Everything You Need To Know About Rock Heroes Pulled Apart By Horses

Formed in Leeds in early 2008 following the demise of members’ previous musical endeavours, Pulled Apart By Horses dominated the UK circuit before branching out internationally, and spreading their wings through the release of three highly-acclaimed studio albums, their most recent of which, Blood placed at number 38 on the UK albums chart.

On the cusp of their forthcoming fourth LP and ready to return to our Australian shores for a handful of shows at the end of October, we caught up with lead guitarist James Brown to have a chat about his endeavours.

Musical Origins

“I think one of my main early memories is… there’s a program over here called Later with Jools Holland” Brown recalls when prompted about his origins in music. “I use to watch that as a kid, it was on quite late at night on the BBC. I saw loads of bands on that that totally inspired me to pick up a guitar and learn about rock music.” He goes on to say that he used to tape each episode and watch them over and over again.

“At college, I started speaking to the people who played instruments, and it was just a tiny little town, so nobody ever thought “Oh let’s start a band” so I started loads of terrible bands in college” he muses. “I guess I was just massively influenced by all these bands I saw on Jools Holland and I started buying singles and seven inches and I started learning about old scenes and old bands and the like.”

When prompted about having a heavy exposure to music from a fairly young age, Brown mentioned the sense of dualism between the different kinds of music that influences you during your youth. “It was either listen to all the pop on the radio, which I didn’t really like, or try and find stuff I did like, like these bands I was seeing. I went down the good route” he chuckles.

Starting the Band

Brown recalls that when he moved to Leeds he was in a couple of bands, but none ever became very serious. “I just enjoyed doing it and hanging out with like-minded people, almost like a club or something. Eventually I decided that I really wanted to pursue music so I started up a record label and put out a lot of bands and went on the road with them and released singles and stuff.”

[include_post id=”455925″] “Later down the line, after a couple of years doing that, I realized I wanted to be in that band that was having singles released and touring and stuff. This realization kind of hit me that I wanted to do this, and that I hadn’t figured it out yet. I was trying to get as close as I could to it by involving myself with a label and it just kind of clicked and I was like “I need to start a band…I need to start a band…”

Looking back, Brown believes he was trying to get as close as he could to music by involving himself with the label before he came to his realization. “It’s the same as anything; if you want to do something that you’re really passionate about, you strive to do it as much as you can to get close to it. I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but y’know, I get it now, I was doing all this stuff with bands, but it’s because I wanted to be in a band.”

“So I spoke to Tom [guitar, lead vocals] who was in one of the bands I released; Mother Vulpine. I met Rob [bass] through a girlfriend, and Lee, the old drummer, I spoke to him over an Internet forum” acknowledging how strange it sounds now that he’s relaying how they all came together. “Even at that point it wasn’t even a massively serious thing, I just wanted to be in a band again – I just enjoyed it.”

This prompted the idea that most bands never start out with success in mind, which Brown disagreed, explaining his take on participants of the music industry. “I think there’s two types of artists or musicians, and it’s people who do it for the love of it because they enjoy it or those that consciously want to infiltrate the charts and make it a career and make money and be famous, and that’s kind of the divide, and at the time I just wanted to do what I enjoyed doing.”

“I’m not like an angel that’s fallen from heaven or anything, but I did something I loved and wanted to do. We never assumed we’d get a record deal, but after about six months, suddenly people wanted to work with us, which was just completely bonkers” he stated, acknowledging the snowball effect that was in motion.

“If you really want to do it, you’ll put 100-percent into it, so I stopped the record label, stopped my job and everything and thought, right; I’m gonna do this now. Thankfully it worked out”.

Pulled Apart By What?

“I used to lie through my teeth about this,” he laughs. “I used to say that I lived in a pub called The Packhorse in Leeds. I was going through a bit of a rough time and I was sleeping in the flat above the pub. This was around the time the band had started and we rehearsed in the pub, drinking quite a lot, playing music late. I had a bar tab which was hundred of pounds”, he chuckles.

“So I used to say the name came from that “We’re being pulled apart by The Packhorse” but that’s not true; I nicked it!” he sheepishly confesses. “It was actually from a Radiohead song. There was a song they never released which had the line “feeling pulled apart by horses” and I loved that line and that idea of something being torn apart by animals. It was kind of absurd and silly but also quite graphic in nature. With the kind of band that I wanted it to be, I intended for it to be quite heavy and riffy, and at the time I wanted it to be a Jesus Lizard style of band and even though that didn’t really happen, Pulled Apart By Horses seemed to fit this idea I had in my head.”

“But then unfortunately, three years later, Thom Yorke did a solo song and released it and it was called ‘Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses’ and I got caught!” he says, laughing. “Everyone was like “Ohhh, that’s where it came from!” and they’d had the song for five or six years and everyone knew I was a massive Radiohead fan, so it was pretty obvious.”

Favourite/Influential Albums

“I’m talking a bit more about Radiohead here, but OK Computer is probably the one album I bought which I discovered through Jools Holland. I’d not really heard anything other than a few songs from The Bends, but I watched them play ‘Paranoid Android’ and I think I taped it and stopped watching it, and put the tape back on to watch this one song over and over again until the album came out a week later. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and how on earth they had made this record. It was just the most amazing thing I’d ever heard.”

Brown went on to say how the album helped to open his mind towards more contemporary rock music. “At that point I was still really into my rock, but this album showed me what’s possible in terms of rock. It’s essentially a progressive rock album, and it kind of opened my eyes, and then I discovered bands like Pink Floyd and stuff like that” he reminisces.

“But that really opened my eyes up to music and their influences and how they came to make that record. That’s definitely the one that sticks in my mind.”

We Like To Party

On the topic of their upcoming tour we asked Brown if he was looking forward to returning to Aussie shores, with a notable excitement in his voice.

[include_post id=”462101″]“It’ll be out third time over and…” he begins, before trailing off and subsequently cracking up. “We shouldn’t really call it a holiday but whenever we go to Australia we always call it a holiday because it’s always so much fun for us” he admits, laughing.

“It’s so nice to go so far away to an amazing country and it’s always good weather. The one thing we always think is “we’re going on holiday” but it’s not, we’re going to work on tour, but whenever we come to Australia we always have the best time. You people know how to party as well! We like to party” he chuckles.

Details On The New Album

“Funnily enough we’re kind of deep into the next record now. We just got a bit bored and we thought “why not we’ve got some time off”, and we’re gonna be playing some of the new stuff in Australia. We thought it’d be a cool idea to go out there and road test some of the new tracks we’ve written over the past months.”

“It’s really exciting for us because you do get bored playing the same songs over and over again so we’ll be playing a couple of new tracks out there and fingers crossed when we get back from Australia we’ll probably go in and record the whole album and start the process again!”