This is an interview I did way back in 2009 with Emily Haines of Metric
When we all met we just had this idea of “let’s fuck things up”, in a friendly way. A friendly 'Fuck You'.
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Last Edited by: Jack Stovin December 17th, 2009.
We met up with Emily Haines of Metric backstage at the Edinburgh Picture House. It's 6.30pm. Metric have just finished sound checking. The rest of the band have popped out somewhere in a taxi and I get to sit down to chat with Emily
Altsounds: So Scotland…
Emily Haines: Yeah I love it
You seen anything of it?
We've done a little bit of exploring - we've walked around you know
When did you get here?
Yesterday. Rest is always the most treasured thing. Rest and a pint (with a surprisingly English sounding accent really coming through on "pint"). We arrived on the ferry in the morning. We had to get up at four in the morning to cross the border, and then 8 AM again, you know, life on the road on the tour bus is taxing a little bit.
Where were you last then?
It's always funny when I cross borders and people ask me where I'm coming from, It seems like THE most existential question... because I can't often remember. We played in Belgium, Holland and Germany at festivals and before that I was in New York.
You've been back and forth the Altlantic many time haven't you since the album came out?
Yeah we hadn't really spent a lot of effort on the UK and Europe - so this time round we thought we'd make a bit more of an appearance. Most of our energy goes into North America which I guess is normal.
It must be quite a thing to just come and plug all the stuff in and it works alright? That gone okay tonight?
Yeah its fine, but I know what you mean though; we were loading up the bus in Paris, where we flew into. We'd shipped all our gear and we had a bus and a trailer. We were in this dark parking lot and I was just standing outside the bus getting ready for this next chapter, looking at - even at our scale - what an undertaking it is. All the gear. We have a great crew. Everyone's happy to have this as their job instead of you know, killing people… Or working in an industrialized farm… or a slaughterhouse back in the States (Emily laughs).
I was just listening to you sound check - I've got to ask, I've listened to the lyrics quite a few times - who is it that is going to get you and "eat you alive" if you stumble?
Ah that. Can’t answer that because then the riddle would be no fun.
The Edinburgh Festival - I was thinking - is a sort of precursor to the newer town and city-based music festivals like SXSW or Liverpool Sound City. Do you prefer it like this or the two to four days camping in a field like say Coachella?
It's funny we're not very good as a band at favourites. We generally feel like big fans of biodiversity. We feel like we need everything, you know. Certainly playing Coachella for musicians is a great experience, because the backstage is beautiful. It is held in one of the most coveted locations in the United States, a holiday destination. They take really good care of you, the margaritas are delightful and it's an all-round excellent experience with zero mud. B ut at the same time, coming to play Glastonbury this year and feeling the history of it and the spirit of it, and the fact that its farmland and the family behind the tradition of the festival. Seeing Neil Young performing ‘A Day In The Life’ to 150,000 people is also totally necessary so when it comes to saying whether one thing is better than the other I'm just going to flunk out.
It's all good.
It's all good or it's all shit depending on how you're feeling!
What's the best and the worst of touring for you then? Just this being lost existential thing?
I don't know, I'm feeling a bit melancholy today, the best and the worst... the whole premise of making music and playing concerts is I suppose to overcome the mundane life that we've all got in front of us, regardless of our stature and the idea that music could somehow have this magical power to unify people to create open-mindedness and raise consciousness and have all these wonderful therapeutic effects. So I would say the best thing about touring is feeling that we are participating in that legacy and that's contributing positively to the human experience by us making some music.
And I'd say that what sucks about it is that sometimes I feel as though we are the last band on earth that is doing this out of love and that makes you feel like a bit of a sucker.
What do you mean by that, out of love?
Well because it's sort of like - in an age of American Idol and Britain's Got Talent, you know it's a pretty crass commercial climate right now. It's all fine. Everyone enjoy themselves.
What do you think of that - Britain's Got Talent?
I think it's sad, funny and clapped.
I think it finds people who can sing but they're just singing other people songs.
It illuminates the nature of what we are looking for as people from our artists in 2009 which is someone you can feel superior to and ultimately, you know, have as a clown for your entertainment. It's not as though we are looking to our musicians and artists, it seems, for inspiration. I feel it is so few and far between on a mass scale that we have that. We can say - oh thank you - as musicians. Me and my friends we just cling to those few people whose lives meant something, or it seemed as though their purpose was to have their life mean something.
You connect to a completely different audience to Britain's Got Talent though!
Well exactly - I'm just answering the bigger question than you asked.
That's okay I'm really interested.
I just think it's, as I said, it's a strange time in music to be making music out of love, for the love of music. It doesn't seem like that is the motivating factor for most bands out there right now. It is for us. Of course there ARE people, but they are probably toiling away in relative obscurity right alongside us (Emily laughs). Bless them for doing it for love.
I came to see you in Manchester.
Oh you did?
And I was queued up outside early - front row. You seem to have a pretty strong connection with the front row.
We do yes we have a really good connection with - I almost just want to say listeners instead of fans. I try to play along with the vocabulary of my profession.
And you said you really wanted to try and concentrate on the UK this time?
Well no, we're not going to concentrate on it; we're just trying to give it a little bit more of our time. I'm not sure why, the world is a vast place. We're very excited to go to Australia in a couple of months, and Japan.
Have you done Japan before?
Just once as part of a festival with a bunch of Canadian bands, a thing called Canada Wet which was great. And we have a huge thing happening in South America so as you can imagine for us, it's a difficult decision to weigh where our love is best spent. Right now I'd say South America and Australia, as well as all of North America, as they are all larger land masses.
I did notice that the video for ‘Sick Muse’ you brought forward because of the attention it was getting in the UK?
Yeah it seemed like people like that song so we thought we would make a video for it.
I said I came to see you in Manchester; I'm going to give you an observation. A couple of weeks before that I'd been to see Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I guess I came up through Punk. I came out of your gig just thinking. I actually drove home recording into my camera what I thought of it. And all I could think was, yeah that was PUNK. I blogged that and I wasn't the only person who thought it was punk. How do you react to that?
I would say - glad you noticed. This is part of getting back to what we were discussing earlier. Perhaps that's the spirit that I'm referring to - that I feel that perhaps it's just a bit too subtle or something. But to me, the idea - if you have a punk attitude in 2009, you're not going to be getting up on stage with a fucking Mohawk obviously. It's a FEELING that I'm very happy that you picked up on. Punk is sort of the theme that runs through the project. When we all met we just had this idea of “let’s fuck things up”, in a friendly way. A friendly 'Fuck You'. Just to see what's possible without automatically pandering to the existing industry people who present themselves.
And for me as a woman, or as a girl, or just as a person even – I wanted to not do what would be the appropriate and expected thing of me. I wanted to be a musician that would make everyone uncomfortable, you know? That was definitely part of the plan. To have some fun and part of that was inspired by musicians whose musical genre is punk rock but also musicians who have done things on the business side. Obviously we're right along with everyone else having maximum admiration for Radiohead, and others who have found a way to navigate and to do something unconventional. I would say they have the benefit of 10 years of major label marketing behind them, but still.
But people are going to throw money at them anyway?
Well they are, and they're not a good example of anything other than themselves, but that is the point - believing in individuality and the power of the individual and the power of ideas over the existing establishment. That's definitely the point of this band and I'm awfully happy that you noticed.
I think you can be a folk singer and be punk - I think it's about attitude
Yeah I agree. It's nice though - I've not heard anyone else... I'm usually the one initiating that. I'm glad we see eye to eye on that.
Well it's funny because I blogged it, then I thought I'll see what other people have written and I wasn't the only one to think that. Maybe it's something to do with UK audiences, that we've grown up listening to the Clash or something.
Maybe it was the crowd surfing in the Stranglers T-shirt. There are a lot of possibilities.
I didn't see you crowd surfing.
No, it's a chapter that is gone.
I was kind of wondering about that. Does it have to be a home crowd?
No it's been all over the world. It was just a chapter. You know I saw Jesus Lizard at Pukkelpop and it was so funny to watch him crowd surf all the way out into the audience with the microphone and it was still in tune – well - in tune as in singular note melodies, but still. And making his way all the way back was so funny to me.
Was it like - "turn me around now, deliver me back" (Emily laughs). I was going to ask you one last thing - I was watching the video documentary you did, about the making of this album, “Fantasies” and you talked about stripping things back, going camp fire. I wondered when the last opportunity you had was to do that.
We've actually been doing it a lot with this record. In fact tomorrow our nice little window of hanging out in Edinburgh has been cut short because Jimmy and I are going to perform acoustically for Grimmy on Radio 1 (Nick Grimshaw). So Jimmy and I are going to go and play Gimme Sympathy acoustically for him and probably a couple of other songs.
That acoustic version - I've heard that. Is that you stripped down or does it get any more elemental than that?
In the writing process it did. Every single one of the songs was subjected to that test earlier on without necessarily the intention that we would perform them in that way. It's a nice feeling, it's like the architecture is there and it's not just a collection of production gimmicks taking you from the verse to the bridge to the chorus.
I think it's great to hear how the two versions work together
On the other hand one of the interesting things I think about this TIME, culturally, and in music, is that there is this possibility of the behind-the-scenes of everything, and the mask has been torn off. The mystique of idolizing our musical heroes or others has changed. It's almost at this point that anyone who is pretending to be that much different from anyone is going to look a bit silly because they can so easily be revealed for their regular daily self. I think it's a very interesting thing. Can you be - is it possible to have, post Kurt Cobain when everyone says he was the last real rock star? I'm very excited to see the next generation and our generation come up with people you can admire BECAUSE of everything you know and BECAUSE they are human, not because they've been able to create an artifice. Certainly the death of Michael Jackson is the end of a certain capability of artifice and a sad testament to the side-effects sometimes.
I think I know what you mean. There is this connection that people can now have. You can message people on MySpace and they write back. I sent Annie from St Vincent a message and it was Annie that wrote back. .........10 years ago that sort of connectivity wouldn't have happened.
Yeah that just wouldn't have happened. To take this conversation further, I think that absolutely the most corrosive and terrifying development in social networking is Twitter. I don't know how much people are into it in the UK but (I tell her I have an account I've never used) I have the same point of view as you. It's like a gateway drug. For example I know that before I had even changed out of my stage clothes at a concert in Massachusetts a friend of mine had already received a photograph of me. It had already come up on their Twitter of the show and my friend was e-mailing me in response to that. I was still wearing the same thing. That was a little too instantaneous for me. You try to find the positive in this but it does take away some of the fun, spontaneity and the possibilities for subversiveness out of a live show because there is no privacy, there's no private MOMENT. I could play a concert for 50 people in Oxford and footage of that could come up before our David Letterman performance or before our $100,000 music video that we've made and so far as the intimacy with the crowd of being able to say this is ONE night which has kind of always been our mantra. It's like here we have an hour and a half, what are we all going to do with it. Who cares? We might as well sweat our asses off or make fools of ourselves and be uninhibited because it's just an hour and a half but now that's not really the case. It was slowly eroding over the last few years but now it's definitely documented.
Two years ago I saw Stars in Dublin and Torquil was shouting off as he does....
.....as he does yeah....
......about people videoing and saying “is that going to be on YouTube before I get home?”
Well you know this is the thing. You can't have a negative attitude towards it, people are embracing it. People are having a good time and if their idea of a good time is to film it or photograph it - knock yourself out, enjoy yourself! It's just that I would personally rather have a memory that I could perhaps romanticize with a little bit.
You've talked about the close connection with our fans, that has taken a few years to build. Sometimes I feel bad because it was really like three years of touring which is not that much. In those times, say for example someone had taken some pictures and then got home and decided what they were going to do with them. Maybe put them up on Flickr or MySpace or something. At that point the wall was still there. There was still a sense that once the thing was over, THEN maybe you can do something with the content. Nowadays this is as its happening. The possibilities for very interesting things to come of that I think are massive, but right now it's the most mundane and trivial thing.
(I relate to Emily the story of Levi Leipheimer in this year's Tour de France who was tweeting photos of his own wrist surgery while he was actually still being operated on)
Do you know what? It all takes us back to Philip K Dick, which is fine with me. It takes some of the wind out of your sails trying to come up with fantastic extreme examples of how the world is, when the world just keeps trumping me. The things that happen are just - wow - that's beyond what I could have even cynically anticipated. (Emily laughs). It's an interesting moment and sometimes it would be great to care a little less, to be a little less invested, but this is who we are. This is the band we are. The payoff is so huge for us - in so many ways that is not the case for other people, but it does take an extra sort of something - especially if you are an atheist, you need something - it takes an extra sort of FORCE to keep believing that there is a point to it all.
But you keep believing?
I do.
Cool. Do you know what, I've taken up loads of your time? (I’d been told I had a strict 15 minutes which had long gone)
Yeah, you're basically my therapist, you've saved me a hundred quid.
So where next after tonight?
Well we've got to go to London for Grimmy which will be good, then we go to Reading and Leeds, we go to Rock-en-Seine, I've got a couple of days in Spain to relax which will be lovely. Then we're playing. We're playing in North America and Australia then in Japan.
It’s time for me to go, damn, I could have talked all night but they have a gig to play!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Later on I am watching the gig. The band has really lit up what might have started out a slightly indifferent audience. Emily has made great play about this being a Tuesday night, which we might otherwise be at home watching House, but “tonight is all we've got”.
Emily does a sort of ‘one arm crossed in front of the other’ gesture, which she repeats, robot-like. Then she stands right on the edge of the stage, turns her back to the audience and spreads her arms out wide. She stays there more than a few moments. There's a pit, there's a barrier, so she is physically removed from the audience, but I am CONVINCED that in her mind Emily is just dropping backwards into the crowd. “Crowd-surf off a cliff.”
Off stage and then back on for the encore. I've been at the back dancing by myself. Now I can't stand it any more and have to burrow my way back into the crowd, heading to the front again. This crowd is in a monstrous frenzy for a Tuesday night.
Joules and Josh go off stage leaving just Jimmy and Emily for the moment. This has become (this year at least) their traditional ending. A stripped down version of ‘Live It Out’. Just vocals and guitar. Would that be “camp fire” I wonder? Emily tells us “ If you know the words sing along, for the love of God, sing along” and we do.
Emily climbs down into the pit, then onto the barrier, making her way shaking hands along the front row, climbing up on the railing to say hello or thanks to those further back. She holds that special connection to the audience and this girl is as good as her word. Joules and Josh come back, the song builds to the glorious end of a Tuesday night in Edinburgh. We stumble outside into the night. It's stopped raining.
Altsounds: So Scotland…
Emily Haines: Yeah I love it
You seen anything of it?
We've done a little bit of exploring - we've walked around you know
When did you get here?
Yesterday. Rest is always the most treasured thing. Rest and a pint (with a surprisingly English sounding accent really coming through on "pint"). We arrived on the ferry in the morning. We had to get up at four in the morning to cross the border, and then 8 AM again, you know, life on the road on the tour bus is taxing a little bit.
Where were you last then?
It's always funny when I cross borders and people ask me where I'm coming from, It seems like THE most existential question... because I can't often remember. We played in Belgium, Holland and Germany at festivals and before that I was in New York.
You've been back and forth the Altlantic many time haven't you since the album came out?
Yeah we hadn't really spent a lot of effort on the UK and Europe - so this time round we thought we'd make a bit more of an appearance. Most of our energy goes into North America which I guess is normal.
It must be quite a thing to just come and plug all the stuff in and it works alright? That gone okay tonight?
Yeah its fine, but I know what you mean though; we were loading up the bus in Paris, where we flew into. We'd shipped all our gear and we had a bus and a trailer. We were in this dark parking lot and I was just standing outside the bus getting ready for this next chapter, looking at - even at our scale - what an undertaking it is. All the gear. We have a great crew. Everyone's happy to have this as their job instead of you know, killing people… Or working in an industrialized farm… or a slaughterhouse back in the States (Emily laughs).
I was just listening to you sound check - I've got to ask, I've listened to the lyrics quite a few times - who is it that is going to get you and "eat you alive" if you stumble?
Ah that. Can’t answer that because then the riddle would be no fun.
The Edinburgh Festival - I was thinking - is a sort of precursor to the newer town and city-based music festivals like SXSW or Liverpool Sound City. Do you prefer it like this or the two to four days camping in a field like say Coachella?
It's funny we're not very good as a band at favourites. We generally feel like big fans of biodiversity. We feel like we need everything, you know. Certainly playing Coachella for musicians is a great experience, because the backstage is beautiful. It is held in one of the most coveted locations in the United States, a holiday destination. They take really good care of you, the margaritas are delightful and it's an all-round excellent experience with zero mud. B ut at the same time, coming to play Glastonbury this year and feeling the history of it and the spirit of it, and the fact that its farmland and the family behind the tradition of the festival. Seeing Neil Young performing ‘A Day In The Life’ to 150,000 people is also totally necessary so when it comes to saying whether one thing is better than the other I'm just going to flunk out.
It's all good.
It's all good or it's all shit depending on how you're feeling!
What's the best and the worst of touring for you then? Just this being lost existential thing?
I don't know, I'm feeling a bit melancholy today, the best and the worst... the whole premise of making music and playing concerts is I suppose to overcome the mundane life that we've all got in front of us, regardless of our stature and the idea that music could somehow have this magical power to unify people to create open-mindedness and raise consciousness and have all these wonderful therapeutic effects. So I would say the best thing about touring is feeling that we are participating in that legacy and that's contributing positively to the human experience by us making some music.
And I'd say that what sucks about it is that sometimes I feel as though we are the last band on earth that is doing this out of love and that makes you feel like a bit of a sucker.
What do you mean by that, out of love?
Well because it's sort of like - in an age of American Idol and Britain's Got Talent, you know it's a pretty crass commercial climate right now. It's all fine. Everyone enjoy themselves.
What do you think of that - Britain's Got Talent?
I think it's sad, funny and clapped.
I think it finds people who can sing but they're just singing other people songs.
It illuminates the nature of what we are looking for as people from our artists in 2009 which is someone you can feel superior to and ultimately, you know, have as a clown for your entertainment. It's not as though we are looking to our musicians and artists, it seems, for inspiration. I feel it is so few and far between on a mass scale that we have that. We can say - oh thank you - as musicians. Me and my friends we just cling to those few people whose lives meant something, or it seemed as though their purpose was to have their life mean something.
You connect to a completely different audience to Britain's Got Talent though!
Well exactly - I'm just answering the bigger question than you asked.
That's okay I'm really interested.
I just think it's, as I said, it's a strange time in music to be making music out of love, for the love of music. It doesn't seem like that is the motivating factor for most bands out there right now. It is for us. Of course there ARE people, but they are probably toiling away in relative obscurity right alongside us (Emily laughs). Bless them for doing it for love.
I came to see you in Manchester.
Oh you did?
And I was queued up outside early - front row. You seem to have a pretty strong connection with the front row.
We do yes we have a really good connection with - I almost just want to say listeners instead of fans. I try to play along with the vocabulary of my profession.
And you said you really wanted to try and concentrate on the UK this time?
Well no, we're not going to concentrate on it; we're just trying to give it a little bit more of our time. I'm not sure why, the world is a vast place. We're very excited to go to Australia in a couple of months, and Japan.
Have you done Japan before?
Just once as part of a festival with a bunch of Canadian bands, a thing called Canada Wet which was great. And we have a huge thing happening in South America so as you can imagine for us, it's a difficult decision to weigh where our love is best spent. Right now I'd say South America and Australia, as well as all of North America, as they are all larger land masses.
I did notice that the video for ‘Sick Muse’ you brought forward because of the attention it was getting in the UK?
Yeah it seemed like people like that song so we thought we would make a video for it.
I said I came to see you in Manchester; I'm going to give you an observation. A couple of weeks before that I'd been to see Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I guess I came up through Punk. I came out of your gig just thinking. I actually drove home recording into my camera what I thought of it. And all I could think was, yeah that was PUNK. I blogged that and I wasn't the only person who thought it was punk. How do you react to that?
I would say - glad you noticed. This is part of getting back to what we were discussing earlier. Perhaps that's the spirit that I'm referring to - that I feel that perhaps it's just a bit too subtle or something. But to me, the idea - if you have a punk attitude in 2009, you're not going to be getting up on stage with a fucking Mohawk obviously. It's a FEELING that I'm very happy that you picked up on. Punk is sort of the theme that runs through the project. When we all met we just had this idea of “let’s fuck things up”, in a friendly way. A friendly 'Fuck You'. Just to see what's possible without automatically pandering to the existing industry people who present themselves.
And for me as a woman, or as a girl, or just as a person even – I wanted to not do what would be the appropriate and expected thing of me. I wanted to be a musician that would make everyone uncomfortable, you know? That was definitely part of the plan. To have some fun and part of that was inspired by musicians whose musical genre is punk rock but also musicians who have done things on the business side. Obviously we're right along with everyone else having maximum admiration for Radiohead, and others who have found a way to navigate and to do something unconventional. I would say they have the benefit of 10 years of major label marketing behind them, but still.
But people are going to throw money at them anyway?
Well they are, and they're not a good example of anything other than themselves, but that is the point - believing in individuality and the power of the individual and the power of ideas over the existing establishment. That's definitely the point of this band and I'm awfully happy that you noticed.
I think you can be a folk singer and be punk - I think it's about attitude
Yeah I agree. It's nice though - I've not heard anyone else... I'm usually the one initiating that. I'm glad we see eye to eye on that.
Well it's funny because I blogged it, then I thought I'll see what other people have written and I wasn't the only one to think that. Maybe it's something to do with UK audiences, that we've grown up listening to the Clash or something.
Maybe it was the crowd surfing in the Stranglers T-shirt. There are a lot of possibilities.
I didn't see you crowd surfing.
No, it's a chapter that is gone.
I was kind of wondering about that. Does it have to be a home crowd?
No it's been all over the world. It was just a chapter. You know I saw Jesus Lizard at Pukkelpop and it was so funny to watch him crowd surf all the way out into the audience with the microphone and it was still in tune – well - in tune as in singular note melodies, but still. And making his way all the way back was so funny to me.
Was it like - "turn me around now, deliver me back" (Emily laughs). I was going to ask you one last thing - I was watching the video documentary you did, about the making of this album, “Fantasies” and you talked about stripping things back, going camp fire. I wondered when the last opportunity you had was to do that.
We've actually been doing it a lot with this record. In fact tomorrow our nice little window of hanging out in Edinburgh has been cut short because Jimmy and I are going to perform acoustically for Grimmy on Radio 1 (Nick Grimshaw). So Jimmy and I are going to go and play Gimme Sympathy acoustically for him and probably a couple of other songs.
That acoustic version - I've heard that. Is that you stripped down or does it get any more elemental than that?
In the writing process it did. Every single one of the songs was subjected to that test earlier on without necessarily the intention that we would perform them in that way. It's a nice feeling, it's like the architecture is there and it's not just a collection of production gimmicks taking you from the verse to the bridge to the chorus.
I think it's great to hear how the two versions work together
On the other hand one of the interesting things I think about this TIME, culturally, and in music, is that there is this possibility of the behind-the-scenes of everything, and the mask has been torn off. The mystique of idolizing our musical heroes or others has changed. It's almost at this point that anyone who is pretending to be that much different from anyone is going to look a bit silly because they can so easily be revealed for their regular daily self. I think it's a very interesting thing. Can you be - is it possible to have, post Kurt Cobain when everyone says he was the last real rock star? I'm very excited to see the next generation and our generation come up with people you can admire BECAUSE of everything you know and BECAUSE they are human, not because they've been able to create an artifice. Certainly the death of Michael Jackson is the end of a certain capability of artifice and a sad testament to the side-effects sometimes.
I think I know what you mean. There is this connection that people can now have. You can message people on MySpace and they write back. I sent Annie from St Vincent a message and it was Annie that wrote back. .........10 years ago that sort of connectivity wouldn't have happened.
Yeah that just wouldn't have happened. To take this conversation further, I think that absolutely the most corrosive and terrifying development in social networking is Twitter. I don't know how much people are into it in the UK but (I tell her I have an account I've never used) I have the same point of view as you. It's like a gateway drug. For example I know that before I had even changed out of my stage clothes at a concert in Massachusetts a friend of mine had already received a photograph of me. It had already come up on their Twitter of the show and my friend was e-mailing me in response to that. I was still wearing the same thing. That was a little too instantaneous for me. You try to find the positive in this but it does take away some of the fun, spontaneity and the possibilities for subversiveness out of a live show because there is no privacy, there's no private MOMENT. I could play a concert for 50 people in Oxford and footage of that could come up before our David Letterman performance or before our $100,000 music video that we've made and so far as the intimacy with the crowd of being able to say this is ONE night which has kind of always been our mantra. It's like here we have an hour and a half, what are we all going to do with it. Who cares? We might as well sweat our asses off or make fools of ourselves and be uninhibited because it's just an hour and a half but now that's not really the case. It was slowly eroding over the last few years but now it's definitely documented.
Two years ago I saw Stars in Dublin and Torquil was shouting off as he does....
.....as he does yeah....
......about people videoing and saying “is that going to be on YouTube before I get home?”
Well you know this is the thing. You can't have a negative attitude towards it, people are embracing it. People are having a good time and if their idea of a good time is to film it or photograph it - knock yourself out, enjoy yourself! It's just that I would personally rather have a memory that I could perhaps romanticize with a little bit.
You've talked about the close connection with our fans, that has taken a few years to build. Sometimes I feel bad because it was really like three years of touring which is not that much. In those times, say for example someone had taken some pictures and then got home and decided what they were going to do with them. Maybe put them up on Flickr or MySpace or something. At that point the wall was still there. There was still a sense that once the thing was over, THEN maybe you can do something with the content. Nowadays this is as its happening. The possibilities for very interesting things to come of that I think are massive, but right now it's the most mundane and trivial thing.
(I relate to Emily the story of Levi Leipheimer in this year's Tour de France who was tweeting photos of his own wrist surgery while he was actually still being operated on)
Do you know what? It all takes us back to Philip K Dick, which is fine with me. It takes some of the wind out of your sails trying to come up with fantastic extreme examples of how the world is, when the world just keeps trumping me. The things that happen are just - wow - that's beyond what I could have even cynically anticipated. (Emily laughs). It's an interesting moment and sometimes it would be great to care a little less, to be a little less invested, but this is who we are. This is the band we are. The payoff is so huge for us - in so many ways that is not the case for other people, but it does take an extra sort of something - especially if you are an atheist, you need something - it takes an extra sort of FORCE to keep believing that there is a point to it all.
But you keep believing?
I do.
Cool. Do you know what, I've taken up loads of your time? (I’d been told I had a strict 15 minutes which had long gone)
Yeah, you're basically my therapist, you've saved me a hundred quid.
So where next after tonight?
Well we've got to go to London for Grimmy which will be good, then we go to Reading and Leeds, we go to Rock-en-Seine, I've got a couple of days in Spain to relax which will be lovely. Then we're playing. We're playing in North America and Australia then in Japan.
It’s time for me to go, damn, I could have talked all night but they have a gig to play!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Later on I am watching the gig. The band has really lit up what might have started out a slightly indifferent audience. Emily has made great play about this being a Tuesday night, which we might otherwise be at home watching House, but “tonight is all we've got”.
Emily does a sort of ‘one arm crossed in front of the other’ gesture, which she repeats, robot-like. Then she stands right on the edge of the stage, turns her back to the audience and spreads her arms out wide. She stays there more than a few moments. There's a pit, there's a barrier, so she is physically removed from the audience, but I am CONVINCED that in her mind Emily is just dropping backwards into the crowd. “Crowd-surf off a cliff.”
Off stage and then back on for the encore. I've been at the back dancing by myself. Now I can't stand it any more and have to burrow my way back into the crowd, heading to the front again. This crowd is in a monstrous frenzy for a Tuesday night.
Joules and Josh go off stage leaving just Jimmy and Emily for the moment. This has become (this year at least) their traditional ending. A stripped down version of ‘Live It Out’. Just vocals and guitar. Would that be “camp fire” I wonder? Emily tells us “ If you know the words sing along, for the love of God, sing along” and we do.
Emily climbs down into the pit, then onto the barrier, making her way shaking hands along the front row, climbing up on the railing to say hello or thanks to those further back. She holds that special connection to the audience and this girl is as good as her word. Joules and Josh come back, the song builds to the glorious end of a Tuesday night in Edinburgh. We stumble outside into the night. It's stopped raining.
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