There Will Be 'Blood': Pulled Apart By Horses Are Climbing The Ladder
Thursday, 28 August 2014
Written by Laura Johnson
Last weekend, Pulled Apart By Horses made their the Main Stage debut at Reading Festival, climbing another rung on rock’s ladder prior to the release of their new album, ‘Blood’.
We caught up with bassist Robert Lee and guitarist James Brown to discuss tackling one of world music’s biggest stages, how ‘Blood’ took shape and, naturally, who’s the mum of the band.
How did it feel going from BBC Introducing to the Main Stage at Reading?
RL: It’s an absolute honour. We’ve moved through the stages and it’s great.
JB: I think we got picked by Radio 1 to play the Introducing Stage in 2008. Back then you don’t think you might be playing the Main Stage in a few years’ time. So looking back now, it looks like we’ve climbed a ladder, really slowly, eventually got to the top, the Main Stage. It’s really bizarre to look back. Some bands can be brand new, first album and ‘bang!’ But we’ve worked and grafted.
I’ve read that you consider yourselves the hardest working/touring band in the UK?
RL: I don’t think we really work that hard. It’s all fun for us. I guess you do have to put a certain amount of effort in to get anywhere.
JB: Yeah, you could call it hard work but Rob’s right, it’s the best job in the world. There is an amount of work that goes into it, like writing the album and recording, and Tom [Hudson, guitar/vocals] and Rob do all the artwork which takes time. There is a lot of hard work but I wouldn’t call it ‘work’. It’s just awesome fun.
The gig thing, we did like 254 gigs in the first year, which was just insane. It was totally crazy. I guess that was kind of hard but at the same time, because it was new to us, it was just a cool thing to do. Now we don’t need to do as many gigs, in England especially. It’s all about going abroad now. Maybe next year will be the first year we go to America and just play any and every show we get offered to build a thing out there. Part of a staple diet of Horses is gigging. Without that we’d all go hungry.
Are you at the point where you still have to work other jobs?
RL: It’s worked out that this is our job now.
JB: We were all working when we started but then it got to this point where we had to stop working in order to tour. Rob had a job as a graphic designer didn’t you?
RL: Yeah, I was actually earning quite a lot of money before the band. One day I got this phone call going: “Right, you’ve got to quit your job. We’re going on tour tomorrow and you’ve got to live on £50 a week for the rest of your life!”
JB: You talk about things being hard and, yeah, it was back then surviving on £50 a week. But it’s our full time job now.
Does having the band be your full time job give you a feeling of “I’ve made it”?
RL: I don’t know if we’ve actually made it, I think we’re just coasting along.
Main Stage at Reading Festival guys...Queens Of The Stone Age were standing on that same stage last night. Come on!
RL: Yeah, true.
JB: Yeah, I don’t know, maybe we’re quite humble or something. We still just feel like we’re four mates. Even though we’ve been doing it for six years and we’re playing the Main Stage, it just feels like, you know, we’re doing what we love doing and we enjoy it. We don’t really see it as “we’ve made it”. We just see it as doing what we wanna do. But that’s a good point about Queens Of The Stone Age. When you put it like that, you do kind of go: “Oh, right. Yeah.”
RL: They’ve made it, Queens Of The Stone Age!
You consider yourselves a ‘fucked up dysfunctional family’? So, who’s the mum?
RL: Probably James.
JB: Probably me.
RL: James and Lee [Vincent, drums] are very well behaved and the most responsible of the band.
JB: Rob’s the naughty teenager.
RL: Yeah, I’m the most badly behaved.
JB: And Tom is I guess the pet dog. Yapping all the time!
During the writing of the new album you discarded a lot of songs. Will you revisit them?
RL: That does happen a lot, actually. When you’re writing an album it’s not necessarily about which are the best songs, it’s about the way that the album flows. There are certain songs that we love but didn’t feel like they were right on the album. But we’ll end up probably playing them more than the songs that are on the album.
JB: Yeah, he’s hit the nail on the head there. When you’re writing you don’t sit down and write 12 songs and you’ve made your album. We wrote maybe 30 and some of them felt right and some of them we went back to. There’s one on ‘Blood’ called Hello Men and at first we weren’t sure. Some other people said to us: “This is a really good song.” So we went back to it and went ‘yeah, maybe it is’ and put it on the album. You don’t draw a blueprint out for a record. You just write and it becomes an album. It has to flow and you realise after you’ve made all the pieces of the puzzle that you can put it together, because there’s certain bits that fit and that’s how it works.
Do you write collaboratively?
RL: It works differently each time. We all write. Me, James and Tom are all frustrated guitarists so we all write songs at home. But then we’ll just be in a room together and something will happen. A lot of the time that’s when the best results are.
JB: Rob may bring a song that he’s written at home and then we all kind of jump on it and start adding/changing bits. Then I’ll bring one that’s got the craziest, most ridiculous rhythm to it and tempo ever and Lee will straighten it out. Then there are some songs, like Grim Deal off the new record, where literally we were fucking about and it just happened, it appeared. Even Lee writes as well. He wrote Bag of Snakes on the new record. It’s a really weird process with us. We do write at home, but when you bring that song into the practice room it often changes into a Pulled Apart By Horses song because of the four of us.
You mentioned that a song can get changed a lot. Does anyone get protective?
JB: I don’t think anyone gets protective, but I know personally I always get a little smile on my face if something I bring to the table works out. But then it works both ways. Someone else will bring something that will work out and you’ve got to go: “Fuck, that was cool too actually.” There isn’t a bubble around anything. It’s just what works, works and what doesn’t...fuck it!
RL: There are certain songs where I’m like: “Oh yeah, I remember that’s James’ riff.” And I remember that day, but I think it wouldn’t be a Pulled Apart By Horses song if we weren’t all completely in love with it.
JB: We always used to say that we’re four brothers and we’ve got similar tastes in music and we’ve got bands we love. It’s kind of a unit thing. We’ve all got a general idea of what we want to do and it seems to work. If it was just one of us writing I think it would be a different band.
Are there any bands that you think people should keep an ear out for?
RL: The Wytches. It gets to the point where you’re in a band for a few years and you start thinking: “Are there any more good bands coming out?” Then we heard them and it’s just amazing.
JB: They came out of nowhere and they are a band we’ve all got a connection with. I always want to say Nirvana, but I shouldn’t say Nirvana, but it kind of is. They make you think of ‘Bleach’, but it’s a bit surf. They’ve just got it right. It’s not as if they’ve sat down and gone: “We want to be this kind of band.” It just works. It’s really, really good. They’re destined for big things if people understand it the way we understand it.
RL: There’s another band from Leeds called Post War Glamour Girls who are amazing. I’ve been listening to their album a lot recently.
JB: Their record hasn’t been out that long and it’s incredible. [And] Marmozets. We missed them when they played earlier and they’re playing at five but we’ll be gone. But if you like your brain melting from riffing you’ll like Marmozets. They’re painfully young as well, which is kind of frustrating. Frustrating to the extent you think: “I should have learned guitar a lot younger!”
Pulled Apart by Horses Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Fri November 21 2014 - MANCHESTER Gorilla
Sat November 22 2014 - GLASGOW Stereo
Mon November 24 2014 - BRIGHTON Haunt
Tue November 25 2014 - BIRMINGHAM Library, Institute
Wed November 26 2014 - BRISTOL THE FLEECE
Fri November 28 2014 - LONDON Heaven
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