Anthemic For The People

“Alright there, mate? Fuckin’ freezing, isn’t it?”

It’s a bitterly cold and frosty December afternoon in Manchester, and Elbow frontman Guy Garvey is having a shivering smoke outside the back door of Blueprint Studios. Which is handy, because your Hot Press correspondent needs a light.
An anonymous-looking three-storey facility with heavily barred windows situated on a bleak Salford industrial estate, Blueprint Studios is one of those places that’s destined to become legendary in rock ‘n’ roll circles. It’s in this vast and cavernous building that local heroes Elbow (they all grew up and still live in the area) recorded their last three albums – 2005’s Leaders Of The Free World, 2008’s Mercury-winning The Seldom Seen Kid, and the one they’re literally just putting the finishing touches to today, build a rocket, boys.
There’s still plenty of, ahem, elbow room in Blueprint, for rehearsals and intimate live shows as well as for recording. The likes of Justin Timberlake, R.E.M., Lady Gaga and various other big name acts have passed through its heavy metal doors in recent times. No matter who you are, though, smoking indoors is strictly verboten.
Thankfully, while our official introduction isn’t scheduled for another ninety minutes, Garvey’s the approachable type. He might be a million-selling rock star, but the burly 36-year-old Manc has absolutely no airs or graces about himself. “No worries, mate,” he says, proffering a light.
Introductions are quickly done. Having just been given a brief tour of the building, which included a gawk at the huge hall in which Elbow have been rehearsing recently (slightly larger than a basketball court), I ask if Garvey stands on the main stage looking down on the band when he’s singing?
“No, no,” he laughs, shaking his head. “Generally speaking, I’m nearest the door, just for speed of getting in and out of there.”
Although the red-bricked view of Salford from the big windows of the rehearsal room doesn’t seem too inspiring, Garvey finds his muse in the oddest of places.
“Well, it actually looks out over Strangeways Prison,” he explains. “I’ll look out there and I really enjoy that view; I like seeing Strangeways. Actually, I’ve never really mentioned it to anyone, but our friend Brian who we lost and we dedicated Seldom Seen Kid to, his old flat is in one of the tower blocks that’s visible from the big room. So, I think I told the boys just recently but whenever I’m doing a vocal and I want it to be really good, I make sure that I can see Brian’s flat for a bit of extra luck.”
There’s an album listening session happening shortly, so we avoid the subject of music. Instead, we chat briefly about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assanges, who has just been arrested in London. Garvey has mixed feelings about the mysterious Australian cyber-revolutionary.
“You know, I’m not sure what I think about randomly releasing millions of files, especially if it affects the security of a country,” he muses, exhaling a plume of bluish smoke. “If it was specifically revealing scandalous stuff that the public had a right to know then, of course, I think it’s great, but to randomly release every secret file that you’ve had your hands on when it really may result in people being hurt or killed, I think it’s irresponsible and childish.”
A record company person appears and summons me inside for the listening session.
“Hope you like it,” Garvey says. “See ya later, mate.”
Having climbed several flights of stairs, I’m brought into an oppressively warm production suite where equally affable Elbow keyboardist – and sole producer on this album – Craig Potter is setting up a playback on a mixing desk. Although the album needs a few more tweaks, the band’s longtime manager Phil Chadwick assures me that nobody outside of the band will ever be able to tell the difference.
“We’re just going out for a bite to eat,” he explains, as the music starts. “We’ll see you again in 51 minutes and 37 seconds. Exactly!”
First impressions of build a rocket, boys are that it’s very much vintage Elbow – a definite grower of an album with wistfully confessional lyrics, assured musicianship, and a few trademark sonic surprises. Although its acronym is barb, it’s not a particularly barbed affair. While it’s unlikely to attract hordes of new fans, it certainly won’t disappoint their current admirers. There’s no great reinvention here; indeed, some of the songs could be outtakes from their debut. Which isn’t to say that they’ve played it safe. More that they’re doggedly sticking to their guns and their groove.
After a couple of plays, Hot Press is ushered into another room where Garvey and bassist Pete Turner are sipping mugs of strong tea and preparing for an afternoon of strictly embargoed press. Turner is yawning widely, hopefully more the consequence of having a 13 week-old baby girl at home than at the prospect of being interviewed. Or maybe he already knows that Guy will do most of the talking...
“As with all Elbow records, it’s where we’re at,” Guy says of the new album. “It’s ended up being about memories of growing up in the north and remembering amazing and not-so-amazing things about our teen years and looking forward to another stage of life. We’ve gone from being kids to being fathers in each other’s company, so I guess it’s about all the feelings that that throws up.”
You’d imagine the pressure would have been on the quintet following the massive success of The Seldom Seen Kid (sales in excess of a million, the Mercury Prize, a BRIT Award, two Ivor Novellos, etc.), but actually they maintain that this album was probably the easiest of their twenty year career.
“We’ve made records under much more difficult circumstances,” Guy laughs. “The first one we had to make twice because we lost our deal and our recordings.”
He’s referring to 2001’s Asleep In The Back, first recorded in the late ‘90s with producer Steve Osbourne at the helm. Unfortunately, when Island Records was bought out by Universal, Elbow were dropped in a mass cull and lost their rights to the recordings.
“We started with Steve and recorded the whole thing – then we lost our record deal because the label changed structure, hands, whatever, before we’d released anything and we had to make the record again,” he explains. “So we hooked up with Ben Hillier. The second time round was a great experience because we really thought, you know, ‘we’re going to prove something to the people that got in our way the first time’, but again tricky, made under tricky circumstances.
“While we were making the album we knew we were under the comedy anvil, you know,” he continues. “The second album (2003’s Cast Of Thousands) was really difficult because we went back into the same studio with the same producer and assumed it was going to be a lovely experience, like the first time, but we hadn’t written all the songs so it was right into a pressure cooker and probably at times we got very irritating to adhere to the cliché of the difficult second album, yeah. Leaders was the first one we made ourselves so there was that pressure, you know?
“Having the confidence to start recording and producing things on your own without any outside opinions was really tricky. And then the last album, again we had no record label while we were making it. So this is the first time that we’ve started a record knowing it’s going to come out, knowing that we’ve got a large audience waiting for it so, in that respect, the only pressure was to make it good.”
Pete Turner agrees: “That was the difference, really, that was the main difference, knowing that a lot of people would hear it and talk about it because Seldom did so well. That was good. I don’t think it really ever worried us, we’ve been here just over a year, you know, and for me definitely it’s been the most pleasant writing experience we’ve had.”
Although most of the album was recorded here in Blueprint, its initial genesis began on a Scottish island following the end of their last major tour.
“We did some work on the road while we were still touring Seldom,” Guy explains. “We got some songs started, I’d say probably about three of them, and then we went up to the Isle of Mull almost directly off the back of coming off tour. We thought, ‘this would be a good chance to get something started’, and the main themes of the records were cracked in two weeks in Mull. That’s where most of the key lyrics were written.”
The first song to be completed was ‘Jesus Is A Rochdale Girl’, which appears on the album in its originally recorded form. Featuring simple lyrics and music, the song is a list of details Guy remembers from his life when he was 22, written with the knowledge of how things would unfold. Much of what lyrically flowed later was in the same vein. Songs about life and love, childhood and youth, coming of age, and coming to terms with the past.
“I’ve become self-referential in my old age!” Guy laughs. “There’s a line in the song ‘Lippy Kids’ that goes, “One long June I came down from the trees”. I mean it’s obviously about being a man so it hints at the evolutionary process, or Darwin’s evolutionary process, but also “I came down from the trees” refers to stopping hanging around in trees.”
How do you mean?
“I remember, very clearly, my mum taking me to one side one day and telling me that she was really proud of me and I didn’t know why. I was probably about 12 or something and she said, ‘Because I saw you stood talking with your friends and not running around playing games’, and she said, ‘I realised you were turning into a man’. And I was so proud, you know, But that very clearly is about that stage of your life, it’s your teen years, when you start discussing things and find out who you are and doing the ‘simian stroll’ (a lyrical image from the song) or not and meeting girls and all that kind of stuff.”
As it happens, Lippy Kids was the original working title for the album. Appropriate given that much of it is concerned with growing up and slowly maturing in Manchester.
“We’ve always, always lived in Manchester – all of us – but I recently bought a house where I grew up and moved in there and all the boys, being young dads now and all of us having grown up together – it’s twenty years next July that we’ve been a band together – and the themes that were coming through were sort of about that. I think, you hit your mid-thirties and if you’ve had a pretty wild youth – which we all have – you start making decisions to act a little more rationally, a little less impulsively. Or you make the decision not to, and that quite often ends in your dying young. And all around me there are examples of people suddenly considering the future and deciding to carve out a niche for themselves in the world and maybe grow a family and that’s what I’ve decided to do as well, that’s what the boys are doing. So suddenly you start identifying with what your parents went through with you and perhaps understanding them more, and for me that’s ended up being, getting closer to my family again.
“And in that respect I suppose you start looking at the things that you don’t like about yourself that you’ve always blamed on your upbringing, and you start forgiving your folks, and you start understanding where they were coming from. And it seemed, as those things were at the forefront of all of our minds, it seemed the honest thing to do was to try and write about them.”
Were you a lippy kid yourself, growing up?
“Yeah, of course, yeah,” he laughs. “It’s like at Hallowe’en some little bastard threw an egg at our window and it was a fucker to shift. But I was thinking, ‘I used to do that’, you know, because my girlfriend was quite scared and she thought maybe we were being targeted because I’m well known in the area. But I was like, ‘No, that’s what kids do’, because that’s what I used to do. And she was quite anxious and concerned about it and it struck me that, when we were kids, somebody would have leaned out the window and said, ‘I know where you live, Guy Garvey’, but these days you don’t necessarily know your neighbours or their kids so that breeds this whole fear thing that the Daily Mail loves, you know.”
What are his thoughts on modern Britain?
“I like its people, I believe in its people,” he says, after a pause. “I think its government are ignoring it again. I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I’m trying to find the silver lining and it might be that, having these arrogant bastards in, making cuts where they can’t be afforded to be made, it might help bring back some kind of sense of community, because there really hasn’t been one since Thatcher trounced it in the first place. But no I’m terrified, and one of the things that I was thinking about while we were making the album was trying to offer some help and some solace. And I think the best we can do as songwriters is concentrate on what we know, and what we know is growing up in the north... and the divisions within local communities can very easily be healed.”
Community is obviously important to you. You never really moved away from where you grew up...
“No, no. I always wanted to live elsewhere at different points, you know, but I think, I enjoyed being a part of that community – we all do really, we all get involved – and we thought that, we could do a lot more staying where we are, where we know and helping out than we could do by running round the world helping people, I’m sure.”
And are you very much local celebrities around here?
Guy puffs his chest out and mock-pompously declares, “Oh yes!”
Do you turn on the local Christmas lights kind of thing?
Turner turns to his bandmate: “We opened a citizens’ advice bureau, didn’t we?”
“There’s a plaque up,” Guy reminds him. “I think that was one of our proudest moments. I was a beneficiary of the CAB when I was 18 and I couldn’t get my benefits, so that kind of thing, yeah definitely, we all get involved. We’re giving a talk in our local primary school in a few weeks about, just giving the kids a bit of a gee-up, you know? Look what you can do from Prestwich!”
Turner: “We all do a bit really, (Richard) Jupp has done similar things as well. Community-based things and stuff, it’s a buzz. Yeah, a good laugh.”
Back to the new record. It opens both bravely and brilliantly with eight-minute epic ‘The Birds’, which is reprised towards the end of the album with an older, quavering voice singing the mournful lyrics.
“It’s a nostalgic song about somebody remembering the last encounter of a failed love affair and towards the end of the record, the reprise is sung by an old northern actor called John Mosley,” Guy explains. “I suppose we wanted to do that because one of the things we’re concerned with is that we feel it’s important to have respect for people of all ages. It’s one of the most ridiculous side-effects of pop culture that you can’t be old and you can’t be young, you know, according to British media. I remember seeing years ago a Persil advert, which was an old woman dressed in leopard skin and the tagline was, ‘If only everything didn’t wrinkle’. You know what I mean? And I thought that was so disrespectful! Shit!
“These are all stages of your life that deserve as much respect as when you’re at the height of your powers. We need to look after our old, we need to look after our young, so I suppose there’s a lot of that on the record.”
Elbow are famous for their musical surprises (think those insanely blaring horns on Seldom’s opening number ‘Starlings’). There’s some deliciously retro electronica on the initial version of ‘The Birds’ that completely transforms the song.
“We found a beautiful couple of old synths,” Guy recalls. “I found one in the window of Café Pop which is on Oldham Street, it’s like a retro clothes shop that sells old lampshades and flares and this thing was in the window and it was like a fascinating little toy – we try and get new toys every album – and the Hammond Sounder is this really rich old thing, it cost us 50 quid to buy, cost us 350 quid to fix because they don’t make the parts for it anymore but it has this bizarre repeat function on it, which really, we found it quite hypnotic so it made it into quite a few songs.”
Album closer ‘Dear Friends’ is probably one of the greatest songs you’ve ever written.
“Thank you, sir!” Guy laughs, raising his mug.
“That’s one of those songs,” Turner says. “You always have certain tracks like on… It’s usually a track like ‘Station Approach’ that you’re writing and it comes quite quickly and you know that it’s going to start the album, it’s just that’s where it is and you work from there onwards, and ‘Dear Friends’ was always the closer and it just seemed to work perfectly. Not necessarily the same way that we’ve closed albums in the past, which was important – you know with the whole album really – we wanted to sort of make a bit of a turn.”
Elbow will be touring barb with an arena tour in March, something of a radical departure for them. Presumably their appetites for larger audiences were whetted following their U2 360° tour support at Wembley last year?
Turner turns to Garvey and laughs: “That was amazing, wasn’t it? That was a really good gig ‘cause it came at the end of the whole touring – like a year and a half, two years of touring – and, you know, we grew up listening to U2 so we were at Wembley Stadium and we were all sat in a box watching them, and it was really emotional for us all to be there having supported a band that we’ve loved for years. I’ve got to say that, the 360° tour was like nothing else. It was ridiculous, it was incredible, amazing.”
Guy couldn’t agree more: “Yeah, it was absolutely fantastic. And they were great, they were so lovely, you know, and whenever we’ve been in Ireland since, if they’ve not been around, they’ve left us a crate of Guinness and some Champagne, haven’t they? It was to make, what’s that drink called – Black Velvet! It comes across that they’re mates as well.”
Speaking of staying mates, how have Elbow managed to sustain friendships after twenty years gigging, touring and recording together?
“When we were young men, it was a sort of Greco-Roman wrestle,” Guy laughs. “It was like you’ve got way too much energy and you always end up kicking each other up the arse and arguing. But no, it’s never been more difficult than stopping would have been, or considering leaving would have been. It’s always been good fun – luckily we all find each other very funny.”
So a sense of humour is a big part of being in Elbow, is it?
“Yeah, and also reacting well to sleep deprivation. Yeah, there’s a lot of that (laughs). And it’s, we all find it quite amusing luckily.”
Do you still party hard?
“Well, we would still drink like bastards, yeah! But we get lots of songs out of it... sometimes!”
Do you still write all the lyrics or does everybody contribute at this stage?
“I’m the only lyricist but certain tunes we’ll workshop, you know. It’s like, I’ll come in and run current themes lyrically, so it’s like, I filled nine or ten journals with lyrics and ideas for this record and sort of nearing the end I wanted to make sure that I had the balance right of all the things we were talking about so I had this stuck all over the wall and I asked the lads to go and circle anything that resonated with them. So in that way the lads are editors and the first point of call. It’s got to work for everybody, but I’m the only lyricist today but...”
Turner interrupts: “I think that will always be the case. I think we’ve all probably secretly tried at one time or another, but Guy’s just so good at it. I think it’s the first time ever that you’ve asked us while you’ve been tracking things but I think we’ve tried this another way and we’ve tried giving him ideas and stuff but... that’s definitely Guy’s department.”
Are you looking forward to going out on tour again?
“Yeah, yeah,” Guy nods enthusiastically. “It works out fine because you really enjoy yourself in studio and when you’ve just about had enough and you could do with doing a bit of travelling, it happens and then when you’ve just about had enough of touring you’re allowed to go home and go back to the studio and some semblance of a normal life.”
Turner: “That’s the great thing, no one’s more than three miles away from here so you do get a normal life. Actually, we were pretty lucky, we had three-day weeks where we’d come in and work and then four-day weekends.”
Guy couldn’t agree more: “I still can’t believe it’s bought us a house each, you know? It’s incredible. It’s very, very difficult to make money with music as well as do something you love. But...”
He shrugs his shoulders and laughs heartily. Then he takes a satisfied slurp of tea.

Soon afterwards, Hot Press is escorted into yet another room in Blueprint’s maze, where guitarist Mark Potter and percussionist Richard Jupp are awaiting with more cups of char. A friendly and cheerful pair, they tell me that they’re quite jealous of my hearing their album with virgin ears.
“We’ve probably not done what you did,” says Mark. “You know, just sat down and listened to it without thinking about mixes and without thinking about ‘this guitar needs to come up here’, so we’ve yet to do that and actually sit down and listen to it – try and listen to it – from someone else’s perspective.”
Craig Potter was meant to join us, but apparently he’s still tweaking away at the album upstairs.
“He really took the reins at the beginning of recording Leaders Of The Free World – the one before Seldom Seen Kid,” Mark explains. “At the end of it he didn’t quite have the confidence to mix it on his own so we worked with Tom Rothrock on finishing it but then going into The Seldom Seen Kid, he had total confidence to do it. And since then him and Guy recorded the I Am Kloot’s new record, Sky At Night, which is great because he just gets better and better at what he does. Faster at what he does, it’s almost now, a lot of this stage of making a record is looking at the back of Craig’s head and picking the right moment to stick your oar in. You know (laughs). But, Craig is so good now that even before you’ve finished saying something he’s already done it.”
Although they’re siblings, Mark claims that they see themselves more as bandmates these days.
“When Craig first joined the band I wasn’t very happy about it,” he admits. “I mean who wants their fifteen-year-old brother in their band, when you’re seventeen? But he was just so talented that there was no doubt, he had to come onboard. Yeah, it’s a funny one, I don’t really see him as my brother. We’re just a bunch of mates.”
Agreeing wholeheartedly with Guy and Pete, he says – and Jupp nods his agreement – that humour is the glue that’s held Elbow together these last two decades.
“We find each other very funny, especially on very little sleep and especially hungover. We find each other very funny, don’t we? And I think we’re lucky in that sense because I imagine some people hungover on no sleep would be a recipe for disaster. But we just laugh our way through it. And of course we know each other incredibly well.”
Of course, Elbow is more than just the five main players.
“We’ve had the same crew around us since the year dot,” Jupp explains. “Probably about 25 people in all.”
Mark Potter: “Yeah. And a lot of the people have worked with us for nothing for years and we’re lucky...”
Jupp interrupts with a grin: “We got rid of them didn’t we? We got rid of them and got the best in (laughs). Nah, we didn’t!”
Mark Potter: “Yeah, it really feels like a family. You know, and when we’re touring we all eat together, that’s important. It’s not, ‘Okay, we’re the band, we’re off for a meal’. It’s like, ‘Okay, have you got time? Are you done? Is the show ready? Let’s all go for dinner’. It’s not just us in and out, is it?”
Talk turns to the album. Although a few tracks feature no percussion at all, Jupp maintains that he didn’t feel left out.
“They just didn’t need it,” he says. “That was pure and simple, yeah, it was just that they sounded alright and it was exactly what the song needs so there was no point in shoehorning some drums or even percussion or whatever.”
Mark Potter: “It’s not how it works at all, it’s not like ‘you play drums therefore, let’s play some drums’, far from it, it’s more, we’ll be writing a song: ‘Okay, this song needs this sound, let’s go and find it’ and whether it’s a guitar or, often Guy will sing the sound or the lines, and we’ll go and find the right thing to play it on. There’s like three on the record with no drums, we will have tried drums and percussion ideas...”
Richard Jupp: “My favourite track on the album is ‘The Night Will Always Win’ which is, I was.. where was I? I wasn’t in studio.” He scratches his head. “I was on… honeymoon.”
After two decades of hard graft, they’re looking forward to the challenge of Elbow’s upcoming arena tour. Though they’ve yet to work out how to play the songs live.
“We haven’t tried it yet,” Mark laughs. “That’s one of my favourite things about what we do actually, once you’ve done the record, working out the live versions – because they often end up different. In an ideal world you’d tour your record and then record it, because the record would be better if you did, (laughs) you know, things evolve. But that’s not how things work.”
“It’ll be our first tour like that,” Jupp explains. “We touched on it, we did two shows at the end of the Seldom Seen Kid tour at Wembley and then a big hometown show at the MEN Arena which were a bit of a punt, we weren’t sure if they’d sell, but they all sold out so it gave us a taste for it really. And we were worried that – what we do is quite intimate, and the way Guy is as a frontman quite heavily relies on his interaction with the crowd and that. So as soon as we knew we were doing these arena shows we were like, ‘right, how do we make this different? How do we make the venues feel smaller? How do we make it still feel like an intimate Elbow show?’”
And how do you?
“It’s simple things like – the last two arena shows we did we put lights right down the middle rather than just on the stage so the crowd were lit and it just brought it in a little bit more. And that’s stuff we’re going to take to the next level on the next tour. We’ve lots of ideas to carry on that.”
They learnt a lot from their U2 support at Wembley.
“We were quite exposed on The Claw,” admits Potter. “It was fairly scary up there.”
Jupp bursts out laughing. “Do you remember Guy running around? It’s one of the first times he’s had a remote microphone. And he tried to do a Bono and run on the stage... and he got out of breath halfway through!”
Slagging aside, their love and affection for their heavy smoking frontman is obvious. As is their relief that he bears the brunt of Elbow’s collective fame.
“I mean, Guy is quite famous now, Mark shrugs, “and he’s very good at it. We’re lucky that when we come off tour, we just go home to being dads and we go round the supermarket. I get recognised occasionally and it is nice, you know it’s flattering when it happens but it happens to Guy all the time.”
Jupp nods his agreement. “It can be quite frightening almost, you know, we can’t really go out as five lads who go into town and have a beer and have a chat because people will want to speak to Guy. But to see Guy... he’s just a consummate gent.”
Mark Potter: “He’s just such a lovely man, he’ll never say to anyone, ‘I’m having a drink with my mates’, he’s got time for everyone. Which is a part of what people like about him. I find it weird, because… it’s just Guy.”
The guitarist turns to the drummer and shrugs his bafflement at just how far these five Manchester musicians have come.
“It’s just Garvey, you know?”

build a rocket boys is out now on Fiction/Polydor. Elbow play the Dublin O2 on March 31 with support from Villagers.