Music > Interviews
Interview with Peace
13/02/13
It’s been the biggest teaser campaign for any emerging band, ever. People have been adorning surfaces, edges of notebooks and themselves with the Peace sign since before the band was even born. Now that’s a marketing strategy. Alright, it’s not true, but it is a fact that Peace, the band, have attached themselves to the notion of civil calm and free love – not a bad manifesto, and one more Transatlantic sounding than their origins of industrial Birmingham. The same can be said of their music, a kind of sun-tinged grunge pop – music for nineties kids. What’s unmistakably British about them is their humour though, as we became aware of in our pre-NME Tour chat.
Morning Harry, how are you doing? I’m good, I’m good, feeling alright.
I’m looking out over a snowy wonderland this morning – what about you? Really? I don’t know; I haven’t looked out of the window yet. It’s not snowy, there’s no snow. It’s a little big grey, a little bit blue. It’s pretty, but no snow – what a shame.
I think it’s localised actually – we’ve got a good five inches. No way! Jealous. That’s nice though – a nice little Norwich snow scene.
You came to Norwich last month though, didn’t you, as part of your big headline tour? Was my hometown on good form? It was, it was great; one of the better shows of the tour. Top ten! Maybe even top five.
Really? You’re not even just saying that? No, I’m not, ‘cause everybody, like, jumped on stage at the end – I remember that.
The Norwich Arts Centre is a great venue because of its intimate size, but it’s on to bigger things next month – you’re returning as part of the NME Tour, as everybody knows – - Yeah, opening the NME Awards Tour.
There’s a great tradition in Norwich of the NME Tour bands playing inter-band football when they come to the UEA. White Lies did it, The Cribs – Glasvegas even said they’d break the legs of anyone they played – - Lads! Woah.
Will you be partaking? Yeah, if that’s happening, I’m sure we’ll give it a go. I think Doug thinks he’s really good at football, but actually he’s not. But he thinks he is, so I’m sure he’ll be really, really up for that.
Miles Kane’s gonna be at a bit of a disadvantage, isn’t he? Yeah, he’s just gonna be a loner, unless he gets some of his crew, or whatever, or maybe just find some amazing football locals to join in with him. Yeah, he should get to have a few of the local crop, some of the best. I’m sure he has a keen eye for a good sportsman; he’ll be able to pick out a good team.
Yeah, apart from making music, that’s his second concern at all times, you know – if I had to put together a fantasy team of Norwich locals, who would they be? Yeah, I bet he could manage the England football team, Miles.
So much is spoken of that coveted opening slot on the NME Awards Tour. And it’s true – we’ve seen so many NME shows where the opening band on the Tour have gone on to eclipse the rest and be the biggest band ever. Were you pretty stoked to be starting things off? Yeah, I mean, I didn’t realise the tradition of the first slot when we first got it, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really good’. I was thrilled, and then someone explained to me that it was quite a meaningful place to play and I was like, “sheeeet! That’s cool!” Like, woah, that’s nuts. So I don’t know, we’re all really psyched already.
You’ve been touring so much, with barely any time off – have you had much studio time? What’s the latest on the album? We’d basically got about a month in-between tours, in the studio. I can’t even remember when it was – that’s so bad! It could have been summer, it could have been winter – maybe it was between the two… autumn! We went to Lincolnshire and we went to Chapel Studios and recorded it all. We actually finished mastering it two days ago so I’ve got the real thing now. I’ve, erm, I’ve got the only existing CD copy –
- Keeping it under lock and key, I hope? Yeah, well I actually went to the pub with it in my pocket, but I had my hands on it at all times! I was like, ‘actually, wait! What if I lose this? I can’t lose this!’ so I was guarding it with my life. So yeah, it’s actually finished and it’ll be coming out at the end of March.
That’s not long at all – - I know, yeah; not very long at all.
You must be fizzing with excitement? Yeah, I actually am. I don’t know if the other guys have actually heard the finished thing yet. I’ve just got back from London today, but I’ll see them later and I’ll be like, ‘LISTEN!!’ But it sounds… it sounds great!
Jim Abbiss produced your ‘EP Delicious’ – did he have a hand in the album? Yeah, we kinda did it all, like ‘EP Delicious’ we did earlier on in the year with Jim, then we went back into the same kind of studio and the same style of working. ‘EP Delicious’ is kinda like, I don’t know, the first way quarter of the album in the way it feels. It’s like we almost went back in and started where we left off, recording more songs in the same way, with the same people, so it was really cool. It was basically like we toured, recorded the EP, toured again and then recorded the album in the same studio, so it felt like we were never away really, except for playing really. We just got straight back to work and did it in a few weeks.
A read a little about you working with him, and there was something to do with a rotating drum of hot wax – does that make more sense to you than me? Yeah, basically he had this old pedal from the sixties, which was this old rotating Wah pedal, so it’s a wah pedal with vibrato, and the vibrato comes from – it’s a giant thing and it has a spinning drum of hot wax inside, which makes it sound like vibrato, but it sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before, so I used it on everything. But it actually died…! When we were recording our opening track. It was like, what? It’s almost sixty years old now, and the opening track of our album, the first sound you hear is through that and it has a little guitar pick, like a chimey loop that sounds like a doorbell, which was the last thing ever recorded through that pedal, then it died at the end of the track, so we were just like, “Woah, RIP.”
What a way to go out – that’s a legacy, isn’t it? Yeah, it went out on a high. But it’s the most amazing pedal; it makes like a screeching noise, like a [makes harsh noise] when you’re in the room because it has like this drum of hot wax spinning in the middle of it, but the sound through the amplifier is amazing.
Wow, I’m gonna listen out for that. So, the first sound on the album – - Yeah, on the EP, on the guitar solo in ‘California’ there’s like a guitar whooshing sound done through there as well, and organs through the rotating wah as well.
I’m gonna play it and then sound like a really knowledgeable production buff, like, ‘Oh, can you hear the Morley rotating wah on that?!’ It’s on everything; I put it on as much stuff as I can.
I think my favourite song of yours to date is ‘Lil Echo’, which is the B-side to ‘Follow Baby’ – it’s darker than the rest, isn’t it? I wondered, does it show the expanse that we might be able to appreciate when the album comes out? Yeah, I think there’s some stuff as dark as that, maybe… I’m trying to think what’s on there! Erm, yeah, but I think that’s one of my favourite songs, ‘cause it’s one of the older songs, but yeah, the album’s definitely got some more stuff like that on it.
You were previously called November and the Criminal – I know you’ve left it behind, but what do you take forward? What do you take from that experience? Well I guess we were in college and our final line-up of November and the Criminal was the line-up that went on to form Peace, so I guess when the line-up fell together, that’s when we were happy with each other. Then when we finished college, it sort of ended and I don’t know, we sort of wanted to play together again. We’d sort of got used to each other as musicians and started playing live a bit and then when we started writing and made Peace after that, we knew each other, I guess, and knew we wanted to be in a band together.
It’s like the Avengers: Assemble… Yeah, that was it; we knew exactly how – we were a bit wiser, I guess.
I read a quote from you that said someone else had said of you that, “you have no respect for the notion of genre”, but that’s indicative of our generation I think. Pre-internet, say, when the only music you were exposed to was that of your friends, of your scene and the places you went, now it’s just coming at you from all directions. Genre seems redundant in this day and age – do you think people still get hung up on it? I think people still get hung up on it because anything that feels un-pigeon holed, people get a bit scared about and it’s unsettling, but I agree with you that it seems unimportant – nothing seems important any more really – but genre, I don’t think anyone really needs to worry about. I don’t think many people do, but yeah, I dunno… I’m kind of lost in my own point here! I think it’s like people like to give something a label, because it’s more comfortable then, and you can refer to it. Especially when people want to be negative about something, which I think people want to do, because they just want to be negative, and I think they just wanna say, ‘yeah, I hate…’ – insert genre, or like insert band. If you don’t have genre then it’s hard to dislike.
I think what I’m enjoying is that nowadays there doesn’t seem to be so much snobbery towards pop, or dance music, or R&B – - Yeah, there’s no shame in writing something that could have been like, a pop song 10 or 20 years ago. That now almost seems fresh. Pop music now seems to be like someone had a bank full of hook lines and songs aren’t written like songs anymore; they’re just a collection of catchy lines. They don’t really make much sense to me with the majority of pop I hear, with the exception of some newer stuff from the last year, I guess. But a lot of mainstream American pop music is written in a way that’s, I don’t know, so random it seems, so writing a good pop song sort of respects what good songwriting was, over the last sort of fifty years. Now it’s almost an alternative thing, which doesn’t make sense.
So Harry, I just want to ask you quickly about the ‘What the Fuck Birmingham’ billboard; you were having a bit of fun, obviously, when you asked for that from your newly signed label, but it just shows that bands play a fair game with record labels now. Is it indicative of how you assert yourself as a band, and call the shots? I think yeah, we wanted to make sure – well we were having fun – but we were testing them and it’s good to make sure, like, it really showed that they were serious and it showed that we were gonna do things our way, I guess, which they’ve never had a problem with, like, we’ve always done things the way we wanted to do it, down to artwork and all the online stuff. We’ve made sure that we’ve been at every meeting that we can be and like, everything basically comes from us. From day one, they knew that that’s how it was gonna be. We kind of demanded a few things, but it kinda worked in our favour and I think they really liked that we were like that. I don’t think bands do enough stuff like that I guess, or have enough fun.
Where the billboard was, did it get a good reaction? Where was it, and did you get messages off people saying they’d just seen your face? Did it get a good honking? Yeah, it was on Digbeth High Street, opposite a wall that we used to like, sit on I guess, so it was in a funny place, I guess. But it was great, everyone was like, ‘What the Fuck?’, like exactly! We just couldn’t believe a major record label had got involved. I remember like everyone we told that we’d signed to Colombia was like, ‘what? That’s so ridiculous!’ It just makes no sense!
Emma Garwood
Peace perform as part of the NME Awards Tour line-up at the UEA on February 15th, along with Django Django, Miles Kane and Palma Violets. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk. Read the uncut version of this interview at Outlineonline.co.uk