Scares apparent

When they first burst onto the scene clad in fright make-up, The Horrors were quite the curious thing indeed. At best they were an arthouse project, some kind of clever statement about the direction the music industry was heading in. At worst, they were simply taking the piss for the benefit of their mates. Early days saw the band arguably more concerned with showmanship than their music, although tracks like ‘Gloves’ and ‘Count In Fives’ hinted at real promise. That promise was capitalised on with 2009’s Primary Colours, a breathy affair that demanded people sit up and take notice. Their latest release, Skying, has (deservedly) provoked whispers that The Horrors just might be the saviours of British music. So where did it all go right?

“Different things are interesting to us now,” says lead singer Faris Badwan, matter-of-factly. “The songs are definitely more mature. When you’re writing an album and working on it for the best part of a year, you really take things in. You read a lot of books, watch a lot of films and listen to all kinds of music, and when there are five of you, it increases that. Skying is not really rooted in normal life. It’s not really one specific genre, it’s more subconscious, and it’s hard to pin down, which we like.”
Faris notes that Skying really came together in the studio, with the band taking complete control of production duties. If the willingness to be so hands-on suggests over-confidence, the finished product allays any such fears, as Skying is an album entirely free of the ego that threatened to be the band’s undoing in the early days.
“We really wanted to record and produce the album ourselves,” explains Faris. “It felt like the right time. We experimented with Primary Colours, recording bits of it ourselves, so that gave us the confidence to do an entire album. We just went for it. On Primary Colours, Geoff [Barrow, producer] joked that we didn’t really need him there, but I think we would have done this regardless.”
At times, Badwan’s vocal style and the washed-out feeling that runs through Skying brings to mind The Stone Roses and their classic self-titled debut. This is no accident.

“There’s a great tradition of British pop,” Faris reflects. “We’ve always had British groups in mind when we’re writing songs and this album, more than the others, is deeply rooted in British music. When you hear that Stone Roses album and you see that John Leckie produced it, you think it’s all down to him, but you listen to their demos and they always had that sound… it was a bit more natural. But I do love that album.”
Of course, finding their own authentic sound in the studio required a certain looseness, an absence of overly-stringent editing, the freedom to stretch songs on, thus allowing them to draw to their own natural conclusion.
“A song like ‘Moving Further Away’, if you cut it in half, it ruins the point. Some songs need to be eight minutes long, that’s the area they exist in. The label has always been quite hands-off with us, for better or worse. ‘Moving Further Away’ is one of my favourite tracks, and I think it’s a great indication of how far we’ve come, because there's a wide range of emotion and feelings on the record, but also more subtlety. There are parts of Skying that are really euphoric and other parts that are pretty heavy. It’s quite melodic, a little poppy, and accessible.”
There are also parts that drip with anger and an accusatory feel, not least the finger-pointing ‘I Can See Through You’, a song laced with venom. So just who or what provoked the ire of the Horrors’ frontman?

“I suppose that one is pretty angry,” he laughs. “If you tell people the story of the lyrics, it kind of ruins it for them, but I don’t think they’re too hard to work out! The sentiment is pretty strong. I think that when you listen to music you get more from it without being told. I never write specifically, more about a few different things altogether, and it ends up being a slightly distorted view of what it originally was.”
Looking at The Horrors now, distorted or not, the view seems pretty damn good.