Guillemots Aim To Show They’re No Fly By Nights
March 30th, 2008, 1:07 am Hobby Shops
Tucked away in the quiet back streets of Hackney, east London, is a building that used to be a synagogue, then an art gallery, and is now the creative hub where Guillemots have spent the past year rehearsing and recording their new album. The rehearsal room is an Aladdin’s cave: old furniture, electric guitars and amps; the big black metallic bird (made out of a shopping trolley and colander) that appears at their shows; a microphone dangling from a wooden beam.
“I lassoed it up there,” frontman Fyfe Dangerfield says as he shows me around. At the back, behind amps and cables, he is keen to reveal his prized treasure, a 100-year-old harmonium. When Dangerfield starts pumping his foot on the antique instrument a beautiful rich sound fills the vaulted room.
“The atmosphere in there is great. It’s so cool going in at one or two in the morning to play the piano,” 27-year-old Dangerfield says, his boundless enthusiasm edged with nervous energy as he fidgets endlessly. The unconventional space even played a part in shaping the sound of the new album.
“Mainly out of laziness we just set up a couple of drum kits and bass amps. The last album was very soft and dreamy and we wanted this one to be the opposite and rhythm-led. We played for hours with bass and drums and riffs. The room had an influence because it was really cold. And just the surroundings as well. Not being somewhere… glamorous.”
When Guillemots first came to attention in 2006, nominated for a Mercury Music Prize for their debut album Through the Windowpane, their music was worlds away from anything else on the shortlist. A collection of dreamy ethereal melodies, the Mercury judges called it “a superbly adventurous exploration of mood and melody – ambitious and imaginative”.
Apart for their track “Sao Paulo”, the album was composed by Dangerfield, a classically trained multi-instrumentalist who has played piano since the age of three and has perfect pitch. Two years on and their follow-up, Red, retains that musical adventure and ambition, but takes a 180-degree turn from the romantic dream pop of their debut. Aside from a couple of songs penned by Dangerfield back in 2003, the album is by all four band members.
“It was a very different way of working because for the first one a lot were songs that had been in my head a long time. The weird thing is, this one was scarier. None of us knew where we were going with this.
“There were four of us producing, Adam [Noble] as well. We learnt how to work as a band. It was one of those weird things, it just clicked – we learnt what roles each of us were taking and where to step in and step back.”
Tags: amp, long time, nfl, weird thingsRelated posts
