STS - To have your music heard?

D - Yeah.  Whether it’s right or not I think you kind of have to have to feel like that in order to really to do this because it does really take a lot.  I mean, there 10s of 1000’s of bands trying and only a few really get through.  You got to NEED to do it! It’s a horrible actor thing but if you ‘want to’ do it, give up now but if you ‘have to’ do it, your in with a shot.  I remember, we were together for like 6-7 yrs before we got signed and I remember about 3-4 years in, it wasn’t looking very good.  The bass player had just left and all kinds of stuff and I was feeling really sort of down about it all.  It does take over your life; I had no girlfriend and no kind of life.  I was on the dole and what I had went on strings, rehearsal rooms and stuff and literally living like a monk.  It’s scary as well because all you eat is rice and you live on it.  Literally live on it.

STS - Very true! I think a lot of unsigned bands still find themselves in that same boat where all their money goes into the band and not much else is left. What advice would you give bands out there trying to make it ‘big’?

D - For me the key bit of advice would be, get the people in the band right!  If you’re arguing all the time and you’re spending more time talking about what you want to do rather than dong it, it’s maybe you haven’t got the right people in the band.  For me it was always the most important thing; that we got on and we had a shared goal.  Whether someone was an amazing player technically or whatever didn’t really matter as much as that, and that stood us in good stead, as 12 years later we are the line up and not had any changes, which is really unique.

STS - Shows you had the right formula as band members.

D - Well yeah, I just felt that if you got the people right you could go through thick and thin together.  There’s definitely been a lot of thin as well as the good times!  There have been a lot of hard times and if you can’t get on before you hit that roller coaster ride, you’ve got no chance when it comes along. I remember when we just wanted to be signed and I’d be able to give up the day job and concentrate on writing, I’d be out on the building site all day and then all night writing and then getting up after one hours sleep and working all day and burning yourself out. Which you can do when you’re in your late teens and early 20s but as you get older it gets harder, but you know, I remember thinking ‘I wish we were just signed’, but then you do get signed and all the media attention’s on you and all that stuff it brings another pressure that’s hard to describe to someone who has never been there, but being in the public eye and everything you do being scrutinised, it’s almost like being on something like Big Brother I imagine; you constantly have to be ‘on’ and it’s wired if you’re not that kind of person and you’re just a normal Joe which I always am.  To be in the public eye and have microphones shoved in your mouth being asked to quote about the latest issues of the day…it’s just a weird thing.

STS - It must be really strange to have that sort of attention after struggling for so long for recognition.     

D - Yeah, and when we toured across America and stuff, we were on the cover of Billboard magazine, which was a massive deal, and we were on TV shows and talk shows, it’s weird that it can have a bad effect on you, everybody turns into a diva…Everyone! People start moaning about the smallest things.  If you thought we’d be doing this 10 years ago you wouldn’t believe it and like, people moan they haven’t got any cold water or something crap like that!  But the best advice that I would give anyone in an unsigned band is something that I heard from Neneh Cherry when we were starting out…Just enjoy it!  Because if you don’t what’s the point!  You might spend 10 hours with your acoustic guitar banging your head against a wall trying to get ‘that chorus’ or whatever, and yeah some of that’s not enjoyable but try and enjoy the ride because at the end there’s not a lot waiting for you!  -  Both laugh.

STS - Do you feel things in the music industry have changed now that everything is becoming more digital media based? Compared to getting your record cut and getting it into a record shop and out there.

D - Erm. Yeah.  I think people are worried about getting paid or not, but I always think that if you’re good enough it’ll be OK and they’ll find a way of paying you.  If you’re really good then you’ll do alright, but if your not you won’t.  It’s quite cut throat.  If you write a good tune you’re made for life, if you write a tune that’s not so good people don’t give a shit.  You either do really well or really badly, there’s no in between but I quite like that.  I like the fact that music is not like athletics; in the sense that it’s not always the best that always win.

STS - Very true.

D - I mean, in athletics if you’re the fastest person on the day then you get a gold medal that’s how it goes, but in music you can die in obscurity!  What that makes you do as an artist is dig deeper and try harder.

STS - Striving to constantly be the best.

D  - Yeah. No matter how good you are and how hard you try, it’s never good enough!  So you’re constantly under achieving all the time.  I think the day you stop singing other peoples songs in the mirror before you do a gig and start singing your own….that’s when it starts clicking.  We wrote a song called ‘Retread’ and it didn’t sound like anybody else.  Once you’ve found that uniqueness about you, it all pours out, after ‘Retread’ we wrote 6 songs over the next couple of weeks, before that we sounded like Joy Division or U2 or Echo and the Bunnymen and the bands we liked from the 80s and stuff.  And then we found our own sound and it all clicks and I think again what happens with unsigned bands is that they sound like the Arctic Monkeys or Oasis or a bit like The Libertines or whatever and they are pretending that they don’t.   It’s like if you strip away all that stuff that sounds like everyone else, what are you left with?  If it’s not much then you have more digging to do.

STS - How important is that point of difference when wanting to be noticed?

D - You can’t just sound like your favourite band… and what is quite often said is ‘the bands that are number one are rubbish and I’m really good so why aren’t I at number one’. Well those bands that are at number one have a load of people who like them and stuff, that’s just how it goes.  I mean, you might not like The PussyCat Dolls but they are at number one, or The Black Eyed Peas and they might be at number one.  The only reason people think their music is better is because it’s not to their taste.  So you have to look at the music that IS to your taste, The Editors or summit and your music has to be better than their music because you are competing with them, not The PussyCat Dolls.  It’s a different market.  I mean you can’t say ‘we’re not as good as The Editors but we are better than Westlife or PussyCat Dolls’.  A lot of people do this, they go like ‘we are better than Westlife and we’re not number one yet.  But it’s got nothing to do with Westlife, it’s because they aren’t as good as REM yet and that’s whom they are trying to be like.  There’s already one of them.  You try and be like Radiohead but you’re not as good, or trying to be like The Arctic Monkeys but you’re not as good.   It’s the day when you stop singing other people’s songs in front of the mirror.  For me it was ‘ I am the resurrection’, I was into Ian Brown when I was a kid, the monkey walk and everything but then something that just comes along and it’s just you.  

STS - How did it happen for you?

D - We happened across it by accident.  I gave Richard a tape and it had stuff on the A side I wanted him to listen to and he put the tape in the wrong way round and it was me singing on my own.  And he’s like ‘what’s this?’ and I said it was just me singing on my own.  “This is something special” he said so really it was Richard that found what was unique about us.  Something that I wouldn’t have ever flagged up. Sometimes the most beautiful thing about your band is stuff that you don’t realise because it comes naturally to you.  It’s the stuff that takes two seconds to write.

STS - Which track are you most proud of?

D - Erm, probably ‘All you good good people’ or ‘Ashes’.

STS - Big Tunes

D - They are both really hard, a lot of people really like ‘Come back to what you know’ and the reason I guess I don’t love that as much is because we went to the producer too early with it.  So I didn’t really get a chance to finish the lyrics and the production on the record isn’t as thought out as I would have liked it to be.  It was really quick; it was almost like a premature birth!  It’s like I was telling you about unsigned bands; that song is really different and really Embrace.  I don’t realise that because that’s just how I sound but it is why people like it.

STS - It is a very distinctive song and one of reasons a lot of people like Embrace.

D - Yeah cheers.  People really need to strive for that. But knowing when you’ve got that is really difficult because it’s you! If you ever watch yourself on video and you’ll notice mannerisms and things you do without thinking and you think ‘I didn’t realise I did that’.  Maybe you have a twitch or eyes that are wider than you thought or you are less articulate than you thought.  It’s that uniqueness that are the things you need to use to make a spark.  If you can get that across in music then you’ve got a chance, if you can’t, you are going to find it really difficult.