Being a student journalist can be a pretty unrewarding job sometimes. You constantly churn out article after article, spurred on by the naive notion that someone out there will read your piece and maybe even give a damn about your opinion. On rare days though, this job will make you feel like the dogs bollocks. The day I got to meet and interview White Lies was one of these days.
Somehow in the period between ‘White who?’ and UK album chart toppers I’d managed to bag a chat with the boys on the Birmingham Academy date of the NME Awards Tour 2009, thereby catching the band in the very midst of their ascendency. Truth-be-told, White Lies seemed more than aware that they’d out grown the student media talk circuit as when we entered their dressing room, the announcement of yet a another interview was met with a collective groan.
Nevertheless, both Harry McVeigh (lead vocals, rhythm guitar) and Jack Lawrence-Brown (drums) proved themselves to be professionals to the core and after a chat on the merits of tour catering, my dictaphone was switched on and it was time to roll with the questions.
You started out as a post-punk ‘Fear of Flying’ before making the switch to the bleaker, starker sound of ‘White Lies’. What prompted the change?
Harry: “Fear of Flying was very much a band we were in when we were growing up. We started that band when we were fifteen/sixteen years old and we started White Lies when we were nineteen. Between those ages you learn a lot and you change a lot as people and we just learnt through the experiences in that band how to write songs, how to record songs and basically everything you need to know to become a success in the music industry. Eventually we reached the point where we wrote some really good songs, ‘Unfinished Business’ being the first song we wrote as White Lies, and we decided to hit the nail on the head, finish the old band and start again as White Lies.”
You got picked up by Fiction records after your first twenty-five minute gig in the new incarnation. How did you cope with the prospect of having to write in the studio to complete the album?
Harry: It’s certainly very different, but I think it was easier for us than it would have been for others because of the way we write and also, because of the fact there’s a distinctive sound to our band. So yes, we did write five songs in the studio but it was very easy to make them good White Lies songs. I think sometimes it’s good to be under a bit of pressure to write because otherwise you just end up producing a ‘Chinese Democracy’ or ‘St. Anger’.
I always take it as a great sign when a band puts out an album that’s ten tracks long, I think it shows an absolute confidence in the songs on offer. Was this a conscious decision with your LP or was the track listing borne out of necessity?
Jack: It was a combination of both really. I think from an early stage we knew that the album was going to be ten tracks long for two reasons. One, we wanted to keep it concise and put out a real statement as an album. The other reason is that we’re just no good at writing b-sides we never finish songs knowing that they’re going to be b-sides, so we actually only have thirteen tracks in our repertoire.
The media at large have been keen to label your album as 2009’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’. Both LPs were released in the midst of a recession. What effect, if any, does the current economic climate have on your music?
Harry: It depends how the public want to perceive it. I see it as kind of unrelated. In terms of the Joy Division thing, they’ve never been a big inspiration to us although we get compared to them all the time. I suppose the comparison comes from the way I sing and partly the way we dress. It’s not really music that we listen to. We’ve never really been interested in songs that are connected to the political or the here and now. Our songs are based on feelings and emotions that span the history of time.
You recently celebrated a UK number one album yet you’re currently third on the bill of the NME Awards Tour. Does this disparity between status and billing upset you or is it a grounding experience?
Harry: No I think we’re a pretty grounded band. In May we’re headlining our own tour and we’re just looking forward to getting prepared for that. Doing things like this is really good practice for us. This is the first time we’ve played venues this size and you shouldn’t do that on the top of a bill, that’s just crazy. We weren’t expecting our album to go to number one and even if we were I still don’t think we’d have wanted to headline something like this.
The NME Awards tour is traditionally billed as a hub of creativity. Is this the case?
Harry: We get along very well with the other bands on this tour. We toured with Friendly Fires and Glasvegas before. We toured with Glasvegas in December last year and we’re touring with Friendly Fires again in America later this year.
Any possible collaborations on the cards?
Harry: You know I think Florence is a fantastic singer. If she agreed to do it I’d love for her to sing on one of our songs. [Lo and behold later that night: YouTube]
A lot of more morbid bands find their personalities tarred with a ‘suicidal’ brush by the media. Do you live out the strong emotions expressed in your songs or is this kind of typecasting a complete fallacy?
Jack: I think that it’s fair the media have picked up on that because it’s quite clear that our lyrics are fairly dark. Most artists and songwriters usually choose to vent those emotions through their art. It is one side to our personality but it doesn’t really sum us up as people. I don’t think you need to be on the verge of suicide to write music like that. That’s not how life really works and that’s not the right way to look at it.
You recently shot the video for your next single ‘Farewell to the Fairground’ in Nikel, Russia. How did the setting suit the song?
Harry: I think certainly with the Farewell to the Fairground video, the location fitted the song perfectly. It’s the kind of place you can go to and almost do what the lyrics are written about, but in a way that’s not cheesy.
Jack: Those videos have left a lot of people feeling completely confused. There’s such great YouTube beef surrounding them. You get some people leaving comments like ‘This is utter w**k! What is this fake David Lynch s**t?’ and others are will say ‘This is the best video I’ve seen in five years!’ and that’s exactly what we wanted to do.
Finally, what are your post-tour plans for the rest of the year?
Harry: Hopefully at some point we’ll celebrate the fact we’ve had number one album. We found out the news in Russia, in the middle of Siberia, in a town that mines nickel and so it was pretty hard to focus on that. It’s just going to be more touring for the rest of the year really.
‘To Lose My Life’ the debut album from White Lies is out now (MySpace)
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