We met The Joy Formidable backstage at Manchester Academy just before their sold out gig there on Saturday night. We’d just sat through soundcheck and it was all sounding pretty impressive.
How are you guys?
Ritzy Pretty good thanks Mike, and you?
Yeah great. I had to have official permission from the record company to speak to you now (laughter all round the dressing room at that)
Ritzy Absolutely. Some of the requests are a bit… it’s not a bad thing to have a bit of protection (more laughter) … a bit of a middle man
How’s the first couple of nights of the tour?
Ritzy Really good. It’s lovely to be back. We’ve been away for a long time, apart from Reading and Leeds. We were in the States before that and straight back again after. It’s end of year for us, we’ve had a great year
One of these days you’re going to have to live in a house again, that’s going to come as a bit of a shock
Ritzy I know, I’m dreading that. When we go home, the amount of post we go back to, post and laundry, so I’m always itching to get back on the road.. I get twitchy, you get accustomed to that sort of lifestyle. It’s nice to be here though, nice to be back. It’s definitely our last tour of the UK for this year, then we’re going to disappear for a little while and finish our second record
You never seem to take time off. I’ve never understood how you ever have time to record
Ritzy Have you seen these eyes ?
Rhydian That’s the thing, me and Ritzy we started off in our bedroom in North Wales, getting stuff down on the computer; we’re quite lucky we got quite a modest mobile studio. We always wanted that anyway, we didn’t want to just tour then come off it to write. It’s like a diary for us, we’re churning stuff out all the time
So what’s touring the States like then?
Ritzy It’s great, but I think it’s like touring anywhere, if you’re with the right people, and you love what you do. You’ve got to be a little bit more patient with the drives, doing 17-odd hours in the van at a time. It’s very cinematic and interesting. But you’ve got to really fucking like doing this. I think that’s why it breaks a lot of bands. It’s not for pussies
Rhydian Going to new places, meeting new people, but doing what you fucking love at the end of the night, that’s the key thing. We get off on playing music together
Ritzy We’ve got a lot of good stories
We have some debate about rock and roll stories, and Ritzy carries on – What is rock and roll? I think it’s about even when you’ve had no sleep, getting up and giving the people that have bought tickets the best night ever.That’s rock and roll to me, it’s not about throwing up in your hotel room
I saw you (Rhydian) on the Conan TV show diving into the drum, was that something pre-planned? (on the show, Rhyd ended the song by going head first through the skin into a bass drum, ending up with his feet in the air)
Ritzy Not at all, in fact, when I turned round and saw him with his head in the bass drum I thought he’d had a very nasty accident! My first thought was – Oh no, Rhydian’s fallen in and come to a sticky end! They were very surreal both of those experiences (they did appearances on both Conan and Letterman)
Rhydian TV stuff is quite strange, they have you there 15 hours to come down and do 3 minutes, they’re weird experiences
There’s a sudden influx of flies in through the window which Ritzy, to general giggles, claims is a sign that Rhydian and Matt seriously need to do some laundry
I ask them what are the strangest places they’ve ended up playing, and Rhydian is quick to say that they won’t diss anywhere that people have paid to come and see them. He does though go on to mention a certain corrugated ‘shack’ in Salt Lake City, and bizarrely it’s one of a very few venues in the USA that I also know, a well known and venerable all-ages place by the name of Kilby Court. We all end up agreeing that despite being literally a very unlikely looking tin shed down an alley on an industrial estate, it has a kick-ass sound system and a fabulous attitude, and Ritzy keen to point out that they had great crowd and real fun there.
Ritzy That’s about the most frustrating thing, that sometimes you haven’t got control of the sound, and like you say, it can happen in well known supposedly decent venues.
The stage set tonight, you’ve gone for it with the lighthouse. I was expecting to see goats, I thought there was some sort of connection, Ritzy Bryan and goats?
Ritzy We’ve done the goats…
Rhydian You’ve got it out of your system, although goats are Ritzy’s favourite animals
You were collecting souvenirs and giving them away?
Ritzy We’ve stopped for now. Fucking hell it was getting a bit silly, the amount of stuff, suitcases, that we brought back. And we’ve given it all away now, like we often do. We went to try and put our equipment in the storage box the other day and we couldn’t fit it in for birdcages, cats, see-saws, all sorts…and we thought we need to do something about this (for the uninitiated, TJF stage sets have been getting more and more elaborate, often resembling an over-stuffed Victorian drawing room) We’re just hoarders
I don’t know if I can ask you this, but I know you held out for so long doing things your own way before you eventually got signed, you always appeared desperate to do things your own way
Ritzy and Rhydian (in unison) – Still the same, still the same!
Ritzy We held out till we found a label that was ready to embrace us as we are, we’re delighted with how that’s gone
Last time I saw you was at Koko and you announced from the stage that there was an aftershow and just invited everyone, the whole audience
Ritzy I got in so much trouble for that, the place only held about 300 people, and I just thought fuck it, it’s only one night, and that’s the people you want there, people from the gig (the way she’s laughing doesn’t sound like she’s sorry, and in fact four hours later she repeats the performance from the stage in the Academy) She goes on – …..we did the same last night, and the people that were there were the fans, a lot of them people that have been there since the beginning, no scumbags, we’ve obviously surrounded ourselves with good people
And I saw on the forum, it said sign up for the street crew and you can have tickets and the band’s rider, did you know about that?
(They indicate the brightly lit and somewhat functional dressing room) – I think that would be one avocado, and some tap water, the kettle doesn’t work, lovely, a few pretzels….
You always seem to have yet another little black dress one, where do they all come from?
Ritzy I just like finding things. I don’t spend a lot of time shopping, we don’t have time, buy yes, it’s nice, a lot are from charity shops and you can add things to make them your own
Rhydian …and you hardly spend anything on your clothes, I think you just like finding a bargain
We’re going to be expecting another album then? How far along is that?
Ritzy Absolutely, although we’re definitely not putting a time limit on it. I’m not even analysing it. We’ve very much gone back to the period when we first got together. Like Rhyds was saying, we locked ourselves away in Mold, just writing and writing. Lots of splurging, experimenting, just really getting into it and enjoying it. Fighting as well, the passion and the getting the emotive element through. We’re going to wait and see what it all grows into. It will all start making sense at some point
Rhydian We could probably put an album out now, but it’s got to work as a body. We’ve still got some churning to do, piecing it all together, but definitely at some point next year
Ritzy – We’ve got a very big tour of the States in March, so we’ll see how it goes. Maybe a single or an EP before the album. We’ll just see what feels right
We talk for a bit about SXSW where they did themselves a huge amount of good
Ritzy I think the way some bands approach SXSW, I think you can approach it the wrong way, especially to put too much expectation on any one thing, you’re always going to risk feeling a little bit let down. It’s all about consistency, and heads down, and just ‘doing’. It’s never going to be just that one show that’s going to break you – we always laugh, we think fuck it, it’s just another show, but we play every show like it’s our last anyway. SXSW was just mental. After those five days we hadn’t slept and we’d played something like nine shows. We looked like we’d just been dug up….
I’ve way over-run my allocated fifteen minutes, so we wish them all the best and leave them to their ironing and fly-swatting
