Never mind the bucolics, here's Editors

The last time Hot Press shared a Guinness with Editors was 10 months ago in Belfast where they were on the same Tennent’s Vital ’06 bill as Snow Patrol.
Tom Smith, minus the luxuriant head of curls he has now, was in a state of hyper-excitement after hearing that U2, Bloc Party, REM and ‘Patrol man Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee had agreed to produce the band’s second album.
“Gary Lightbody said, ‘He really challenges you in the studio,’ which is perfect ‘cause we want to make the same leap that Radiohead did when they went from Pablo Honey to The Bends,” Smith informed us at the time. “As proud as I am of The Back Room, there’s a hell of a lot more we’re capable of musically.”
While perhaps not quite as dramatic as Thom Yorke & Co’s ‘90s growth spurt, the newly released An End Has A Start is indeed a very different beast to its 2005 predecessor. Gone is the claustrophobic menace of old – who said Joy Division? – to be replaced by a lavish wall of sound that Chris Martin wouldn’t kick out of bed for eating crisps.
“I remember that Botanic Gardens gig really well,” says Smith as we renew acquaintances – and pints of stout – backstage at the Dublin Olympia. “We were coming to the end of the summer festival season and, performance wise, had hit a new high. Getting the intensity we have across in a small room is one thing, but it takes a while to work out how you do it on a giant stage in front of 15,000 people who don’t necessarily know your music. When you’ve been playing the same songs for two years – like we had by then – you stop worrying about bum notes and concentrate on the performance.
“We were also on a high in Belfast after doing ‘Bones’ and ‘Weight Of The World’ with Garret as a sort of a test session to see if we got on – which we did spectacularly. It would’ve been great if we could have gone on and recorded the whole thing there and then, but those were the only songs we had finished.”
There are 10 tracks on An End Has A Start, which means Smith must have indulged in an orgy of writing between Editors coming off the road in September and going in to Meath’s Grouse Lodge studio with Jacknife before Christmas.
“Not being an Alex Kapranos type who writes a hit single waiting for the tour bus to turn up at the hotel, I came back from Istanbul and locked myself away for a couple of months,” Tom resumes. “Bits of ideas gradually turned into demos, which I sent out to both the guys and Garret and we started talking about where we were heading stylistically. The group decision was to not rehearse the arse out of the songs, but to bring them together in the studio where we could go off on a tangent for the afternoon and then listen back to see if we’d wasted our time or not.”
“Which is how we did the song we’re probably most proud of on The Back Room, ‘Camera’,” adds guitarist Chris Urbanowicz. “That was constructed – or deconstructed – by stripping it down and starting again with just keyboards and vocals. Some bands would have a nervous breakdown going into the studio with only seeds of ideas, but it works for us.”
Opinions on Grouse Lodge range from James Dean Bradfield declaring it the best place the Manics have ever recorded in to Kele Okereke saying its remote rural location drove him potty with boredom. What’s the Editors’ verdict?
“I can’t think of anybody less suited to country squiredom than Kele from Bloc Party,” Tom chuckles. “If you’d asked us beforehand, ‘City or middle of nowhere?’ we’d have gone for the pub-club-and-curry-house option, but Garret was insistent, and rightly so, because we absolutely loved it.”
“After eights weeks of horse riding, clay pigeon shooting and generally acting like a monied landowner I didn’t want to leave,” Urbanowicz rues. “Best of all was getting to act out my Jim Bowen fantasies when I was put in charge of the Bullseye night we had in Grouse Lodge’s own pub. Definitely my proudest moment outside of music!”
“Each time you help yourself to a Guinness you put a tick in the book and then at the end of two months realise that you’re a total alcoholic,” Smith observes wryly. “We’d switch off and then go back into the studio the following day and say, ‘Right, let’s fucking nail it!’”
It didn’t take Editors long to work out why Garret Lee is one of Planet Rock’s most in-demand studio men.
“You don’t get to the level where you’re able to say, ‘That’s shit mate, do it again’ to Bono unless you’re very, very good, and he is,” Chris says, conjuring up a wonderful mental image. “We’d work from eleven in the morning ‘til anywhere between two and three at night, but never all at the same time. There were a couple of days when Ed was drumming non-stop ‘cause in Garret’s opinion the feel wasn’t right. As a guitarist I was thinking, ‘It’s a drum, it’s in time, it’s in tune’, but I don’t have his producer’s hearing! I actually had a lot of fun with Garret because, like me, he’s into experimenting with sound.”
Before becoming Mr. A-List Producer, an orange-haired Jacknife could be found raising hell with punk provocateurs Compulsion.
“They certainly seem to have enjoyed rock ‘n’ roll life to the full,” Tom responds diplomatically. “The irony being that one of them has now devised a kids TV programme.”
Yes, if parents knew the shenanigans Sligo’s Sid Rainey got up to whilst bass-playing his way round the world, they’d never let their little darlings watch Underground Ernie on CBeebies. A show, incidentally, that’s voiced by former Everton and England player Gary Lineker.
Whilst unerringly upbeat in person, An End Has A Start’s flagship single, ‘Smokers Outside The Hospital Door’, suggests that Smith isn’t devoid of demons to wrestle with.
“The words have always come from the thoughts and worries I have about myself and the people around me,” he reveals. “I don’t really want to go into specifics, but a few things have happened since The Back Room that have made me think about the finality of life.”
Are we talking friends or family?
“A bit of both. One of the events, which was very tragic, involved somebody from my past. Although I wasn’t particularly close to the situation, it really resonated and made me ponder my own mortality. That’s the way it is as you get older.”
Tell me about it. Another standout track is the closing ‘Well Worn Hand’, which I have in my interview notes as “Editors go Andrew Lloyd-Webber.”
“That’s a bit flippant,” Tom growls, his sunny disposition clouding over until I explain that I’ve always considered Mr. Lloyd-Webber to be a master of the epically dramatic.
“I suppose it is a little bit operatic,” he smiles, bonhomie restored. “With there being so many colossal moments on the record, it was important to end on a more personal and intimate note. Chris and I did it live together in one take. There are some little mistakes and errors, but we left them in rather than dilute the power of the performance.”
I hate to mention the C-word in what is a family publication, but whether dramatically hugging his own body or spiritually transcending at the piano, everything about Smith’s Olympia performance screamed “Coldplay!”
“Coldplay were derided as Radiohead copyists when they first came along, and now they’re cited as the original of the species,” Tom muses. “Give it another couple of years and you’ll start reading about bands being ‘Editors-esque’. The only thing that bothers me is, ‘Have we made the best record that it’s possible for us to make?’ and the answer to that is, ‘Yes.’”