It’s not like some bands where you take away one effect peddle and the whole band just fails.
- Can we expect any surprises from the set?
Emma: I’ve spiked the hell out of Rick’s drink. There’re a lot of barbiturates in there so we’ll just see what happens?
- What kind of progressing can we see between Virtue and First Love?
Euan: There’s a massive progression, we just became more interested in Sonics and working with Gareth, who was Depeche Mode’s right-hand-man in the 80s, so he’s massively into synths and samples. We didn’t use a huge amount of that but we definitely had that thing going on with him.
Emma: It was that mentality applied to organic sounds, which was really cool. And Gareth is a wise person as well, he’s really lived.
- What’s the content of the new album?
Emma: I started to write it after we came off our first First Love tour when I was about to get engaged. I was writing all this stuff that seemed very general but a lot of fairytale themes came out naturally, which was interesting because I was feeling very lost, because engagement is intense.
Then all of a sudden he left to go to another country and became a very very Christian person so then the rest of the album kind of wrote itself. Then we just went straight away to record it with Gareth but I was trying to hide the fact that it was a break-up album because I didn’t want to talk about the break-up, it was horrible, and also I’d already made one quite adolescent series of break-up songs.
So all that heartbreak is in there but it’s hidden amongst these archetypal story themes which I really focused on when I was writing lyrics.
- A term you’ve used to define the genre of Virtue is Digital Medieval, can you explain what that is?
Emma: When we would go and talk about the parts, Euan for example has a musical vocabulary, I just don’t. I would say things like ‘can we just think nuns for these backing vocals’ but everyone really took to it. If you’d heard what I’d said in sound design meetings, you’d be surprised at how much it’s reflected in the stuff.
There were a couple of songs like Paper Forest and Century of Sleep where we started off with a drumbeat and I’d go ‘oh this is really medieval, let’s go with that’ and I don’t really know if the other guys gave a shit but that’s my personal way of looking at it.
Euan: I think mine and Gareth’s job is to kind of take what Emma was saying and make it make sense musically, we couldn’t just have you in the background saying ‘birds here’.
Emma: Well we did have jungle noises. There was a song called Paper Forest 1, that didn’t make it on the album, but Gareth took it really literally and said ‘everybody is going to be an animal in a forest, there are four microphones in this room and you’re spending the next fifteen minutes as animals.’ Euan was like the kid in school who has a leather jacket and doesn’t want to play dodge ball.
Euan: I didn’t want to do it.
- What’s your favourite anecdote from recording?
Emma: There’s a song called North which is about imagined paradises being colonised by missionaries. My imagined paradise is very south because I grew up in the Tropics and I thought the song was getting too warm.
That night was the engineers birthday and we’d booked to go to a pub and just before the taxi arrived, Gareth did this magic stuff and all of a sudden everything sounded like the Arctic, it was beautiful.
We went outside to get the taxi and it was a full moon in November and it was absolutely freezing. That was my favourite night.
- What are your first impression of Friends of Mine?
We’ve been here for an hour maybe. My falafel was only ok but their bean wrap looked really good - I’m so pleased that we got asked to play a Manchester festival because I looked at the line-up and it is really very Manchester based and I felt so proud that they thought of us.
Interview by Antonia Charlesworth