Noah And The Whale

0:03Alright Charlie, well thanks for doing this man, much appreciated. Pleasure. Where are you coming from? We just flew in from Melbourne yesterday actually. No way. How are you feeling? A bit confused but good. Confused? It's a cool festival though, I like the way it's set up. I guess you guys have been probably doing the festivals for a couple of years now. Yeah, it's incredible though, it looks amazing. We just did a sound check on stage and the way it's kind of set up, obviously you know, built for music fans. Yeah, you just wait until it gets in there and full and it looks incredible. I actually had a view last night, my hotel faces backwards onto this. Oh nice. So I could see that it looked really cool. We're talking about festivals a lot with the bands that are coming since we're here. And I hear there's a pretty big difference between UK festivals and North American festivals. Have you noticed that? Well the sun shines here which is good.

0:50Plus it's not raining all the time. UK festivals you've got to bring a hat, an umbrella. But no, I think there probably is. We've just done in the last week we've done a festival in Japan, Australia now here. And then we're doing a lot of pollues around Sunday. But it's true that every festival really has its own identity, you know, and that's good. I think that's important, that's how good festivals sustain themselves I think. What's the best one you've been to? What is your favorite festival experience? Well, so you know Edmonton obviously. Of course, yes of course. No one else here. There's another one, a particular favorite mine in the UK called Latitude Festival. It's a really nice festival. It's just kind of an all arts festival, it has great bands but then it also has like sort of comedy stages and film stages and you know sort of book readings and things.

1:40Nice, I heard you guys are speaking of film, Big West Anderson fans. Yeah, fans of his, yeah big film fans. What did he do a music video for you? Have you reached out? No, we've always just, it's funny, he gets talked about a lot of someone we admire. He's one of many names that I really like. Mm-hmm. So yeah. Do you see a comparison between the way you write songs and the way you write scripts? Not really, I mean I definitely find the sort of film influences our music though, a lot. You know, and we actually did for the last, not this record, the second record of ours. We made a film that ran the full length of the album, you know, so it was like essentially a music video that lasted 11 tracks. Oh wow. Yeah, and so that was really cool. We always like to take care of the sort of visual element of what we do. Nice, how, speaking of visual element, what's the stage setup like then?

2:27Stage setup tonight is just to have the wait and see. Fair enough, not going to give up anything, all right, that's cool. So you got two stages, you have a talking about my generation stage, that's actually our stage at six o'clock and then you're hitting the main stage a little after 11 tonight. What's the six o'clock stage for? Do you know what it's about? Yeah, well, as far as I know this isn't secret, it's just like a jam I think. It's like with Taj Mahal and Lissy I think. Yeah. And I don't really know too much about it, as I think it's just sort of turn up and figure something out. Sounds very good. Yeah, no one seems to know what's going on, everyone's going to be on stage and what we do. I'm glad nobody else knows what's going on, it makes me feel good. We do a little thing else called Storytellers where we just get you to talk about a tune. Would you mind talking about Life Goes On writing that one? Sure, yeah. That song was like a turning point in the writing of this album.

3:17I think on this album I kind of found the lyrical thread on a song called Tonight's A Kind of Night and found that I wanted to do sort of narratives and storytelling and characters. And then Life Goes On is kind of sonically where we found the sound of the album. I remember we demoed about four or five songs and then I went into the studio and recorded it. And it sounded the demo sounded pretty much how it ended up. And I just kind of felt like that was how the record I wanted to make I guess. It has a very, don't come around here no more drum sound with the reverb and the very 80s drum sound. Where did that come from? Do you know what, we were doing the demos, we were in this sort of converted synagogue in Bethville Green in London. It's basically a huge room, you know, like the size of a church or whatever. And I was actually, I'd hung two microphones off the ceiling.

4:08And I just played the pattern on the drums in there, you know. You play drums too. Yeah, well not very badly. And it's just that we kept that sound on the record because we liked it so much, the big sort of roomy vibe. Cool. Five quick questions, one more answers. Okay. You ready? Road or studio? Studio. Lening or McCartney? Lening. Song you've written your most proud of. Tonight's Kind of Night. Cool. What's the most important to song, lyrics, melody or rhythm? All of them. Choose one. I do know I'm a sucker for melody. They're all important but I can't beat a good melody. Cool. And in one word, no on the whale. No. No. It sounds. No, all the whale. It's good. I like it. Thank you man. Much a pleasure.

4:53Yeah, absolutely.