Late Of The Pier - an oral history

Late of the Pier – An oral history

“More than a thousand years ago, Late of the Pier took to the stage…”

BEGINNINGS

Sam: “We went to the same primary school and hung out together from an early age. Then we started going out to nights in the city like Liars Club, when it was at The Social. There was a huge buzz of art students at that time and really colourful scene. We turned up as 15-16 year olds and hustled our way in and found out about music. Everything that was happening in 2004 just came straight out, hit us on our head and made us wake up and the four of us knew what we wanted do from there on.”

“It was just a small place with a few weirdos that went for the music. We used to go still in our school clothes and think ‘what the fuck is going on here?’ We spent nearly a year trying to write music and be good enough to appear at Liars club.”

Potter: “We came from a village, a tiny, little boring place where you make your own fun. We started being creative from this blank slate – this void. It would take us as far away from where we were as possible. That’s why we want to make epic things – really big things. It’s a reaction from being bored and growing up in mediocrity.”

“We were all kind of friends, half friends, and we became better friends the older we got. And then we realised nobody else in the village was really like us; with our lack of social skills we had something in common.”

“What was really nice about Liars Club was that at the time we were just about getting on the internet and downloading as much music from as far afield as we could and back in those days there wasn’t too many gatekeepers that you respected too much. With Liars Club it felt like a physical version of stumbling across a guy on the internet who had incredible taste in music and you could download everything. “

Faley: “Nottingham’s always had really short bursts of really exciting scenes, it’s kind of good because it never gets popular enough to become a real scene and it will stay quite fresh and exciting.”

“It’s a tiny place called Castle Donnington. It’s this small place but we have a massive famous racetrack next to us, and it also houses heavy metal festivals. It is known as the spiritual home of rock and heavy metal! This sleepy village that gets mobbed by like, 50,000 guys in black for three days.”

Potter: “One of the best things about it is the hottest weekend in the summer and you get these Goths in their white makeup, dripping everywhere. Fucking cool! Really extreme.”

“Castle Donington a great place to start making music. It’s not attached to any theme or style or anything, you’re free to do your own thing. The Leicestershire mindset is very different to the London mindset.”

Sam: “It came out of us reaching out and grabbing bits from other parts of the world where we don’t come from. We’ve always been…just by the very nature of Castle Donington, it’s a nowhere place. “

Potter: “It’s a very Spartan place, really kind of grey, right-in-the- middle kind of place, essentially it’s suburbia really.”

Sam: “Just by the nature of that we’ve always looked out from that, never really inwards.”

Potter: “It’s like reaching for the stars and scraping down and getting everything around, and maybe spinning around and sucking it in and saying that’ll do.”

Sam: “So we formed this band. We wrote our first few songs as we were learning to play our instruments, which we did without any proper tuition. We messed about and experimented to see what we could do differently to other people, so there’d be a lot of weird time signatures and strange chords. When you don’t really know how to play an instrument, in some ways, you end up being more creative or at least experimental and so we were hearing a lot of stuff that was going on. There was this electro-clash scene as it was known at the time, but is nowadays called nu rave. There were hundreds of bands doing those sounds mixing electronic and punk and various other kinds of noise. Even now when we make music it’s very influenced by that kind of early excitement and we try to relive that excitement and create that mood with our music.”

“I found [a synth] behind the shelves in our living room. It was a weird plastic thing covered in dials. I thought, ‘I’ll never learn to play that’.”

Potter: “2005 was kind of when we started but we were really slack and didn’t really do all that much – we were just friends making music.”

“We started making music, Sam had inherited some nice analogue synthesisers from his father and he lived in a kind of attic room, we started making music and jamming and at some point bringing together all the disparate, weird electronic demos Sam had, together with the more boisterous typical post-punky things...this was [aged] 15/16. His dad was in a proto kind of electro band called ‘My Dog Has No Nose’ and from what I remember they were a rag tag bunch of musicians, I think one was from Poland and they made a kind of all-you-can-eat world buffet, funnelled it through some early synthesisers and created what they did. Sams mum as well was in a band called the Gang of Four. The drum kit we had was the guy from Gang of Four’s drum kit.”

Sam: “Once I started writing my Dad kind of stopped. I don’t think what he did influences what I do. There are aspects of it. It’s more an ideas thing.”

Faley: “We’d spend hours and hours in Sam’s attic, messing about with synthesizers or guitars or drums

“None of us have ever really had any training. I think Sam had drum lessons for two hours once. I used to play piano a bit but I was never really passionate about it. But apart from that none of us have done anything. Sam just sat in his room from the age of 12 making music and he slowly learnt his craft that way, and with the instruments it’s just been a case of teaching ourselves. It’s always about trying something new. The music’s just a big array of everything, literally everything. In music pretty much everything’s been done at some point but for us, since we didn’t live through those eras, there’s still something new and magical and fresh. It’s reusing old ideas with newer influences. It’s just accidents a lot of the time.”

Sam: “The first song we played together, was called Wasted Intellectual (smiling) – it would be really funny if people listened to it now! Basically, we’d just get out of school and write something stupid (laughing), but that was the song that made us pick up instruments and play along. We rarely did covers strangely enough, I remember covering The Beatles’ Birthday once, but that was pretty much it really, we more-or-less got together and made our own songs.”

Faley: “When we were younger we had child-like ambitions, thinking ‘what if this, what if that?’ Looking at bands like The Beatles, wondering why don’t we just do what The Beatles did, do it for now, then take visual elements from groups like Daft Punk. In the end, all we’ve done is be inspired by really good people.”

“The Beatles were probably the biggest inspiration to the band, though that probably wasn't obvious. It was the common ground that we all united on and that we all grew up with.”

“It’s 90 per cent Sam who writes, but I am coming up with ideas all the time. It’ll get even more diverse. Potter makes the odd thing on FruityLoops – it sounds like Aphex Twin or something. : I think Sam’s the best with sounds, but I have lots of ideas now on how to structure songs and how build-ups / breakdowns / verses should work. I think a lot of that comes from DJing.” 

Potter:  “We just do not know how to compose a song correctly. We do not train. People think that prog-rock and its derivatives are intelligent genres, but they are just stupid people who do not know how to write songs correctly, and it's the same for us. We do not know how to finish a song so we stick two together. We cannot play on a single pace so we keep changing it.”

“Quite a lot of our songs start out as a fun exercise writing music – a playful experimentation. When we first start doing it, we laugh wondering if we can get away with it. The more we do it, the more we realize everybody enjoys it. Then in time, the more serious it gets. To us, it is a serious thing though. Being ridiculously lofty with our ambitions really – being like that at the start, then it just goes through the process.”

“I think one of the biggest driving forces of our success was the fact that none of us really studied in any other subjects so we were skipping lots of lessons and we were never going to be academics and never going to go to university. We had nothing else to fall back on so we had to keep making music.”

“One of our first gigs we played in a biker bar in this really recessed village near our place, they cut our gig half way through, bundled us out the venue and told us never to ever come back.”

Sam: “[Late of the Pier]… was a phrase that was kicking about. It was written on one of the demos and was meant to be the name of the demo rather than the band, but these things just happen sometimes and get lost in history. It’s the same with most of the track titles no one can really remember when they come from. The more you say the name the more it seems to have some ring to it and sounds more and more official. It’s the same with all names I was thinking about the name Bloc Party the other day. When a band becomes famous no matter what name they have it becomes official and a real sounding name. But most of the time when you really think about it its just random words put together.”

“When I was a teenager I had the typical Sgt. Peppers obsession. I just wanted to copy them, to have this alter ego. In the days of Late of the Pier, we were just having fun making name for everyone, but that one stuck around. I had a shed in my garden with loads of dusty stuff in there, so I became Dusty Shears. Now I’m just Sam Dust. It’s a dumb story, but that’s where it came from.”

‘NU-RAVE’

Faley: “The only thing that would piss me off is when press would use the tag “new rave.” It’s kind of like, have you not worked out that it’s a complete joke and a piss take? It was all a joke to use the press, and now the press are kind of like trying to use that. We do get comparisons to Klaxons, and in a lot of ways, it’s great to be able to be related, because we do share a lot of ideas and things and are big fans of each other, but I don’t think we share any more in common with them than anyone you can think of.  

“You don’t get any say with the NME. They use and abuse you, but at the end of the day they can do a lot of good, even if they’re using you. The new rave tagline was something that was bound to happen with them and there was nothing we could really do about it.”

“Basically it's about saying that because we have a weird t-shirt, we belong to a whole bunch of bands we share exactly the same opinions, the same style, the same music ...”

“Well, they write about what people can currently relate to, or what can make them popular, which is currently the new rave thing. That’s fine, but if you look beyond that, into the music, there’s a lot, lot more to it, and a hell of a lot of influences.”

Ross: “We do not belong to any scene really.”

“Our music is much deeper, it's not just a story of drugs and sleepless nights.”

Sam: ”A year ago, we shared the same public as the so-called new rave groups but we already had this recession, this feeling of not quite corresponding to the spirit of the movement.”

“When a big scene appears with a hype that surrounds it, naturally, we try to avoid it.”

“Our first single was compared to like 240 different artists and from then on I think we realised just because people will say you sound like this or that it’s just a tip of the iceberg for them and they might soon give up because we do change our sound so much I don’t think it’s our point to try and confuse people we just didn’t feel there’s a need to stick to one particular theme there are some great albums that have a distinct sound and flow to them but when we make music its always the case of this sounds like nothing we’ve done before we never really agree with people when they compare us and even people we do respect but we just let them carry on with those pigeonholes. People can realise for themselves.”

Potter:” It does not feel like you really belong to any scene, really.”

“Before the Klaxons started to become a real phenomenon, we had a concert dressed in fluo. We thought it was funny before we realized that everyone was taking these codes. We immediately stopped and prayed not to be assimilated to this movement.”

“I don’t like Klaxons but they do have nicer cheekbones than us, we don’t really have any.”

“They’re basically trying to make something really popular. There are a lot of people that come in from a different angle, and I think we’re doing it completely different ways. We come from completely different angles, but in that one respect we are kind of linked and are kind of similar in purpose, I guess.”

Sam: “You can only make those comparisons before you hear our music. Once you hear the music there’s more comparisons with Whitehouse and the Beatles.” 

Potter: “We probably smile too much, that brings about comparisons to the Klaxons.”

EROL ALKAN

Sam: “We knew of Erol Alkan from when we he used to play at Liars Club. He was putting things together like Aphex Twin with Abba, which we’d never heard done before yet made perfect sense at two in the morning. I couldn’t believe how good Windowlicker was to dance to its probably one of the best tunes there is, yet most DJs wouldn’t touch that. A year or two later he approached us and said he’d like to record stuff with us and we were flabbergasted as he had a celebrity status in our minds. But as soon as you start talking to him you’re completely on the same level. Even when his fans meet him, he seems much closer to them than a lot of famous musicians. He embraced the fact we had so many different ideas and understood straight away what we were doing. We were just really lucky really to be on that same wavelength all the way through recording and it worked brilliantly.”

Faley: “I kind of bombarded him with messages at one point on MySpace page, just being like, “Look, Erol, I know you’re gonna fucking love this,” and when he’d DJ I’d throw CDs to him.”

“Erol, before he got married and stuff, used to smoke quite a bit of pot — he used to smoke a lot of pot. He went through a phase where he kind of just smoked too much and got really paranoid and started freaking out. He thought people were going to jump through his windows and get him and stuff. I used to hand him CDs while he was DJ’ing, just kind of like reach up — “Oh, Erol, play my CD” — like every other kid does. I sent him a MySpace message and he really freaked out and thought I was like stalking him and stuff. Then a year later, one of his friends who worked for 679 [Recordings] brought him down to a gig, and he was just like, “Yeah, that was pretty cool,” even though we played a terrible gig. Then he was just like, “Yeah, do you want to come and have pasta?” so we went and had pasta. Then we started hanging out a lot more. He’s very much like my older brother. He’s kind of like an uncle figure to the four of us. I think he kind of sees a lot of himself in us and we see a lot of ourselves in him, just because we share a lot of things in common. We just work really well and really hit it off. We never really planned on having a producer do anything — the original idea was Sam [Eastgate] was gonna do it all. We ended up doing “Bathroom Gurgle” with Erol, and the response was amazing, and because of where he is and who he is, the attention from that was great as well. At the time, it was very 50-50 — some people thought we were amazing, like one of the most exciting new bands of the year, and the other people you’d meet: “No, it’s completely awful; what the fuck’s everyone talking about?” I think he swayed a lot of people who took to thinking down about us: “Well, if Erol’s behind it and Erol produced it, maybe I’m missing something.”

Potter: “He was just lingering around really. He was kind of perving on us from a dark room, kind of playing with his really big fingers thinking, “You know I could do something with these boys.””

Faley: “And then he said, “Do you want to come back to my house?”

Potter: “And so we did …”

Faley: “And he cooked us pasta, and it was really good pasta, so we said, “If your production’s anything like your pasta, we’re in business.”

Potter: “It was really surreal, because to be honest, before we met Erol, he was a celebrity, you know what I mean? He was always a cool figure, and seeing him make pasta was the moment we realized he was human, I think.”

Faley: “He had two pots and was like mixing the pasta like he mixes records.”

Potter: “He kind of seduced us with his strange mind and enthusiasm for weird and wonderful things, really.

Sam: “It was effective and we felt the same things in many ways. And that's what we thought before we even worked with him. He has always been a figure who could play a plastic rock joined to electro really strange. The way he does his DJ sets is very similar to the way we do our songs.”

“He has an incredible knowledge of music, especially in the various production techniques. He is very experienced.”

“He’s been a DJ for 10 years and worked in music for ages, seen it all, done it all, but he still gets stupidly excited about what he hears us doing. That for us is so inspiring.”

Potter: “I think a lot of people thought we were real flash in the pan before we met Erol. We tied up a lot of loose ends with a lot of our songs — a lot about who we were as well, in a way, ‘cause I think even after our debut album we’re still finding ourselves. We still feel fairly kind of new to it. We’ve been doing it for like three years, but we’re still kind of approaching it in the same way. We’re still trying different things and testing the water in a lot of different senses.”

Faley: “We don’t know who we are or what we want to be, and we’re kind of slowly growing that way, but all the press and industry kind of telling other people what we are and who we are and what we are going to be when we don’t even know ourselves is really confusing. It’s something that’s really difficult to get your head around and to keep your feet on the ground. Erol can’t tell us what we are, but at least he can inspire us and give us ideas [about] other people and the way to do things. He has kind of walked in a fountain of knowledge with everything to do with music. If we’re ever kind of unsure of anything or we’re starting to get swayed by other ideas, he always brings us back down.”

PARLOPHONE

Sam: “We were being ‘courted’ by a few labels, which is quite a gross term when you think about it. Basically a lot of them took us for squid dinners and while it was happening we just tried to stay ourselves as much as possible. So it was really easy to tell if they understood us and if they liked us for what we were as a band. We did a few funny things to mess with them as well, like one time we met Atlantic records we painted lines all over ourselves. That was to just confuse the record label and they really didn’t understand it. “

“We didn’t have any ambition to be this in your face big band straight away. We just want to make music and they were clear that they didn’t want to rush us, saying the first album didn’t have to sell, taking the pressure off. They just wanted us to make music and put a huge blank canvas in front of us and said paint. I think we got the best deal and it makes us try harder so it’s a good relationship.”

“When we signed our record deal we got carried away and asked Parlophone if they would sort us a house so we could all live together and make music. To our surprise they said yes and it was there that we had a big party involving lots of people camping outside. We had a fancy dress theme and all in all that was a real laugh.”

Potter: “We have since moved away – to Radcliffe-on-Trent! We wanted a house in the country.”

Faley: ” We’d rather not have the constraints of time against us. We’d like to work how we’re working already. Basically, the house will be a place for us all the move into and to carry on doing what we do... but better. It’s essentially just an extension of Sam’s bedroom.”

Ross: "We've found you can get some good recordings from some quite basic set-ups."

"London is a fantastic place, it's so busy and vibrant but I guess we're country lads at the end of the day.

"We're not at the house that much but when we're here it's so peaceful. When we go to London it's so exciting and inspirational, so you get the best of both worlds."

Sam: “All the Nottingham bands we talked to would always say it will be really hard to get a good reception in London, compared to here, but we always found the opposite. We learned our craft in Nottingham but whenever we played gigs here people would be a bit confused. Then when all the Liars Club crew and the art students moved out in about 2004 I think a lot of them moved down to London and it sort of became our second home.”

Potter: “It’s hard to tell, when you’re in a band…the whole process is; you play a gig, somebody watches from a venue, they book you, you think ‘yes this is it’ then you get invited to play London, then you get invited to play a really big place in London, then you’re getting courted by record labels who are blowing wind up your arse telling you you’re the next big thing then comes the press, and the English press to new bands is completely over the top, completely putting all their eggs in one basket saying everyone’s the best new band in the world, the next new Radiohead, Beatles/Blur whatever, and the from there you go abroad and it just keeps climbing and climbing and climbing. I guess when you’ve got ambition and doing well and there’s no slump in what you do then you always feel that you’re going upwards. “

FANTASY BLACK CHANNEL

Faley: “For me [Fantasy Black Channel]… it's just the idea of ​​an empty television screen, which encourages the imagination.”

“Very different to what people are expecting, I think. I think most tracks will sound different to each other. I have a lovely image of it sounding like a compilation someone makes of all their favourite bands. Except we’re just one band.  I’m sure some stuff will sound similar, or familiar, but then there will be something completely different next. I’d like to make an album that everyone will like bits of. Maybe you’ll love tracks four and nine and your dad will hate them, but he’ll love tracks two and twelve. “

“I think people will like it. It’ll probably get hyped as some new rave album, or something, but if it is we’ll just stick some early ‘60s rock and roll tracks on it.” 

“I want it just to be a great record. But only as much as The Beatles. The only reason people have picked up on the dance thing is because of Klaxons.”

“We started on it in December [2007], but I think the majority of It was done in January/February [2008]. March we toured, and then we kind of went back in. It took about eight weeks total. A lot of it was just kind of pieced together slowly and done in different studios all over the place — probably took like six months overall to put together, but I think that’s also why the album sounds so disjointed. It sounds more like a compilation of hits or like different bands to me — not one album with a consecutive theme or idea. “

“It works. There are so many ideas on the album, it’s impossible to kind of tie it all together with one string. We did think of mixing all the songs together, especially [working] with Erol, and having like one 45-minute solid track, but in the end it just kind of felt right how it was. That’s the thing with doing the album. We did so many different things with it and [had] so many different ideas, in the end we just ended up saying yes when it felt right to everyone. Like, the four of us and Jimmy the engineer and Erol kind of all sat there, and if all six of us were just like, “That’s it,” then it stayed, even if like we had more ideas. If it hit that point, that’s where it stayed. And then when it came to actually tying the album together, I think the album fell into place itself, like the songs basically told us where they wanted to go on the album.”

Potter: “There’s nearly a narrative there. I think in the three years to build up to the album, we never actually thought of a track list, and we never really kind of considered the fact that it should sound like an album. I think we recorded all the songs and then they were there and it was like, “Oh, we have to kind of stitch this together and make it sound like one piece.”

Faley: “Although the whole album isn’t cohesive in any way, I still do think it does the one thing that all albums in music — well, the best ones — do, and that is it kind of tells a story. It’s a journey. It has an opening, it has an ending and it has all the different kinds of emotions and experiences of a story in the middle.”

“[Recording the album was]…sometimes horribly slow, because each of us did not know what he was supposed to do. It was always experimental, trying new things, then seeing what works and what does not work. But that's what was fun. With any other producer who would know exactly what to do, and who would have told us exactly what to do, it would not have been the same.”

Sam: “The thing also is that most of these pieces are four or five years old. They are like the different facets of the same story that would be the story of our evolution as an individual, the story of our becoming as a young adult, the story of the excitement that still lives in us as a teenager and all the emotions that go with it.”

Faley:” It always amazes me that people find our album apocalyptic. It's just that it sounds like the end of something and the beginning of something else.”

Erol Alkan: “The equipment that they had wasn’t anything that I’d used in a studio environment before. Their drum kit looked like it was falling apart, their instruments I suppose to some people could have very easily been sneered upon. Sam’s guitar was a Vintage make guitar, an SG copy, and Faley’s bass was...I can’t remember the make now, but the kind of things you’d find in a cheap rehearsal room. The first rule was that the band were happy and comfortable playing those instruments so that’s what we went with instead of hiring in expensive equipment. If someone’s comfortable playing something then what you’re going to get out of it is going to be far greater than if you have this expensive guitar. The one thing that struck us when we miked up the drum kit was how good this kit, which looked like it was going to fall apart, sounded. It sounded great so we just went with what they had. “

'Hot Tent Blues'

Sam: “This song started with the Zoom 506 pedal I bought for £10. It was meant to be a Bass pedal but I always used it for guitar. The story behind it is that the first three members of Late of the Pier went camping at the airport, which is a stupid place to camp, with loads of friends and as the sun was rising it got hotter and hotter and we got more obliterated by cheap alcohol. This riff was going round and round in my head as I was walking home in the baking sun, and I plugged the guitar in when I got back and played 7 layers of guitars through the same pedal. This tune always reminds me of a Chinese funeral for some reason, that’s why it had to go at the start of the album.”

'Broken'

Sam: “When we first formed the band Ross could only play 2 or 3 beats, but when I started playing this riff he suddenly made up all these beats I had never heard before. The verses I wrote very late at night, it took a long time to describe how I was feeling in a way that sounded original. Not being able to sleep is a common theme in pop music! The chorus lyrics are about the first time we drove to London and we got incredibly lost, it could be about trying to map read in a place which holds great treasures for you.”

“[Broken]…basically started life as a bit of a jamming session, a bit of a kind of conversation between me and the bassist. The interesting thing about this is that the lead guitar and the bass guitar in this song swap roles every few bars. It was one of those songs that was inspired by being a kid, being a little bit lonely, wanting to get out in the world. And here we are now so it doesn’t have a lot of relevance really does it!”

'Space And The Woods'

Sam: “This song is trying to weigh up what is more important; a person or an inanimate object, or an absence of anything. It’s a strange question, but I clearly wanted to get to the bottom of it in these lyrics. They were originally sang over a slow “All Apologies” type of riff, but I completely forgot it the next day and when I was walking down the stairs I made up a new one. This demo was shelved for a year until I was at a house party and everyone was in a room crowding round a stereo listening to it. Then it was in the top 100 of the year mixmag chart with things like “Hustler” by Simian Mobile Disco, and we knew that was crazy. We released it as our first single in 2006, but it always seemed strange, the huge amount of love there was for it.”

Potter: “It’s mostly Sam...[who writes the lyrics]… I think Space and the Woods was the only one where he’s considered the lyrics and written them down and thought about it, usually his process is kind of...we’ll be in the studio recording the album and kind of record the whole track and we’ll all be there and we’ll then just need a vocal take. And the it will be like ‘oh we don’t have lyrics do we, gosh we don’t have lyrics, you’ve got to go in there Sam and sing some lyrics right now’ and this is where Erol kind of stepped in by creating a kind of party atmosphere and playing a track really loud and Sam just basically being really instinctive and just saying what kind of comes in his head. Like with this album he’s used his voice as more of an instrument than a tool for poetry or for saying a particular thing, everything he’s done vocally on this album is done very subconscious and not really thought about. “

“The reason we don’t really bother with lyrics is because people don’t really listen anymore. And when people do listen then take them as face value, especially with Space and the Woods, because the opening line is so controversial ‘suicide is in my blood’ people immediately didn’t like that whatsoever. The word is a hook, the way you say the word is a hook. I guess that’s what we do. “

Erol Alkan: “With Space and the Woods because [the synth] was kind of the central part of the track, we did lots and lots of overdubs and reamping on it. On the album we used a lot of CS synths, the 10 and 15. A lot of Roland stuff, the Juno, the Jupiter, ProMars as well.”

'The Bears Are Coming'

Sam: “Back in 2006, probably just before we re-recorded “Space and the Woods” we met Storm Mortimer* for the first time. She used to drive the car around London for us, and make sure we woke up to play shows and practice, but she always sang these amazing songs which came out of thin air. I took a whole page of her songs one day and remembering the tune she sang, fitted this deep afro beat rhythm to it. Me and Ross had been talking about making beats that actually sounded like they were coming out of the jungle and they sort of combined with this 80s Herbie Hancockstyle as well to make the backing for this song. Also Slagsmalsklubben, Prince, The Beatles, Mr Flash, FrYars and Lutricia McNeal were massive influences on this song.”

*Now known as Xenoula

Ross: “The track itself is a strange mixture of sort of tribal drums mixed with a heavy bassline and out there vocals that create a strange montage of sounds really, I think a lot of people can’t quite put their finger on it but they seem to find it quite interesting.” 

'Random Firl'

Sam: “Erol (our producer) loved this song so much, and though we were reluctant to re-record it, we knew he was right. The problem was that we had started playing it like it was a rock record and forgotten that it was much more like a classical piece of music. Once we got the right facial expressions and wore big enough ruffles we could play it properly. The vocal harmonies at the end were added on one of the last days of recording the album, the pressure was high, but the harmonies are very calming like a gentle breeze.”

“We’ve thrown away a lot of tunes that we thought were too normal; we almost cut ‘Random Firl’ out of the album for being too comfortable.”

'Heartbeat'

Sam: “It’s a very upbeat song but I think the first line of it came after listening to “The Bony King of Nowhere” by Radiohead, which is about as down beat as you can get. The time signature is always changing and at one point it just started saying “A heartbeat, a flicker, a line” in my head. The big drop into the chorus comes from a really ancient acid 303 track that I made when I was a kid, and I added some Kings of Leon style guitar jangling over the top. The time signature at the end is very difficult because it is one bar of 4/4 then 3 bars of ¾ and that’s just for the bass line! We cut up a guitar solo and put each note on the sampler and that’s why it sounds so messed up at the end of the song. It’s very funny seeing Potter play such a preposterous metal solo on his sampler.”

'Whitesnake'

Sam: “I can’t remember writing this song at all. But we only found out about a month ago that there was a band called Whitesnake and the weird thing is, this song is just like them, plus a bit of Devo, Roxy Music and Dandi Wind. I’ve only just realized that everyone will think it’s a song about the band Whitesnake. Shit.”

'VW'

Sam: “The oldest song on the album, the first demo of this was recorded in my attic in 2001. Oddly I think it sounds like the newest song on the album because the chords are completely original, they don’t have names. In the studio we got a saxophonist and a trumpet player to play all the horn sections in and they had to invent new scales just to keep up with the song. It was incredibly confusing but what came out was really beautiful. For the album version of VW we decided to drop all the music out so you could hear these horns for a few seconds and its one of those “wake up” moments on the album.”

'Focker'

Sam: “I used to be good at playing the guitar when I was about 17 and I could come up with these Hendrix-esque guitar riffs. One particular bobby dazzler got the name “6/8 Focker” then I made a demo with indecipherable lyrics sang through a guitar amp. When we made Focker “mark II” for the album I took the original riff from before the demo and cut it to pieces using Fruityloops. Then a drum solo I made for it became the drum beat for the whole song. For the last 20 seconds of the song I cut the whole song up again and rearranged it, and now Boyz Noize have done a remix where they cut that up too. I might do an edit of that!”

'The Enemy Are The Future'

Sam: “Sometimes practicing can feel really forced and it feels pointless. One day we were all hung-over and got a few songs in and then just stopped talking to each other. Instead of trying to make things work we all started trying to play across each other so that we couldn’t keep track of anything. Ross was the best at this, despite feeling much worse than the rest of us, he played about 40 different beats one after another all in different timings. Luckily we had the tape player running and we spent the next week or so trying to learn the song and I also made a Chicago House-esque remix. We played the original running into the remix in our live show for a bit, but we didn’t have an ending for it so we would count to 17 and then play Bathroom Gurgle. When we went into the studio we recorded 4 different endings and instead of using one, we spliced 3 of them together and the song was complete! It’s called “The Enemy Are The Future” because we supported them once and they are. It even says so in their promotional leaflet. We liked this sentence so much that we had to make a song out of it.”

'Mad Dogs And Englishmen'

Sam: “The simple idea behind this song was that me and Faley would play a few notes each and make a riff, but the bass and guitar wouldn’t play at the same time. The riff is actually based on an old French samba song but nobody can tell, even when I play it to them. The lyrics and chorus came from a one take demo, where we all just played and I shouted lots of short phrases, then I just had to work out what words I might have been saying, that’s really fun, especially with lines like “Falling over aeroplanes and wanting to be a derelict.” We’ve all had that feeling haven’t we?”

'Bathroom Gurgle'

Sam: “The first half of this song owes a huge amount to Liars Club, a club night in Nottingham where the best Porno-Noise-Electro-Thrash bands would compete to win over the equally baffling audience. The squelchy grind of the riff was purpose built for that place and in true Liars Club style it took about 2 minutes to make up the first 2 minutes of the song. The next bit is a blur! I had these two themes, which looped round on each other which I sang very exasperated Annie Lennox style vocals over, but I couldn’t find anything to do with them. Yet again the worst idea seemed to work perfectly which was to get to the really frantic sped up bit of the first half of the song and then just hit this brick wall of slow drama which was the other section, without any warning at all.”

“This song was just a bit of a mickey take to begin with because a lot of people started calling us this 80s throwback band when we started using synthesisers so we went out of our way to make the most pompous tune we could. And at first we just thought everybody would laugh about it...”

Ross: “…and they loved it”

Erol Alkan: “We recorded this is April/May 2007, before they were signed. It was a pretty exciting session for me in that it was a band who hadn’t really been in a studio before and wanted to keep it kind of exciting and fresh for them, just to be fun I suppose.”

“The band all played live to it and we just did a few overdubs. Faley can sometimes be the one take wonder. I remember he put this bass down in the control room just sitting down next to us. We always DI’d the bass with a view to reamping it. We used a Trace Elliot and a Selmer in the studio when we were making the album. Always through a 4x12 cab. [The bass line] is doubled up on a CS 15. Faley completely went for it on the bass and then Potter came out with this almost extra-terrestrial synth noise.”

Faley: “Our music works like a world in itself, a sort of parallel world. I think the directors are aware of that and they transcend it through their clips. That's what Saam Farahmand did with the music video for The Bears Are Coming, as he did for Janet Jackson's last single, The Feedback.

“Space and the Woods is our biggest disappointment. It was directed by Ian Emes, a guy who worked a lot on the graphic identity of Pink Floyd's The Wall. In fact, we wanted something pretty arty to reflect the fact that we use old stuff. But he said, "I can do your music, I really want it, but I need six months." On this, our label said, "Ok, but you have a week! "

Ross: “In comparison [to Focker] Space and the Woods cost four times as much. It was fun to do but less than Focker, because when there is a lot of money involved, it spoils the fun. On Focker, there are no special effects”

“The Focker video is the best, it's the video that best fits our spirit.”

Faley: “Dan Brereton [Focker director] drew the robot and…a girl whose name I do not remember anymore. And it was fantastic. The robot is animated by a guy who wears it as a disguise, and at the end of the clip he beats us for real.”

Daniel Brereton: “I've been doing videos for about a year. Before that I was doing graphic design. I got asked by the guys from Moshi Moshi if I wanted to do a video for Best Fwends, then I did one for Late of the Pier's "Bathroom Gurgle" based on the hall of mirrors from Enter the Dragon, then one for Metronomy where we made them into airbrushed record covers, then one for These New Puritans, and now this one for Late of the Pier again. Well, the song "Focker" is really energetic and quite tense, and the band wanted to do a performance video, but also not. So it was a performance video in which they visualise how they perform in their own minds. There's lots of steam and keyboards break, and then the room cracks in half, and out of it comes this keyboard monster/totem pole, and he's taking vengeance for their breaking their instruments, so he starts beating them up with giant drumsticks, and they get melted by the sound of him. My friend Helen, who's a really good prop designer, made the keyboard monolith out of cardboard. It looks really good. We shot it all with an old camera because we wanted it to look timeless - like Top of the Pops from the 70s or 80s.”

TOURING

Sam: “Automatically, that’s what you’re trying to attain – that’s more-or-less like the goal of a gig, to make a bond with the audience and all feel at one and all be involved in the same party. That’s what makes a good gig and when you don’t reach that, it’s a bad gig. An average gig is when you kind of have it sometimes and don’t other times. Yeah, it’s pretty much the judge of a good or a bad gig really.”

“I think it was just after we’d finished the record, we were sitting down for breakfast somewhere in London, and this massive folder just got bonked on the table by our tour manager. It was like: this is what you’re doing for the next two years. It was kind of horrific. Exciting as well, going around the world, but there was never any escaping from that for that time.”

“We all had gripes about what had already been booked way in advance. Recording was just stuck in the tiny little gaps between all that stuff, which for me is just a blueprint for failure. I don’t know why labels ever work like that. It’s probably a good thing nowadays that those sorts of deals don’t get given out to bands, because it probably saves them. The thing that really burns you out is having ambition that you just can’t do anything with. Feeling like you’re repeating every day over and over again. It’s like a Groundhog Day kind of thing.”

“Automatically, that’s what you’re trying to attain – that’s more-or-less like the goal of a gig, to make a bond with the audience and all feel at one and all be involved in the same party. That’s what makes a good gig and when you don’t reach that, it’s a bad gig. An average gig is when you kind of have it sometimes and don’t other times. Yeah, it’s pretty much the judge of a good or a bad gig really.”

Faley: “Japan was another country, completely like another world but it’s still the same, it’s just strange. Great place though. Best festival ever, probably the best gig ever. “

Potter: “There were ten thousand Japanese in the crowd copying me.” 

“We’ve set our hearts on living here forever more never having to deal with grey weather, boring people and boring buildings. Fuck your mediocrity we’re in Japan now.”

Ross: “People said we were going to get a culture shock, jet lag was the only culture shock. English and Japanese have an affinity, people should explore that”

“Only in Japan, there’s these massive crickets man and they’re so loud and so scary” 

Potter: “We are very lucky, what would I be doing right now if I wasn’t doing this I’d be on the dole, this is a lot easier. “

Ross: “I’d just be dead if I didn’t have the band right now.”

Potter: “You’d be dead? How does that work?”

Ross: “I’d just be dead, I would have died.”

Potter: “What you would have killed yourself or it would have been like what you get when you play your drums is therapy, every time that you hit your snare you get health and vitality and you live, and the day that goes you go, my friend.”

Ross: “Yeah that’s pretty much it.”

Potter: “We don’t plan anything anymore, we just get told to do things””

“It’s really fucking scary thinking about your age. Being in a band, you kind of, basically, we’ve never had any responsibility in our lives. We’re kind of living this child’s life. We’re basically playing. Even when we’re on tour at home, we have these mummies and daddies, to kind of set up the stage and drive us to places – and shepherd us through life.”

“We're fed up of touring, we don't enjoy it any more. We're musicians; we're supposed to write music. At the moment we're just performers – playing songs we made four years ago to keep our record label happy and it's getting boring."

Faley: “We want to go back to doing what we get a kick out of, and not to please a label or management”

“Because we play live so much it’s getting really difficult to take time out to write and record and figure out how we do new things. It’s just relentless. We started touring bits of Europe and we do America next year. To do something like that eats up months and you suddenly realise you can’t actually do anything until next year. I’ve always been the most disorganised person and now to have my whole life set out in front of me on a screen for the next six months is strange. “

Sam: “… But after a while, you actually realise that this is a job, like we have a salary and we have all of the trimmings of a professional outfit. So it’s almost battling against that professionalism, still delivering something creative and still being an artist, rather than a performer.”

“… it used to be a lot more fun when we drove round ourselves – we had this really long Citroën Estate and we used to get our friend to drive us around, she used to pretend to be our Tour Manager (laughing)! I mean we broke down quite a lot (pausing), we met some really interesting Russian breakdown drivers who smoked pipes and told us these strange stories that I probably can’t repeat in an interview (laughing). There’s other times, where we’d play a gig and driving home we’d be tired, so we’d find a forest and sleep in the forest – and one time, we woke up and saw a guy wearing a mask holding a gun! We shook if off and then he’d gone (laughing). There are some really good stories and you kind of miss that a little bit when you have a bus, it’s that whole thing of being professional again, which we’re fighting against at the minute.”

“We played in Manchester last night and there was a guy outside selling fake bootleg Late Of The Pier T-shirts – I thought, “We’ve made it (laughing)!” It was really strange, because now I know that we’ve got people copying our T-shirts and selling them, trying to make money out of us (laughing). But performance-wise, Japan was really good, because there were about 10,000 people all moving in-unison and they were really enthusiastic and excited, so that was really cool (smiling)!”

Potter: “We’ve been working on that last album for 21 years you could say and we just want to do new shit, it’s kind of tricky looking inside yourself and finding the passion for those songs again to be honest. I guess when you play a gig it’s kind of like a dialogue with the crowd: you create an energy they respond to it you respond to that then it’s kind of this back and forth kind of thing, that’s how you kind of have good gigs, I guess it’s just a different kind of dynamic now we’re a little bit bored of the songs and we want to move on. 

BLUEBERRY/BEST IN THE CLASS

The Band: “2008, Coachella. In a nearby disused power station we had just been asked to play a live set by MTV. They were a little surprised when we made a feedback loop instead, coaxing a warm and sticky swell that swilled around the room like a naughty breeze. Here the empathy machine technique was born and you can hear it used again a few years later for the intro of Blueberry.”

Faley: “Blueberry was supposed to be on 'Fantasy Black Channel' but we could just never get it finished.”

“We wanted it to be like The Beatles, if The Beatlesstarted out today, so it’s like you’re hearing what The Beatles would sound like if they were inspired by everything that came out since the ‘60s.

“We’re taking bedroom recordings into the studio and refining it and tweaking it with Erol, turning it into a more presentable package. I think we’ll be working with him for a long time. We’ve just got a lot of ideas, most of the album was old songs that we were getting sick of, so we’ve been waiting to work on new songs. And there is that second album syndrome when a band comes out so exciting and the second album comes out a year and a half later and there’s just not the same excitement. We’re still excited about what we’re doing at the moment so hopefully other people will be.”

Potter: “Yeah, we just did some recordings. We went to London and did like a five-day long session.”

Faley:” We tried to do an EP. We thought, like, “Yeah, we’ve got these four ideas for songs, so we’ll make an EP.” We kind of didn’t finish three of the songs. One of them’s just this really strong, weird instrumental, really kind of psyched-out. “

Potter: “Sounds like a less-techy Four Tet. There’s some real noises in there, really kind of organic and rich. It’s not really a song, though — it’s more of a texture, really. I think we’ll put it on a B-side. That was the big thing about this EP we did: We had like four songs but they didn’t really — it would have been like the album, basically. We would have put them together and it would have sounded OK, but there wasn’t a string of something cohesive there, and I don’t think we’re really into doing that for our next record. We really want — not a theme, but something really that kind of makes it feel more like an album and not a best of the last four years.”

Faley:” None of them sound like really strong singles. [One] starts with The Snowman, goes into the Beatles, turns into Ultravox, and then goes into like Soulwaxremixing Daft Punk at the end. Fucking weird song.”

THE END?

Sam: “I think we just think short-term really – the long-term is just something that happens and I think it’s best to be like that. Obviously, you have deep-down hopes and ambitions and stuff, but they might not be realised and (pausing), I don’t know, I think it’s good just to be incredible in the short-term and hopefully that will ripple onto the future. But if it doesn’t and you make a massive poke or an impact, what more do you really want?”

“...it didn’t seem right to do what people expected, to do another Late of the Pier record. We all wanted to shapeshift”.

“We were just determined to give ourselves a chance to grow up naturally. When we met we hadn’t even done our GCSEs [exams you take 16 in the UK]. It sounds like I’m being a bit miserable about it but it seemed natural not to have to follow this standard trajectory. If you start a band in your early or mid-20s then you kind of know what you’re getting into a bit more, you’re a bit more grown up and you’re gonna know it’s a good thing to commit and keep this rolling. We were 16 when we wrote all that stuff and recorded it at 17 and 18 and then we were just like, let’s see what we actually want to do.”

“We just kind of went to an extreme. After the Late of the Pier record, there wasn’t really any problem with thinking ‘What do we do next?’ It was more: ‘What do I want to do next?’ We were all feeling a bit selfish. We never tried to write stuff like, ‘Oh, how do we make another record?’ But it makes sense, because we never did that with the first record. We got together and we played music loads. We carried on doing it.”

The Band: “Ross ‘Rouge Dog Consuela’ Dawson has joined the great gig in the sky age 27. He was beyond a brother to us all and the most brilliant friend we could ever have hoped to have known. There are no words to describe the loss. We love you Ross.”

Sam: “Ross told me a few weeks ago how much he loved [recent single] Oino. And he was the only person I wanted to hear that from, because we grew up listening to the same stuff and wanting to achieve the same things: to be as good as the bands we were listening to. So when he said that I’d cracked it, it was pretty amazing to hear.”

“The process of it sinking in or knowing what it all means, the most surprising thing about it is how slow it's been to put any meaning to it. It’s not really the kind of thing that I can say a lot about. It’s terrible. The one thing I can say is, considering the internet can be cruel place, the support has been overwhelming, and the kind of things people have been saying has really helped everybody. And we realize how proud we are of Ross and will be in the future.”