Photo by Steve Gullick
So what I’m hearing you say is you name your songs or albums to give them titles; it’s not necessarily related to what the song or album sounds like. Then people can take those titles and really interpret them on his or her own. Have you ever heard anything that’s been completely off?
All the time. I think we made fun of people too much, no one tells us anymore [laughs]. I remember Christmas Steps, off our second album, named after a street in Bristol. It’s a street that has lots of steps in it. People thought it was about the build up to Christmas and the excitement of opening your presents and stuff like that. I mean, you call the songs something, and people expect it to have some attachment.
It’s the same way you name a child and then the child grows up and you’re like ‘They’re a bit of a Margaret or like a Robert.’ You just gave the child a name! You gave a child a name and it doesn’t have any bearing or any reflection of its character.
Yeah but I think you meet people and you think ‘You’re a ‘Chris,’ you could never be a ‘Steve’ or an ‘Edgar.’
Yeah, it seems that way, but that’s just a total nonsense that people think of.
You are from Glasgow, Scotland. How formative or important is the general vibe and history of Scotland in relation to your music?
I don’t think being from a place can have that much bearing on the music you make. Taking that to an extreme: every band from Glasgow would say the same. Glasgow enjoys a certain distance from London, and historically has been a bit more distant from the music business. If people want to be in a band, they do it because they want to be in a band. You don’t find people starting bands to get famous, which seems like more of a London-centric media thing.
Our magazine is called NOTHING BUT HOPE AND PASSION. I want you to think about those two words: hope and passion and what they mean to you. I’ll give you a little bit of time to think about it.
Hope’s a good one: it’s a lovely and positive thought. There’s nothing bad about it. There’s a Sandman comic where the Sandman ends up in some duel with the Devil. It’s a battle of wills where the Sandman eventually wins by saying ‘I am hope’ and defeating whatever badness there was. That’s always stuck with me, doesn’t matter what terrible or horrible situation you are in but you can get out of it, if you have hope.
Passion: the British have a funny relationship with passion. We don’t like to be too passionate about things. People are a bit more restrained. It’s not like we don’t have any passions; we get excited about things. But to be going around passionate…seems a wee bit not right.
Is it seen like showing off?
Yeah, I think, British people, Scottish people certainly don’t like a show off. But obviously not having passions for things, not a lot would get done.
So it exists for you, but under a layer of restraint?
Yeah, that’s a good place for it.
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