’t really slept in about four days,” he smiles as we exchange pleasantries about his ever-busier schedule. “We were in Denmark last night I think, and yeah that was great. It’s kind of great and strange to find out people listen to your music in other countries – even outside of London. London can seem like its own bubble sometimes. But yeah, it’s been building. You know it (Electric Picnic) was kind of like Reading in that the tent was pretty full. And, I don’t know…it’s a bit of an awakening moment.”

2009 has been a year full of awakening moments for the quartet. At the start of the year, while the band were still in the midst of recording their self-titled debut, the NME (amongst others) was pointing to them as ones to watch, listing them at number six in their ‘future 50’ list. They’ve picked up other plaudits too – from the BBC to a glowing review on this very site for their much-anticipated debut, which was released last August.

“In some ways we’ve obviously really noticed the pace quicken since the album has come out,” Sim says, pausing at various times as he tries to get his head around the group’s burgeoning success. “The attention we’re getting has definitely meant things have became much busier. But I don’t know…I suppose I’ve just been too busy and tired to check up on it. I’m sure that’s worked to my benefit because if I had been taking notice, I’m sure that I’d have got a little bit freaked out by the whole thing. But yeah, it’s important not to Google yourself! Just get on with the music.”

Get on with the music is what the quartet have been doing since Sim and best friend Romy Madley Croft (guitar/ vocals) began writing together some years ago. Mates from year dot, the pair attended Elliott secondary school in Putney, London – notable as the institution that also schooled Hot Chip, Burial, Four Tet and The Maccabees. There, they met guitarist Baria Qureshi and producer Jamie Smith – progressing things to the stage that they were ready to pen a deal with the Young Turks label by the time they were 17.

“Well, Romy’s kind of like my sister. I’ve known her since I was two or three,” Sim offers. “And, it just kind of…we were both bored I suppose and the idea to get a band together, and make music, just came at a time when we were both really getting into music and both going to a lot of gigs and all of that. So we were like, why don’t we try ourselves? And although it’s hard to start singing and showing lyrics to your best friend, at the same time it made it easier that we were so close. So it was quite a comfortable place to start. From that Baria joined, and then Jamie joined a few years later. So it was kind of like building blocks.”

The mesmeric, sparse and nocturnal qualities of the material aside, much of the plaudits the record has received have focussed on the way both Sim and Madley Croft’s vocals and lyrics work so well together. Both voices help too create an intimate and engaging foreground by which Jamie Smith is able to inject his various blips and beats across the back of. What’s most interesting though, is the nature of the album’s lyrical side. Despite the fact they sound and read like raw, extremely personal love songs, the words are in fact collaged together from Sim and Madley Croft’s individual inputs.

“Basically how it works,” says Sim, “is what she’s written, she sings and what I’ve written, I sing. It feels a lot more genuine that way. I don’t know how comfortable I’d feel if I was singing somebody else’s lyrics, especially as they’re quite personal…but we don’t write off each other’s stuff either. It is strange I guess, but looking back I kind of went through some lyrics that I’d already written and kind of collaged it together for songs on the record. And it ended up fitting quite well, which was strange…but it works, so you tend not to question these things.” Was he aware from the off how well the pair’s voices worked together? “Well no…before we started doing this, I hadn’t really sang. Nor had Romy. So we kind of started singing together and learned together. Also, I think, because we each write our own lyrics for any particular song, we’re not really singing to each other. I’ve never really asked Romy what her lyrics mean, or what they refer to. I have my own interpretations and we’re both singing to an outside subject. It’s not Sonny and Cher.”

Shunning bigger labels two years ago in favour of the little-known Young Turks imprint signals one side of the group’s assured nature in doing things their way. Another is their relatively brave decision to self-produce the record, scrapping sessions with Kwes and Diplo. “Young Turks,” Sim says, “came at a time when we were beginning to get some interest from other people who were talking to us about releasing singles and this and that. At that time, we had about six songs, hadn’t done that many shows, didn’t have a very good live show…and Young Turks just offered us a place to rehearse and really, let us develop. The first year with them was just all about that, rehearsing and developing and them putting us in contact with some producers. From that we wrote most of the album and then, in the past year, we’ve been mostly working towards the album.”

“With Kwes and Diplo…we definitely learned so much from working with them before the decision was made to go it alone. I can definitely recognise their marks on the album. It was just that the recordings with them kind of came out sounding a little bit more like them than it did us. It just felt more like their interpretation of our songs. And, the space in the songs… they kind of saw that as space to be filled with their trademark sounds I guess…because all of them had trademark styles.”

Did those sessions lead to the band stripping things back even further and being very guarded about the space within each song? “Well….”, he pauses as he puts his hand through his hair. “We never really intentionally thought to make really sparse, minimalist music. But after being complimented about it, I guess we made a bit more of a conscious decision not to stray away from that and to maintain it. When Jamie joined the band, it kind of gave us the potential to make a wealth of whatever noises we wanted to make. So I guess yeah, we had to recognise that…that we had to keep the space in the songs. We had recorded stuff and kind of stripped back whatever wasn’t necessary or whatever didn’t really serve a function. Most of my favourite songs are kind of down-tempo, mid-tempo and that, I suppose, influenced my writing…and I guess, in getting back to the attention and how people might see us as kind of shy and sullen…I’m not really a shouty, kind of jump up on a table waving my hands type of guy, you know. That’s never been me. I don’t think any of us are outrageous in-your-face people, and that, I think, is reflected in the music.”

The next two-years will prove interesting for The XX and whether they have the staying power. “I’ve only started to write again,” admits Sim. “And it’s hard getting the time. You know, things have changed quite a lot and I’m aware now when I’m writing that the stuff I’m writing isn’t necessarily just for me anymore.” And although the business of penning a second album is at the forefront of Sim’s mind, the next few months will see the group boost their live experience with tours lined up with Florence & The Machine, Friendly Fires, and their own headlining tour.

A relatively fledgling live act, anyone who has seen the band over the past nine months will attest to much room for improvement. “We’re a bit new to it,” admits Sim. “We’re kind of being playing venues with 300 people max in them and festivals are really new to us. But for the next tour, we’ve invested in some pretty amazing light boxes for the shows. It’s something that I think that will come in time – that kid of mix of putting on a show for bigger audiences whilst also putting across the songs in a good way.”

The XX play Dublin’s Tripod on Saturday December 19th

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You’ve said that you personally weren’t too surprised to win the Mercury. Did you feel that people got what the record was about from the off?

Yeah, the people who heard it did anyway. It was just that not a lot of people heard it. There are no straight pop songs on the record so it was difficult to get played on daytime radio. We didn’t have much money for marketing so it was just put out there, like a teardrop in the ocean. No-one really knew it existed.

A label like Big Dada must have been patient though, they know what’s involved with promoting a UK hip-hop record more than most?

From their point of view it was going to have to speak for itself. I know people considered it to be one kind of record but I did believe it could go on to sell a lot of copies on its own.

You’ve attracted a lot of criticism, does that get to you personally?

Everybody’s going to have something to complain about, no-one’s happy all the time. It’s not real. People have complained that I don’t sound like a real rapper. People have opinions which is good, it’s just the Internet means they can share them with other people a lot more easily.

We saw you reacted to Mike Skinner’s dig at you on Twitter, do you feel the need to respond to people directly?

Sometimes I do, it depends on the kind of comment. If it’s someone like Mike Skinner then I’ll react because he’s someone who should know better. It was a strange comment, slightly nondescript but still enough to make a point and make me put him straight every time I see him. Twitter doesn’t make people look good, it just makes them say things that’ll upset somebody. Lily Allen was a case in point when she was upset about not being nominated.

You mention your background and that has drawn a lot of attention, from those who claim you’re not ‘real’ enough and then the mainstream media who seem desperate to make out that you were living rough and forced to turn to crime. Does that depress you that an artist like yourself can only be dealt with in those terms?

That’s easier for some people to digest. Before this happened I was having a conversation with my A&R and saying “I’m a black artist coming out of the UK, the media are going to look for a story like that.” Some people can’t comprehend that I grew up in a middle class background. They ask me if it was tough and the only reason it was was because I was used to having everything that I wanted. Then I had to look after myself, which could happen to anyone at any point. You have to learn to manage your money and what you have. I mention being in a hostel once on one song on the album but all I hear is that I was homeless and living on the streets, which I wasn’t. It’s just bullshit.

Speech Debelle plays the Academy in Dublin this Saturday 3rd October. A few tickets are left but hurry, hurry, hurry…

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So what is it about the Maybeshewill sound that’s grabbing audiences in far-reaching places? The fact they’re instrumental, like Ireland’s God is An Astronaut (who are pretty popular in Japan and Russia), means that there are no lyrics to isolate listeners. “I guess maybe because it’s music without lyrics, it translates better. But maybe that’s a patronising way to look at it. I don’t know why the guys over there are so into it but it seems to be the way,” muses the guitarist.

The band recently completed a month’s tour around the UK with ASIWYFA “that was pretty epic”, and they’re no strangers to life on the road. “I think touring is probably our only reason for being in a band,” laughs John. “Obviously making the music as well, but if it was just us sat at home doing that we probably wouldn’t be as into the band as we are. We pretty much live for touring – any opportunity we get to go out with a band around the country, we’ll take it. It’s sort of escapism in a way, I think because you don’t have to worry about work or your normal like for a couple of weeks. I love it.”

While he can’t – or won’t – remember any Spinal Tap tour stories, John enjoys touring despite the endless travelling, eating at motorway stations and lugging gear from venue to venue. “Obviously it’s not nearly as glamorous as when you’re a kid and you think of being in a band,” he laughs. “It’s a really simple way of living because all you have to do is get from one place to another, and feed yourself and make sure you’re at the venue on time to play a show. You don’t have to think about anything you have to think about at home.”

One thing that Maybeshewill are keen to do is promote their independent way of working. They’re not signed to a major label; nor do they have any intention to. Instead, they try to do things at as much of a grassroots level as possible. “The best way to summarise it is that we sort of feel that no one is going to help us unless it’s easy to help us, within the mainstream music industry, unless they’re going to make money off us,” he sighs. “So if it’s easy for them to do it, it should be easy for us to learn to do it and to do it ourselves.” The band works with a few people, such as Tim Waterfield, who runs Field Records, and a Swedish tour booker. “All these people working together doing stuff without having to become part of that machine,” is how John describes it, a “cottage industry system that needs encouraging rather than just giving money to people who don’t really care”.

Although John admits that a “sort of” sacrifice of this approach is that, having chosen not to pursue larger labels or booking agencies “maybe we could be doing a little bit better for ourselves”, it’s clear the band are more than content with their decision. “We’re not isolationists, we’re happy to work with other people – as long as they’re the right people,” is how John puts it.

When it comes to their sound, like many instrumental bands Maybeshewill have found that they occasionally get lumped in with genres that they don’t quite agree with. “We get called post rock a lot which I don’t think we’re massively keen on,” admits John. “There’s a lot of post rock bands that sound very, very similar. We’d hate to get lumped in with that I think.” Generally, he says the band tend to refer to themselves as “instrumental”, and listen to hardcore and punk acts like Glassjaw. “We listen to Mogwai, electronic stuff like M83, all those things have a place in Maybeshewill. It’s difficult for us when we’re inside to describe the band to other people,” adds John.

The band are currently working on new material – although they’re not entirely sure yet whether it’s going to be compiled into an EP or an album – and a bit of online japing had some of their fans convinced that they were going down a very different direction. “We made a joke on Twitter a couple of weeks ago that we were writing a new album and it’s going to sound like Dimmu Borgir. And someone took that so seriously that they updated our Wikipedia page – and we couldn’t understand how they thought we were serious!” says an incredulous John, adding the fact that someone thinks that is possible, “made us take a second look at how we sound!”

They might, he jokes, even write a pop album: “We’re going to get four female singers and sound like Girls Aloud…” Somehow I think there’s more chance of them going down the metal route – perhaps even corpse paint and all.

Maybeshewill play Baker Place, Limerick, on Saturday 7 October, and Club AC30 Dublin #14 with Death of London, Whelans Upstairs, Sunday 4 October,8pm, €8.

We don’t get cut off – instead, there’s an eerie silence. State is not surprised – there’s something about King Khan that invites this spiritual interference, a confluence of beliefs that take in everything from tarot to punk.
Khan’s a wonderfully effervescent character – he speaks swiftly, like he’s trying to cram in everything before he forgets. His excitement is infectious, and he can switch between fantastical tales of hazy nights jamming with hip-hop royalty and the influence of spirituality on his music at ease. He’s excited about his band; his upcoming Dublin gig (“I love Irish people!”); his attachment to Ireland thanks to his brother’s recent marriage to the sister of actress Rose McGowan. He’s intense without being overbearing, eager to share knowledge, telling me to look up specific GG Allin interviews on Youtube. He’s someone for whom the word ‘character’ was invented, but he’s certainly no caricature.

The last time King Khan played here, with his other band, The King Khan and BBQ Show, Khan went home with a rather unusual Derry city souvenir. “This enormous woman bit my ass!” he says incredulously. Dressed like Tina Turner in a go-go outfit, Khan can only guess that he ‘looked tantalising’ to the hungry woman, “like a birthday cake or a piece of chicken”. “I was just shaking my butt in her vicinity and she came up and took a bite, almost. Luckily she didn’t draw blood, but there was a big bruise. It required quite an explanation for my wife…”

Bizarre audience participation is in fact welcomed at his gigs, and Khan says he wants a Mardi Gras vibe to his shows: “I never want it to be too theatrical. I want to have it more loose and funny and crazy.” Loose, funny and crazy are all key words in the guide to life for King Khan. “I think I have cartoon in my blood,” he laughs at one point, wondering aloud if it was because of the classical Indian sitar music that he heard in utero, through headphones placed on his mother’s swollen belly. When Khan says that his life is like the story of Homer, he’s not talking about the yellow, paunchy cartoon character. At 17, wanting to escape his home life, Khan went on his own odyssey. “And ever since then I’ve been on the road,” he says. “I moved downtown [in Montreal] and discovered playing punk, and then I found travelling was the most amazing way of discovering yourself.”

He describes this life-changing decision as “all pre-destined or whatever”, and says that it simply dawned on him one day to start a band. That band was the Spaceshits, a freaky garage punk group that included Mark Sultan, aka BBQ, who still plays with King Khan on a regular basis as The King Khan and BBQ Show. The Spaceshits were Khan’s introduction to life as a fulltime musician, and he spent nearly six years kicking out the jams with his cohorts.

But by his early twenties, things had changed once more for the Canadian. He fell in love, became a father, and settled in Berlin with his wife and daughters. If punk saved him from the banality of everyday life, love saved him from the fate of punk, where the overriding belief is in a ‘live fast, die young’ mentality. Parenthood, he says, kicked him in the ass to get serious – but not too serious, and above all, “to make music that’s about love and not fighting”. He no longer wanted to burn out rather than fade away. Instead, in 2002, he decided to form a band and bring soul to the masses.

“I think we carry the tradition [of soul music] on, but in the proper way,” says Khan of The Shrines. “A lot of people do this, you know, imitation kind of stuff, or dressing up – actually we dress up but I don’t do it in any imitation way, I like to put our own influence on it and make it authentic.” Also influenced by the sounds of Bollywood – “If you listen to Bollywood stuff from the ‘70s it’s just like, oh my god it’s jaw-droppingly psychedelic, it’s amazing” – The Shrines are “all about the freak out”.

But what may surprise some is that Khan has crossed paths with hip hop, after chance meetings with old-school hip hop legend Fab Five Freddy and contemporary hip hop legend GZA. After GZA’s manager fell for The Shrine’s sound, the duo kept in touch by phone for a number of months, with Khan emailing the rapper some tracks. GZA and Khan then hooked up at the NXNE festival in Toronto, with Khan moonlighting as the guitarist for the Wu Tang Clan founder’s solo show. He was even given his own clan name – Lord Khan.

Meanwhile, Khan and BBQ caught Fab Five Freddy’s eye when covered head to toe in gold paint – and Khan wound up jamming with the hip hop pioneer in his hotel room. “We smoked so much weed and we jammed for four hours,” laughs Khan. “I was just playing guitar in his hotel room and he was rapping. And then when I get back to my hotel room I don’t remember anything I played. The next morning I got up and frantically tried to remember what I’d done.”

This recent leap in King Khan’s profile – a high-five from his musical heroes as well as signing to the Vice record label – may have come relatively late in his long career, but Khan, who is just in his early thirties, is happy about that. He says it’s because he has been patient and not tried “to be the flavour of the month”. “That’s one of the reasons I’ve avoided England,” he explains. “We’ve played there a couple of times but I can’t stand this whole NME bullshit, like: ‘Oh this is cool now so everyone listen to this’. That exists, but it has nothing to do with my world.”

So what will you find in Khan’s world? Spirituality, for one thing. He places great stock in the power of tarot cards, not least because the figure that rests on the top of the deck is the Fool. “That’s why I think tarot is so amazing, because that’s the highest card, above the universe, above religion, above everything,” he enthuses. “And it’s essentially true – people who are smiling and just happily living their life and dealing with everything and turning hate into love, are the ones who survive. That’s also one element of my music that I take seriously, the gospel feeling, that’s nothing necessarily to do with Christianity, it’s more to do with being able to turn hate into love.”

The power of gospel has great meaning for Khan. “To be honest, things in the world haven’t changed: the same racism and corruptness, and all that brutality, it still exists but it manifests itself in a different form. So people still need gospel music. And that’s why my gospel is basically about losing yourself, and enjoying life, and putting firecrackers in body parts.” He says his religion is music – “If I want to pray I’ll put on Silver Apples or Alice Coltrane” – but he still holds a space in his spiritual beliefs for the darker side of things, the GG Allins of this world and their obsession with death, destruction, the detritus of human life.

And yes, this genial, hyperactive, positivity-focused soul king believes in Lucifer too. “I think basically rock and roll comes from Lucifer – but not the devil Lucifer, more the fallen angel part,” he explains breathlessly. “I completely believe in that, and that’s I guess one of the things with the [Kukamonga] Death Cult, it’s not got biblical connections, but in a way, spiritually, I feel like the story of Lucifer is still…” He never did get around to finishing that sentence.

Foggy Notions presents King Khan and the Shrines, Whelan’s Upstairs on Wednesday 7th October. Tickets €14 plus booking fee from WAV. The line-up includes 60 year-old Chicago-born, Ron Streeter (the live-percussionist of Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, and many other Soul-Legends), a horn section consisting of Simon Wojan (member of Kranky Records recording artists Cloudland Canyon), Ben Ra (Germany’s John Coltrane), and famous French rockabilly saxophonist Big Fred Rollercoaster.