Australian fans giddy with excitement over the impending arrival of Manchester quartet Everything Everything will be pleased to know that the feeling is definitely mutual.
“We’re actually really looking forward to it. It’s the first time in the country at all, for any of us in any way,” chirps frontman Jonathan Higgs, who first teased a potential visit in one of the band’s first Australian interviews last March, ahead of their official announcement as part of the Splendour In The Grass bill in April.
The four-piece arrive to play the festival and select sideshows off the back of their second album Arc, a winning expansion of their agitated art-pop that better claimed the heart as much as its predecessor did the head.
While their 2010 debut Man Alive dazzled enough to earn Everything Everything a coveted Mercury Prize nomination, critics pegged them as eccentric musical iconoclasts, a product of the internet generation that clouded their role as artful critiques of it.
Showing little clemency for genres or convention, they were certainly inventive but their jarring sonic sharp turns – combined with the whooping voice and abstract lyrics of Jonathan Higgs – likely scared off many. A situation that the band made a concerted effort to avoid for the release of their second album.
“I think we got to the end of the Man Alive ‘campaign’ and we felt that we’d been bamboozling people a bit and people thought we were clever or unique or quirky but they didn’t really feel moved by us,” says frontman Higgs. “We felt that we’d been bamboozling people a bit… but we wanted to make a bigger emotional connection the second time round.”
“I don’t know if that was our perception or if that was actually the case, but we wanted to make a bigger emotional connection the second time round,” he explains. “We just wanted to move people more.”
Mission accomplished it would seem if Arc’s UK Top 5 chart position just weeks after its release was anything to go by. Neither fans, cynics, nor the band themselves could have predicted such a feat based on the crafty evidence of their music. And while Arc demonstrates greater accessibility, Bruno Mars or Adele it ain’t.
Unlike the chart-bothering regulars the record found itself rubbing shoulders with, Arc was certainly the only album in the upper ends of the pop charts in recent memory to deal with “the arc of time.”
“The shape of civilisation and success in life and whether it’s we’re at the bottom of a curve or the top of a curve,” explains Higgs, whose songwriting reflects a personal interest in the “origin of life and the end point of life – on a big scale you don’t know where you are until a lot of time has passed and you can look back at it and judge it,” Higgs reflects.
To stoke his curiosity, the delved into Futurology, an alternative branch of studies that attempts to postulate possible and probable predictions of ‘what comes next’ based on what’s already gone before. If history looks at the past and social sciences studies, the present, then the discipline looks at both to map out the future.
“I got tired of not knowing enough about what was going to happen and obviously one of those ways to find out is futurology,” says Higgs plainly. “It’s fairly fantastical a lot of it, but it’s quite interesting to see how extreme someone can predict things – see how far they can push it. I take it all with quite a pinch of salt but it’s pretty interesting in the mean time.”
It’s certainly made for creative inspiration for the singer, with Arc becoming an emotional exploration of where mankind fits on the bell curve of history, whether ascending to its greatest achievements or sliding towards an inevitable apocalypse.
“I saw the whole thing rise/ I saw the whole thing fall” Higgs aches on the album’s penultimate track, ‘The Peaks’, while ‘Radiant’ goes “when every inch of matter is measured… you’re looking for whatever comes after.”
But pinpointing mankind’s trajectory isn’t so much the point as it is the uncertainty of knowing whether we’re all going to be saved or doomed.
“I think that’s it [the uncertainty] in a lot of ways – that I’m not sure,” Higgs ponders aloud. “In a lot of ways I think things are better than ever and in a lot of ways things are worse than ever. It looks as though could very easily go up and down, and they probably do both at the same time it’s just very interesting to try and place yourself on the scale.”
“I don’t know, I’m not a scholar, you can look at it through as an optimist or pessimist. My view’s fairly pessimistic but in some ways I’m quite hopeful too.” Something that can be seen in the more tender turns of Arc; ‘Armourland’ calls for capturing romance even as the world falls apart, while ‘Duet’ takes that theme even more literally.
“You can be my wonder in my time of woe,” goes one triumphant line in the string-led climax of ‘Duet’, even during an apocalypse of “sulphur howling” and “black caldera ash falling.”
Both, as Higgs admits, are an example of songs on Arc that “are about virtually exactly the same thing, it’s just a slightly different angle on it.” “In a lot of ways I think things are better than ever and in a lot of ways things are worse than ever – it’s just very interesting to try and place yourself on the scale.”
“Lyrically, I guess I had a handful of things on my mind – and I wanted to keep referring back to those things across songs and within songs – but there would be different focuses for each song.”
This new methodology also marks the subtle but important shift in Arc, a new musical focus to “care less about fiddly notes and trying to surprise people all the time,” as Higgs puts it.
For their second studio effort, the intention was not to have ideas clamouring for space. “[We] tried not to jump around as much as [we] did before, trying to stick to the same themes and saying them within a song and [not] introduce too much,” he continues. “Make two or three points and make them strong in as beautiful a way as [we] could… it’s more focussed atmospheres or whatever.”
Everything Everything’s changes from Man Alive shouldn’t be considered a simplification though.
Barrelling lead single ‘Cough Cough’ demonstrated they’d conceded little in the way of inventive ideas, its theatrical turns curving across stinging guitar tics, grooving bass and a smart, singable refrain of: “That eureka moment hits you like a cop car/and you wake up just head and shoulders in a glass jar.”
So what other songwriters inspire such a distinctive brand of abstract lyricism? Radiohead for one, which should come as no surprise, says Higgs. “Thom Yorke I’ve definitely taken a lot of influence from, his sort of coldness… Morissey’s pretty amazing, I can’t say that he’s influenced me in a way that you’d ‘detect’.”
“Maybe Win Butler – Arcade Fire. He’s got something very human about the way he writes words and I’ve always enjoyed that sort of connection you get from him,” details Higgs, before modestly adding, “I listen to the same music as everyone else really.”
“I guess I’ve been writing lyrics for a long time and I’ve always tried to make them… not, really boring,” Higgs notes, bursting into a throaty laugh
On that same thread, Everything Everything could be seen as spearheading a wave of new bands whose mission statement is to ‘not be boring’.
“I think there’s definitely other people who are doing stuff in the same kind of world.” Higgs replies when asked to list his contemporaries. There’s close mates and fellow Mancunians, Dutch Uncles, “sort of striving for the same kind of intelligent pop,” along with “Django Django, Alt-J – all the other bands you keep hearing the names of who supposedly sound a bit like us.”
This loosely collected movement is “a pretty good thing for music really,” reasons the frontman; “that bands are stepping out of traditional comfort zones and trying to push things.”
Everything Everything’s invention has also won them the respect of their peers. Muse invited them to open on a European tour (“we just got a call one day, I think Dom [Howard, drummer] had checked us out”). They can also count Coldplay and Noel Gallagher among their fanbase, while Elbow’s admiration even extended to letting Everything Everything use their Salford-based warehouse, Blueprint Studios, to rehearse and record parts of Arc.
One of the lesser-known fans of the band is also the strangest. “Are you familiar with Take That in Australia?” quizzes Higgs. “Howard [Donald], one of the members – not the one that everyone knows but one of the dancing kind of members – he appeared earlier on in our career saying that he was a fan.”
Did the group have a knee-jerk reaction to the groomed boy band pop star liking their music? “No not at all, I think that’s pretty immature really,” responds Higgs. “We’ve got a lot of weird pop fans and a lot of weird prog fans and there seems to be a hell of a lot of crossover actually.”
“People that like the band [are] not very genre-specific, but I think we’re not really,” he continues. “In fact, our whole attitude is to ignore genre and clubs like that. We get a lot of people from the hip hop world and the rock world, I don’t see any reason why that’s weird.” “I think music is becoming less concerned with tribalism and genre… that’s really good for opening minds and breaking down pretty boring barriers.”
There’s an obvious allure to the way Everything Everything’s music defies categorisation and in the current musical landscape where the lines are continuously blurred, they see it as a cause for celebration, not concern.
“Kids don’t care if they listen to a pop song and then a rock song and then a hip hop song in a way that when we were young kids – you’d have five CDs in the house and you’d listen to the whole thing and you’d be a goth or whatever,” he continues.
“Now it’s just iPods and iTunes and the whole way of listening to music where you have just one song by one artist and it’s onto the next one; I think that’s really good for opening minds and breaking down pretty boring barriers.”
That includes the dichotomist view that the current fragmented trend of fragmented music listening is sending the ‘classic album’ the way of the dodo. “I think if people want to sit down and have a meal then they’ll listen to an album in the same way that you can snack on singles,” Higgs illuminates.
“I don’t think albums are in any danger; I don’t think anyone’s anti-album. I think it’s just a way of casually listening to music as opposed to seriously doing it.”
“A lot of times I don’t want to listen to a whole album of something and dedicate my all and sometimes I do,” Higgs states emphatically, saying the two can run in tandem. “Yeah, they are now. It’s been happening for a while – it’s always been happening, it’s just that dominant sales are in singles now – cause kids buy ‘em,” he adds light-heartedly.
So as a futurologist, where does Higgs predict the sound of music heading? “It would be nice if bands were to push things more and trying to forget about traditions. I think music is becoming less concerned with tribalism and genre,” Higgs opines.
Slaying tradition’s sacred cows and breaking free from the stoic, cyclical patterns of music history seems to be Everything Everything in a nutshell. A progressive-leaning band of futurist pop makers beloved by a member of Take That, who covertly storm the charts with an album that isn’t sure if civilisation is at its peak, its nadir, or a bee’s dick from either.
One thing’s for sure, when it comes to that arcing bell curve, Everything Everything are, rather unambiguously, on the ascent.
Arc is out now through Sony. Read our album review here.
Everything Everything 2013 Australian Tour
Friday 26th July – Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
w/CLUBFEET
Tickets: www.cornerhotel.com
Saturday 27th July – Metro Theatre, Sydney NSW
w/ CLUBFEET and VYDAMO
Tickets: metrotheatre.com.au
Sunday 28th July – Splendour In The Grass – SOLD OUT
North Byron Parklands, Byron Bay
www.splendourinthegrass.com
