Buzzine Interview with Dan, Chris and Matt
From buzzinemusic.com:
Talking Rock, Taking The Awards, Hitting The Road And Proving That ‘Sinners Never Sleep’
By: Team Buzzine
August 17, 2012
In 2008 British rock band You Me at Six burst onto the scene with their critically acclaimed debut album Take Off Your Colours. In four short years commercial success has followed each release, while the nominations and awards have come rolling in.
It was during the heat of the Warped Tour 2012, in Irvine CA, that Buzzine’s Stefan Goldby sat down with Matt Barnes, Dan Flint and Chris Miller to discuss the band’s increasing acclaim, the latest developments in their musical direction, the driving desire to continually revise their personal goals, and even the release of their own clothing brands, perhaps proving that ‘Sinners Never Sleep’…
Stefan Goldby: We’re going back to the future a little bit, but in terms of the new record - out here in America beginning of this year and released in the UK last year - you worked with Garth Richardson, here in L.A.: What did he bring to the creative process for you -wWhat made this album different from what you’d done before?
Matt Barnes: We were used to recording with our friends at home because these two guys called Matt Greeley and John Mitchell, we did our first two albums with them so it was like super casual. We were only forty minutes away from our homes. So we went really out of our comfort zone to go after him. And he’s a really cool dude. He’s worked with massive bands Biffy Clyro and Skunk Anansie.
Dan Flint: I guess the reason that’s why this record was different is because this is the first time that… we don’t usually do pre-production, a big producer. It was a new experience for us to sit down with someone like Garth, and he’d pick apart our songs slightly and say, “Why don’t you try, y’know, lengthening that chorus or shortening that one?” And y’know, he’d help you make sure the songs are to the highest standard, I guess.
SG: Was this a conscious effort to take yourselves out of the comfort zone?
DF: We just wanted a new experience really, as Matt said… we’d done two records with, like our friends basically, and we just wanted to try something a bit different. So he met me there, Garth Richardson. He came down to see us play in London and he loved it, so he was more than happy to do an album with us in f***ing L.A. [Laughs] Yeah… we wanted to stay in Hollywood!
MB: For obvious reasons. It was messy, so…
DF: …I remember basically saying “If we get our stuff done by this date, then we can go to Vegas that weekend because it’s our birthday weekend.” And yeah, I remember finishing by four, and then by six we’re in the car driving to Vegas! [Laughs]
SG: So aside from a day trying to get done to head out to Vegas, is there a session that stands out most in your minds when it comes to the making of this record?
Chris Miller: I don’t think any particular day stands out just because all days just blur into one when you’re recording for two or three months, y’know? But I think just the whole experience itself is pretty memorable; to be in the new environment, the new people, lots of new equipment we never played with before, and just the whole process was standout amazing, and we produced a great record at the end of it!
DF: See the studio that we worked in as well, had had the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin… so that was quite monumental; that we were able to go there and make an album with these platinum disks on the wall: It’s sort of daunting…
SG: You also reached outside of the band - you had Oli Sykes and Winston McCall popping up to make contributions: Were those cases where they were people that you wanted to work with so you crafted a song to their voices, or finding voices to match songs?
MB: I think we wrote the songs before we even had it in mind. We’re really good friends with Oli and Winston and we had these two songs that were just slightly heavier than everything else on our album. We were like, “Hey, if we get Oli on this, it could sound even heavier and even better”.
He came in, tried to track some stuff down - it sounded amazing. And it just kind of stayed on - it’s sort of trial and error. I think we were like, “Let’s see if it works!” and it did work. It was awesome.
DF: Yeah, we winced and we sent it back, kind of ironically, to the studio where we recorded our first two albums. And he was about an hour down the road and he got in a cab. He was touring England, we were in America. And it’s 6:00 a.m. where we were and Josh was on Skype, saying “This is what you are going to do… do this like this to this bit.” I think Josh ended up falling asleep! [Laughs] This was at 7:00 a.m. He would wake up in the morning, and ask, “Did it sound good?!!”
SG: You came to LA, you worked with Garth, brought in all these different people. Now with a little bit of hindsight thinking about the album itself, what are you proudest of about the finished record?
CM: I think it’s the overall sound of it, and just the content on the album. I think we always have a lot different genres on the CD, so I think just being able to craft songs in different genres is exciting.
MB: Yeah, it’s nice. We’ve got… like I was saying earlier… heavy songs, they’re like more ‘proper’ songs. Like if you compare “Reckless” to “Bite My Tongue”, it sounds like a kind of different band. But we like to hit all these different genres. We’re just trying to like mix it up. It gets boring playing the same stuff over and over again. We like to mix it up. Next album might be bluegrass, we just don’t know it yet! [Laughs]
DF: Well, we just write whatever we kind of want to hear and maybe we’ll do the ‘Chili Peppers’ kind of song. We don’t really think about it too much, then we just look and see, and see how it turns out in the end…
SG: Keeping with that theme of being musically open-minded, on the track “Rescue Me”, you worked with American Hip Hop duo Chiddy Bang: that is probably not the most obvious collaboration in the minds of most fans! How did that come about? And when it did. were you consciously trying to bring them into your musical world, or was it just a straight meeting of the minds somewhere in the middle between the two groups’ usual musical genres?
DF: Some of us went down to the Chiddy Bang show in London just like… he’s kind of into the same kind of stuff as us, y’know… like skating. And we… had mutual friends, basically. And so we went down to the show and we had this song that we were joking around with and do we really want to… didn’t think it would fit in the album anyway. So we toyed with the idea of having Chiddy Bang rap over it, and he was up for it so we kind of just did it and see what happened.
MB. Yeah. It was a really quick thing. We kind of just did it just to see how it would happen. So I think he’s been like two or three days of work before saying “well okay, cool, that’s done.”!
DF: Didn’t want to take it too seriously. We weren’t even in the video, we were just like…
MB: Yeah, they were like, “Do you want to be in the video?” We were like, “No!” [Laughs]
CM: But it’s just the point… it’s really that we’re not pigeonholed as one sound. We can, and we like, doing different things. I just find it boring in a band. to really sound the same and many times, it’s nice to have variation.
SG: Does bringing Chiddy or Oli or Winston into the circle help you guys see the way that you make music in a new light… after seeing the way that they do it?
CM: I think it’s exciting having someone else on board. Essentially, we’ve been writing music together for five or six years. So when you have someone new and fresh in the studio with you, or writing with you, it’s just a nice new experience.
DF: Yeah, adds another dynamic.
SG: “No One Does it Better”, it’s much softer than what you’ve done before. Was that a big decision for you guys? You’ve said you like to break it down and keep everybody off balance a little bit. Was that a conscious effort to say “Alright, we can go this way, and still be ourselves”?
DF: I mean, I remember the day that you [Matt] came in. We were rehearsing and Chris was on this riff and everyone was just like, “That’s so cool and so different than anything we’ve ever done before.” And then we were thought, “It might work if we wrote them like kind of more chilled out, like a Chili Peppers style song”. And everyone just kind of ran with it. It ended up being, I think, one of our favorite songs on the album, which is why we then sort of did a video for it. I think yeah, it’s just another way of proving that we’re not just a one-trick pony kind of thing, we can write in any style.
MB: It’s just fun to me, that’s just fun. I don’t understand bands that just write the same album as their last album.
DF: Everyone else sticks to one genre of music. It’s sort of like when we play shows of that kind… headline shows on our last tour… everyone went just as crazy for “Crash” as they did for “Bite My Tongue” or whatever. So I mean, I think we… I like to think we just sound like You Me At Six, you know?
SG: The “Stay With Me”; video was filmed back here in Southern California. You recorded your last album in Southern California, You’re back here touring… in Southern California. You came here with a glint in your eyes, almost as tourists, but over the past year you’ve accomplished all this work, and also got to live and breath the place; has the West Cost atttraction faded at all?
DF: There are definitely parts of California and L.A. that we like and dislike. I think we maybe made a mistake living in the center of Hollywood - we lived on Hollywood and Vine. And there’s a lot of homeless people and this may sound werid… because obviously, for how short a time we actually lived there… but there was a lot of tourists which, after a while, when you’re trying to actually live and work, it gets kind of annoying. So I think then I remember driving out to see one of my friends out in Santa Monica. And we drove out to Malibu one day and we were thinking, “God, we should have been living out here!” [Laughs] We love In-N-Out burgers so we’re always going to love California! [Laughs] And it’s only four hours from Vegas! [Laughs]
I like the fact that you can wake up every day… we were here for two months and there was one day that it rained. Whereas back home, where we’re from, if you wake up and it’s sunny, everyone’s straight down the shops to buy a barbecue and trying to get friends over. Whereas you know, over here you just, do it last minute… We don’t!
SG: So, here we are sitting backstage at Warped Tour… four days in… What has met your expectations and what’s been a complete surprise so far?
CM: I think the crowds have been surprising because they’ve been really, really good. But as far as the tour goes, we’ve been here so many times there is no surprise really. We’re on the same stage we were two years ago. It’s just the same madness.
DF: Yeah, this is great. The signings and the shows have gone bigger, and I don’t really know why, but they have. It’s made it more enjoyable to actually go on to a new place. Otherwise, this tour can get quite stressful… if you’re really hustling every day and you’re selling your soul trying to get five people to come watch you. We’ve been lucky enough today to have a few people who are interested about the band. The first day or second day we were up at the same time as Taking Back Sunday, and even today we played up against We The Kings. And there’s other big bands you try and contend with, and the fact that we still had a great show, that’s pretty promising for the future.
CM: Thumbs up! [Laughs]
SG: Having climbed the musical mountain in the UK, commercially and critically, is it exciting to take another run at a bigger mountain here in America? Success in Britain is very different from moving towards it here because America’s almost an idea more than a country. America is so many different things all jammed together. How do you try and get your head around that as a band?
DF: America’s really quite daunting, I think, because… even the first time we ever played in Chicago, it was crazy. It was so good. So a ton of people emerged… tons of people came to watch us. It was, “Oh my God, maybe this is it! We’re a big band in America!” [Laughs] And you go a few hours down the road and no one cares.
I think that’s the hardest thing about it is if you get big in England, you can travel across England and play decent shows everywhere. Whereas over here, you could literally be big on the East Coast and not be on the West Coast. So I think if anything, it’s just really daunting…
CM: Do we like the challenge, though?
DF: Yeah!
CM: And one of my favorite parts about being in a band is you always play to crowds that don’t know who you are or don’t necessarily like you. So you’ve got a challenge of winning people over and there’s no better feeling than winning a crowd over, like the start of the set, no one cares… but by the end they’re going crazy. So I think America’s just one big challenge, really. We just want to get as far as we can, just to be honest. And work hard, just get on with it, see what happens.
DF: Yeah. It’s always fun when someone comes up to you and says, “I’ve never heard of your band, I had stumbled across your set at Warped Tour when I was buying CDs… and I really liked it!” - that’s always really quite exciting for us to hear.
SG: What did it mean to you, stepping up again recently as winners at the Kerrang Awards in the UK? That may not something that’s in the everyday consciousness, in America, but it’s a hell of a big deal in the British rock scene…
CM: It’s an amazing achievement, I think, for us to be up against such big bands in the UK. And just to still be on top in terms of having that award…
DF: We all grew up reading Kerrang (magazine) and even the first year that we ever went to the Kerrang Awards, we were… I think the way they do it is obviously when you get nominated, they put the video of yours up. The first year we ever went it was such a small band, they just put a photo up of us…
MB: …it was so embarrassing!
DF: We didn’t even have a video. And we were there, we were like the little sixteen-year-olds who were running around really drunk making fools of ourselves. I couldn’t believe that we were at the Kerrang Awards…
MB: …Max was sixteen years old at the time and he got so drunk he passed out in a bush out in the front and Kerry King took a photo of him. Then someone went around Kerry King’s house three years later and saw this photo of Max on a computer…
DF: …It’s like Max’s claim to fame. Only a few years later, we were up against bands like Bullet For My Valentine and this year, we were up against Iron Maiden. And two years in a row, we’ve won best British band!
SG: Congratulations! And so, finally, away from music… one member of a band having their own clothing line, okay, we’re kind of used to that… Two of you having your own clothing lines, well, that was a good idea… But three of you have your own design labels now… [Laughs] Is making music really just holding back your budding fashion careers at this point?
MB: [Laughs] Yeah, I think it is, to some extent! [Laughs] No, when we’re on the road so much, we’re so full-on and nonstop. So when we go home, we kind of just chill and just don’t do anything. We just go insane so we need something to sort of vent our…
DF: …creative…
MB: …our creative side, basically. So we just started doing some stuff.
DF: Fashion goes hand in hand with music, I think. Like you’re going to have to walk around Warped Tour to see the crazy different fashions that people are into. So I mean, like Matt said, it’s something fun to do when you’re at home. And I think quite often, it’s something fun to do with different friends rather than the same five people. Because we’ve probably spent so much time together so then when you get home, you need other ways to enjoy your time with different people; hence, the designing clothes.
CM: [Laughs] I need to make one, my own label….
You Me At Six at Day Two of Leeds Festival earlier this year
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