Elbow: TAS In Session

It took nearly two decades, but Manchester rockers Elbow have become one of the most critically praised, beloved bands in the UK. The group,  just picked to provide music for the BBC's coverage of the 2012 London Olympics, has three prestigious Mercury Prize nominations to their name, including one win in 2008 for The Seldom Seen Kid.

Elbow's backstory is undeniably uplifting.  Although they gradually built a strong, grassroots fanbase in Britain, the lads from Bury, Greater Manchester, bounced around to several record labels with disappointing results, watching contemporaries like Coldplay and Radiohead ascend to megastar status. Refusing to give up, the five friends persevered and their quiet, artful trajectory finally paid off when they not only won the Mercury Prize, but scores of other honors, from the 2009 Brit Award for Best British group to the Ivor Novello Award for songwriting.

Elbow, who just wrapped another European road trip, have also slated a March 2012 tour of Australia 

The quintet — singer/lyricist Guy Garvey, guitarist Mark Potter, bassist Pete Turner, keyboadist/producer Craig Potter and drummer Richard Jupp — recently visited WFUV and The Alternate Side for a very special session where they performed songs from 2011's build a rocket boys! and The Seldom Seen Kid and discussed their extraordinary, 20-year history as friends and bandmates. 

Kara Manning: [Elbow] has been around for twenty years. While many bands that have been around for that length of time are on the verge of collapse, this one is on an ascent. What has kept the five of you together?

Guy Garvey: It’s asked a lot. It’s a combination of lots and lots of things which is a similar situation to why we’ve succeeded, at least at home. It’s not down to one thing; it’s a combination of things. First of all, the personalities of everyone in the group: we’re all gentlemen. Second of all, a real verve and excitement about making music together. We still talk about what we’re going to do next, excitedly, all the time. We all like a drink. And we all find sleep deprivation, most of the time, quite funny. I think that’s an essential ingredient, because you end up being tired a lot of time when you’re in a touring band. So the fact that we find that amusing, I think, probably has kept us together longer than if it were otherwise?

Kara: You also didn’t have a record deal until ten years into your career. But Mark, I think you said that you always had a sense that the band would make it, even when things looked dire? That somehow something good was going to happen to Elbow?

Mark Potter: Yes, even in the first rehearsal which was in St. Ann’s Church Hall in Bury where we’re from, we were convinced that we were going to be massive within a year (laughs). Twenty years on, we’re slowly getting there.

Kara: Wwhen I was in the UK in July, I heard your single “Lippy Kids,” from build a rocket boys!, everywhere. But after the riots in August, the song seemed to have an added layer of poignancy. You’ve addressed that before, in other songs, the issue of where does youth put its anger?

Guy: It wasn’t lost on any of us, really. The actually feeling was, “You’re joking.” It was an opportunity to talk about the theme of the song again with a national spotlight on it. We headed the media off at the pass, I suppose, through Twitter. I put out a couple of statements about my feelings, more to do with feelings of the knee-jerk reaction that the government gave, like throwing people in jail for two years for having stole a pair of trainers. Then this awful right-wing backlash [asking] to take benefits [from] the families, throw the families out of their council homes because they’ve been involved in this looting. Which is so stupid. These are the most vulnerable people in society and they’re turning to crime and not afraid of prison because life is a prison already. So to lock them up and throw away the key, the strident politics in Britain at the moment, is all knee-jerk. All dividing, more and more, the right and the left. It was an opportunity for me to rant, the way that I’m doing now! Try to calm down before I sing the song, but it couldn’t have been more poignant timing, really, given that the song is about encouraging young people to find themselves.

I’m not very fond of the term “tolerance” — it comes up a lot in politics and it’s considered a liberal word. It suggests putting up with things to me. People need understanding more than they need tolerance. The song is about remembering that you were young once. How crazy is it to fear people for being something that you were a couple of years ago?

I was walking down the street where I live — and where I now own a home. I now have something to protect and worry about. Saw a bunch of kids sitting on the streetside smoking and immediately thought, “What are they up to?” Are they criminals? Then I thought, hang on a minute. That was you. That was a really important time. So that’s what triggered most of the things on the album.

Kara: You were Mercury Prize nominated for your debut album, Asleep in the Back, in 2001. Few bands can claim releasing five albums and having three of them nominated for the Mercury Prize and winning one, for 2008’s The Seldom Seen Kid. Which was the album, I imagine, that blew you up in a big way. When you began [The Seldom Seen Kid] you had no record deal. Was there a sense of agony about what the next step might be? Did that creatively fuel that album in some way?

Guy: We managed to keep the angst of the situation off the record which is something we’re all really proud of. It was a daily grind — and again, the correct ingredients of why we tick the way we do. It was an unprecedented two years of hard work on the part of our manager, Phil Chadwick, and our lawyer, Gavin Maude, as well. They were levering us off of one record label and onto another; it’s never been done before in quite that way. Every day was either a good bit of news or a bad bit of news. But the whole thing was hanging in the balance for two and a half years. That daily angst was so frustrating and Phil, bless him, had to ring all five of us every day or receive phone calls from us [and tell us] what was happening.  

So while we were making the record, we didn’t know if it was going to come out and who was going to put it out. But we just kept focused on the record. Who knows how it might have been different if we hadn’t had this interference, this worry in the background, this constant hum of, “Are we going to have to get proper jobs for the first time soon?” The money ran out. Phil is a good manager and we had enough in the bank to live as a band, but of course, the boys have children and it was suddenly so much more important to be realistic about finance. The coffer was empty when we were making the album and the lads had to feed the kids. It’s not like we can live off Mark’s hotpot, like we used to do when we were 18. Yes, it was terrifying, but we’re all really proud that none of those feelings made it onto The Seldom Seen Kid.

Kara: Walking into this album, build a rocket boys!,  it's the first time you were able to look ahead to making an album with a label.  And, I might be wrong about this, but there seems to be a marriage with this album and your first album, Asleep in the Back. As if you revisited the angry, young man aspect of [your debut] and brought it full circle.

Guy: It’s a lovely thought because that’s been said before. The idea that this record is rounding our work up so far is really exciting because it means a new direction for the next record. We were very influenced by trip-hop, DJ Shadow and loop or sample culture where it was in the 90s and it sounds like that again, yeah. The themes of [build a rocket boys!] are all about looking back, not to a specific time, but the age between 14 and 24. Working out who you are; that period of life. I did that in this company so it’s something that all the lads could relate to and musically we found ourselves going back there as well.

Kara: You all grew up together yes? Your sound engineer was telling me of a photo of you, Pete and Jupp, in strollers together.

Pete Turner: Yes, Jupp lived just a few doors down from me and our parents knew each other so we’d occasionally be next to each other in little buggies. Just checking each other, figuring out if we liked each other or not as a 6-month old baby.

Kara: And the Potters lived around the corner right?

Craig: Yeah, we all went to the same primary. I was a couple years below so I didn’t hang out with them, but we saw each other around.

Kara: And Guy, you were 16 or 17 [when you met them]?

Guy: Seventeen. Mark and I were at the same sixth form college, in the same art class. We didn’t like the looks of each other, did we, actually?

Mark: No, not at all! (laughs) We’d throw each other dirty looks across the room.

Kara: So what changed?

Guy: I realized he wasn’t a knobhead and he realized I wasn’t a fop.

Mark: I head Guy singing in the common room where we hung out between classes. For some reason, I was driving home in my blue Beetle, pulled over and picked him up. I can’t remember why. To give him a lift home. And R.E.M., funny enough, came on the radio. “Losing My Religion.” Guy started harmonizing.

Guy: Showing off.

Mark: And I said, I’ve got a band, do you fancy coming to rehearsal? We invited Craig along as well and here we are.

Guy: We spent ten years becoming any good. We were really quite naff when we started.

Kara: You started as Soft, right? You played a lot of funk.

Guy: Really bad funk. Terrible, working class, white Latin funk. (laughs). Just absolute s**t. I think what became the sound it is now was called “September Sometime.”  It was the first that we used production as a writing tool rather than just Mark and I writing something on a guitar and then “bandalizing” it, as we called it. So this was the first time that we put loops together. There were strings on that song too; it was quite ambitious for a bunch of 18 or 19-year-old kids to try. It was inspired by a heartbreak, so all the pieces were there. That was the beginning of the sound really. Other than rubbish funk.

Kara: Craig, you’ve been producing Elbow since the third album?

Craig Potter: Officially the last two. We’ve co-produced all of them from the beginning really, but it’s the last two that I felt the confidence to take it on. We’ve always recorded our own B-sides right from the beginning. I think I was more interested in that side of things. We actually intended to do Leaders of the Free World on our own, but we got a little stuck three-quarters of the way through and brought a couple of people in. But the last two, yes.

Kara: Where do you step in as a producer and begin shaping and crafting?

Craig: I think it’s just being able to imagine what we all want and physically being able to go into the recording studio and making it happen. Experience over the years to take it where everyone wants it to sound.

Kara: When you came together to make this album, you all retreated to the Isle of Mull. To make sure you were all on the same page?

Guy: That was the first thing: check that everyone wants to do the same thing. We all did. And then it was to ponder and chat. We try and keep germs of ideas coming while we’re on tour, but it’s very difficult writing on tour.  Despite all the down time you have, you’ve got something coming up constantly. It’s that feeling of knowing you don’t have to be anywhere for the rest of the day that allows you to empty your mind and use your imagination. You can’t really do it on the road. But we had some bits and bobs.

“Dear Friends” was the first thing, musically, that we had because most of it was recorded in a dressing room in Liverpool. We actually used that recording because we couldn’t capture the performance again of the guitar and drums. We got up to Mull and only came back with one finished song which was “Jesus Is A Rochdale Girl.” But we got the germ of the album, the feel of the record and the groundwork done while we were there.

Kara: I love the fact that you’re still friendly with the woman for whom “Jesus Is A Rochdale Girl” was written.

Guy: She’s ace. She’s beautiful. She married someone who looks like George Clooney and they’ve got a baby boy. She’s having a great life. Word got around, very flatteringly, and the Rochdale Observer put it on their front page. She heard about it and she phoned me up and was full of glee. She’d heard the song and said, “Oh! I remember all the details, that room, that bloody bed!” I was living in abject poverty. It was amazing that she wanted anything to do with me. I didn’t have a bean, the smell of my feet was terrible and this angel used to visit me, feed me and love me.

Kara: Is it true that you’re already working on the next album?

Guy: We’ve discussed what we would like to happen, yeah. It changes daily. It really does. The stripped-back nature of Build … we’d like to do something that’s not that this time. I think we’ve talked about utlizing Jupp’s skills a bit more and utilizing Mark’s skills a bit more. As “Jesus Is A Rochdale Girl” is so stripped back, there’s no vocal athletics either and it’s really an exercise in self-restraint. That was kind of the blueprint for the whole record. It was definitely the way Craig wanted to produce it as well, sound-wise. What keeps on coming up is doing the opposite this time. I don’t know if it will be the kitchen sink! I don’t think we’ll unnecessarily put sounds on the record, just to have loads of them, but we know it’s going to be different.

Kara: I watched your performance at Glastonbury and was so impressed with the way you can also write a crowd-pleasing anthem. What is the gift of not only being able to write a song that is intimate, but expansive?

Guy: It’s pleasing to exercise self-restraint and strip back things to their very basic elements. It’s almost like a purefication process and you feel very smug with yourself when you’ve done it that way. That’s the artist in us trying to distill what we do. Whereas when we write an anthem, we’re thinking about everybody else. It’s the exact opposite almost — let’s be generous. That word comes up a lot. Let’s be generous with the sounds, the arrangements. When it got to the sort of “Hey Jude” chord progression at the end of “One Day Like This,” I remember, Mark, Craig and I were in the room together and we looked at each other and we went, “We can’t do that!” And then we all started laughing and said, “Yeah, we can.” It’s gonna go down great, so let’s do it.

Kara: Well, you have the knack of writing tender songs and anthems, but also bluesy, sexy, dirty songs like “Grounds For Divorce” from your last album. You all listen to quite a bit of music, but was “Grounds For Divorce” influenced by that old, funk-loving, Sly and The Family Stone early years?

Guy: I didn’t see it that way. More than anything, it’s Mark, that riff. Mark was playing that riff for many, many years and it sort of evolved and evolved. There were four versions of the song by the time we finished it. The version that we’re going to play today is an entirely different one than the one on the album.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INs2XazC6lU]

Kara: Mark, you told me an interesting story of where that riff came from.

Mark: It’s a simple slide riff and when I was first learning how to play slide, it was one of the first things that I played. I thought, that sounded pretty good! Let’s see if we can do something with it.

Kara: The lyrics of song are so stupendous. Were they informed by the gritty, sexy quality of the music, or do you literally have phrases and lyrics that you tuck away and then drag out on a later date?

Guy: I think we got the groove down, the riff an all that stuff before I went anywhere near the thing. Basically it was all about being unhappy in Manchester. The number of love songs I’ve written to the city, lyrically, that are about Manchester and loving being there, that’s one that’s about being sick of the place. Wanting to get out of there. In actual fact, the line, “I’ve been working on a cocktail called grounds for divorce” — I wrote that [in the] Temple of Convenience, which is a little underground toilet-stroke-pub in Manchester where we all hang out. I forgot about it; I put the thing in my pocket and I must have washed it or something. My mate Tony, who is in a band called the Trophy Husbands in Manchester, [asked if I] ever used that "cocktail" lyric. And I was like, “What cocktail lyric?” And he reminded me of it. So we owe Tony Gilfellon that one.

Kara: What it is about Manchester that fuels all of you creatively? Most Americans think of it as the home of New Order or The Smiths, but there’s so much that’s gone on there [musicially] in the nineties and the past ten years.

Guy: Every September there’s new blood in the city. The university is massive. A lot of the local businesses rely on that. Every September, just as it hits autumn, you get these flushed, fresh faces, streaming down Oxford Road. Every Mancunian reserves the right to bitch about the students, but what they’re really saying is, “I live here and I have done all my life and I’m proud of it.” So the new blood comes in, it feeds the music, the scene and it keeps the city young as a music city. Everything Everything, for instance, none of them are from Manchester but they came to Manchester to form their band. So a lot of people do that. They come to study and they stay there to play music.

Kara: We touched on politics earlier, discussing “Lippy Kids." You’re all very outspoken, but do you feel it’s hard marrying politics and music without sounding didactic?

Guy: Yes, it’s really, really difficult and I reckon I’ve put pen to paper more in anger, about politics, than anything else, actually. Yeah, it winds me up. But having said that, it doesn’t always make for great songs. At the end of the day, the song is everything, followed closely by the album. I have a responsibility to the rest of the lads because they trust me to write the lyrics for their music. So, I can’t use it as a soap box for my personal rants. It’s got to be what’s the best thing I can write with the time I’ve been given [for a] piece of music. Which is why “Dear Friends” took so long, because we knew that we wanted the opening line to be “Dear friends,” as a sincere letter to all our mates.

Kara: I asked all of you earlier to think of a guest DJ pick at session’s end ... and?

Guy: One of our favorites, since back in the day when we were a funk band, even though we weren’t a very good one, was Sly and the Family Stone. So before we go onstage, every time, we listen to “Thank You For Talkin' To Me Africa” from There’s A Riot Goin' On. That’s quite a poignant album title for the British political climate at the moment.