Brett Anderson: vocals, lyrics, some percussions, some sleeve design

Brett Anderson: vocals, lyrics, some percussions, some sleeve design

Bernard Butler: guitars, some keyboards,arrangements, music, producer

Bernard: It takes my control freak reputation to its limits, really, and I explain

Steve Lamacq: I supposed you would produce the session as well

Bernard: as long as I get paid. Definitely engineering credits

Steve: Now listen. I heard you talking to Paul earlier on…but how odd is it to have to talk about your music again. Because you had time off.

Brett: It is almost impossible to talk about music… It’s like… Most music journalism is about gossip and about the story and that sort of thing, when it comes to talk about music it’s one of those ridiculous situations.

Bernard: hmm.

Steve: I mean, is it weird, almost weird that in some instances people are just waiting for the moment when one of you will roll up an old copy of the New Musical Express and bash the other’s head with it.

Bernard: When that moment happens, it will be scripted. So it will be a good moment. No, I mean, people forget that… was it in April… when we first… fifteen months we have been doing this. So it’s not like… we have been so far down the line with this band already.

Steve: How much has it sunk in, now that you are back together again? That you are seen as one of the best… best known songwriting duo for the past twelve years? Has that sunk in.

Brett: We constantly walk around together talking to each other as Anderson and Butler (!)

Steve: (!)

Brett: It doesn’t work like that. Anyone who has erm.. that ridiculous sort of… like vision of themselves as being great is like… The way we work is sort of like we are doing now… one of the big issue that we got of course is the whole suede shadow over us. But we are not interested in talking about it everywhere. The whole point of The Tears is what we write and produce in 2005, it’s not about what we did in 1994.

Steve: I don’t mean it exactly in a retro way. That’s why I am interested in this project. It’s the fact that your legacy lends itself to this reunion. For the people it’s what you have done and what you can do.

Brett: Definitely, yeah, I think it’s very important for us not to let them down as well. One of the things we have said to each other is that we are not going to release a note unless we love what we are doing. We didn’t want it to be a tired old kinda thing.

Steve: How much have you changed, you think, since during the period you weren’t working together? What’s interesting to me I think is when I meet people I used to go to college with, they are essentially the same people as they were 15 years ago, but all their experiences have been different, so they are now different people, did you have to get to know each other again?

Bernard: It’s the same old rubbish all the time… we are the same old lunatics.

Steve: You got cats now and things now, and you have probably…

Brett: Bernard has a family now, so that’s very different. I dunno. I think we are essentially the same people.

Steve Lamacq: Do you think so.

Brett: Yeah, I do actually, yeah I do. It didn’t seem when we first met after nine years away it didn’t seem weird, or it didn’t seem like me and someone I didn’t know. It’s just like Ah, get on with it. It’s like… just ordinary, really.

Steve: Did you ask things you were curious about?

Brett: We had a sort of drunken night when we talked rubbish to each other for a few hours but I can’t remember anything we said really.

Bernard: I remember getting you into a taxi.

Brett: Yeah,

Steve: Did you have to pay for it as well?

Bernard: Bristol quick! Don’t ask (all of them are talking at the same time and having a laff)

Steve: …We are going to talk about the album after the news, we are going to play a track now that you want to play. Lots of things to talk about, but you tell what track I will now play?

Bernard: Who, us?… Errr..

Steve: I was going to pick one for you

Bernard: You pick one.

Steve: No, No!

Brett: Come on, you pick one. We are just the people who talk rubbish.

Steve: What if I chose The Ghost of You?

Bernard: ooh!

Brett: Ok.

Steve: it was well worth getting to the end of this track. We are live. One extract from the new album by The Tears to give you an idea what kind of lines you will find on this album. We will hear more about the Tears after the news, but that was Ghost of You.

Steve: Is it a case of sitting down, How do you get a lyrical theme? Because that seems to be to me at least the inspiration of the first seven tracks.

Brett: a lot of songs that I write seem to be like.. romantic love stories, you know, one of my favourites is a book called Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, and there is a thing in that, where two lovers call “The nation of two”, a whole thread in my lyrical content is inspired by that. But I think there is a lot of other things on the album that are much darker, like The Asylum and Ghost of You and things like that. The album is two half, light and shade. The second half drags you into this sort of, you know, into the depth of something that is quite dark, really.

Steve: It does feel like it’s dark. How do you arrange the album.

Brett: I think we have always kinda written in a duality. Light and shade thing, you know. That’s the way we write really. We are not like, there is one star like that, so we have swings between two things, you know, we can write sorta up things which always up on singles, and there is a lot of my favourites which are the dark moodier pieces.

Steve: Did you surprise each other with things you came up with during the process… We had this conversation before. There is this track called The Lovers which is one my favourites this duo have done, it’s got most of (?) Guitar on it which is absolutely miaow.

Brett: It did surprise me, Bernard has a bit of an obsession with flamenco, during the write of this record and he gave me things that sounda like, I dunno, Spanish

Bernard: And this is before I have been to Spain (!)

Brett: There are castanets on the song.

Bernard: I always got a vision how music is from countries and then I got there and I realise it’s not like that. Like Russian, definitely there is this Spanish thing. And before it was Italy. What you are talking about is not the Spanish thing, it’s the Italian thing. What was that for? (tap tap) Co-Star? No… no…

Brett: That’s eastern european

Bernard: Oh yes…

Brett: Because you wanted to sound like a cornet didn’t you?

Bernard: Imperfection was the one! Imperfection. It got this ta-errrghumm which suggest… I always liked the idea of dances, I can’t dance. I don’t want to dance. I don’t even like watching people dance. But I like the idea.

Brett: Basically the whole album is like a tour of … or a trip round Europe.

Steve: Does it sound like the whole Eurovision song contest?

Bernard: Exactly (!)

Brett: Yeah (!)

Bernard: Or close to cliches of Europe. Because obviously all italians are gunmen selling ice cream. Spanish people constantly have castanets in their pockets, at all times.

Steve: Let’s talk about the sound on that album…. But the drums on this record are astonishing. It’s like the psychadellic furs. At the right start of the record which you get on refugees and all through the album.. Warehouse size sounding drums.

Bernard: I never get that big thing reference so much on my records. Most of this record was made in the bedroom on top of my house. Not the drums obviously. But the drums were not done in a big room or anything like that. But the drummer is Mako, and I have worked with Mako for ten years and he’s just an incredible drummer.

Steve: And this is a question from Suzan in Leeds: How did you get together with the rest of the band? Did you find them in a pub?

Bernard: Pretty much, yeah! Most of them live around. We tried to get rid of Mako like we have been doing this for years and it didn’t work so we have Mako again. He is an incredible musician. And Nathan is the bass player, yeah, and Will is the keyboard player – yeah, just people I know, they all live in my street and we meet in the pub and chat about music and whatever, and in the end, I need like a bass player so obviously you will be doing it, because how will I be able to get to the pub again (!), Is there a bass player?

Steve: Here is someone from Hong Kong and fifty other people who emailed asking are there any plans to tour outside of Europe with The Tears.

Brett: I mean, this is what we were talking about. People don’t really understand that we don’t sit and think, oh yeah, we would like to go to Hong Kong with this record, and then we want to go to Chile, and then we want to go… It’s just not like that, we don’t go, oh yeah, we should go, and there we go. You don’t go to places because you fancy seeing the local tourist sites, no you go there, you go there because there is a reason. Having said that, I always loved going to Hong Kong and if there is a chance, I would love to go back there, and it’s great, it’s probably one of my favourite part of the world.

Steve: (to audience) So you know what to do. You form a gang and find a promoter. How much is a cheap flight to Hong Kong, we find that out later. James Brown, I assume it’s not the godfather of soul, from worcestershire, is asking: how did you feel stepping on the stage at the Zodiac the first time?

Bernard: It didn’t feel like the first time we played together. But it was a sold out gig and we had never played a gig before. People forget that. It’s a band, and we had never done a gig. We were just turning up and it was embarrassing really. Just see our fans, people standing there with their arms folded like “Off you go then!”. Incredible. Everyone is rubbish the first eighteen months at least, you know, of being in a band, we got a couple of gigs and a few seconds at Heaven it was an almighty disaster.

Brett: Every single newspaper in the world came down to our second gig. And even though we are experienced, it’s still like what Bernard says, it’s a new band and every single gig, I saw an improvement, we’ve played six gigs in total.

Steve: Are you very harsh on yourselves?

Brett: I think we got a lot to live up to. And we don’t want to let people down. We are not doing this, it’s not like a hobby, sort of thing, you know what I mean. We are very serious about it.

Steve: So your standards are possibly even higher?

Bernard: I think so. We always had high standard because that is what turns you on.

Steve: But this time, if you are going to do this and make it work…

Brett: The thing is about The Tears is that it’s much more… Suede became like a big corporate machine, we approached this with a different kind of view. We are trying to do this because we want to do it, rather than we have to. So we are not trying to compete, like we are getting to a level, and we got to get to a higher level, it’s not like that.

Steve: I think it’s more creatively.

Brett: Yeah, we are trying to approach it in a pure.. as pure as you can possibly be in the pop music world. We are trying to approach it with the right point of view.

Steve: Listen…

Brett: Yes we could talk rubbish all day! Ruining our career already!

Steve: I need a very short answer on this one. Windowlatch in London is asking this: “Now that you two have reunited, what are the songwriters/band partnerships you would like to see back together again, (no dead people)?

Brett: Peters and Lee?

Bernard: Jimmy Webb and Glenn Campbell, obviously

Steve: Excellent answer. And from the line of Co-Star, “When we are together the world smiles” which is the most optimistic thing I have listen to all morning.

Bernard: Ahh!

Steve: If that says anything about the way you are

Bernard: It’s starting raining now… Look outside. Put the sunroof down.

Steve: We could babble on all day. We haven’t got the time!”

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04