The Hot Press Cover Story: Elbow

Regarded as one of the nicest, most grounded blokes in contemporary rock ‘n’ roll, Guy Garvey doesn’t have much of a reputation as a hell-raiser. Perhaps he should.

“I’ve never gone on stage sober in me life!” the Elbow frontman proudly declares, taking a long satisfying slug from a pint of lunchtime lager to emphasise his point.

Big, burly and bearded, the eminently amicable and charming Garvey seems an unlikely hedonist. Wearing unfashionable spectacles and what seems to be a yellow fisherman’s waterproof jacket, he looks more like a permanently dishevelled sociology lecturer in an underperforming provincial university than a Mercury-winning rock star.

He’s reminiscing about the Danny Boyle-curated closing ceremony of the London Olympics in August 2012, during which Elbow performed a new song specially commissioned by the BBC for the occasion, called ‘First Steps’. He wasn’t sober singing it, but the Mancunian alt-rock quintet had to fight for their right to party.

“It was a massively surreal gig,” he recalls. “Word came down from the mountain that it was going to be a dry event until 10 o'clock. And I'm like, ‘Hang on a minute, what the fuck does that mean?’ There was no booze backstage until 10 o'clock, and I was like, ‘Says fucking who?’ People said, ‘These guys who produced this event, they produce the Superbowl every year’. I’m like, ‘And?! Tell them to suck my balls! I'm fucking nearly 40 and you're telling me I can't have a pint before we go on?’”

He scowls darkly at the memory. “So I kicked up an enormous fuss with the manager, the likes of which I've never kicked up before – it was quite a key issue for me (smiles) – and we ended up smuggling in two cases of Guinness, a shitload of whiskey, a shitload of vodka, and a load of gin, in Madness' flight case without them knowing. And then we got it in, and Brian May knocked on the door, ‘I heard you guys have got some beer?!’ Timothy Spall came and got leathered with me. Basically we were the toast of the town. Our dressing room was the Olympic party.”

Have you really never been on stage sober?“Well, I did it once in California,” he admits, grimacing, “but it was desperately uncomfortable.”

Sitting to his left, Elbow guitarist Mark Potter corrects him. “No, remember there was that Seattle show as well,” he says. “Oh yeah, Seattle,” Garvey nods. “I was nervous then, too. It was horrible.”

Bassist Pete Turner laughs: “Funny how we remember them instantly, isn't it? The shows with no booze.”

Garvey chuckles. “Yeah, I remember thinking that it's like there's a band member missing.” He raises his glass again. “Mr. Alcohol wasn't with us.”

Although keyboardist/producer Craig Potter and percussionist Richard Jupp aren’t sitting in on this interview, Mr. Alcohol is most definitely present. It’s a bitterly cold and grey December afternoon in Salford. We’re in a quiet corner of a pub called The Eagle, situated just a stone’s throw away from Elbow’s long-time base of musical operations, Blueprint Studios.

It’s been three years, almost to the very day, since your Hot Press correspondent last met the band, and the circumstances today are almost exactly the same as last time – an exclusive playback of their forthcoming album, followed by a 30-minute interview in which Garvey will do most of the talking. The only difference is that this time they’ve sensibly opted to do the chin-wagging in the pub.

“We nicknamed this place ‘The Downfall’,” Garvey confides, waving a hand around the bar, “…for obvious reasons.”

In December 2011, the album Elbow had just completed was Build a Rocket, Boys!, their follow-up to 2008’s million-selling, Mercury-winning The Seldom Seen Kid. Today is the very first day of promotion for their eagerly awaited sixth studio album, which they’ve literally only finished. Its title was decided just a few hours ago.

“As of this morning, the album’s called The Take off And Landing Of Everything,” Garvey informs me. “Oh, I thought it was going to be called Carry Her…em…something something,” I say.

The singer smiles. “Yeah, Carry Her, Carry Me was going to be title. We changed it for exactly that reason – because nobody can remember it!”

Whatever its title, the new album isn’t going to disappoint their legions of fans. Hot Press has just been treated to two playbacks, and it’s immediately obvious that Elbow haven’t rested on their laurels. It’s a musically smooth and progressive piece of work, only occasionally featuring their trademark blasts of brass, and showcasing some of Garvey’s most poetically melancholic songwriting to date.

Sticking with the alcohol theme for another moment, standout song ‘Lunette’ is partly a paean to the sheer unadulterated joys of smoking and drinking. “What can be said of the cigarettes smoked/ a prop for a joke or a mark on the clock,” Garvey croons, concluding that verse with, “Perverse as it may sound, I sometimes believe/ the tip to my lips just reminds me to breathe.” Later, he states, “I’m reaching the age where decisions are made on the life and the liver,” before confessing, “But Mother forgive me/ I still want a bottle of good Irish whiskey/ and a bundle of smokes in my grave.”

So you’re not planning on giving up your bad habits any time soon then, Guy? “Nah – as you can see!” he smiles, tapping his pouch of tobacco on the table. Although you do seem to be slightly worried about your health in your lyrics? “I’ve got the same concerns as any man with a poor diet and a bit of a penchant for that (indicates pint glass). It's got to stop at some point, but not yet. Actually ‘Lunette’ was considered as an album title as well, but it’s also a popular brand of menstruation cup.”

Did you know that when you were writing the song? “No, I googled it. I found it originally as an archaeological term for the arch at the top of a doorway. I was looking up a glossary of architectural terms, as you do, because I actually wanted to describe the back of a woman’s neck. And I was wondering if there are any romantic words in architecture and I found ‘lunette,’ which literally translated means ‘little moon.’ So I used it to describe the bottom of a woman’s hairline, which I think all blokes love, don’t they? So that’s quite a straightforward diary entry, that song.”

If Build A Rocket, Boys! was an album that took a wistful look back at Garvey’s childhood and adolescence, this new one seems slightly more concerned with growing old disgracefully as middle age beckons.

“I don’t know why I expected our generation to be exempt from midlife crises, but we’re not,” he smiles. “A load of my mates who were part of the ecstasy generation, but didn’t get involved, have got involved approaching 40. They started going to Ibiza and doing loads of pills and listening to this horrible music.

“These guys I've known for 16 years, and they’ll go, ‘Have you ever heard Skrillex?’ And it sounds like something they’d made up, and they’ll open their laptop and they’ll show me a video and it’s a club, and you can see the silhouettes of a few heads, and the screen flashes blue and red, and it sounds like this: ‘KKKKKKHHHHHHH!!!’ And they’re all stood round it like that (mimes Bez-style dancing). And I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?!’”

For his own part, Garvey’s found different new interests. “I suppose my mid-life crisis takes the form of spending a bit more time in New York, and indulging in a love affair with that place that I’ve had for the last 10 years. So there’s a lot [on the album] about that transatlantic hop, and it’s a lot to do with a long-term relationship of mine [with writer Emma Unsworth] which has run its course in the last few months.”

Oh, sorry to hear… He shrugs: “It’s fine, we’re both fine, we’re both happier for it. And there wasn’t any wrongdoing.”

They’ve at least agreed to divide their intellectual property evenly. “We still help each other with work. In fact there’s a line on the album which also starts the chapter of one of her books, ‘The way the day begins decides the shade of everything’ [on ‘New York Morning’]. She starts a chapter with that line, but neither of us can be sure who wrote it – so we still have joint ownership of a few ideas.”

The members of Elbow were all still in their teens – playing together in a lowly garage band under the unmemorable moniker Mr. Soft – when ‘Madchester’ was in full swing. Did they partake in the excesses of that hard-partying period of their native city’s history?

“Well, we were well into the music,” Turner recalls. “We were leaving school in 1990, when you had the Stone Roses album, and there was a lot going on, so we’d be hanging out listening to these tunes and stuff.”

Garvey nods: “Oh yeah, to be at the centre of the musical universe too, at that age, was fantastic. I knew more people with Stone Roses t-shirts than with the actual physical record. And you were one or the other. Stone Roses or Happy Mondays! It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, why not both?”

Are you friendly with any of those bands? “I’ve met Shaun [Ryder] a few times,” he says. “Mani was very supportive of us when we started up. I remember him very publicly shaking my hand and bowing, which was an amazing nod.”

Turner: “We’re on the same label as Ian Brown, and the day we signed to Universal – or to Fiction – Ian Brown walked up to us in the K-West [Hotel] in London and congratulated us, so that was a special day.”

Talk turns briefly to Shane Meadows’ acclaimed Stone Roses tour film Made Of Stone. “It’s fucking amazing,” Garvey enthuses. “It’s so good. It reestablished Ian Brown as a cultural icon. We went to the premiere. And I won’t ruin it for you, but there’s a slow-motion shot that starts and ends the film, and it just shows you exactly why it stuck in the first place. He’s just effortlessly cool. And open and generous of spirit.”

As it happens, Elbow have just released their own concert album and DVD. Live at Jodrell Bank was recorded in front of a 10,000 strong audience at the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory on June 23, 2012.

“I've not watched it,” Guy admits. “I've watched it,” says Turner. “I'm dead proud of it.”

You really haven't watched it, Guy? “No, not yet,” he insists. “I've literally got my head wedged firmly in writing and recording mode. I have to gear myself up and change all my filters for live. Once we're in the swing of things, it's fine. It'll be a good one to watch on the bus. I loved the day, though! It was great, we got to pick the lineup, all the bands that were on in the afternoon before us.”

So who else played? “We had bands like Field Music and Cherry Ghost. Willy Mason came over in the middle of an American tour, and Lianne La Havas, because when I first came across her stuff, it was doing a duet with Willy, which was fucking beautiful! But it was a lovely day. Lianne La Havas, first time I met her. She's a top bird. Absolutely love her! She comes over to me, obviously a little bit drunk, yeah, she comes over to me and the first thing she says to me is, 'Guy fucking Garvey, no way! Give us a squeeze!' And I was like, 'Yeah, you'll do for me!' She's absolutely great. She'll make somebody a fine wife!”

Although they’d been making music together for more than a decade beforehand, Elbow’s debut Asleep in the Back was released on V2 in 2001. While the album garnered them Mercury and BRIT nominations, they were still hardly overnight sensations and their hard slog went on. It took until the 2008 release of their fourth album, The Seldom Seen Kid, for the band to become commercially successful, and make the leap from playing smaller venues to selling out arenas. Now that they’re presumably a lot more comfortable financially, have their working methods changed?

“We’ve changed, but not because of the success,” says Potter. “I think Build a Rocket, Boys! kind of felt like closing a chapter on a body of work. So we wanted to change it up, somehow, when we went and started doing this record. One of the things we did was each take a different day off in the week, rather than all of us taking, say, the Wednesday off. So there was a different dynamic in the studio every day, because there was always one missing.

“And it worked really well, for a very long time, because you would do stuff with that other person in mind, thinking, ‘Oh, Guy’s going to love this when he comes in’, you know what I mean? Naturally different things get done when one person is missing.”

Garvey nods. “Plus it gave everybody – you know that lovely feeling when you’re supposed to be at school? And you can hear, perhaps a nearby school, and you can hear all the kids in the yard and you’re in watching The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. But yeah, your day off, because the rest of the lads are at work, you’d find yourself at 4 o’clock texting and ringing, asking, ‘How’d it go today, what happened?’ And what you always want to hear is, ‘Hey we’ve got something really good.’”

Potter laughs. “Or at least, ‘We’ve done something above average’.” Garvey: “Yeah, ‘We’ve done something listenable.’So unusual things [happened]. Pete supplied all the music for ‘Colour Fields’, and I turned it into a song. I did the same on ‘Honey Sun’ with Mark, did the same with ‘Real Life’ with Craig. So a third of the album has been made musically by individuals in the band, and that’s really unusual.

“There was another song we called ‘RPM’ – Richard, Peter, Mark. We’ve changed the name to ‘Fly Boy Blue’, but it was called ‘RPM’ as a working title because Jupp, Pete and Pott/Richard, Peter and Mark, that’s what they were called when they were at school. They were the founding members of the band sort of thing, so it was just the three of them working together again, and it definitely went in a direction that perhaps it wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Turner: “It's also just because if Craig's not there then we don't have someone with his ability. I mean we can all play a bit of keyboards, but when he's gone we don't really have that.”

Potter: “Also, we don't have the Pro Tools skills, so we had to sit down and work live, which is why that's a live recording.”

Turner: “It tends to build, because there was a day that Jupp wasn't there, and when we were doing that, we were kind of like this – starting something new so [lyric] ‘this night will always win’ came, and it just took a very keyboard led thing but there was no kit involved. That's why it was quite interesting, because you were a little bit restricted.”

For their last album, Elbow spent some time writing in the solitude of the aptly named Isle of Mull prior to recording. This time around, they headed to Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in the heart of the English countryside for their brainstorming sessions.

“Yeah, I do like writing in Real World, just for the otherness of it,” says Garvey. “It's like I'll get so much more done in a week there than I will in a week here, with all these beautiful old pubs and all my friends around.”

Why didn’t you go to Mull? “We didn't get away in that regard this time together, but really the Mull retreats were only if it was necessary to have an intense period of work.” Turner: “It was different, we'd go to Mull because we'd finished touring and there was this clear style, and this is kind of sneakily doing things.” Potter: “And Mull was as much playing each other the music that we were into, getting into the same headspace, and eating around the same table.”

Garvey laughingly interjects, “And getting high!” Potter: “Yeah! Getting high, having apparitions. And deciding what kind of record we wanted to make. And because we'd already started writing it on the road, we'd already done that.”

The fact that Garvey is now the only member of Elbow who isn’t a father was also a factor. Freer than his bandmates, he spent a lot of time writing over in the US. “For certain band members, relaxing and being comfortable is being at home with the kids,” he says. “So it's like, why would you be unnecessarily away from them? I think we did four weeks in all in Real World as a band, and other than that it was all written over the pond there in Brooklyn, in Greenpoint.”

Elbow recently covered Peter Gabriel’s ‘Mercy Street’ for his And I’ll Scratch Yours album project (he reciprocated with a superb version of their ‘Mirrorball’). Presumably they’re quite pally at this stage?

“He’s a lovely man, yeah,” Garvey nods. “Very encouraging. He came and listened to ‘This Blue World’. He was lovely, actually, he turned up with his children. He's got two boys now that are like 11 and four, I think, and he turned up in his canoe outside the studio window, and just paddled in. And it was a glorious summer day, and he's got a house further down the river, so he paddled down to the studio and I just watched him and his boys getting out of the canoe.

“So he always comes and has a cup of tea when he's around, and he says, ‘Can you play me some music? It's not fucking lost on me, you know, that Peter Gabriel comes in, listens to our stuff and nods his head and passes comment, do you know what I mean? If you told me that was going to happen when I was like 11 or 12… (shakes head disbelievingly) It's just magic. And I feel a real affinity with him.

“I like where he's coming from, he's done very positive things with his success,” he continues. “He's built an absolute cathedral to sound, it's beautiful. And generous of spirit, and he's fighting tooth and nail to keep it open, and it's purely out of love. And I like that he loved world music enough to make the most successful festival for world music, and the most successful label for world music as well. He's just a very, very big-hearted man, and it's a testament to him that everyone who works in his studio adores him. He's a great bloke.”

While the initial sessions happened in Real World, most of The Take Off and Landing of Everything was recorded in Blueprint.

“Yeah, the vast majority of it was done over there. It's just a beautiful space, such a lovely room. And we’ve got this lovely pub across the road.”

There are 13 tracks on the finished album, but how many songs were actually written? Potter scrunches his face and considers: “Between 35 and 40 I think we wrote, in the couple of years we've been working on this.”

Turner: “On Pro-Tools, we have sort of like a cull folder. A few weeks back, we went back to look at it and you can see things grow at different rates, and you realize why that one was discarded. You go back and look and think, ‘Well, maybe there is something that we did miss’. And you realise why some things didn't make it. And the fact that we had this period of time to live with it, and work on these things, means that we were definitely right. For us, there's no songs that any of us think are a bit weaker.”

Potter: “I think that's a first for us. We have never been as confident that an album is great from start to finish as I think we are with this one. On all our other albums, there's always been that one song, I think, that we've regretted putting on, hasn't there?”

Garvey nods: “Yeah. We'd never disclose which one, but we nearly always agree that we wish that tune shouldn't be on there.” Who’s the biggest ‘no-man’ in Elbow? “The biggest nomad?” says Garvey. “Oh, the ‘No’-man.”

Potter: “Well, we've all learnt, I think, to just sit back. If you're not feeling something, trust the other lads and go with it rather than putting a negative comment in.”

Garvey: “It's a remarkable thing, especially considering that all of the lads are fathers. Imagine that sort of bone weariness of a new father, to come in to work and be positive under those circumstances is really an achievement and, you know, when you're working on something and someone will go like, 'I'm really not sure about these drums, man' and you have to just go, 'It's alright, don't worry', and you realise how much you're worrying."

Turner: “It's like, if you've not been there and you come in and, like, Guy's done a vocal, or one of the lads has done something, and you listen through to it and you really wanna like it. I don't want to go, 'Umm, I'm not sure about that'. You want to like it, you want it to be right.”

Garvey: “I do a really annoying thing, when Pete's worrying. I go (sings) ‘Peeeeteeer, don't worr-eeee'. And he despises it. And me!”

There are a few obvious sing-along anthems on The Take Off and Landing of Everything. Now that Elbow are playing much larger venues, are they deliberately writing songs with big live performances in mind?

“You can't help but consider it,” Garvey admits. “But on the odd time that we have started one off with that in mind, we've ended up not liking it. So we've learnt not to do that.”

Potter: “But you do know when a song's good and is gonna make the album when you start talking about it in live terms, when you start saying, 'This is gonna sound great at Glastonbury’ or whatever.” Garvey nods in agreement. “Yeah, that’s true, but if anything's got arch intentions, you can just tell. And people are very polite, you know. We don't hear the negative comments.”

The ebullient Elbow singer takes a final gulp of lager and laughs happily. “Like, seriously, I haven't met a twat in 15 years.”

The Take Off And Landing Of Everything is out now. Elbow play the Royal Hospital Kilmainham on June 25.