Everything Everything’s unique blend of alternative, electronic, math and indie has earned them critical acclaim and a host of nominations for the Mercury Prize and Ivor Novello Awards. Drummer Michael Spearman speaks to Marcus Hughes about their busy summer of festival gigs and writing.
I’ve heard you’re in the middle of writing the next album. How’s that been going?
The writing’s going well! It’s just the way we’re doing it. Last time we had a year stretched out ahead of us where we needed to make an album. Which obviously we did do, but it was a bit repetitive because we didn’t do any gigs that year. So it’s kind of nice to combine the two things, because then at the weekend it kind of informs the writing by playing. It’s just remembering what it is to do shows rather than just doing the same thing all the time.
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So what festivals have you been playing?
Well, last year we did the main ones, because the record was out a year ago today actually. So we did Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, and all of the bigger ones. But this year it’s the smaller ones, apart from Isle Of Wight. We’ve never really done those before, so it’s nice to mix it up really.
Everything Everything, Dizzee Rascal and Kaiser Chiefs are playing the SSE SWALEC Stadium in Cardiff. It’s a bit of an unusual line up isn’t it?
Yeah, we’re looking forward to it. Outdoors is always good and it’s summer time! I suppose Dizzee Rascal might be the odd one out in a sense, but I think he’s so popular he can play those sorts of gigs. Whereas when he was starting out it was quite a niche thing he was doing, but now he has some really big pop songs. We like Kaiser Chiefs as well though. When we were starting out, their songs were all over the charts and it’s good to see a band that’s still doing it at a high level. They came back with a number one record and they’re still relevant, so it’s good to be amongst that.
The lyrics on Get To Heaven contained notable themes of social commentary inspired by what was happening in the news at the time. With everything that’s going on at the moment, is this an area you’re continuing to explore?
I don’t think we want to continue in the same vein. We were talking about lyrics last week and unfortunately a lot of themes we were talking about on Get To Heaven are still prevalent and even more so maybe. It’s been a horrible few weeks in the news, so it’s difficult for us to see past those themes. But we’ll get there; we don’t want to repeat ourselves, which is actually quite a difficult task to set. More than ever, we need to push ourselves out of our comfort zone.
So have any of the songs you’ve written this year made their way into the set?
In general we want to play a lot of these songs live before we record them because we didn’t get a chance to do that last time. It’s a fun thing to do and it helps us with the writing too. We’ve got our own gig in Somerset House so we might play a few there, and last year we managed to play a few whilst we were supporting Snow Patrol, so maybe another opportunity like that might present itself. It’s a fun thing to do and hopefully the fans enjoy it sometimes too.
Everything Everything, On The Pitch, The SSE SWALEC, Cardiff. Sat 16 July. Tickets: £45-£85. Info: 029 2040 9380 / www.glamorgancricket.co.uk