Tellison front-man Stephen Davidson reveals the bleak sides of life on tour, the reason it’s all worth it, and how even
artists like Kate Nash bear an influence on his song-writing.
On the penultimate night of their extensive autumnal tour, the second since the release of ‘The Wages of Fear’ in June, Tellison played an action-packed show at Southampton’s famous ‘Joiners’ venue. They flourished amid the venue’s warm and frenzied atmosphere, storming their way through a set that contained largely newer material, and rarely paused for breath.
As front-man Stephen Davidson admits to me before the show, ‘It’s supposed to be an enjoyable experience, we’re trying to make it fun, energetic and engaging I suppose; generally there’s a lot of sweating.’ For a band that maybe, despite a very credible reputation, haven’t had the success they fully deserve in recent years, those Tellison fanatics that do turn out for the show, and in some cases travel up to four hours to be there, revel in the almost cathartic celebration of finally being together and seeing the band perform. It’s that atmosphere that makes the evening feel special, brings out the best in the band themselves, and leaves your voice feeling rather croaky and soar at the end of the night.
The end of the tour effectively draws to a close what has been a long year for Tellison and marks a return to form, as well as the hearts and minds of their fans. Despite remaining almost frustratingly modest throughout all of their dialogue, behind all of that self-conscious angst that characterises the noble spirit of their sound, they clearly draw on a lot of self-belief to have come this far, something that will only be re-invigorated by the success of the album and tours like this one. ‘Considering where things were a year ago, it’s great; this is exactly what we wanted. The last six months we’ve been doing what we’ve always wanted to do, which was be in a band properly, so in that sense it’s going really well.’ Looking to bring that into 2012, where they plan to record and release a further E.P, this should make a return to optimistic thinking and a sense of hard-earned contentedness over the Christmas break for one of the nicer and more down to earth groups on the live circuit.
Listen to the interview below, or read the transcript.
FULL INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Coming towards the end of the tour now, how do you think it’s all gone?
Good, it’s been kind of a weird one, there’s been lots of cities we haven’t been to for a while. We’ve still been to big cities like Sheffield and Cardiff, but also to some smaller places like Crewe and Preston for the first time. So yeah, it’s been a little bit off the beaten track, at least for us. The positive of which is that it’s quite fun and more of an adventure to go to places we haven’t been to in a while, and also, I grew up in Scotland so where I lived there weren’t many shows you know, ha! So when a band did come to town it was kind of an event, and you could certainly sense that in some of the cities. Which is obviously different to playing Manchester or London or Leeds where there’s several gigs every night.
But as winter sets in, we’re definitely feeling it, like our van is fucked! It doesn’t have any heaters or anything. So we’re all sitting there, wrapped up and shivering. But equally, it’s been good to get out again.
I know you play with an extra member when you play live, but do you find it difficult, with some songs, to re-create something that you’ve recorded?
It’s something that’s always in the back of our mind when we’re recording, but Pete Miles, who made the new album, kept on telling us ‘Stop thinking about what it’s going to sound like live, just focus on making the record sound good’, and we kept on saying ‘but whose actually gonna play that part when none of us can actually do this now, except after like sixty goes.’ So it’s something we always have in the back of our heads, but I think having Rick has made things work, I don’t think there’s anything that’s on the record that we don’t at least attempt live.
So what do you think someone coming to their first Tellison show can expect?
I’ve met quite a few people on this tour who’ve been dragged along by their friend and thought it was okay, and actually came to tell me it was okay afterwards, so that’s positive. It’s supposed to be an enjoyable experience, we’re trying to make it fun, energetic and engaging I suppose; generally there’s a lot of sweating.
One of the things I really like about our band is how we’re all normal people, and just the same as everyone else. I always liked with The Clash, they always talked about the people on stage being the same as those in the audience. You could take someone from the audience and put them in our band and you wouldn’t be able to say they didn’t look right. I think maybe we’re maybe unassuming to look at, but hopefully when we start playing, you’ll have a good time.
Wages of Fear seemed to go down pretty well, but having taken such a long time to make the record, do you think it met your expectations, with how it went down?
Yeah, definitely, I think it exceeded them. We felt quite marginalised and ‘out of the game’ for so long, playing shows but not really doing press, because to be honest no one really seemed to care and we didn’t feel like anyone was expecting anything. So our expectations were pretty scattered, we didn’t know whether it was going to go really well, or if any one was going to give a shit at all. I think we were quite insular making that new record as well, so it got quite weird, and making a record, listening to things thousands of times, you lose all perspective and we couldn’t tell if it was good or awful. So it was gratifying that some people seem to have engaged with it.
We always feel like we could do better, you do feel frustrated sometimes when you play to twenty people in Derby and you have to get back into your freezing cold van. But considering where things were a year ago, it’s great; this is exactly what we wanted. The last six months we’ve been doing what we’ve always wanted to do, which was be in a band properly, so in that sense it’s going pretty well.
You have a lot of literary references in your work, from Edith Wharton to Shakespeare and Keats, and I think one of your main appeals, personally, is how you take those themes and ideas and frame them in a modern day perspective for your audience. So I’m wondering what comes first, do you use that as a direct influence, or do you have an idea and then delve into that to enrich it?
I think it’s a bit of both really. A lot of literary stuff from this record was in there because it was on my mind, I was finishing my degree and I was living in a tiny room, and all these books were literally all around me, practically insulating my bedroom, so I couldn’t really help but have it to hand. But there are some songs, like ‘Edith’ for example, where really Edith Wharton starts out as the jumping off point of that song and then leaves her behind really, even if the title suggests it being very literary. That came about just because I read ‘Age of Innocence’ and just thought ‘Oh my God, how can this woman whose dead and pretty out of fashion know exactly how this feels like in 2010?’, so wrote down the first line and went off from there.
Then there’s ‘Freud Links the Teeth and the Heart’. I mean people pour scorn on Kate Nash’s lyricism, but I remember hearing that ‘Mouthwash’ song where the chorus is ‘I use mouthwash, sometimes I floss, I’ve got a family, and I drink cups of tea’ and it’s ridiculous, that’s mad. But equally, I don’t know whether it’s the way that she sings it, but it’s somehow more than the sum of its parts, I really like that very banal documentation of life, and yet it makes it romantic, it makes it meaningful. Which again then links back to ‘Edith’, and feeling that your normal life just isn’t that exciting, so I thought it’d be fun to write a song like that, which is where ‘Freud Links…’ came from. So as soon as you start talking about teeth, and dreams and stuff, people would go ‘Well, that’s a Freudian trope isn’t it?!’ and Freud doesn’t link the teeth and the heart, it’s a complete corruption of what he said, but I just thought it was funny to make it sound like it was some astute observation.
Is there anything you ever look to, not so much teach, but maybe communicate through your music?
Not at all, I don’t think I’m in the position to say anything to anyone! But I do like the idea of their being a dialogue between a listener and a band. I remember hearing that Idlewild song ‘Roseability’ and talking about Gertrude Stein, and I went and looked her up and found out more. And then there’s bands like ‘Stapleton’, and the singer Al Paxman writes very weirdly sort of hidden lyrics, with a lot of word play and puns, and is quite funny in some ways. So it’s very difficult to penetrate but actually if you find a lyric sheet, you kind of see and realise ‘This is what this is’. I like the idea of having to do a bit of detective work, not just being like ‘I love her, the moon is so shiny, oh look at the stars!’. And maybe there are a couple of songs on the first Tellison record where I feel I copped out a bit, lyrically, and didn’t push myself to write something that had that depth, so really wanted to do that more with this one, and make something a bit more real, and engaging in that way.
I mean the genre we write in, for the most part, is quite electro-poppy and people just go ‘Well that’s just trash’, that music’s not really anything, it’s not really intellectual or it’s just easy or whatever. So I like pairing that musical style with lyrics that do actually have a lot of depth.
Moving back to literature for a second, would you say there’s any specific movement or writer you’d align yourself to?
I think I’m way to derivative to do that I suppose, I’m bit of a magpie, I just find things I like, I’m really just a product of my degree I guess, doing Greek Tragedy right up to Postmodernism, and Post-humanism, which is something I wrote a little bit about when I was at University. But having said that, I do like that post-modern idea that everything is just a bit of a mess and fragmented but yet you can pick out relationships between seemingly disparate notions and ideas, you can stick them together and make meaning, and things don’t have to be immediately clear, but you can somehow pair things back and find truth or beauty and whatever else.
Do you think writing music, for you, has become easier, or more fluent, as time’s gone on, or do you find it more difficult to just completely start fresh and write something new?
I think it’s got harder, I do think I’ve got better at learning the craft maybe, you find a sort of skill set of tricks, ideas and techniques, but, as you say, it’s difficult to be fresh, and I also second guess myself a lot. There were bits with the first record which were completely instinctive, where with this record we’d say ‘Well, why? Is that boring? Are people going to be bored by that? Are we going to be bored by that? Am I bored playing this?’ so we threw away so many songs because we attacked it with a very critical eye, so I think our new record is a lot more mid-pace and steady, it’s very solid, but it lacks that spark of ‘Whey! I’m sixteen and I’m gonna turn on a distortion pedal!’ which the first record had, and I listened to it again a few times when making this one to try and work out how that came about, but I couldn’t, it wasn’t something I could re-create artificially.
Would you say you write very quickly, some people would say they write something in a day and that’s that, or do you find yourself coming back to stuff a lot?
I vary, ‘Edith’ was written in ten minutes on my own, I brought it to the band, played the riff and Andy and Pete both started playing their parts as it is on the record, so then that was that! And then there’s other songs that we’ll slave other. The last track, ‘My Wife’s Grave…’, we were never sure with, we tried it with different instrumentation, went back and forth, and I know Pete was a real sceptic for a long time, but in the end we hammered it out.
That’s weird, because that seems like one of the most minimal songs on the album.
Yeah exactly, it’s funny how you sort of try all these things and some songs we pretty much built brick by brick, and then get to the point where you think ‘Why don’t we just take all that junk out?’. I guess we’re quite lazy sometimes too when we’re writing, we’ll be playing for a bit and then we’ll get tired, I’ll be hung-over, or Henry will need to go somewhere. So for this record we did a lot of messing around with computers, sitting round a table making weird MIDI versions of all the songs and weird stuff happens with it, you make mistakes with it by copying and pasting something to where it shouldn’t be and hear it and are like ‘Wow!’, and mistakes make it onto the record, and we just pretend we meant it all along.
Are there any artists that maybe you hadn’t heard a year ago that have really grabbed you recently?
On this tour I’ve been listening to a band called Algiers, which is Will from Dartz! and John from the Maple State, we’ve played with them twice now, and they just put an E.P. out and it’s so good! I listen to it about three times a day, every day on tour, I think it’s wonderful. They both do some of my favourite bits of their respective bands and put them together and it’s really nice.
On the last tour, they’re not new particularly but they had sort of slipped through my fingers, I heard and then bought the We Were Promised Jetpacks record. I really feel like I should’ve stayed in Scotland sometimes, when I was growing up there there was nothing, Idlewild was ‘the band’! But I just felt like nothing’s going to happen here, if I want to do music I’ve got to go to England, to London particularly. But in the last few years we’ve had Frightened Rabbit, The Twilight Sad, We Were Promised Jetpacks and it’s kind of like my generation I guess, so I feel like maybe I should’ve stuck around and seen what could’ve happened!
What does the next year have in store for Tellison?
Well, I’ll be going back to work come Sunday! As will everyone else. But I think we’re going to do some Christmas shows in December. But I have been working on some new stuff, bits and pieces on tour, and then hopefully we’ll be recording, with a view to a release, in the new year.
But yeah, I think they’ll definitely be something in the next year, hopefully in the first four or five months, I don’t know if it will be an album, but maybe an E.P. or mini-album.
In the last five or six years, being in Tellison, what do you think it’s taught you about making indie music in the UK?
I guess you start off very naïve and hopeful, but my entrance into this world coincided with the world collapsing and being set on fire from every corner, so it’s very easy to become very cynical and become embittered, I know so many people who have been in bands and quit, basically most of our peer group of bands that started or were around when we were starting don’t exist any more, those people have proper jobs now. They often don’t come to shows, just because they hate it, because of what happened, it’s tough.
I think it’s made all of us quite strong and stubborn, but there’s been an awful lot of heartache and difficult decisions and sacrifices to be made because it’s not a career, I’ve got to go and work in a cinema for next three months to afford to have done this. When you’re shovelling pop-corn for the seventh day in a row you just think ‘What am I doing?!’, or when you’re having a shitty show, it can really feel pretty bad. But when you come back round you realise there are massive positives, and when you have a great show you just think ‘This is way better than anything else I could be doing’. You meet people along the road who say ‘I wish I was doing what you’re doing’, and I just feel ‘You know, you have a house! And a nice TV, and a car, and you’re going to sleep in your bed tonight, I wish I had what you had!’
I still feel pretty lucky to be able to do it, I remember coming to Southampton to see my friend’s band play in a pub, and coming past ‘Joiners’ and thinking ‘Wow, imagine playing here!’ and we’re doing it! We’ve played here a few times, we’ve played the freaking Guild Hall with Biffy Clyro, that’s mad! So it’s taught me to, despite the many difficult times, to stick to your guns and it will be worth it. You have to think like that, otherwise you quit, and you feel awful and would have wasted coming up on six years, but I don‘t think it‘s been a waste at all. I was talking to this girl at a show, and she worked for the NHS, and I was saying ‘It’s great that you’re giving something back’. And their our tour manager Ben said ‘Well, you’ve made records and people listen to those’, and I’m in no way comparing being in a band to working for the NHS, but you can forget that your music does exist in people’s lives, and you never get to see that. I’m still figuring it out, I probably sound more sure of myself now than I really am. But I’ve learned the value of that, and despite it all this is still what I want to do, I don’t want to be a lawyer! I just want to be in a band and write music, and if I get to do that half or a quarter of the year then I’ll still do it.
