Athlete

0:04Alright, gentlemen from Athlete Joel, Kerry, welcome to the show. Thanks very much. My pleasure. We're backstage at the Independent in San Francisco. A long ways for home for you, long ways for home for us. Yeah. But a big show for you guys tonight. Yeah, yeah. Handful of tickets left and it's a pretty big room, which is fantastic. Yeah, man, it's nice. I mean, we always love playing in San Francisco. This is the first time we played at the Independent, though, isn't it? I think so, yeah. Yeah. What did you play last time? That's a very good question. No idea. That's alright. Really, really bad with like the names of venues. That's okay. It was a good show, though. It was unbelievable. That's all that matters. Yeah. So you boys are coming from where? Up, down south or north? We've just done Vancouver, Paul, and then here. Nice, and then where do you have to? What are the points for us tomorrow? Down south, so the rest of this tour, you know, we're just kind of doing the whole shoe.

0:52Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then after that, we're back home doing some festivals and stuff. Cool. And thinking about making a new record, I guess, at some point. I knew it was a singles collection coming up. There really is, yeah. Yeah, well, the best part of ten years of singles, so. Yeah. Shove them all on the CD and realise there's quite a lot. It's really, it was exciting about that, though, actually, is we've got this track that we recorded, like, first ever track that you were in. It's like Westside, which was on the first record, and this song, Backtrack, where our demos that we sent out to record companies that we got signed up for back on. And funnily enough, like the record at the parlophone that we signed to back in the day, they did a live backtrack.

1:39So it was like, they liked Westside, but they didn't want backtrack on the record. So it's just like, okay, so you're signing us just off one song, you know, whatever. But it turns out that backtrack is like, you listen back to it and you go, that should have been a single all along. So now it is just like, we're putting that out as a single, but haven't touched it, it's just as it was, like, 10 years ago. So what else can we be on the record? Obviously, all the hits. Some B-sides, rareties, that kind of stuff too, like, backtrack. Yeah, well, we kind of, part of the deal for doing it was we got to do a B-sides and rareties CD as well, so we went through our old B-sides and just picked all the ones we really liked and all the ones that are a little bit weird and just fun. What's that like listening to all the songs that you had scrapped at the time, be like, oh, this is shit or whatever, you know?

2:25And then listening back to it, well, maybe it wasn't so bad. Yeah, it's actually really nice. Yeah, listen, the most I'm going, actually, this is just a lot of fun. Most of them just didn't make records because they were generally a bit weird or just a bit crazy. We were how, right? Too many weird keyboard sounds and songs. At the end of the day you go for, you know, what are the best songs at that core. I think that's what, you know, you're always choosing. But yeah, I think on some of the B-sides, there's a few nice surprises, you know, maybe now if you went back and chose a record, you'd choose a few of those to go on a record. It's just where you're at at a particular point in time, I suppose, as to what you choose. There are other songs that come out live that never made a record that are going to be on this B-side that fans will know and stuff.

3:11There will be. We're going to do a little tour to support this record in the UK towards the end of the year. So we'll be picking a few songs we've never played before and trying to figure out how to make them work. But there haven't been any songs over the years that you've been playing live that will be on this collection that never made a record. Oh yeah, backtrack to one of them we used to play that live and that never made, in fact someone came up to us, we played a gig in Dubai recently and someone came up to Steve while drama was like, I saw you years ago and you did this song that went like, somebody did it, did it, but it wasn't on the record, where was it? Turns out it was this song, you remembered it from here and it once, ten years ago, and got the melody right. That's a catchy song. To catchy song. Oh, Jesus, there's no lyrics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not difficult. Dubai though, what was that like? It was good, but yeah, it's pretty random and the good thing about it was that we got

3:58to go quad biking in the gym. In the desert, that was the highlight. Yeah, the gig itself was kind of weird. All right, we'll leave it at that. This is a little different, this is a real tour that you guys are on, this is just the one off kind of thing. Is it like venue hotel, venue hotel or do you get to actually see cities? More like venue bus, venue bus. Oh yeah, we're sorry. That's how the bus opens. Yeah, it's been pretty fun on tour actually, it's one we kind of did it that way to try and cram as much into the time we've got. So yeah, it is, yeah, I mean, the drive from Denver to like Seattle is about 30 hours. But we've seen some weird places, Carne, Nebraska and Boise. Boise, yeah, cool. Yeah, and so we've kind of got to see a few weird places, but I mean, we've been to San Francisco a load of times and it's a great town.

4:45It's a music town. Yeah, it's a great town. Cool. I guess the song will get out of the way. We'll chat a little bit more in a few, but what are you going to play for? So I'll sing a whole lot at the moment and she's called the getaway. Cool. Yeah, get out of the way. I never really know who you are. You could be a ghost for all I know. Whenever you're picking up pieces of my heart, I leave the fool and an arm. And I'm not that everything.

8:38Tell everyone about writing and coming up with that one. I mean, it kind of, it came out around the time, the last time we were touring over here in the States and we actually did that tour acoustically. And it was weird doing an arena tour we were supporting another band. Just two of you. Just no, it was me and Tim. I'll give you a tour. And it was weird doing, but it was kind of also really telling because when a song's that's stripped out, they really have to hold people's attention. There's nothing else that's kind of, there's no big beat or anything to suddenly get people engaged straight away or anything.

9:25And this song, in its really early stages, I was kind of still writing it. But Tim and Kerry just said, oh man, you should play that tonight. And this one particular place, just give it a go. So I played it and it went down the best out of all the songs. It was just, everybody towards the end of the song was singing along.