Pistols At Dawn
Pistols At Dawn have making a name for themselves this year with the release of their album Tarnation and a series of great singles.
This week the band is back with their best single release to date in the form of Fugitives - which shows off a much darker side to their sound.
We caught up with Matt to chat about the new single, how the album has been received and what lies ahead.
- You are about to release your final single of 2012 and that is Fugitives so what can we expect from the new track?
The new track is kind of a dark brooding story of a couple who - we don’t quite know what they have done - but they have done a runner from their house and their entire live and disappeared off into the wilderness.
The song is from the point of view of the guy who feels horrendously guilty for whatever he has done that has meant they have had to run off together.
The song is pretty dark and brooding but it is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, track on the album and according to someone it is a good antidote to Christmas.
- You have slightly touched on my next question this is the latest single of Tarnation so how does this song fit into the rest of the album?
Well all of the album was written by sitting around at our bass player’s house with our acoustic guitars - so it was all acoustic guitar based to begin with before we started overlaying electronic stuff on it.
So the idea was to get all of the acoustic stuff down first and make it sound lush and natural and then start overlaying some processed beats and looping bass lines, so really repetitive bass lines that given it a really firm bedrock to sit on. We then recorded over a lot of them with live drums at the end - so we did it all backwards.
But with Fugitives we liked it so much after we had just given it the initial treatment that we never bothered with any of… so at the end of the song you have just got this massive drum beat that kicks in and drives it through to the end where there is a big crescendo.
This song fitted better with this whole electronic drum beat running all of the way through. So it was recorded in the same way and that is why it sits reasonably well in the rest of the album.
- There is a great video to go along with the single that was directed by Stephen Pook - he has worked with Blur - so how did that collaboration come about?
He is a friend of the band. I have known him for a couple of years and the reason that I met him was because a friend of mine went of to Africa with him to make a video.
They commandeered a big football pitch in the middle of a couple of African villages and they put on a big football tournament and concert. But they also had a doctor there, who they referred to as Doctor Aids, who did Aids screening for everyone in those African villages.
So it was Aids awareness and a big football tournament and Stephen Pook filmed it all and turned it into a video - which is now on his catalogue of tuff that he has on his side. So a friend of mine went with him to do that and I saw that video and thought it was wicked and then met Stephen.
I mentioned to him that we have a band and we wanted to do a decent video for Fugitives and he jumped on it.
He came to us with a fully… we gave him three lines of what we thought the video could be like and he came back to us with a two page screenplay of what he thought it could be. So a lot of the video was a lot of his ideas and concept.
- I did wonder how much input you had had into the concept of the video - it is a black and white and it carries on a theme of city meeting the countryside so how much did that stem from you?
We said we wanted it to be a road movie in a box so that it really fitted in that three and a bit minutes. Stephen then went away and came back with two or three candidates and then we started talking about the logistics.
So the band organised where we were shooting it and the car and that sort of stuff; so Stephen came up with the concept and the camera angles and so on and we came up with where we were going go and what car we were going to be in and stuff. So it was quite a good combination and an equal weighting between the two in the end.
- I have mentioned the debut album Tarnation already and it was released earlier this year so how have you found the response to the album overall - it does seem to have gone down well?
The album has gone down well but what we haven’t got yet is the radio play that we wanted and so what we are really keen to get is more coverage on channels like Radio 6 and that is why we are doing a re-plug of the album.
The album was originally promoted before we had released any of the singles and done any of the live stuff and so as a result people didn’t take a huge amount of notice of it at that point.
There has been more interest in the singles since and that has built up and up and up during the year and on top of that we have done about twenty five gigs through the course of the year.
We are quietly hoping that there will be more interest in the Tarnation album second time around because everyone has heard us live and we have got this gig coming up with Mark Chadwick from The Levellers on 8th December so that is going to be a good platform to do another push of the album.
- I was reading that you recorded the album yourselves in in one long weekend so why did you decide to do all the recording yourselves?
When it says we recorded it one long weekend we actually recorded it in about six months of going round to Jim’s house and recording and recording and recording and putting more and more ideas down.
Then what we did in that weekend we went away to Rutland, which is this village in the middle of nowhere; in fact near Rutland there is this village that got done in by the plague and so there are just a few houses in the middle of nowhere and then there is a farmhouse on the further reaches.
And so we set up our gear up there and we recorded over everything so that we got much better quality takes of all of the parts.
Basically by that point we had done so much there was no point in trying to re-re-record it all as we would lose the feel of what we had managed to capture by getting drunk at Jim’s house.
The whole think was it all felt a little bit drunken and woozy and floaty and stuff and we thought if we went and try to recreate that in a studio we would never get that back and so it seemed better to keep the basis of it and lower everything else over the top. So that is what we ended up doing.
- How much do you think this do it yourself approach impacted on the music as you did perhaps have a little more freedom by doing it this way?
Loads. We kind of re-launched Pistols with this album because we have done about four or five EP’s before and all of those sound a lot more like Queens of the Stone Age.
By recording this way completely changed the sound because we use to practise, write songs in the studio then rehearse them up before recording them live and the overlay lots of additional stuff to give it a more juicy production flavour.
This time around doing it all this way meant that we got a completely different style but also it was more fun as a process.
We had a lot more fun recording this album even though this album took over a year in the end because we did all the recording then we went away and when we came back we did all of our own mixing before we handed over the mixed stuff to John Reynolds - he did the Sinead O’Connor album.
We had all the levels and the panning where we wanted them and then he took them to pieces and did ridiculously clever things with lots of sounds to make them bigger and wider. He injected the magic source that makes it sound like a finished album.
- You have talked about re-releasing Tarnation so do you intend to tour this record for a while or are you looking to get back into the studio into next year?
We haven’t decided yet as it depends on two things; it depend on the radio response to the re-release and it also depends on the second time around and whether people take a lot more notice of it because they have seen the live shows.
So it really does depend on the response and the demand really otherwise we really want to get back into the studio and record some new stuff.
- You are also going to be playing at the Scream Lounge in Croydon next weekend so what can fans who are heading to the show expect from the gig?
They can expect us to play a really tasty version of our album live. I don’t know if it is clear on the album but we have actually become a four piece now, our guitarist joined about a year and a half ago, so it has got the same sort of luscious and big sound to it but live it sounds a lot more dynamic.
On the record is sounds mesmeric and loopy and that of thing but live it sounds really big and vibrant so that is what people should be expecting to hear.
- Finally what is next for the band going into 2013?
We are going to hopefully write another album but that will probably take a whole year.
I would like to think that the beginning of the year will see us do a few more gigs based on the back of the re-release of the album and then start a new album towards the latter end of the year to be ready for release at the beginning of 2014.
Pistols At Dawn - Fugitives is out now.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw