Interview: Richard Jupp from Elbow

Melancholic Manchester legends Elbow have just announced tour dates in Australia for this October and with that good news we also bring you an interview from yesterday with Elbow's drummer, Richard Jupp.

Read on to see what Jupp had to say about Elbow's new recording process, the wide variety of Elbow fans in Moscow and Latvia, the band's new stage dynamic and what the term 'album band' means. 

Just to start off with tonight, can you tell us some more about Elbow’s upcoming touring schedule? Nothing has been officially published about Australian dates, but we have heard some rumours over here.

Some rumours…well, we are coming over in October to play some shows. It’s not a really long tour, but we can’t wait to come back.

Yeah, we’re looking forward to it as well.

It will be great. I can do some surfing while we’re over there as well. Yeah, it will be nice.

It will definitely be the right time for that, it’s really cold at the moment, but by October it should start to heat up nicely.

Oh that’s good. Though actually, we’re a UK band so we like the cold.

So what can Australian audiences expect from these upcoming live shows? Any surprises in store, or the same sort of set up as last time?

It will be different...smaller, more intimate gigs are what we look to do…and what we hope to do really well.  Our LD Cate Carter is an absolute genius at making us look good. We’ve got new tracks to play and we’ll be getting back to The Tivoli in Brisbane and doing the opera house, I mean, how amazing is that. We’re just looking forward to getting over there.

That’s definitely a huge milestone here, for any band - playing the opera house. It’s a lovely venue.

Absolutely, absolutely.

So what kind of set list are you planning? It sounds like you’ll be playing lots of new stuff, but will you include plenty of the old hits too?

Oh, yes. Absolutely. We will definitely be playing the hit. It’s like a different journey throughout sets from when we started in…was it March? We’ve done some big arena sets, then we had the festival sets. So we’re kind of getting a sense of what works. I think we’ve got about five new ones and then obviously we’ve got the sort of mellow earlier tunes. But we’ll sort of see when we’re over there. It’s always nice to be able vary the set and try not to depend on the hit.

So you’ve played all over the world. Can you tell me about some of your different fan-bases and where you enjoy playing the most?

Um…fan-bases…it’s kind of weird, we were at Glastonbury this year and it was quite funny, I was backstage at the hospitality tent, we were hiding from the rain because it was sort of lashing down. And you’ve got all these celebrities and bands knocking about and the only person who said ‘oh my god, it’s the drummer from Elbow’ was this security guard who was about 55, lovely, lovely guy, but he was the only person who said ‘oh look there’s that guy from Elbow’. My wife was sort of, you know, sniggering a little bit, but I thought it was quite cool. So we stopped to have a chat or whatever. But then when we played in Moscow there was a load of 20 to 25 year old kids who were going mental at our stuff, which we found really strange. And the same in Latvia, people going absolutely mental, but they were sort of 20…22. It’s really weird because we’re sort of a middle aged band, literally a middle-aged band, and we’re still, you know, we’re still going.

Well to be fair you have produced a lot of new material as well, do you think that’s brought in a lot of the younger fans?

Yeah, I think so. I think it’s just…well, I don’t know what it is. When it hits, it hits. You just never know. When we brought Build a Rocket Boys! out, you know, the biggest tune, really, on that, was with the kids. So I don’t know.

So you guys have some new material that you’re going to play for us when you come over here…can you tell me about the ways in which you guys changed your writing or recording practises for this new stuff?

We’ve worked kind of….not separately, but we kind of worked differently. The track Real Life was pretty much written by Craig at home and then he brought that in. Honey Sun was written by Mark at home, he brought it in and we tried to put drums on it, some strings and some chords, but nothing would work. So what you hear on the record is his home recording, which is amazing. And also Colour Fields, which was completely written by Pete at home. So it was a bit of a departure for us as a band, but it kind of worked really, really well. One of us would take a day off during the week so there would be a different kind of dynamic. You know, so if I wasn’t in, I’d be writing at home, then on the next day someone else would take a day off. So it wasn’t all of us all the time, which was kind of good for us.

Do you think this new approach has created a more fractured or divided sound?

I don’t know. I think it was just a quicker way of working. Another major factor was that we had Danny Evans, our front of house engineer, which gave Craig a little bit of a break from us seeing the back of his head when he would be editing. That was…that sort of made it a little more old school, back to the gang mentality. It was just us five in the room. So I don’t know whether it was fractured, I think it’s just given us a bit more confidence individually and it also sort of brought us together even more. Because when you’ve got a day off you want to sort of get back into it. You feel like you’re missing out. And it keeps that hunger, d’you know what I mean? It kind of seems weird in hindsight, but at the time it worked really well. 

So Elbow has been referred to as an ‘album band’ by a bunch of journalists who sort of latched onto the term after Guy Garvey coined the term himself. What does this term mean to you and how accurate do you think it is?

I think it’s really accurate. I think for me, it’s that body of work. That old vinyl mindset. I mean, I was never a vinyl head, but I can completely see what the attraction was. It was almost like a ceremony, you know you’d put it on, plug your head headphones in and play it from start to finish and then you’d turn it over, and you’ve got another journey. You’ve got 10 or 11 tracks and you’d listen to them in sequence in one sitting. And I think that for us is really important - that you have a journey and do have a sense of an A and a B side. You want to listen to a track with a segue that goes into another track because every segue takes you on a different journey and sets you up for the next track.

But you know, with the sort of frenetic life everybody leads there’s never time for anything, so we want to produce something that could possibly stop you for 50 minutes, when you can just sit down and press play and be taken you to another place. I think it’s all about trying to block a certain amount of time out of this insane world with kids, jobs, work, mates, and everything. It’s like when you get a good book and all you want to do is sit down and read that book.

Yeah, from start to finish.

That’s what we want with our albums, for people to listen to them from start to finish.

I think people are doing that a lot more at the moment with the vinyl revival going on at the moment, but do you think all the downloading and all that sort of stuff has somewhat compromised this?

I think it’s made it a little more exclusive. What you were saying about the vinyl revival…it’s like a thing. But then you’ve got all the people who like to download one track, so there’s a market for that, but there’s also enough room for albums. There’s plenty of people out there. You know, I speak to a lot of people who download music and don’t really sit down and listen to music, but when I play them stuff, it’s kind of a benchmark. If they go ‘oh yeah, yeah that’s really good’, that for me is great because I don’t want them to get all serious about music…it’s like, okay, would you listen to that if it was played on the radio and if they say, ‘yeah’, well…these are the kind of people who use social media. And that way of marketing, it’s brilliant, you know, it’s out there and there are millions of people looking at it. Sorry, I’m rambling on here. Getting back to the point that I’m actually trying to make here; do your downloads, download your one track, stream it, whatever, but there’s also a lot of people who want to listen to a whole album.

There’s definitely options for everybody, maybe that’s why you’ve managed to break the 20-something market with all the downloading and social media press, so I guess there’s a silver lining, even if being an album band does become something exclusive to a particular demographic of fans.

Absolutely, absolutely. And also for playing live. People can travel, people can get to a lot of European festivals further afield and vice versa, so you get to see more people live and for less money.