Record breaker

The story of Archive and their latest album, the unquestionably fine You All Look The Same To Me, is in fact the story of two bands, an unlikely meeting and a rush of inspiration. In one corner we have the South London studio duo of Darius Griffiths and Danny Keeler, who had already guided Archive through two albums of reasonably successful trip-hop. In the other, we have Craig Walker – better known to most around these parts as the principle light behind Dublin guitar trio Power Of Dreams. Not, on the surface at any rate, an obvious combination.

“I’d given up music for three or four years,” explains Walker down a mobile phone line from somewhere in Belgium. “I had a three-month-old baby and thought fuck it and knuckled down and did a regular nine to five job – just did the family thing for a while. I was sat in the canteen at work feeling a bit gloomy on a Monday, reading NME and I saw their ad. It said, ‘influences, the Doors and Pink Floyd’ and I thought, why not, it was the first ad I’d ever answered. I was the first person to answer and the guys came round that night and we sat and played music and talked about what we wanted to achieve. That was pretty much it”.

Had he been aware of their previous work?

“Yeah, because I was working in a Virgin Megastore in London so I was aware of them but I’d never had any real reason to investigate them, as they’d never had any real press in the UK. We just started afresh. Darius and Dan have only heard Power Of Dreams stuff recently, I’ve only heard old Archive stuff recently, but as soon as we met it was let’s just get fucking busy”.

So, was this the sort of music he’d always been dying to make?

“Absolutely, I’d got really bored of straight ahead guitar music. I’d run out of ideas, there was nothing to inspire me. I’ve been into electronic music since about 1989, when I moved to the UK. During Power Of Dreams days I wasn’t listening to the type of music that I was making. They’re from a dance background, very electronic, but it’s funny because my history has kind of influenced their sound now – they’ve never worked with guitars before, feeding them through a computer it’s so bizarre what you can achieve with it. I’ve been learning stuff off them and I’ve been introducing them to the Velvet Underground. Recording the album was a pure musical experience. We made the album we wanted to make, and discovered new music along the way, which is always a pleasure”.

You All Look The Same To Me is an album of massive scope, not just in terms of pure length (over half the tracks clock in at over eight minutes) but also in it’s musical approach, which recalls those Doors and Pink Floyd influences as well as more modern ones, such as UNKLE and Radiohead. It is, however, not a particularly happy album, as Craig agrees.

“The three of us were going through a rough time personally while we were making the album, there’s a lot of pain on there. It’s honest pain, there’s no bullshit. What you hear is what was happening to us at that time”.

The road to fusing rock and electronic music has been strewn with countless disasters (“Jesus Jones spring to mind immediately”), but this time it really does work. Does Craig have any idea why they’ve managed to get it right where so many others have failed?

“We’re not led, the worst thing is when a guitar band is led by the technology or visa versa. We’re not like that. For us, Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity was a massive inspiration, purely for the fact that you stick it on now and it still sounds more current than Fatboy Slim’s last album. It’s all about getting the right sounds and emotion. It’s also very human”.

Indeed, the album is stuffed full of ‘real’ instruments and musicians, even including one time Yardbird Alan Glem on harmonica on lead single ‘Again’. It’s an element to the trio’s music that Walker is keen to acknowledge.

“I’m saying Kraftwerk but at the same time The Who Live At Leeds is just as important with this album.” In a business when so many acts trot out the ‘this is our best album yet’ party line, the Dubliner’s pure belief in his record is not just admirable, it’s downright refreshing. “It makes more sense when you see it live”, he enthuses, “it’s proper fucking music, made purely for the fact that we want to create something special. It’s not pop music or shit music, or just another album”.