 |
| Photograph from insideout.topshop.com |
Can you give me a brief history of the band?
Joe: We all met at Leeds University. I just started playing songs to Gwil, recorded it, set up a myspace and we thought that was it. But we realised we really liked playing with one another and eight months into that we started hooking up with Thom and Gus, and playing in our bedrooms.
Gus: And did that for a couple of years.
Joe: In the early stages we all were just keen to see what would happen with just us playing in a room, but then we started thinking we could play to people and see what they think. The first gig we did was in our house and no one really had any idea of what to expect from us and we impressed people. People said some really nice things and that gave us motivation to keep on going.
Alt-J is quite an unusual name, where is it from?
Gus: It's a keyboard command.
Joe: When you press Alt and J you get a delta symbol, but we didn't realise it was only something you could do with Macs, we thought it was PC users as well. We didn't realise we were pro Mac people. But yeah, it's just that. The short-cut to the symbol and the symbol is our name.
Gus: Delta means change in maths and it was a change in name. We were called Films before but there was another band called The Films. I think people read too much into the whole triangle thing though. It's just a name.
People have referred to you as folk or indie but it seems a bit more complicated than that. What would you define yourselves as?
Gus: We don't really like genres.
Joe: I think we just know what we like and do what we do and let other people figure it out, let the audience make the decision.
Gus: We didn't go let’s start an indie band, or let's start a folk band or let’s start a weird band, we just did the band. Any band whose sound you can describe too easily is not very good. You shouldn't be able to pin somebody down, just like that. Some artists you think “oh, it's just blues” but is it just blues? Or is it folk or country?
So how do you go about making music?
Joe: It changes, it depends on the song. Sometimes it’s a chord on a guitar that influences a melody or lyrics, or sometimes it a passage from a book, or a word, or a sentence. Sometime it's something someone says, and you write it down, thinking it's really nice. There's a song and there's a phrase “I'm going to bed into you like a cat beds into a bean bag” and that was something Thom was talking about - talking about a spider bedding into your brain. I thought it was a really nice, odd and fucking weird, but nice so I wrote it down.
What would you say your main influences were?
Joe: Well the people around me. Books and films and art, I suppose. You're not aware of your influences that much because you're bombarded with so many things that you absorb, it's hard to pinpoint them really.
Gus: I think that it’s influential to look at what some bands are doing. I mean to look at Wild Beasts for example, they have three albums and that's great. Each album just seems to gain more and more momentum and do bigger and bigger things for them. There not like a massive band, they're not playing Wembley six nights, but the furrow that they're ploughing is great and they're making music that they want to make.
Tell me about your new album.
Joe: It's coming out on 28th May and it's called 'An Awesome Wave'. We really enjoyed recording it, and I think that if people have enjoyed what they've heard so far they're going to really like the album. Hopefully.
Gus: I think it should be a pretty rich listening experience, hopefully. It hangs together well, it's not too eclectic that it doesn't work, but sometimes it's pretty varied.
Joe: We've thought about the structure and the overall narrative of how the album sounds. We're happy with it. I'm not saying we nailed it but we're happy with it. That's the main thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment