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Intervju: Broken Records

groove has talked to one of the most exciting new bands around about not being a record label, signing to a great record label and great things to come.

Øyvind Rones 

Del på Facebook17.04.09

You could be excused for not knowing who Broken Records are, but that won’t last long. With a debut album expected in June, a fresh record deal with 4AD and a solid reputation as one of the most spectacular live bands around, this is one of the bands you cannot allow yourself to miss out on. This band performing A Good Reason at the Liquid Room, during the Edinburgh Fringe in August last year, needed to be seen to be believed. And they have the epic songsmith to match their epic sound, which promises many more magic evenings like that.

The album, Until the Earth Begins to Part, has been in the making for quite some time now, and the band are obviously keen to let people have a listen. But first things first - groove got the lowdown from the very excited and exciting band.

Most people don’t know you yet; can you tell us how it all started?

Broken Records was originally meant to be Jamie’s plan for setting up a small independent label and collective similar to King Creosote’s Fence Collective or Bright Eyes and Saddle Creek. The idea was to get a diverse group of Edinburgh bands and musicians together to self-record and release their own lo-fi projects, including my own badly recorded instrumental electronica, then Jamie would borrow these musicians to play on his own songs. However, we didn’t get round to being a label so Broken Records just became the band name instead. Unfortunately the name causes confusion, and we still keep getting people sending their demos to our MySpace hoping we’ll sign them!

Jamie and I used to play in a different band together at university in St. Andrews, so when we moved back to Edinburgh his brother Rory joined us on the violin. Arne was over here from Berlin studying at Edinburgh University, but we invited him to join us on the cello and he’s stayed here ever since! We had a couple of friends from St. Andrews playing bass and drums with us for a while but they left to pursue other careers. We finally settled on our current line-up in December 2006 when we were offered a support gig with another local band who were quite loud so we wanted to have a full band again to compete! I knew Dave (piano) and Andy (drums) from university and Jamie brought along Gill (bass) who I’d also studied music with at school, and it’s been the seven of us ever since.

What's it been like getting to where you are now?

It’s been a real struggle to make it this far. Because there are so many of us it used to be hard to even find time when we were all free to practice. We were playing lots of small shows all around the country while still trying to hold down some sort of job because the fees were barely paying for our transport costs.

We also had problems when a record deal we’d been working towards for about 6 months fell through at the last minute, which caused a lot of stress and a serious delay in getting the album made. Having said that, there have been a lot of good times and this is what gets us through. There’s still very little money to split seven ways but things are getting a bit better! We played at some brilliant festivals last year and got to play a few shows in Holland, which was very exciting for us.

When something goes wrong, something good seems to happen soon after so it’s not so bad. The day after the record deal fell through we were asked to play at the huge New Year’s Eve street party in Edinburgh. It ended up being a brilliant way to end a very tough year and we got to play one of the most enjoyable shows we’ve ever had in front of thousands of people, knowing we were signing to the 4AD label and going to start recording the album the week after.

Your debut album has been anticipated for quite some time now, how do you relate to the expectations?

I’m not sure we know how much expectation there is about the album. It’s very hard for us to tell how the album sounds from an objective point of view. We’re very pleased with how it’s sounds and we really like it, but I don’t think any of us can listen to it properly anymore after hearing it so many times during the recording and mixing process!

Certainly I think people who have been following us from the start do have expectations of the album to be good because they’ve been waiting for it for so long and it’s taken two and a half years for us to get it into the shops. I don’t think they’ll be disappointed though! Happily all the feedback we’ve had from people in the music press and radio that have heard the promo copy of the album has all been very positive so far!

Did you have a clear idea about how the album was going to sound, or did this change a lot along the way?

I think we had a fairly good idea of how it was going to sound before it was recorded, and out of the tunes we had ready to go we knew about two thirds of them would definitely make it onto the album. We knew we wanted to try and capture the energy and intensity of how the songs are played live, and the final decision on how it would sound overall would be dictated at the mixing stage by which of the other songs we would add for the final cut.

If we’d gone for an album largely comprised of the harder and faster songs we’d have probably boosted the drums and bass in mixing to give it a more violent feel, whereas if we went for a less abrasive set we’d have given the acoustic instruments like the strings, brass and accordion a lot more space to breathe instead. As a result we picked the 10 songs that fit together best and ended up with a good balance between the punkier songs and those with a quiet beauty.

There's seven of you in the band, how do the band dynamics function for you?

They function pretty well considering there are so many voices to be heard! Jamie writes the majority of the songs in terms of basic chord structure, melody and all lyrics. The rest of us then take that, write the parts for our own instruments and then try and arrange it so the parts aren’t conflicting and making sure there aren’t too many things happening at once.

We’ve learned from experience that everyone can write a great part for song but if they’re all played at once it can become a big mess, so we’ve gone back to some of our older songs and stripped them right back so the arrangement works better.

Other times someone else will come up with a riff on one instrument and the rest of us play about with it until we can tease a song out of it. For example, Nearly Home was based around Rory’s violin loop which the song just grew around, and A Promise was a really nice minimalist piece that Dave came up with on the piano but we didn’t know how to finish so it sat around for about 9 months until we all played it through together one day and something clicked. It’s also very useful having so many multi-instrumentalists in the band because if someone is struggling to find a good part on one instrument they can try something else which often ends up changing the sound and feel of a song.

I think every time I read about Broken Records, you are compared to someone completely different than the last time. What's that like for you? And who do you enjoy the most being associated with?

We usually seem to get compared to Arcade Fire, but I think it’s just lazy journalism. Someone sees us for the first time as seven people on stage with a violin and accordion and it’s the quickest comparison to make, even though we don’t really sound like them. We do like Arcade Fire, but it can be annoying when that’s the name that keeps coming up every time there’s something written about us. We’re often compared to Beirut, which is a bit more accurate for some of the songs, but still not a true picture.

I think our sound is too diverse for someone to say that we sound exactly like someone else. However, I was quite pleased when someone described one of our tracks as a bit like a Celtic Sigur Ros, and I don’t think Jamie was offended to hear a reference to Bruce Springsteen!

You've been labelled a promising act for quite some time now. What are your ambitions in terms of this, and for the band's future?

Hopefully with the release of the album we’ll start to make the move from being a promising band towards becoming an established band! For the future I’d hope we continue to make more good albums and keep playing shows to as many people as possible.

Do you have any future plans other than the album release?

We have a tour planned for early June when the album comes out, and then we’ll be off around the country on the festival circuit. We’ll see what happens after that!

Any plans to come to Norway perhaps?

Nothing booked in yet but we’d love to do more shows outside of the UK this year. We’ll let you know!

And even if it might take some time before we get to see Broken Records play Norwegian venues, we have the album to look forward to. And if you happen to be in the UK it could be a very good idea to look up the tour schedule and catch one of their shows.

Until the Earth Begins to Part is out June 30 on 4AD. Get a free MP3 download of album track If Eilert Loevborg Wrote A Song It Would Sound Like This here.

Photos: Ryan Dunn/Broken Records MySpace