Elbow
THE BENDS
Elbow Extend Their Sonic Reach on Their Third -- and Best -- Album
Though their debut, Asleep at the Back, was released in 2001, Manchester's Elbow have been making moody, atmospheric rock for over ten years. After two critically acclaimed albums working with producer Ben Hillier, the band took a different tack for Leaders of the Free World, recording on their own at their own studio, newly built in a cavernous warehouse. Joining the quintet during the album's creation was film collective the Soup Company, who both filmed the band for the disc's accompanying DVD and served as inspiration by projecting films on the studio walls during the recording. The result is Elbow's strongest album to date. Singer Guy Garvey, guitarist Mark Potter, and bassist Pete Turner sat down with Barnes & Noble.com's Bill Pearis to talk about the album's unique birth.
Barnes & Noble.com: Tell us a little about working with a film company and the album's general creative process.
Guy Garvey: Mark Thomas, who heads up the Soup Collective, has followed us around on tour for seven years and is a good friend of ours. I don't think we could have done it, had somebody watching us 24 hours a day, with someone we didn't know and trust. Most records these days, when the CD comes out, it has a bonus disc with it. We just thought that's a great platform for filmmakers to do something really interesting. Why throw something together last-minute after the record's made? Plus, we were messing with the idea of seeing if they would become symbiotic with us. Mark Potter: A lot of it was the space we found, an amazing room that was big enough for more than just making music. So we told Mark to bring anyone he wanted down while we were making the record. There were photographers doing stop-motion animation in corners of the room, and would throw these images up on a big screen on the wall. They were influencing us with the images while we were influencing them with the music.
B&N.com: A lot of the record sounds like it was almost played live.
GG: That was a conscious effort. The idea originally was to write and record the music wherever we were. A lot of these songs came about when we were on tour for the previous record. We wanted to bring these ideas from all these different places together, and the sound of the room became really important. While about three of them were played predominantly live, the ones that weren't sound like they are because we added the ambience of the room. There's a piece of software called Altiverb where you put a couple mikes in a room and it does a "sonic sweep." It measures everything and you can then take the room around with you in your computer so it sounds like you're still recording there. It's pretty incredible. On the songs that we didn't actually record it the room, we added the room later.
B&N.com: The music on "Mexican Standoff" has mariachi-band handclaps, as well as Sergio Leone Western themes. Did the music inspire the lyrics or vise-versa?
GG: The case with that one, our drummer [Richard] Jupp and I were jamming up in [the Scottish island] Mull. I was actually going for something Motown-ish on the guitar, which is why it's got that kind of clean, bell-y sound. We'd been listening to a lot of the groovier Motown stuff and I just said to Jupp, "Give us an interesting beat," and that's what came out. But when I listened back and started singing over it, I started singing a little more theatrically than I usually do, in a whimsical way. Out of nowhere we both started doing the handclaps, it's the rhythm from that song from West Side Story, "America."
B&N.com: This album seems more upbeat, musically, than anything you've ever done before.
GG: I think a lot of it was being at home. Mark and Craig [Potter] have both used this year to procreate, so having a whole year at home in Manchester after being away for such a long, long time.
Mark Potter: Everyone was just relaxed and happy. We looked forward to getting to the studio and working. You'd come in fresh because everyone was able to go home to their loved ones.
GG: I don't have as much experience with this as they do, but being away from somebody when you're on tour or in the studio, part of the worry is not being able to make it up to them. At the same time you're missing them yourself; it's a hard place to be. So knowing we were going to be home for a year, having this incredible space, having the blessing of the record label, getting the Soup Collective in, having it be beautiful weather -- all that energy went into the song "Station Approach." The sentiment is pretty much how we were feeling the first couple months.
Pete Turner: The past two albums, going in we've had a producer, who ends up being almost like a teacher figure. So just the five of us working on the music together, it was just a lot more of a relaxed atmosphere. When you see the space on the DVD you can understand why it was just good fun.
B&N.com: I hear your music a lot in TV shows and movies. You've been used twice at least on Nip/Tuck alone.
MP: My wife is from Boston and her cousin called me to say she'd heard "Any Day Now" [from Asleep at the Back] on that show. That song gets used quite a lot on television.
PT: They've started using "Forget Myself" on football programs in England as well, which is quite weird. I know the Doves get used a lot, like "Catch the Sun," which I can understand; "Forget Myself" doesn't quite work for me. As long as it's not used on soap operas or tobacco ads, I'm cool with it.
GG: The only time I didn't enjoy it was a BBC News promo that was basically saying how great they were as a news service, and they used "Blue" over some refugee footage -- that was the only time we ever objected. Dramatic music over real life events… the line is blurred enough between fact and fiction. Other than that, whoever wants it can have it.
B&N.com: Have you had songs in commercials?
GG: No, but we were asked to cover Destiny's Child's "Independent Woman" for BBC Radio One. They have this regular feature where you cover somebody else's song. We did quite a comic version of "Independent Woman," which was maybe a little too popular of a song. From that, we were offered a credit card commercial, doing the same thing but we turned it down. So they ended up hiring somebody to do a very Elbow-esque version of it anyway.
MP: We want Audi commercials, something like that. Free cars!
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