Music > Interviews

Interview with The Big Pink

02/05/12

It’s worth thumbing your way through the musical history tomes, the ones that never get to gather dust because they’re referenced as such an intrinsic part of modern music, to have a look at the lineage of The Big Pink’s founders, Robertson Furze and Milo Cordell. Most recently, both are names associated with their own record labels - having dished out Klaxons and Crystal Castles to us – they’re celebrated producers and if the name Cordell rings a bell, it’s Milo’s father Denny, the heavyweight producer and sadly departed musician and muse, Tarka who are testing your memory. Their future is as dazzling as their past though; with single ‘Dominoes’ firmly planted and album two, ‘Future This’ nestling in, the lineage is set to strengthen…

How are you doing Robbie? I’m good; I’m waking up in New York, which is a nice thing to do. 

Is it really early? No, not at all, I’m just really lazy.

That’s your prerogative, I feel, because you’ve had a pretty hectic schedule there – you played Coachella this weekend, didn’t you? Yeah, yeah, it’s been pretty intense, to be honest. Last week was insane, like really full on because it’s over two weekends, Coachella. Then we had all these shows to do in the week in San Francisco, then two LA shows and one in San Diego, so it was pretty intense.

You’ve had fantastic receptions in America though to date – did these shows just add to the legacy of good shows you’ve had there? Yeah, I just love our fanbase in the US, they’re just so enthusiastic; the shows have been much more than just sold out and everyone just goes completely insane for us when we go out there, and the sense of support that we have is just incredible. For both Coachellas, there was like 4-5000 people going crazy for our stuff and that was like early in the festival, like we played about 4 o’clock. It was so hot on the second day that you’ve got to be quite a dedicated fan to jump around and go crazy for us in something like 104 degrees.

In contrast, you’ll be exchanging the hot Coachellan festival for the unpredictable British ones soon, starting with Playfest, our local festival. Have you got a packed summer ahead of you? Yeah, I think we’re just busy the whole time; it sort of starts at the end of May, through to June and the end of summer. I think it’s like every weekend, type of thing, then we’re coming back to the US at the end of August, I think, which ends up at Lollapalooza, so it’s gonna be pretty intense. I also want to be writing this third record as soon as possible and we’ve already started writing that; I’m actually staying out in New York this week to do some work in the studio out here to see if I can get some stuff done, so we’re gonna be pretty busy, not much time off, which is good because I don’t like time off really. We are workaholics, we never really stop; we get up, then we work.

Talking about this affinity you seem to have with the US, when I first heard your music and you name-checked yourselves after Canadian The Band’s song, ‘The Big Pink’, and one of your singles was ‘Crystal Visions’ like the American Stevie Nicks album, I was sure you must have been from the other side of the Atlantic. Is the musical bridge between the US and the UK a lot shorter for you? Yeah, I think for me, apart from bands like Stone Roses or Happy Mondays – literally maybe those two, for me growing up it was all American rock bands and Hip Hop acts that would turn me on and made me first fall in love with music, but that’s what I was in to, it was all American acts, you know, like Smashing Pumpkins or Jane’s Addiction, or Metallica or Pantera – those kind of bands, plus Wu Tang, or NWA, or whatever. So for me, that’s all that it was, all that US rock and I guess those influences are still in The Big Pink. We always think that whatever happens to us when we’re writing music, it’s just stuff based on influences that we had when we were like 13 / 14, like on the surface, that’s what we were influenced by, that kind of American sound. I do like it when people say they can hear The Jesus and Mary Chain or Stone Roses influences in us as well; it’s a big melting pot, but it’s heavily rooted in America.

We’re coming in to this week after the week where we lost The Band’s Levon Helm. What was it about The Band that made them worthy of naming your band after, or was it just a good assembly of words? Well one, it was a good assembly of words, but secondly I think that I fell in love with The Band when I was growing up and my parents loved them; we’d watch The Last Waltz all the time and they, for me, really showed me what a real band was. They toured for 15 / 16 years, like they were the real deal; they were amazing musicians and they lived and died for The Band and I see The Big Pink like that – we are a real band and what we do I want to be equally as passionate about, being musicians and being artists, so it seemed a good thing at the time that I should name myself after these artists, this early influence. Also, I think The Big Pink had a good punk reference, which is important to us; I think the punk Pink is quite a good visual for us, like a Sex Pistols reference… I don’t know, it just seemed to work.

We’ve been enjoying your second album since the beginning of the year; it’s been really positively received by us, but what are your feelings on how it’s nestled into this year’s soundtrack? I think it’s good; I think when we first came out, there was a bit of a buzz about the band, but a lot of the time I think the UK press get behind you – and they were behind us – but there comes a bit of a backlash from some people, not to do with our music, but to do with us, which apparently is a very classic thing for the UK press. They like to build a band up on the first record, then give them a hard time on the second record, but it was never really too much to do with the record, which was nice. It was kinda personal stuff that they were coming at us with, which strangely we can ignore because there seems to be a lot of lazy journalists in England and for some magazines it seems to be more about our social comments and that kind of thing. We’re very good at ignoring that kind of side things; magazines like Look Magazine shouldn’t be talking about me! I think it ends up that they start looking more like idiots than us. It doesn’t really bother me, but the actual reaction to the album has been really good. People supported us and saw where we were trying to take The Big Pink, so that was really nice. We’re selling records, and people are coming to our shows and we’re connecting with our fans again, which is so cool. I think we still haven’t found what the sound is of The Big Pink though; the nice thing about The Big Pink is that we can always do different stuff – we can change and that’s something I’ve loved about us. We don’t really fall into any genre and I don’t know if we did that on purpose, but it’s a nice way to be.

You two, you know how to produce a record and you did it very well on the first one, but for this one you chose to hand over the reigns – what was the reason for letting go, and is it an easy thing to do? It’s quite hard when you write and record and produce a record, so I think we just wanted to try out a third set of ears and I think it’s really nice because although we’re not really precious about what we do, I find you can get lost in what’s important and what’s not, so it’s nice to have someone say, ‘that bit’s completely pointless’, you know, ‘you’re just meandering around because you like that part.’ You get these completely pointless parts of songs that maybe a true fan will love, but you’ve got to be completely honest with yourself and realise you’re just leaving that part in because you get this precious feeling, like you love it, so it has to be in. A producer can just come in and go, ‘no, that’s crap.’ It’s a much healthier way of creating leaner songs, and I think Paul Epworth is really good because you’ll come in with a demo of the initial idea, and from there the demo should have the basics of the song, like the verse, chorus, the general sense of the song and what it’s about and a rough structure, then producers like Paul Epworth will present the song in its best possible way that it can relate to a listener. Any good pop song should do that, and it should do it in like 3 minutes, or whatever and you should do that as often as you can; that goes back to The Beatles and any type of classic songwriting, you know, just presenting your idea in the simplest way and that’s what we wanted to do with this record, and that’s why Paul Epworth was great because the songs on ‘Future This’, in my opinion are all well presented and executed ideas. We haven’t gone off into 4 or 5-minute meandering noise solos… which we do tend to do! Things like ‘Crystal Visions’ and that stuff like that, there is an element of where we’ve gone off in a tangent, which is fine, but on this record we just didn’t want to do that.

It’s very easy to connect to, very quickly and I think part of that comes down to the fact that you guys know how to write big hooks, and the ubiquity of ‘Dominoes’ is a testament to that. I think, in part, that comes down to you being able to embrace pop music and not see pop as a dirty word… Yeah, I think sometimes it can confuse people when we say we want to write a pop record, or sometimes people say they’re writing a record that could work on radio and stuff, but I hope people understand that what we’re meaning is that the idea of being a pop band as I see it is that I look at bands like Tears for Fears, or Eurhythmics, pop bands from the 80s – they were so weird and wonderful but yet they were top 10 artists. They went off into so many different tangents and wrote really experimental music that was really out there, but it was pure pop; it translated to the popular. They were all incredibly diverse and experimental and that’s where I want The Big Pink to be; I want us to be an odd pop band who can translate to people who don’t necessarily have that esoteric music taste normally. That’s kind of how I want us to be – when I say we’re a pop band, that’s what I mean. I think that ‘Hit the Ground (Superman)’ was a good example of that, because when we sampled Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’, that was from a conversation, like, ‘O Superman’ was a number one in the 80s, but that is a really odd song! It was a worldwide number one hit! Why have we lost that over the years? Why do we have to put up with the thin dirge that’s in the top ten these days, you know, why can we not have bands like we had back in the 80s and early 90s that had that sense of something a bit more interesting? That’s our aim anyway; if we have any kind of goal or ethos, it’s to break that boundary. To a certain extent, we are, but I think I want it to be Top Ten and that’s what we have to do. We’ll continue with the next record, trying to break that mould of the Top Ten in England, which at the moment is awful, it’s just embarrassing! Why do you have to have cool music, and why do you have to have pop music? It just doesn’t make sense to me; they force children to buy it in supermarkets; it just doesn’t make sense to me.

Yeah, we’re not so good at allowing the quirks to come through any more. Yeah, exactly.

Just to ask you a little about the live show a bit Robbie… We’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Akiko from Comanechi, who has drummed for you in the past, but now you have two new members – how does it work now? Yeah, with Keeks, she just wanted to go and do her own thing after the first record, to concentrate on Comanechi and I think we were so eager to write the new record and the drumming became a different thing than what it was on the first record, so we found this amazing drummer called Vicky Jean Smith, who’s one of the best drummers we’ve ever played with, she’s incredible; she used to play for M.I.A. and she played in a band called Ipso Facto. Then we got in this other guy for the band who’s this like noise artist who I worked with when I played with Alec Empire. When I was thinking that we needed to kick the live show into the next level, these two people seemed perfect and we were majorly lucky that they both said yes. Now what’s happened is that we’ve almost completed The Big Pink, I think; we’ve now found the band and we’re gonna write as a band – it’s gonna be a four-piece creative situation, rather than me and Milo writing. As for the live show though, when we were doing the first record, you always have real trouble when you’re using electronic elements and live drums, putting it all together; you get confined to almost stop / start situations when you’re running samples and things, so what I really want to do is what we’re doing now, which is so much more exciting because we’ve become a kind of organic electronic band, so if you want to move a section, or speed a section up, you can do that live and react to the crowd live – almost like DJ the song live. We’ll click stuff to Vicky on drums and she’ll know we want to speed stuff up; we’re acting like we’re a four-piece acoustic band, but we’re doing it with samples. It just makes it far more exciting; it’s an amazing feeling.

Emma Garwood

The Big Pink are playing as part of the Playfest line-up on Saturday 2nd June of the festival weekend. For tickets go to www.playfest.co.uk. Read the uncut version of this interview at Outlineonline.co.uk