Myles – So, welcome to Toronto for the second time at least.  The last time you guys came and played the Bovine Sex Club.

Matt – Yeah a bit of a…

M - … of a sketchy place.

Emma – Stuff hanging all over the ceiling.

M – Dolls parts…

Matt – The last time we were here Emma’s ankle was busted and she was on crutches, so she had to play the show sitting down, and we were in this hotel [The Metropolitan] and she couldn’t get around very well.  It was pretty frustrating.

M – That’s a pretty daunting staircase.  So, is it good to be in another land where the Queen is on your money?

Emma & Matt – Ahh!

Matt – Yeah, it’s cool.  Canada has been amazing.  We started in Vancouver and it was a sold out show there and then to Montreal.  We’ve all been busy and the responses have been great, people are really enjoying it which is great to see.

Emma – Last night was fun, we played in Ottawa with Spinnerette and they were beautiful.  Good fun; people seem to be picking up on the lyrics and the words.

M – That’s good.  There’s excellent packaging for your promo disc anyways.  It kind of reminded me of a regular dust cover for a regular LP that you’d see in the record store and I was just wondering if that was the purpose?

Emma – It’s just a stripped down version of what the real thing is gonna be, just trying to give a good impression.

M – I’m sure everyone is going to bombard you with questions about your bio because it’s pretty interesting but I’ll try to stay away from as many of them as possible but one thing I gotta ask is how did the iTunes thing come about as far as getting a featured single because that’s not an easy thing to do really especially on an international scale?  Did you guys know somebody, did it just fall into the right hands, or how did that play out?

Matt – Yeah, everyone says it’s a really hard thing to get but the people there just really loved what we were doing and just got behind it.  It was a shock to us.

Emma – Yeah, it’s just that word of mouth thing when people start chatting about stuff and you realize how far it can go sometimes.  Some one heard of it and all of a sudden we got a phone call saying you’re going to be single of the week.  Three months of work had to go into three weeks, and everyone worked really hard to get it out there.

Matt – It was a great introduction, you know because we had only just started.  It was a great way to introduce our self on a large scale.

M – Yeah, no kidding.  I guess going through the album a couple times now I can see why people might try and label you as a classic rock sounding band.  Would you guys be upset if people did that?  That’s not necessarily my opinion.

Emma – There’s nothing wrong with good classic rock.

Matt – It’s classic for a reason.

Emma – As long as there are other elements that people see in the record.

M – And the idea of the power trio is kind of out of fad these days.  It seems like everybody else has a two piece, or a four piece, or a ten piece if you’re Arcade Fire.

Emma – We’ve never really fit the mold to how bands usually work.

Matt – Yeah, you don’t see to many three pieces around all that much these days, or new ones coming out.  You know, it’s just we didn’t want anybody else in the band.  It’s tough enough with three, let alone…

M – Talking about not trying to cater or fit in with what other bands are doing I was just wondering if you guys have a place in NME or Britain?  It seems to be that what we get across the pond form Britain tends to be different from what you guys are doing.  Is that necessarily the case in Britain or are bands like you guys just not getting as much press as others?

Emma – It’s a weird thing in the UK, people seem to kind of know about us and I think people can be a little reluctant to throw themselves at something, champion it straight off…

Matt – because they don’t fit a certain mold of the time.

Emma – Yeah.  We’re not a sort of fad band; we’re not of the scene of the moment I suppose.

Matt – We’ve never really looked at the scene as a thing and written towards that kind of thing, towards what’s coming out at the time.  We’ve done our own thing and stuck to it, you know, and it’s working out.  I think it takes people a bit of time to pick up on it and they need a bit of back up before they can really put themselves behind it.  We’re hoping that will happen.  It’s definitely moving a lot quicker over this way than it is back home, which is a strange, strange thing.

M – Yeah, it is.  A lot of times in North America, maybe more especially Canada, we seem to be taking cue from the UK.  We kind of wait for the UK to say this is cool and then we wake up to it.  Bands like Arcade Fire made a lot of headway in Europe before they made it big in Canada.  I remember them playing the Danforth as part of a food festival that we have, really something small and a couple weeks later you hear of them playing places in Europe that bands dream of. 

Matt – I think it works both ways though because you get a lot of bands, American bands that come over to England that really struggle in their home country and it works the other way around.  Bands like Radiohead weren’t getting picked up in England and then they got a single on the radio in the States, and it helps the other side.  I think it works both ways – it’s kind of a funny thing.  Like the Stones, they took these American blues records and they made them famous in America. 

Emma – It’s always happened.

Matt – It’s a very strange, weird relationship.

M – So, my last question at least about the bio.  There’s one for each of you.  20 000 albums, I mean seriously, you can’t even house that much in the average apartment.

Matt – You’d be surprised.

M – Do you sleep on them?

Emma – I do have an obsession with buying music but I don’t know how many I’ve got.  That number just got thrown out there and I was like “well, if you want to put that down; put that down.”  I’d like to have 20 000 but…

Matt – It’s pretty wall to wall.

M – My aunt and uncle, they have 1500 vinyl, and 1200 CDs and I look at their collection and I say “holy shit”.  That’s a lot of material.  I can go over to their house and blow off the dust and throw it on the table.  But 20,000, I’m sure would be a bit of an exaggeration.  You played tennis with McEnroe?

Matt – Yeah.

M – Did he throw a fit?

Matt – No, he was super nice.  I was only young and I got picked out of my school – they sent around to pick out new young talent and I got picked out of my school.  I had these private lessons for a few years and McEnroe turned up to the center where we did it and kind of gave a little chat and stuff and hit a few balls with some kids and stuff.  Yeah, it was really good.  He’s such a rock star of the tennis world, he came in with his long grey coat and sunglasses and he’s like, “it’s a horrible day in England.”  Very cool, very cool.

M – I was hoping to talk a little about the album specifically.  I like to say that I love it and partly because it’s a little different from what I’ve been listening to lately, also just because it’s so well rounded and sounds very mature for a first effort.  It got me excited about the possibilities for the next album, which might be a little scary for you guys.  “Light of the Morning”: a great way to start off the album.  It’s got a real blues rock feel to it and what sets it apart form other bands introductions is that it’s a real riff-rock song no one’s really doing that right now.  Everyone’s got their three chord progressions, their quirky little key board riffs but it’s just straight out, balls to the wall rock ‘n’ roll.  Was it important to make that song as a statement, or did it matter to you guys?

Matt – That song was originally written… we had this thing where the smoking ban came in England, and we’d put on these club nights and anytime a band finished playing everyone would pile out of the club for a cigarette and the next band would start.  So, you would try and get people back into the room to watch the next band.  We had an intro song that just let everyone know that we’d started and then we’d start a proper set but then we started to love the song so much that it became something that we couldn’t leave off the record.

Emma – It started off as just an instrumental and then we just kind of worked it into a full song.

Matt – I was gonna ask about that because your (Matt’s) work on that track has to be one of the loosest feeling tracks on the record, you’re drum work on it is pretty extraordinary, you’ve got some great rolls and some good fills and it really captures the essence of being of the moment.

Matt – Yeah, it’s a good introduction to what we do.  We’re very much a live band and we really pride our selves on it.  It’s one of those songs that I think it’d be tough for another band to replicate, to cover it because it’s all done on instinct and we know when the little bits come in…

M – “Honest”: a beautiful tune and seated at track five on the album comes at a really great time just because you guys blow us away for the first four tracks and it’s a good chance to sit down and enjoy the album.  [To Emma] Did you write it specifically, or did you share writing duties?

Emma – We all share pretty much everything that is done on the record.  I think I came up with a verse and we kind of cobbled it together and got this song together.

Matt – We couldn’t work out how to do it though.  It was going to be a rock song, like a big heavy…

Emma – Big riffs, and ahhh!

Matt – But it just wasn’t working at all.  And then we took a break and sat down with some acoustic guitars and it was one of those things where it just started playing itself.  As soon as it started within that moment our producer started to set up microphones around where we were just sat, turned it on and recorded.  I t was only a demo at the time then we went back to try and re-record it when we were doing the proper session and we just couldn’t do it again.  It was one of those things that just happened that day.

Emma – We’d written the song as we were recording it, we wrote the lyrics to the chorus just before we were going to record it because we had to have something.  It was like now or never – it’s either going to be an instrumental part or a chorus.  We jotted it down and we were like, “right, this works”.

Matt – Sometimes it gets dropped in your lap, sometimes songs can take months on end to try and finish and sometimes within that second.

M – I’d say that you can feel the moment in it.  There’s some jangle in the acoustic guitars that most producers, if given the opportunity to re-do it would just re-do that part.  There’s some real charm in that at least.

Matt – Yeah, you can hear Russell’s necklace cracking against the back of the guitar.

Emma – We tried mixing it, our producer tried mixing it ten times just trying to get the sound and it was the last day after listening to everything, and he said, “I’m just going to play the original mix”.  It was just way better; it had all the energy in it of the moment.

M – That’s not something that’s easy to capture.

Matt – Yeah, we were very grateful that there were microphones set up at the time.

M – As far as the landscape of the album goes, you guys don’t dwell there for very long though.  You follow it up with “Patterns” which is another great punchy tune.  Again, when you’re piecing together the album do you need to follow up a song like “Honest” with “Patterns”?

Matt – We pent a lot of time with the track listing and how it worked, and we tried to look at it like an LP with two sides where we kind of hoped that would be the introduction to the next side.  I hate those records where you wack all those big songs at the front and you put all the quieter ones to the back of the album, I don’t think it necessarily needs to happen that way.

Emma – It’s good to mix it up and have something that runs smoothly but that you’re constantly surprised.

Matt – It throws a bit when you’ve just gotten over “Honest” and you get thrown into a louder, heavier thing. 

M – I gotta be honest, huh, that wasn’t even on purpose…

Matt & Emma – (laughing)

M – I thought that was gonna happen over the first four tracks.  “Oh shit, they kind of blew it all up at the front end”, and then you get to a song like “Patterns” or just past there to a song like “Impossible” or “Blood”, “Cold Fame” or any of the back end tracks and all I could think of was “holy shit, these guys actually got it”.  It’s very rare that you get to the back end of an album, like you said, and find a band that can carry their weight through the whole disc.  As far as putting together a complete album, did you guys ever worry about that or building the album did you just write it song by song and say that “whatever we write is gonna make it on there”?

Matt – There was a bunch of songs that didn’t get quite finished in time for the album, so it just represented that period of time of work.  We’ve been writing with this band or whatever since we’ve been kids – it was that period of time that we got to make a record, we got a deal with a label and those were the songs that were sat in that particular moment of time.

Emma – We’ve been writing together for a while and we tried testing a few ways of working, sometimes things just don’t quite work out.  We filtered it down from a few.

M – Just going trough some of the back end tracks, a song like “Impossible” I thought really shows you guys at your deepest or most thoughtful.  It seems like a relationship song in some ways and in other ways it doesn’t but you guys set up lyrically to allow people to read into the music, nothing’s set up to specific.  You don’t seem to be nailing home any real specific points.  Is it your intention to be vague, or are you just writing stream of consciousness?

Emma – It’s a mixture really.  We’re quite scared of letting everything go, like being completely on point and showing everything.  We have a tendency to lay our things up a little and have some double meaning.

Matt – I think, I don’t want to call it vague, but leaving it open so people can relate it to them selves.  If you very specific about what was going on like, “I walked down this street and I went in to this particular shop, and bought this chocolate bar” people think, “well, I haven’t done that”.

M – But maybe they’d like to?

Matt – (laughing) Yeah, but songs have a vibe… that’s what I love about listening to music, you make the song your own, you relate to it somehow, and for me that’s my favorite kind of music.

M – Speaking to what Emma said, I don’t know if it’s the right lyrics but… “You gotta be honest/ you gotta be guarded”.  When you said you gotta kind of hide a little bit.

Emma – There’s little clues here and there really.

M – I’m gonna call you guys out at least on one lyric but I have no idea who wrote it.  In “Blood”: “We aim to make a difference/ get a sense of meaning from our time here”.  Is that a statement about your lives, or the band, or both?

Matt – That’s Emma’s lyric.

Emma – A little bit of the mixture of the band and personal.  We were going through a bit where we had bad management for a little bit and we’ve moved on from that now but it was a struggle to get our selves heard.  A little bit of the back end of that mixed with the current situation.

M – One more comment about “Blood”, I know that Russell’s not with us right now but you guys really seem to let the reigns off him in the song where there’s an awesome lead that swells up a little bit and then he just rips off on the wah.  I’m hoping that that’s what I’m gonna see live when I see Band of Skulls.

Matt – Oh, yeah, yeah.  “Blood” is one of those songs that when we play it live jumps like ten times from what it is on the record, and one of my most favorite to play live.  You’ve got this great space at the end to break it down and build it up again.

Emma – Me too.  Its fun to play and Russell get s to go wild for a little bit.

M – “Cold Fame” is a great way to close out the disc for you guys as well.  Although I haven’t postulated too much on the lyrics, have you guys spent time postulating on your own lyrics because that’s what the song seems to imply in some ways?

Emma – That’s Russell’s part of the interview… he wrote most of the lyrics for that song, so we end up going: “so, what was it about?”  I’m assuming it’s about his whole idea of the whole situation that we’re in but it could be something completely different.

M – Do you guys feel that you’re on the precipice of that - is that something that’s possible or is that something you even care for?  I guess every band dreams of success.  Do you want to be something as big as Radiohead, or The Rolling Stones?

Emma – I’d like the music to be that well known, yeah, but I wouldn’t strive to be personally famous.  That doesn’t really appeal to me.

M – I think I picked those bands necessarily because they stand out amongst their piers just as great musicians and to be able to repeatedly be able to produce spectacular albums.

Matt – Yeah, sure.  Like Radiohead have done that great, where you can make a choice, you can choose to get yourself in papers and give a lot away about yourself and stuff, and then you can choose to let the music do the talking.  We’re more about the live shows and writing records.  No one really wants to be mobbed or anything.  We kind of just want the music to get as big as it can, and I know it sounds a bit cheesy but get as many people listening to it as we possibly can.”