Stereoboard Speaks To And So I Watch You From Afar Ahead Of Their Cardiff Show (Interview)
Monday, 29 November 2010
Written by Rhys Morgan
Before And So I Watch You From Afar played Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff (24/11/2010) I got to have a quick chat with guitarist Tony Wright, one of the bands guitarists, about touring, house parties and getting laughed at by Mogwai.
So this is your third night on tour now, is it starting to catch up with you? Are you nursing any hangovers?
No actually, we’re feeling pretty fresh for a touring band actually. We did a few Irish dates before we came over here and it was really great, it was really nice to be playing at home again. Before Ireland we had five weeks in America, during the summer we were in the studio recording whilst playing festivals on weekends and before that we were on tour, and before that we were on tour, and before that we were on tour.
Last year you played a massive 170 shows, which must have affected you?
Yeah, last year we played 170/180 shows and by the end of this summer we will have played not quite as many but almost, the best part of 150 shows. But this time we’ve been as far as America and Latvia, it’s been a fun summer.
You did some touring with Them Crooked Vultures earlier this year, now that must have been an incredible experience for you?
That was everything you could ever imagine it to be, and a lot, lot more. I mean touring with those guys that have played in bands that you’ve always looked up to all your life. It was incredible to come off stage and have the person saying, ‘great set’ to you, be the guy who used to play in Led Zeppelin or the guy who used to drum in Nirvana. There was one time where me and Johnny (bass) were waiting for a lift and the doors opened an inside were John Paul Jones and Josh Homme and John Paul Jones said ‘Hello Tony’ and slapped Josh and said ‘Look Josh, it’s the musicians, say hello!’ and it was like, fucking hell, I’ve just had my career choice validated by John Paul Jones.
Now I’ve read that one of your Belfast ‘home coming’ shows got closed down by police, what the hell did you do?
Well we were playing a secret gig, it was at an illegal gig that AU (Alternative Ulster) used to put on and they asked us to play. We knew that there would be 200 people there max. Which would be cool, we were planning on going down and playing all our new songs and then just as we were about to start the police came in, and they were pretty decent about it to be fair to them, but they told us we could play for 25 minutes, starting instantly. We ended up only playing one new song and we were half way through Set Guitars To Kill when the police started wading through the crowd, making people leave. We actually got shut down by police in America as well, on a day off. We ended up playing a house party, two actually, one probably being the best show of the whole tour, it was just so much fun. I remember the American bands saying, that playing house parties was where they carved their name out and they were telling us that we were so much better than they could hope to be. It was a huge compliment from these guys who are slogging just to get recognised. Those American house parties were so fucking cool, it was just so punk rock.
Obviously you are pretty devoid of lyrics, was this always the intention that you guys set out with?
It just really happened, we just kind of evolved that way. Me, Rory and Chris used to be in band together and I actually sang instead of playing guitar. And before that, me and Johnny used to be in a band together where I sang and played. But when the four of us hooked up to jam, it just felt natural to not have anyone singing and at that time there wasn’t anybody really doing it in the small towns where we came from. So we ended up being an instrumental band when none of us really listened to much instrumental unless it was dance music or classical.
You said that you’ve been in a band with lyrics and vocals before, but do you find it easier to write music when you don’t have to follow a lyrical structure, do you feel you have more freedom?
It definitely gives us a lot more scope for things. I can play guitar a lot better when I’m not singing. But it’s not something that we’ve ever discounted doing, the first album does have the track with the choir on it (Don’t Waste Time Doing Things You Hate), and so if it felt right we would definitely do it. We’d never be so closed minded as to say ‘we are an instrumental band, we will never use vocals’
I need to ask you about your song titles. Who is the overly clever person who comes up with them?
It is very much a band effort. It’s something that we spend a lot of time on, since we don’t have lyrics, we want to be able to put across some kind of message and we try to do it in the song titles. We try to leave them vague enough for people to find their own meaning in them, which is great because we get so many people coming up to us with their own interpretation asking us ‘is this what this means?’ and ‘is that what that means?’ and we’ll talk about it and tell them they got it spot on, because it means whatever you want it to mean. But some of them are very tongue in cheek: Set Guitars To Kill and Tip Of The Hat, Punch In The Face for example.
So talking about song titles, where did the name, And So I Watch You From Afar, actually come from?
Johnny actually came up with it, we needed a name and Johnny stepped up and gave that. There’s a lyric he really liked from a Team Sleep song, which is Chino Moreno’s kind of side project from Deftones, but it turns out he actually got it kind of wrong. But it’s really stuck, it’s done us well. People seem to either really love it or hate it, even if they don’t remember it, they’re like ‘oh that band with the stupid big long name’. You turn up to some venues and you get billed as some weird fucking names like, And So I See You From A Distance. Every time we play in Derry they always seem to put us in the past tense, And So Watched You From Afar but then I got bored and I went home.
So you said that none of you massively listened to post-rock before starting up the band, do your influences lie in slightly more obscure places?
We still tend not to listen to masses of post-rock, because we don’t want our own sound to get pigeon holed, there are loads of really great bands in the genre, but it can sometimes feel quite restricted. It’s like when people say post-rock they tend to imagine lots of beardy men and yes the majority of our crowds are beardy men, and we love them, but our influences are very diverse. I listened to a lot of punk rock and a lot of acoustic stuff as well, while Rory would like a lot of dance music and hip-hop and lots of obscure bands which I’d never of heard of, Johnny is in to his heavy metal bands and Chris is into his bands like, The Smashing Pumpkins. We all feel very passionate about passionate music, no matter what genre it’s in, music that’s honest, music that’s free. We really respect people trying to push the envelope, trying to do something new, whether it be a new way to play guitar, whether they’re playing the triangle a different way or just trying to write strange lyrics to paint beautiful pictures.
I really feel like you guys are doing that. In a genre where a lot of bands are influenced by the likes of Mogwai... (Tony cuts me off to talk a little about Mogwai)
Mogwai are a great band. When we were starting out, I worked in this bar in Belfast and Mogwai were playing there. I gave them a demo CD and it had the acronym on it, ASIWYFA, and they asked what it stood for. I was really reluctant to tell them because I knew they were going to laugh, but they promised they wouldn’t and I did eventually tell them, to which they started pissing themselves laughing.
You recently released a new single on the internet for free download, ‘Straight Through The Sun’, does this track mean there is new material coming in the form of an album?
Yeah, we have the second album recorded and it’s about to be mixed and that should be coming out in March next year. Straight Through The Sun won’t be on the record, that’s out as a standalone single, which you can get for free with some ‘pay with a tweet’ thing on line.
Last question, are you going to be playing K is for Killing Spree Tonight?
Unfortunately not, if you’d said before sound check then we could have had a run through it, but we’re all terrible musicians so we wouldn’t be able to do it without some practice. Well we’re all terrible musicians except for Rory. And Chris. And Johnny actually, those three just carry me.
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
We don't run any advertising! Our editorial content is solely funded by lovely people like yourself using Stereoboard's listings when buying tickets for live events. To keep supporting us, next time you're looking for concert, festival, sport or theatre tickets, please search for "Stereoboard". It costs you nothing, you may find a better price than the usual outlets, and save yourself from waiting in an endless queue on Friday mornings as we list ALL available sellers!
You did some touring with Them Crooked Vultures earlier this year, now that must have been an incredible experience for you?
