Well...

Interview with Paul from 65daysofstatic, 04 May 2010 - Newcastle O2 Academy

Nick:
You’ve just kicked off the British leg of the tour in Glasgow and Carlisle, it’s good to have you back in Newcastle. Any reason why you missed us out on the last tour? I had to go all the way up to Glasgow to see you.

Paul:
Really? well thanks! No, we keep trying to switch it round because we do tour a lot, we don’t want to have people get bored of us or give them reason to not come to the show. Because if we’re always going to be around every six months, if someone wants to go and see a million other bands that month, they might just skip it, knowing we’ll come round again. You’d have to ask our agent for the specific reason as to why there was no Newcastle show.

Nick: 
How does gigging abroad compare to back here at home? is it very different?

Paul:
If you put the show to one side, The day surrounding the show is a lot nicer in Europe, generally. You get well looked after, you kinda get spoilt really. Its not that the people here who organise shows, especially at our level are un-caring, everyone is always really supportive. In Europe it’s generally warmer and sunnier and they always give you amazing food, and loads of wine, all the time. It’s just really nice. There’s a lot less places like this, the Academy, They’re slowly making all the venues in England the same kind of damp… misery.

Nick:
What have you been given by the venue tonight?

Paul:
We got some ham and some cheese…

Nick:
Thinking about the fans, particularly the fans on the message board, does their obsessiveness worry you?

Paul:
There’s a bunch of devotional 65 fans, most of it’s flattering. There’s a girl we met last night who’s flown over from Japan literally for two shows, Carlisle and Glasgow. it was terrible because Carlisle was a really hard show, The PA wasn’t that great, it wasn’t packed. It was a tough show, we’ve never been to Carlisle before. We were really worried because she’d flown all the way from Japan, but last night in Glasgow was ace so that was fine. There’s another fan in Japan who always follows us for the whole tour, she’s always there. It can only be a flattering thing, that people care that much

Nick:
Speaking of Japan, what was the reason for “weak 4” just being released over there and not over here, was it just a record company decision, with different rules?

Paul:
Kind of. Japan have it really hard in a lot of ways, for music that’s not super massive music. Our record company would love to put our record out, but because of all the taxes and stuff, it’s often cheaper for the Japanese people to import CDs from Europe, so it makes really hard for the labels, so there’s a bonus on the Japanese edition of the album, and the single before the record that was only in Japan has helped them out, basically. Obviously, “weak 4” is on the album anyway,

and the second track will eventually emerge over here, so no one’s getting short changed.

Nick:
What was the inspiration behind the album title “We Were Exploding Anyway”? Having listened to you for quite a number of years, the sound has changed quite a bit, I wondered if there was any sort of “All or nothing” attitude behind it?

Paul:
I’m not sure I’d say “All or nothing”, more “all regardless”. We didn’t consider failure. It’s tricky. We’ve been asked that question a lot since the record came out. We never have those conversations. We had a lot of conversations about naming the record, but they were mostly someone putting forward an idea and someone saying “no, that sounds too pretentious” or “that sounds like another album” or “we can’t use that because blah blah blah”. It was always quite technical, we never really

talked about the concepts behind it. We’ve always been a little bit like that, it’s not because there’s nothing there and we’re just looking for stuff that sounds cool, it’s just that we’ve spent so much

time together and kind of learned to trust in our instincts, I suppose. So when we did pick that, we went through hundreds, it was so hard to find it. When that one was said, everyone just said “hmm..” and no one immediately hated it and we sat with it for a couple of days and

thought “it kinda makes sense”. We start to work out why as people ask us. I think it’s just because, for us, whether or not people are paying attention to us, we’d kind of be doing this anyway because it’s all we can do. It’s like that thing that we’ve always tried to do, to put to music, which is the thing that you have in your head that there aren’t any words for, that are wider and big and just trying to articulate them in a different way. I suspect everyone has that going on in their heads, it’s just people have different outlets for it, and ours is the music.

Nick:
How are you getting on mixing new and old-style Static together into the setlist?

Paul:
It’s good, the only thing is, we’d be happiest if we just played our new record. That’s what it was designed for and we’re really really enjoying it. Every night we’ve been playing it all, apart from the one with singing on, which should work live, we’ve just not had a chance to get to grips with it yet. We played it before the album came out, before there was singing attached to it, and I’m sure we will again. That’s suddenly fifty minutes of the set swallowed up. We’ve learned, although sometimes people complain that we don’t play for long enough, we seem to have realised that if we go past an hour 20, it kinda loses it’s punch. It’s all so loud and relentless…

Nick:
There’s only so long you can dance like a maniac…

Paul:
We could do it for longer and I’m sure people would keep moving. I saw Alec Empire once, it was great for the first two songs, it was just brutal slabs of white noise, but after the first two songs, it kinda got boring. It was so loud and so intense and relentless. Boring wouldn’t be the first word that springs to mind, but they’ve filled that space and there’s nowhere to go. But to answer your question, the old stuff fits into the set just fine, but we’re kinda rotating it.

Nick:
Are there any old favourites being dropped tonight?

Paul:
Dropped as in played? or dropped as in dropped?

Nick:
um… Not played.

Paul:
It’s hard to know what people’s favourites are. There are a couple of songs that unfortunately none of us like at all that people seem to have a soft spot for. We’ve learned how to play some of them, but they’ve not been getting much of an airing. You’ll have to wait and see tonight, that’s only because we haven’t made a setlist yet.

Nick:
There were a few cracking songs on the live album and on the bootlegs that have fallen by the wayside for the album. How do you decide which ones stay and which ones go?

Paul:
In the end, it kinda made sense. There’s so much more that no one will ever hear. When we first started writing the record for real, there were about 30 ideas which we properly scrapped, because they sounded like just 65, just the same old thing. They were perfectly good, but for that, it’s not what we wanted to do. On the live album, there’s a techno thing and a drum and bass thing. there’s like 30 ideas, some which evolved, some which didn’t, and we scrapped them. When it came down to it, that all felt like necessary steps to reach the next proper step. What we wanted was a whole version 4… or version.. 2, wherever we’re up to now. Like a proper restart, rather than a slight addition.

Nick:
You mentioned before, the song with vocals, that’s with Robert Smith. Are you planning any more collaborations in the future, or do you just wait for them?

Paul:
Yeah, we sort of wait for them to occur to us

Nick:
Is that how it came about with Robert Smith?

Paul:
Basically, it was really late in the day and we were in the studio in Sheffield with some other people, doing vocal ideas on different songs. Which in the end didn’t really work out. That whole process kind of started us thinking off on a tangent. “Come to Me” was as yet untitled, recorded and lacking a certain intangible thing. We just thought “maybe vocals on that”. A few more conversations later and maybe a bottle of wine, someone said “we could ask Robert Smith!” So we emailed him and he was like “I’ll give it a shot”. He didn’t come into the studio as we were right in the last days and it was too busy, so we sent some stuff to him. It came back on a CD in the post, and he gave us permission to do whatever we wanted to do with it, which is amazing because getting to know the guy over the course of touring with him, his attention to detail is insane. Every single lighting cue, every sound cue on that show, he knew about. He was in control, so the fact that he trusted us to do whatever we wanted to do was pretty good.

Nick:
The BBC have been using a bit of your stuff recently, on the Radio version of Slaughterhouse 5 and the Survivor’s trailers. Has that done anything to your popularity? Will you turning up on Attenborough’s next film?

Paul:
Not as far as we’ve noticed.

Nick:
Is that the kind of thing you have to OK?

Paul:
No, well, the Slaughterhouse thing was a bit more involved, we worked with the guy. It’s a radio play so the music is relatively low priority, but it’s really nice as we’re massive fans of Kurt Vonnegut. To be involved in that was a treat, really. We’d love to do more of that kind of thing. The Survivors thing, the way it works with the BBC, they can just, sort of, use it. They did ask us, but it was only to get a CD version from our label. Those kind of emails sort of come in and pass through all the time without necessarily happening. We didn’t really clock it. The first that we knew about it, I got a text on my phone around saying “dude! you’re on telly!” I didn’t see it for weeks, I kept missing it. It was quite exciting when I finally did.

Nick:
Are you looking forward to the home crowd in Sheffield?

Paul:
Yeah, a little bit terrified!

Nick:
Do you have a big local following?

Paul:
Yeah, Sheffield goes out of its way to scare you. Everyone’s so down to earth and unimpressed with things that you really shouldn’t be impressed with, which is great. Last time, for instance, we played Plug, and all day on the day of the show, Plug kept trying to make us move to the smaller room, because they’d only sold 70 tickets, which is nothing for a 1000 capacity room. They were terrified that they’d lose loads and loads of money. We were like “more than 70 people are going to turn up, it’s going to be alright”. In the end we played and it was sold out. It was like the biggest walk-up ever seen. Sheffield’s like that, it keeps you on edge.