Music > Interviews

Interview with Alt-J

08/10/12

When Prince changed his name to, well, that symbol, we weren’t ready to make the step. It didn’t fit in and was impossible to announce on Top of the Pops. That was a different era, it was almost twenty years ago - Top of the Pops is no more. We’ve since opened our minds to cross genre pollination, self-discovery of bands by circumnavigating the presses, and perhaps most essentially, thanks to the internet, we don’t even need to pronounce the name ∆. But if you’re new to them, you can call them Alt-J. 

Hello, who am I speaking to?Gus.

Hey, Gus. So it’s a bit of a British tradition that I ask what the time is over there (Gus is speaking from America somewhere) and what the weather’s like?It’s 10am, and I haven’t been outside yet today so I’m not sure what it’s like, but it’s probably quite crisp and bright, as it was like that yesterday.

I guess we have to start not quite at the start, and talk about your name change. You had a bit of success under the name Films a few years ago, but had to change that because of copyright issues, why Alt-J?Erm, it was just something that we could all agree on, it wasn’t really a name that resonated with us in any deep way, it was just something Gwil (guitar/bass) came up with that sounded quite cool, and we really needed a new name by that point, so we thought “Well this sounds good, let’s go for that.”

One thing I wanted to know is whether you wrote the lyric “Triangles are my favourite shape” before or after you settled on Alt-J?That was before, which is why we thought it could be a slightly more appropriate name, but you know, people like to link that up and we just don’t really think about it.

Your older recordings, which you can still find online if you look hard enough, are a bit darker than their current forms. Did you intentionally change your style?I wouldn’t have said we intentionally did no, but it could be partly due to the fact that we worked with a producer on the album, who obviously had a really good ear from crafting a good song. I know what you mean that we used to be a bit darker, I think we used to write songs exactly how we figured them out and didn’t think too much about hooks or anything like that. When you come to record an album the songs get tightened up, you realise you can’t have a random one-minute long instrumental breakdown in the middle of a song.

You’ve been applauded for having a great breadth of genres on the record, as well as an impressive number of art references. The lyric in Intro “This is an ode to the canon” springs to mind. Is that what this album is; a dedication to everything that has come before, and all of your favourite things in the art world?Yeah exactly, we’re very big believers in the fact that if you like something that someone has done, you should take it and reference it. It’s very hard to be really original, so it’s ok as long as you acknowledge that. You always end up taking other people’s ideas anyway, you just have to reference where you’ve taken them from then that’s ok; that’s our philosophy I think.

Matilda is one of the first songs I’ve heard to directly quote and reference another song (the lyric is “Just as Johnny Flynn said ‘the breath I’ve taken and the one I must to go on’”) and it’s an inspired way to get around plagiarism lawsuits![laughs] Yeah, exactly.

The album has so many levels; it can be equally enjoyed as a collection of straight-up pop songs, or analysed a great deal more closely. Where does the inspiration come for such intricate song-writing?I think we all watch a lot of films and read a lot of books and we’re not afraid to see anything as potential material for a song. If you don’t have any boundaries for what you can write songs about then it becomes very easy to find inspiration almost anywhere. It’s about remembering bits of writing that you like, phrases that you like, whether they are things that come into your head or things you read, writing them down and moulding it all into shape. I think people are always quite shocked by what we write songs about, not outraged, but just kind of baffled that we write songs about stuff other than, like, girls! [laughs] To us it’s just normal, anything that affects you, or makes a lasting impression on you, that could be a piece of art; write a song about it if it moves you, and often it ends up being quite successful. But that said, we do write songs about girls as well [laughs].

As any good band should! There’s a lot of metaphorical work on the album, does a song always start as such a complex creation, or do you kind of stumble upon ideas that work?It’s hard to say really, Joe (vocals/guitar) writes most of the lyrics, so it’s kind of hard for me to answer, but having observed him writing songs for a few years now I think he keeps a notebook with all sort of things written down in it, and he’ll have an idea for a song and then collage other ideas he’s had together. He’ll kind of stitch together this tapestry of metaphors and phrases that sounds coherent when it’s finished, but it’s quite interesting that those lines could have been a completely different song that we didn’t end up writing. It doesn’t just flow out in one cohesive narrative, definitely not.

So you say Joe write all the lyrics, are the instrumentals more of a collective process?Joe writes the basis of the songs, yeah. He writes the lyrics and the melody, then he takes it to the group and we all write our own parts and work collaboratively on restructuring the song and forming it into a finished piece. Then take it to our producer who will tweak it and have ideas of his own. So yeah, a song kind of goes through several phases before it’s done.

You’ve got some cool tones on the record, are they all analogue? I’m thinking in particular about the hook in Taro, do you play that on keys?It’s not actually keys no, that particular sound is guitar and violin; it’s a plucked violin and Gwil is doing a kind of hammer-on on his guitar. It makes it sound really weird, and nobody can tell what it is, and then when they see us live they’re like “Oooooh”.

On your Soundcloud you give a little synopsis about each song at the start, and some people have said that they’d rather be left to give the song their own interpretation. Did you write those because you wanted to keep the songs very specific?Basically that thing came out of being asked to do a track-by-track for a magazine, and it ended up getting put on the Soundcloud; I’m not quite sure why. I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t explain what a song is about and should leave it to other people’s interpretations. That’s probably because of my background; I studied English Literature and I read Roland Barthes’s essay ‘The Death Of The Author’ in my first year, which made me think that the author’s intentions in a piece of writing don’t matter in the slightest and that once a piece has been written down it exists independent of the author, the time, or anything. Having said that, I think maybe it is nice to give a short paragraph which provides a little insight. We don’t say “This is what the song’s about, full stop”, it’s more of a little margin note rather than a heavy handed essay. I guess I’m in two minds really, but I think I kind of agree with those people who would rather interpret it themselves; I think that’s kind of preferable.

Every year there’s always a band that plays a little way down the bill, but manages to draw a huge crowd around the festival circuit, and I think you’ve been that band this year. How has that felt, was it unexpected success, a meteoric rise to use the hackneyed phrase?Yeah, I suppose we only really “turned pro”, to use another odd expression, last autumn when we got signed. Before that we’d just finished studying, so it has been quite quick and the response at the festivals was amazing. It felt kind of cool that we were playing these quite small places and then loads of people would come, it was pretty funny in a way.

Have you noticed a marked increase in the Alt-J fan base then?Yeah definitely, particularly in the UK. It’s kind of crazy that we’ve sold out two nights at Shepherd’s Bush in January; that’s mental. But then the man on the street still hasn’t heard of Alt-J, so it’s kind of weird. And our album is nominated for the Mercury, but almost every daily newspaper has declined to even review it. The Guardian, the Times, none of them have even reviewed the album. Not that I’m bitter [laughs] I’m really not, because things are going so well for us, how could I be bitter? It’s just quite amusing because we do feel like an unknown quantity to a lot of people, especially journalists and stuff. People don’t quite know what to make of us; we’re seen as sort of upstarts, and people think “Where the hell did they come from?”, “Who are Alt-j?”, “They seem like such a leftfield band, they shouldn’t be on the Radio 1 playlist!”, “Their album shouldn’t be charting in the Top Twenty!”

So that’s in the UK, how is it over in the States, I fear the word “hipster” probably gets thrown around a lot?[laughs] It hasn’t too much, but it does now and then. It’s been really good though, we’ve been playing small shows, like 250-500 capacity, and they’ve all been sold out, which is amazing. Some people are excited because they know we’re bigger in the UK than we are in the US, so they’re glad to see us in small venues. People are really confident that we’ll do well in America, but we’re not thinking about that too much. I don’t even know if success in American even really exists for British bands apart from, like, The Beatles.

I’m also pretty excited because The Waterfront in Norwich is a pretty small venue; I guess I should count myself lucky too. Have you got any expectations for Norwich/this UK tour?I think it’s going to really open our eyes to the fact that we have a genuine fan base in the UK. So far, when we play a gig we’re generally able to go outside and smoke afterwards and there’ll be people who come up to us and say “Good show”, or “I love your band”, but it’s never too crazy. In America now we’re sort of able to do that too, although we still get a bit overwhelmed that people want to have photos taken with and stuff, but I think on this UK tour we’re going to have to stay backstage; particularly in London and Manchester and the bigger cities, it’s just going to be too much. I think at some point you do have to act like a, quote-unquote, “rock star”, because it’s what people kind of want from you. If you watch your favourite band play a great gig, then go outside afterwards and they’re just there having a fag, it’s almost a bit disappointing [laughs] do you know what I mean? Growing up I used to be a complete adoring fan, and I actually went to quite a few gigs in Norwich. I remember queuing up outside the UEA, and we could see Kings of Leon in their dressing room, and everyone looked up and pointed; they just drew the curtains, and it was great [laughs] I was so glad, because obviously I wanted to meet them, but at the same time if I had of met them, I’d have probably realised they are just people, whereas in that moment they remained idols. I think we’re going to have an element of that, because if we act like we normally do, and put on our coats and have a ciggie outside the venue, it’s going to be disappointing for people I think. You have to act a bit more like how they want you to, or how they expect you to, you know?

I do know what you mean, and meeting your idols does kind of shatter the illusion, but I still think people would appreciate being able to come up and have a chat! You’ve been doing more expansive things with your live show recently, incorporating a choir into a few of your festival slots for one, are you planning on continuing in that fashion for your headline gigs?It’s hard to say really because it’s so expensive doing that kind of thing. We might be doing some things like that, but it’s more likely to be next year’s tour than this year’s one, because that’s getting pretty close now. But regardless we’ll be trying to make it as great an experience for people as possible; we’ve got a really great band supporting us, so it should be a good night, choir or not.

It is easy playing live, all of your songs are quite complex, I imagine you all have to concentrate a lot?Exactly, yeah, we really do have to concentrate a lot! There are no backing tracks or samplers or anything like that, we’re all doing everything live, and it means in some songs I literally need to be in three places at once; doing one thing on the glockenspiel, one thing on the keyboard, and trying to sing something at the same time.

The artwork on your album is really interesting; the liner notes credit the European Space Agency for use of the picture, what is the picture of?It’s a satellite image of the Ganges delta, so kind of a visual pun on ‘delta’ (Note: for those that don’t know, the little ‘Alt-J’ triangle stands for Delta – the fourth letter in the Greek Alphabet - at this stage my mind is utterly blown, and I say “Oh God, it all makes so much sense”, which is embarrassingly ineloquent) Yeah, well we’re all extremely clever [laughs] (I make up for my previous embarrassment here by retorting with the jovial, yet quick witted, “and modest too!”) [laughs all round] So anyway, we’d found this awesome picture, and really wanted to use it for our artwork, so our label got in touch with the ESA, and we didn’t even have to pay them, they were just like, “Yeah feel free to use it”, which was really nice of them. I really like that cover.

Your music videos are also incredibly creative, both Tessellate and Breezeblocks look like incredibly professionally shot videos, where did you get the funds/ideas?They do don’t they! Obviously they are both done by professionals, but they weren’t expensive videos by any means. It’s all about finding people who are really passionate about making good music videos and who are willing to make it work. We’re only on a small label, so we were lucky to find people with great vision who were pretty much happy to work to the minimum cost; barely paying themselves and just using the money for hiring cameras and things. I mean, we’re not exploitative! [laughs] But it’s just nice to work with people who have a passion for it who will have a good time with us and charge us five grand for a video, not people who would charge us fifty grand and make themselves a nice twenty grand profit from that. And they’ve all been ideas from the directors, for Breezeblocks we used this website called Radar Music… [bit of a pause]… I’ve got another call coming through, I have another interview to do I’m really sorry, is there anything else you wanted to ask?

Erm, well I was going to make a comparison between yourselves and Radiohead, and play on the whole Cambridge versus Oxford thing, which was going to be awesome, but I can drop that [laughs] So yeah, I think that’s pretty much it! Thank you so much for your time, it really was a pleasure, I’ll come say hi after the Norwich show, I’ll probably find you out back having a cigarette or something! [laughs all round again]

Alex Throssell

Alt-J play at The Waterfront on October 30th. Their Mercury-nominated debut album An Awesome Wave is available from all good record shops, apart from Soundclash because I bought the last copy. Read the full transcript of this interview at www.outlineonline.co.uk.