Everything In Its Right Place

Promo can be an awful bore sometimes. From an awkward phone interview to a stagnant photoshoot, being in a band isn’t as thrilling as the media – umm, us – like to make out. That’s unless you’re in Everything Everything, whose day so far consists of tussling with dead fish and taxidermy for one photoshoot and spending their mid-morning wearing leather hoods in a graveyard renowned for its seedy extracurricular activities for another. And right now? Well, The Fly are watching the four-piece flapping about on lilos in an east London canal armed with grapes, lemons and cocktail umbrellas. If that sounds interesting, then hold on – we’re only touching the tip of Everything Everything’s imaginative iceberg…

Given that Jon Higgins (vocals), Jeremy Pritchard (bass), Alex Robertshaw (guitar) and Mike Spearman (drums) aren’t shy of a bit of artistic quirkiness, the idea to shoot the Manchester quartet floating on red lilos – think Club Tropicana, Hackney-style – seemed spot on (sadly the band’s idea to be shot holding “as much fruit as humanly possible” was vetoed. Next time, maybe?). As we watch them pluck post-shoot waterboatmen and general canal waste off one another with the nonchalance of a monkey picking nits off its offspring, it’s clear they’re prepared to surrender cool for the sake of creativity.

Dry and fully-clothed, The Fly whisk Jon and Jeremy off to talk about their forthcoming debut album ‘Man Alive’, due out at the end of the month. “We’re ready to let it breathe and see what happens. We’re better than we ever have been live, that’s all we can do, if it doesn’t work, then so be it…” Jon admits matter-of-factly. It’s been two years since the release of their debut single ‘Suffragettes Suffragettes’, two years which have seen the band evolve from angular art-rockers to peculiar pop pioneers, supporting the likes of Darwin Deez and Delphic and watching a supposed “sea of confused faces” as they unleash their barrage of idiosyncratic anthems. “The last UK tour we did was kind of treading over the old ground but we were touring under the banner of other bands. That was the thing that brought people in, rather than ourselves,” says Jeremy. “And a lot of the people would know the singles but at least half the set would be unknown to them. So, next time we go out we’ll be playing those kind of venues again for the umpteenth time – but people will actually know us. People will be as familiar with the whole set as they were the singles.”

 Following the release of the lyrically arresting ‘Suffragettes Suffragettes’ and the macabre-marching stomp of ‘Photoshop Handsome’, the band then released the shimmering spacegroove of ‘My Kz Ur Bf’, leading to getting signed to the recently relaunched Geffen label, home to the likes of MSTRKFT, The Guillemots and, most famously, Nirvana. “There was no scrum really, we had a few offers but it was quite comforting to know we weren’t a fad – we weren’t a fashion band. We were an unsafe bet,” offers Jon, sipping on a pint. “We’re not fashionable or especially radio friendly…” Jeremy says. “I wouldn’t sign us!” Jon interjects. “We’re kind of learning together with Geffen, it’s kind of like, ‘We’ll take a punt on you if you take a punt on us’. There’s no big rule book attached to it,” admits Jon in a warm northern accent. “We never get ‘sorry we’re working on…’ We feel like a priority. If we signed with one of the enormous giants, we’d be at the bottom of the pile,” cuts in Jeremy “We feel quite lucky to have signed with a label that’s what we like within the realms of realism. We are quite realistic ourselves, I mean we’d never give them a twelve minute drone track and say ‘This is the lead single!’ And we wouldn’t want to because we do actually believe in pop music and its effectiveness.” Indeed, Everything Everything manage to stay true to their pop routes, fusing a commercial hip-hop groove with an eccentric indie twist. Imagine The Beta Band if they shaved their miasma-like eight-minute mazes and channeled the directness of a slick charttopper. “They [The Beta Band] struggled with making songs like that, I always thought when I listened to them when I was much younger, ‘If you really wanted to make something like that then you should have just done that…” Jon states. “What’s harder to do is to whittle your ideas down from eight minutes and then not make some crap bubble-gum pop, and not make a self-indulgent epic but combine to two in the space of four minutes – we’re still learning out how to do that now”.

Helped along by Bat For Lashes and Chew Lips producer David Kosten, ‘Man Alive’, a title which is as much an exasperated exclamation as it is an optimistic declaration of existence, is a musical Frankenstein, packed full of as many ideas you could shake an eel at. How did a band for whom complete artistic control is so important get on putting their songs in the hands of another man? “He wanted to do the single [‘My Kz Ur Bf’] and we approached him about doing it. He made it very clear, actually, by bumping off quite a few big names that he wanted to do the album,” Jeremy explains. “We chose him on the basis not that he was going to agree with us, but because he changed something and we liked it. He was the first person to say ‘I don’t think that sounds good’.” “Putting the chorus at the front of ‘My Kz’ was kind of the thing that tipped the balance in terms of our career. We joke but we were saying it today as we were walking to the shoot, this is our job now, I knew we should have put the chorus at the start of the song!” Jon laughs. “The beginning of ‘My Kz’ used to start with all of us shouting in turn then the noise of a mouse click then straight intothe verse. If we’d done that then things would have been very different…” And so it was. An act who could have perennially become ‘That band who do the song about sitting on someone’s face’ became digestible indie-pop fodder. Now, it wouldn’t seem out of place to see a room full of people chanting back ‘My teeth dazzle like an igloo wall, I inhabit, I inhibit y’all!’”, much like when you watch a sea of tanked-up Radiohead fans sing back the words to, say, ‘Weird Fishes’. “That comes with the music. You get these weird things happening. Lager louts loving the most surreal things,” Jeremy shakes his head. “I mean, Morrissey gigs when you see sweaty plumbers hurling themselves at this – let’s face it – gay man. It’s straight middle-aged men who are disenfranchised by every other music”. Radiohead and Morrissey aside, it’s been a while since guitar music has had the space to breathe and breed without a rickety Boys In The Band approach or MOR drabness filling up the airwaves. In the last few years, it seems, owning a guitar shouldn’t automatically mean you slot into a perfectlyformed pigeon-hole, allowing bands such as this particular foursome to flourish. “I think music’s gotten better in the last four years, since the ramshackle Dickensian thing, the post-post-Strokes thing that was really fucking bad at the beginning of 2007,” Jeremy says with total disgust. “Then, bands like Klaxons and Foals expanded people’s minds a bit and it started to get better. Those two bands helped us out a great deal – it helped people understand what we were about, even though they weren’t a direct influence at all. Choosing not to dumb yourself down and put a porkpie hat on. It was a godsend for us. And also good timing.”

And thus, the avenue was opened for Everything Everything’s imaginative minds to pen glossy pop hits about surgical homogeny and Edwardian waltz songs’ – but is their incessant inventiveness matched by a potential to crossover to the mainstream in the same way that Yannis & co. have? “It depends what we want to do,” Jon carefully considers. “I think we’ve lain out enough different paths for ourselves with what we’ve done so far. When we toured with Keane, Mike said, ‘If we wanted we could be a massive band we could just do that or that or that.’” “It wasn’t something he was considering…” Jeremy quickly steps in. Jon retraces his steps. “It was done with humour, but we have always had the ability to do that and a lot of  ands do and a lot of them try and many don’t succeed, we’ve opened up different patterns we could take. It depends what we choose to do.” For now, what they’ve chosen to do is keep the collective brainbox ticking, penning new material before their debut album has even hit the shops. “The songs we’ve written together recently have been the best and we’re creating all the time,” Jon eagerly confides. “There’s a song we didn’t use on the album which is the most recent thing and I think that’s the best thing we’ve ever done and that’s exciting because it’s a stepping stone to something far more exciting. That’s really the best thing in my life – thinking about when we get to write the next album. It’s like a dream. Just the potential…” “Just because we can shed a lot of history and baggage and emotional stuff that went with this record. There’s years that have gone into [‘Man Alive’],” says Jeremy. “That’s why so many people’s best records are their debut records. And it’s also the reason why so many debuts aren’t – it’s like shedding your skin and then you become a different creature” “It’s like your first wank,” Jon concludes abruptly, leaving us with a suitably odd mental image of the band’s approach. By listening to their music and hearing them speak, it’s clear there’s much, much more to Everything Everything than kooky ideas and falsetto trills – they’re the reaction to a generation who’ve had substandard music smothered into their ears for far too long, a band full of ideas and passion, a middle-finger to a decade to mediocrity. Fancy a challenge? Close your eyes, hold your breath and dive in at the deep end with Everything Everything.

‘Man Alive’ is released on Geffen on August 30th.