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Everything Everything are the talk of the town, not just because they’re a group of four very talented and original sounding musicians, but because they’re flying the flag for a new breed of home-grown, Manchester music. The group were recently on the Manchester leg of the Shockwaves NME Award Tour when Lynda Moyo caught up with them for a chat...
All: Alright.
Jonathan: It’s ours for performing experiments on. We’ve taken the brains out of it so it makes useful sounds like this... (plays an ear piercingly horrendous noise)
Alex: I’m Alex. That’s as good as it gets.
Jeremy: I’m Jeremy. DA NAAAAAAA!
Jonathan: I’m Jonathan – HELLOOO!
Jeremy: Absolutely. It’s good that we’ve just had two dates.
Jonathan: Two sold out dates – it’s ridiculous. It’s our biggest show here by far.
Jonathan: We do (points to Jeremy) and Mick, our drummer.
Alex: I live in London.
Jonathan: No. Couldn’t afford it anyway.
Jonathan: It was smaller last year, similar though. It was pretty diverse – us and Hurts, Darwin Deez and local supports.
Alex: This year is much grander.
Jonathan: It’s bigger and more professional. We have to do far less and we’ve got a ridiculous bus. Last year we thought Hurts were funny because they had one, but there’s only two of them.
Jeremy: We had a humble splitter van.
Jonathan: We were trying to use the word ‘everything’ in a band name because we quite liked it and we couldn’t find a suitable pairing so we just put it with itself and it seemed to create something new and simultaneously very optimistic and strange, just simply using a very obviously well-known word.
Jeremy: It’s sort of all-encompassing, and then it’s twice. It’s got an overwhelming quality to it.
Jeremy: Yeah. Probably. We don’t listen to that much post-punk but I suppose it’s kind of filtered into all of the music in the last 10 years anyway really. We listen to everything. We really do.
Jonathan: That’s one of the crapper reasons that we’re called Everything Everything.
Jonathan: Erm...classical music probably.
Jeremy: We’ve earned ourselves this reputation so I don’t think anything would be surprising anymore.
Jonathan: Erm...Delphic?
Jeremy: That’s not surprising. They’re our mates.
Jonathan: Hahahahaha.
Jeremy: That ‘Happiness’ tune. Alexis Jordan – we like her.
Jonathan: Well. Shayne Ward. I liked a couple of his tunes actually.
Jeremy: I’d almost forgotten about him. Sorry Shayne.
Jonathan: I don’t think he’s gonna be reading up on us somehow.
Jonathan: Both. I started off trying to be a normal singer but with a lot of range. My voice wasn’t really strong enough to do the high stuff so I’d use a falsetto but then the rest of the time I’d use my normal voice. Going between the two just became so normal because I couldn’t really do anything else. That developed itself and now I’ve got much more ability, but I’ve learnt this style that I like and it feels much more natural.
Jonathan: I can actually sing really low too.
Jeremy: Much lower than I can.
Jonathan: I hope so.
Jeremy: How low can Toni Braxton go?
Jonathan: (sings) Un-break my heeeeeaaaart...
Jonathan: Yeah - bowed-up.
Jeremy: He means that in the good way.
Jonathan: We’d love to play there.
Jeremy: We were within a whisker of supporting Elbow there about 18 months ago - not that we knew it until after they’d decided not to have us. But that would have been a bit weird I think – I don’t think we’d have been right for it. It’ll be a long time before we’re there but yeah, we’d like to do that.
Jeremy: We might get there supporting another band. That’s usually how you do it.
Jeremy: It doesn’t annoy me. It’s just the way it is and the way it’s always been. There’s nothing automatically bad about music that sells a lot.
Jonathan: Everything just comes up on its own merit really. It’s a good song if there’s something to believe - even if it’s just that the person is a good singer. If it’s very false and you can see it coming a mile away and the song’s very clichéd it’s just pointless and boring.
There are certain mechanisms that we’ve become aware of about how you sell singles now and it’s very little to do with the quality of the song. More often than not the thing that is compromised the most is the actual song writing. But occasionally that mechanism is employed anyway and the song is good, like Alexis Jordan.
Jonathan: We did think about it but it’s very much a production tune and as a song by itself it doesn’t really work. It’s all about the sound of that synth in it really. (hums the song)
Jeremy: We’re highly unlikely to win the NME award.
Jonathan: Definitely haven’t got speeches prepared.
Alex: We have no thoughts that we’ll win it, or win anything.
Jonathan: Oh look, Beady Eye did win. That’s the acceptance speech. (laughs)
Jeremy: Yeah. Yesterday.
Jeremy: There’s levels of doing it. You can be in a band and have a job or you can really go for it. It becomes impossible trying to rehearse all the time and do all the things you need to do in order to succeed. You could continue to work your 9-5 and play in a band at weekends, but you probably wouldn’t ever go to the next level.
Jeremy: Almost one year before we signed.
Jonathan: There was a long period of having no money.
Jeremy: Followed by an even longer one that we’re still in 9laughs). We can actually pay the rent now at least, which for a long time we couldn’t.
Jonathan: The original I think, but we couldn’t re-use it because we rerecorded the song and had a different guitarist. We absolutely love the original one and we put a lot of work into it. With the new one we did what best we could with the idea and took it to the next level, without completely abandoning the original concept.
Jeremy: We’ll probably do a remix for them at some point. That’d be nice. We’ve played a couple of shows with them.
Jeremy: We have actually got one or two things in mind that we’re going to actively pursue, but we can’t really say at the moment what that is because the people in mind don’t know yet.
Jonathan: Er no, unfortunately not. Don’t know really what we could bring to the table (laughs). Perhaps somebody better than us....Michael Jackson?
Jeremy: That used to be the stock answer and then he went and died. Yet he remains the stock answer.
Jonathan: Bowie. David Bowie. That’s who we’re gonna work with.
Jonathan: Egyptian Hip Hop, Dutch Uncles – both up and coming Manchester bands that we’re really fond of. They’re both different and original sounding. Keep an eye on those two. Hopefully Dutch Uncles will be in everyone’s faces before long because they’ve finished their album and it’s really good.
Jeremy: Same goes for Egyptian Hip Hop because their record can’t be far off. We also like a guy called Jai Paul who was on the BBC sound of 2011 list and James Blake, we like him as well. His record’s out this week so I’m gonna go and buy that.
Jonathan: We do this sometimes – press interviews. Go for walks. There’s very little time that we’re able to devote to anything else. But we just do the normal stuff – go home and spend time with our girlfriends.
Jeremy: Wash dishes.
Alex: Wash our clothes. Make food...
Jeremy: I’ve been making homemade wine recently. It’s probably going to be an absolute disaster. It’s been fermenting for two weeks now so it must be 100 per cent alcohol. And there’s, like, three gallons of it.
Alex: We’ll have forgotten about that in a year anyway so you can just quietly pour it down the sink.
Jeremy: No, I’ll quietly pour it down your throat mate.
Jeremy: Oh my God. Find me a note...
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Saw this band play in the tent on Albert Square during MIF09, good to see ManCon have discovered them now. Loving the Smash Hits style questions.