The Futureheads - Future Perfect

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When your first American tour is supporting 2004’s biggest UK success story and the plaudits are flying in at a frankly embarrassing rate, you’ve every right to be feeling pretty chipper. STARSANDHEROES catches up with extremely cheerful FUTUREHEADS singer ROSS MILLARD, on the road with Franz Ferdinand.

Hi Ross. Where are you and what are you doing?

We’re in Dallas, just parking up. We just drove past the grassy knoll! So we’re planning on going back down there for a bit of re-enactment later on.

How’s the tour going so far?

Amazingly well. We’ve had four or five shows – we played twice in one night in New York. We had a day off yesterday and went to New Orleans – just before the hurricane hit! It was weird though, New York was the first show and it was one of the biggest shows of the tour, y’know, three and a half thousand people. It was a really good one to start with – from our point of view I really don’t think it could’ve gone any better for us, there were people there that knew the songs even though we’d never played there before.

What was the atmosphere like when Franz Ferdinand won the Mercury Prize? Are awards something you worry about?

Well we saw them the day after, when they flew into New York, and they were totally blasé about it. They’ve got the Midas touch at the moment, so they’re like, “thanks very much, we’ll put that with the rest of them!” I think when you get things like that, it’s a nice touch to prove to you that people from more than one walk of life enjoy what you’re doing. But you can’t operate on that level where you say, well hopefully this’ll get nominated for the Mercury Prize or whatever – you’ve just got to do it and see what happens.

Is this your first time in the US? How are you getting on with the Franz boys?

We played South By Southwest in Austin in March, but apart from that it’s certainly our first tour of America. It’s amazing. It’s really nice of Franz Ferdinand to ask us to do it, we’re playing such huge shows – they’ve been really accommodating to us. We kind of knew each other before this tour, but it’s a massive favour for us – we’re getting on as pals now as well, so that’s pretty good. I think their approach to what they’re doing is similar to us. For the level of success they’ve already had, they’re really quite grounded about it all: they’ve got a good background in the more underground indie scene in Glasgow.

Is there not a similar scene in Sunderland? How is it for you in the old town now?

Sunderland’s been great lately for us. We went back and did a show a few days before we left for America – in the one venue that Sunderland had [Bar 36], which closed down after we played! That was amazing because we hadn’t played in Sunderland for a long time, so there were a lot of friendly faces, but also a lot of kids who don’t often go to shows in town. It was the same when Snow Patrol played the same venue last year before that big single of theirs came out – I think that was the first time the venue was sold out! The thought of turning people onto what’s going on in their local area is quite a nice feeling. It’s tragic that the venue’s closed down, but that’s always been the case with Sunderland – it’s always a little bit behind Newcastle in terms of getting things stated.

Does Sunderland have an inferiority complex compared to Newcastle? Did you find it harder as a result?

I think so, as far as putting bands on and having gigs, absolutely. We were ok though – the rivalry between Sunderland and Newcastle in terms of football and industry doesn’t really equate to the local music scene. Everyone really pulled together, a lot of bands in Newcastle gave us and a few of our other Sunderland friends a lot of good help. There was quite a nice community going – it’s too small to have any dividing line!

Have none of you felt the need to relocate to London?

No, I live in Newcastle and the others live in Sunderland. We’re not really [in London] very often, to be perfectly honest, there’s not much reason to live in London. It’s quite nice to have that anonymity to return to, cos you can get lost in London.

I’ve heard about something called the Detached Youth Project – what on earth is that?

Ah, that was where we all met, really. I studied A Levels in college with Jaff, our bassist, but we came into contact with Barry and Dave [Hyde, guitar and drums respectively] because of this youth project that was going on in Sunderland town centre. Its main aim was to try and get all the ruffians off the street and playing music rather than getting pissed on cheap cider or whatever…but it didn’t really appeal to those people. If those sorts of people are confronted with the choice of either hanging out with their mates on a street corner getting drunk, or learning how to play a guitar, they’re not gonna choose the guitar!

Didn’t they realise that they could play the guitar, with their mates, and get drunk?

[laughs] I don’t think they could compute at that level! Anyway, me and Jaff got wind that we could go to this place and basically rehearse for free, and meet some people who were like-minded, so we went down and bumped into Barry and Dave. I think they were in need of meeting some other people who they had a little bit more in common with! It’s a nice story about how we met, cos that project is still going, and I think the kids that go now have seen that we’ve put a record out and there’s something for them to aspire to. The project has cuttings of us on its wall…

How does the musical taste of the four of you differ, and how does that translate to The Futureheads as a whole?

Jaff’s classically trained, he likes his melodic stuff; myself and Barry prefer harder music, we’re big fans of punk rock and hardcore. There’s a lot of control in what we do, which comes from seeing other bands overdoing it too much – we wanted to make it precise but also emotional, without being wet! We saw a lot of local bands and decided it wasn’t for us: the typical guitar player that never does any singing, all the long solos, and the bass player who stands right close to the drummer…there’s too much cliché attached to all that. We just wanted to have a laugh! We were all best friends before we started making music together, and I think that comes across in the band. Even though we do have quite different tastes, we’re fairly accepting of what each other likes – and if we all do what we’re into individually, then it sometimes comes together in the end anyway.

Was it a conscious decision to eschew the “frontman plus band” ethos in favour of a more egalitarian approach?

Absolutely - it was really important to us, the fact that we didn’t want to be just four people who fit into those typical moulds. If there’s three people across the front all singing and shouting, it’s a lot more to look at and a lot less predictable. Also, the fact is that as people, we’re not really like that, we don’t fit those moulds and we all like singing a lot. It sometimes ends up in chaos, and those are the rehearsals where you just sit quietly, and look and each other, and say, “I think we should go home now!” Barry’ll play a riff and Dave’ll say, ‘Barry, that sounds like the ‘Top Gear’ theme tune…” – they’re really close brothers, they fight all the time, so it’s difficult sometimes for me and Jaff to come between that. Most of the time if we try and split them two up, they’ll turn on us!

The Futureheads’ weird vocal harmonies mark your songs with a unique stamp – do they evolve naturally or is it a drawn-out process?

We don’t map it all out on parchment or anything! Some of the block harmonies are worked out in a mathematical way, with augmented ninths and all that, and then there’s the other way where you just shout the first thing that comes into your head and hope it works! As long as they’re in a different rhythm to the lead vocal, they usually come out ok. It sometimes takes us a month to write a song…

Do you have a personal vetting system for songs, or do you get a man in?

No, we do it all ourselves – we never let anyone else come into the rehearsal room with us. When we’re at home we rehearse five days a week; we work really hard, and we’ve already got some new songs on the go, with a lot of ideas bubbling under. We enjoyed writing in the studio as well because you don’t have that time to put too many ideas in the pot. You don’t want to overcomplicate it too much, which is definitely something we’re guilty of doing in the past. We’ve all been through that process of thinking we’ve finished a song, and then playing it live and seeing people trying to dance to it and falling over! So we go back and re-assess it.

Do you look to any particular bands’ careers as a model for what you’d like to see The Futureheads doing?

A band like Blur, who constantly change what they’ve done a little bit…they’ve retained some semblance of their identity but not made the same record twice. That’s really important, and I think it’ll be really interesting for us to start making the second record. What we’ve definitely come away from the last six months with, is that we’ve got more of an idea of writing songs whilst thinking of how they’re gonna come across live. Something I’ve noticed about Franz Ferdinand is that they’ve adapted their songs so they work better in a live situation, made them a bit more taut and accessible. For us, playing 11 two-and-a-half minute songs can get a bit two-dimensional – you want to keep it interesting and visceral, and have something for people to engage themselves with.

I have to ask you about your remarkable cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds Of Love” – what on earth possessed you?

[laughs] It was a weird one for us to decide whether to put it on the record at all! We have rearranged it enough to make it our own, I think, and it fits into the record in context perfectly well. We’re considering releasing it as a single next year, but we need to sit down and talk about it – we don’t want to be pigeonholed as ‘that band who did that cover’. At the end of the day, you just have to have some confidence about what you’re doing, and if I can stand here and say I feel like we’ve made that song our own enough for it to be on the album, then it can be a single. It’s one of the songs that people go mad for…

You sound so enthusiastic about everything and that really comes across onstage.

Oh yeah, we’re having the time of our lives! You’ve got to have that attitude cos you might not get to do this again, or much longer, so play your hardest and best while you can. It sounds kinda cheesy but we’re all having a good time doing it and people seem to enjoy it when we play – and if we don’t enjoy it, then how can anyone else? No-one enjoys looking at a bunch of miserable bastards unless you’re Echo & The Bunnymen or someone! It’d be really hard to do what we do and be miserable. If someone told me five years go that I’d be going on tour in America with bands that were doing really well, and our band would be doing well too, I wouldn’t believe them…

Are you working with [former Gang Of Four guitarist] Andy Gill on the next record?

I don’t think we will, no. I think we might and up working with Paul Epworth again, who did the latter part of the first album – we have a really good relationship with him, and he brought out the best aspects of the band. The thing about Andy was, he’s a super-nice guy and everything, we got on well, but some of the production techniques he likes to employ didn’t exactly suit our needs. He has a very strict sound, and he also enjoys writing a lot with bands in the studio, and that was something we weren’t really open to because we’d had a lot of the songs for a year or two. The songs are pretty much done when we come to the studio, we don’t want to fiddle around with them.

You’ve made a point of singing in your natural Macum accents – how has that gone down with the Americans?

It’s like we [in the UK] have two accents – there’s London and there’s Scottish – that’s what they’re used to, so nearly everyone assumes we’re Scottish! Our accents aren’t really that broad, but when you listen to it in the context of a lot of other British music, it does seem quite strong. People get used to English music sounding like…Cockney, basically, or like Americans – but all that Liverpool scene, they don’t particularly sound like they’re from anywhere but Liverpool. That’s pretty encouraging – The Zutons, who we’re touring with in October, they have a similar approach to us in that they want to make short pop songs but mess them up a bit.

Is there any truth in the rumour that Jaff doesn’t use his real name because he’s on the run from the DSS?

No! [giggling] I’m amazed that’s a rumour! It’s crazy, cos I’ve known Jaff for about six years, and it’s a really, really boring derivation-style thing where he’s called Dave, and some of his friends would call him Jav, and then Jaff. People are always saying, “Is it because you’re seedless?” and all these weird things, and he’s always, “Naaah, it’s much more boring than that…” He’s not running from the DSS, not anymore anyway!

Charlie Ivens

The Futureheads’ new single “Meantime” is out now. The band joins The Zutons on tour throughout the UK – see www.thefutureheads.com for full details.

An edited version of this Q&A was originally published in The Fly magazine, October 2004 issue.