Up At The (Mid) Lake

When the co-founder of Apple is front-row for your gig and tweets a request in advance you know you’re doing something right.
“That was such a random thing; Steve Wozniak at our show!” laughs Midlake’s Eric Pulido. “A friend came up to me backstage and said, ‘Hey! The Woz is here and he’s tweeted that he wants to hear ‘Roscoe’! So just before we played it I said, ‘This one’s for you Woz’. After the show we got talking and he’s just like us, he’s a music nerd!”

The soft-spoken Texan is Sligo Live-bound this month in advance of the release of the band’s fourth album Antiphon, his first as lead vocalist following the departure of Tim Smith in November 2012.
“I’m enjoying it, it’s obviously been quite a transition,” he muses. “It’s something that we’ve just embraced. We’re all getting along really well at the moment. It’s great playing these new songs. We’re enjoying this new chapter.”
Following the success of third outing The Courage Of Others and the live duties it entailed, the band spent two years writing until Tim announced his departure. Feeling he’d gone as far as he could with the outfit, Smith now performs under the moniker Harp, a solo project.
“I thought we could figure it out but at the end the songs were lost. We’d beaten them up so much and were trying to give them CPR but you just can’t do that,” explains Eric. “As hard as it was to let go of that material we had to take the good from it and say, ‘Ok, what did we learn? How do we do things now?’”
Antiphon is the result of a six-month burst of creativity. It’s Midlake, yet not Midlake.
“We had a broader palette of music with this record, more so than any of the others,” he notes. “I think we wore our influences on our sleeves in the past. This time we not only looked to our past, we opened things up. We didn’t sit down and say, ‘Here’s the map and let’s follow it’, we said, ‘Let’s sit down and be creative, have fun and see where it takes us’.”
The band have been successfully road-testing the new material over recent months on a jaunt, which included intimate shows in Cork, Limerick and Galway.
“We were really excited but also a little afraid,” he admits. “We didn’t know how people would react or if they would know who we were! We were so overwhelmed by the support and love from the crowds. We hung out after every show and had some pints and got to talk with folks, it was a real joy.”
Midlake previously played in Cork at a Live At The Marquee show in 2010 where Villagers warmed the crowd up.
“They’re great!” Eric gushes. “I don’t know them personally. We’ve met and I’m familiar with the music. They’re really wonderful songs. You end up doing a lot of festivals with the same people so sometimes it can be like a family reunion, that’s why I love doing them!”
Has he crossed paths with many heroes on the festival circuit?
“One time we were playing a festival with Bjork and I saw her walk across the catering floor, it was almost like she was floating!” he laughs. “I was thinking, ‘Don’t look at her! You’re not supposed to look at her!’ We’ve met Radiohead a good few times; they’ve been such a huge influence. I’m a fan of music first so I turn into a school boy when I see these people. I feel so fortunate that we’re in the same vicinity playing music.”
Following the release of the album the band hit the road in the States for a number of headline shows and a couple of dates (curiously) with Pearl Jam.
“Yeah, it’s kind of random!” Eric smiles. “Their bass-player Jeff Ament lives in Montana and came to one of our shows there, we got chatting after so it stemmed from that. Pearl Jam is one of those bands that I was unabashedly a fan of as a teenager. Growing up in the ’90s you can’t miss them. So it’s cool to be able to play with them and then sit side of stage listening to some songs that were the soundtrack of my high school years.”
If your teenage self could see you now!
“Yeah!” (Laughs)

Midlake play Sligo Live 2013 (October 23-28). Antiphon is out on November 01 on Bella Union.