We Are Scientists

Music-news.com’s Nick Hewitt talks to Chris Cain about being stranded in Switzerland, the new album ‘Barbara’ and getting toilet paper stuck between your butt cheeks.

NH: Let’s start off by talking about your new album ‘Barbara’, which came out in June. Have you been happy with the response so far?

CC: Well, not enough people have heard it, but I probably sound biased.

NH: You’ve returned to a more striped down format which is full of guitar hooks. Was that always your intention for this album, or was it just the direction the writing went at the time?

CC: We definitely set out to write an album that would be a three man arranged album, like arranged for drums, base and guitar and we wanted to return to a three man configuration live. So that was definitely the guiding principle. I think we ended up with a synthesizer for one song on ‘Jack and Ginger’ but that was definitely kind of a conceptual choice that preceded the actual song writing.

NH: You travelled a lot during recording also, hopping the Atlantic frequently, did you ever worry this was going rub off on the record?

CC: Well we made sure not to spend any time in any cities that we despised and insulated ourselves from any negative effects from recording away from home.

NH: With Barbara, everyone seems to have a different favourite song. Did you have trouble picking the tracks to release as singles?

CC: Yeah, it has been quite difficult. I think we’ll always wonder if we made the right choices. Then again I think they’re all fit for singles. So yeah, I don’t know. There does seem to be a broader than usual, array of personal favourites as we poll friends and colleagues, which I think is good. I think the album has some different sounding stuff, from ‘Rules Don’t Stop’ to ‘Nice Guys’ to ‘Foreign Kicks’ to ‘Central AC’. You have four very different sounding songs there and they all sound like We Are Scientists, but pretty {there’s} different stylistic stuff. ‘Pittsburgh’, you know, there’s a little something for each different We Are Scientists fan at least.

NH: It would be negligent to talk about Barbara without mentioning Andy Burrows, who took on drumming duties, how did that come about?

CC: Pretty organically. I mean we were already friends with him when he quit Razorlight and had already discussed the possibility of his playing on two or three tracks on the record. At the time we were thinking we wanted to get four or five different drummers to play on the record, and when he quit his band and became more broadly available we decided to go for him. We jammed with him a little bit and discovered his true potential, which, I like to think, was only allowed to flower once he joined We Are Scientists. Certainly to play with the man live is to experience a real force behind the kit. He’s a God damn amazing live drummer and he records well.

NH: Keith went from playing drums to front man, did he have any advice to pass on?

CC: Well let’s see. I would say many drummers have tried the same, you know, started off as drummers for We Are Scientists and tried to move into the solo career, and they’ve all been ruined by that. Unfortunately, I don’t have the key to succeeding in that venture, but I would urge caution. It is incredibly risky and in the past has only resulted in complete disgrace for the assaying party.

NH: Now Andy has started I Am Arrows, who’s going to be taking on drumming duties for We Are Scientists?

CC: We’ve got a fantastically gifted Australian drummer by the name of Danny Allen playing with us as his band, ‘Youth Group’, has been on Hiatus for the last year. We sort of came to be friends with him in New York City and bonded over a mutual love of beer and after drunken months hanging out with him we learned that he was a drummer. His appearance was perfectly timed to Andy’s needing to flip away and work on the I Am Arrows thing, so Danny’s become our full-time live guy these days.

NH: So over the years, you’ve been joined on stage by Alex and Matt (Arctic Monkeys), Lightspeed Champion, Ash and now Andy Burrows. Does it ever get to the point when you wonder backstage at a festival and say “Alright, so who feels like playing in our band today?”

CC: We’re getting close, that’s obviously the goal. The goal is to not have to travel with any crew or musicians and we’ll just wonder from festival to festival assembling our band with a group of experienced musicians from other bands. That’s the dream, but I think we’re still a couple of years off.

NH: You’re playing the Topman CTRL gig in Brighton tonight (27th August), how did the hook up with Topman come about and what does it involve?

CC: They basically offered us the opportunity to be controllers for the month of August. It turned out to be a fairly painless gig. You essentially make some videos for them, which we like to do anyway. Anytime someone will hold a camera for us, we’ll make jack-asses of ourselves and we get to play a show for a bunch of kids who paid three bucks to get in, or whatever it is. Pick a couple of bands to play with us, you know, give some press to some other small bands we’re into through their website. It turned out to be a fairly pleasurable experience I must say.

NH: Tonight’s gig sold out really quickly, and it’s often said that We Are Scientists get a better reception in the UK then in the US. Is that because, in general, we’re just better people?

CC: Um...It’s hard to say. I have my personal feeling on the matter but it’s impossible to prove that the British are better people.

NH: I Am Arrows will be there tonight also. Is Andy going to play drums for both bands or will you be bringing in Danny?

CC: I think Danny’s going to play our set tonight. We haven’t played with Andy in over a month so he’ll have forgotten everything. We may get him up to guest on a song or two, but Danny’s perfected the role for the moment.

NH: As well as these concerts, you’ve been making a consistent appearance on the UK festival circuit this year. Do you find them at all different to festivals in the States?

CC: Well...yeah they are. I mean the festivals in the States seemed to be more limited in scale. I guess something like Coachella probably comes the closest, where it’s three days, there’s a bunch of stages and it’s fully programmed. But you don’t get the big tent city and you don’t get people suffering for it the way they do here. So yeah it does feel quite different, it all feels a little more full on over here. I think we were kind of dipping our toes in the water over in the States. I mean obviously at some stage this whole thing started with Woodstock. That remains the prototypical weekend you know. Go for it, fucking balls out festival, but we did that once and then kept making efforts to recreate it in the years that followed. But for the most part Glastonbury and some of these other UK festivals became the role models, the Big Brothers. Now in the States, we have a couple of festivals that are probably in their fifth or sixth year of doing a respectable job of putting on a festival, but it still feels very niche.

NH: Do you ever get the chance to wonder around the festivals and cause a ruckus?

CC: Sometimes we do, sometimes we do. And when we get the chance, we take it. Actually, we just played the Gampel Open Air Festival in Switzerland and I somehow missed our 8am bus call and ended up having to take a train to Munich and I had no money or identification. It turns out you don’t need identification to travel from Switzerland to Munich by train. Lucky for me. But the promoter loaned me 250 Swiss Francs and I made my way and it was a long very rough day though. I hadn’t slept a wink, I was still quite drunk and I had no reading material. I just kind of sat on the train for eight hours.

NH: It sounds like the hangover from hell.

CC: Yeah, it was pretty serious punishment.

NH: At this year’s Glastonbury you said “I have toilet paper between my butt cheeks right now and I like it.” Does that mean you’re now comfortable using porta-loos?

CC: Yeah I think at some point you spend enough time at festivals that you kind of go native, as it were. You just embrace things like toilet paper between the buttocks that would wrinkle back in the city, but when you’re on a farm, that’s part of the course, you have to accept it.

NH: It’s almost rude not to have toilet paper between your butt cheeks.

CC: It’s quite pleasant. To me it’s an insurance policy.

NH: You’re playing Reading and Leeds on Saturday and Sunday, who are you looking forward to seeing while you’re there?

CC: Oh God. Well, Weezer’s an all time favourite. I don’t know exactly how our sets line up, but I’m definitely going to catch some Weezer. Klaxons are on right after us. We’ve actually seen them twice in the last week and a half at other festivals and they’re really really fucking great. They’ve come back strong with a great album and they’re playing it really well. A good friend of ours Anthony Rossomando, who was lately of Dirty Pretty Things, is now playing keys and additional guitar with them and they sound huge now with five people on stage. Foals, would be good to see, I haven’t seen Foals in a while. I think they’re on our stage as well. Our stage is actually pretty amazing. Aside from Weezer, I think I pretty much just going to camp out {at our stage} and just watch the afternoon.

NH: For your set, you’re on at the same time as Paramore. You can’t possibly be worried about turnout right?

CC: You know I think there’s going to be very little cross over between the bands, I would imagine. I would imagine they would have a very separate fan base from ours. I feel like we sound quite different, am I wrong?

NH: You sound very different, but I’m sure you won’t have any 14-year-old girls at your set.

CC: No, and that’s how a festival should be programmed, you know, with very little taste conflict. It seems like Reading a Leeds is particularly good at that.

NH: So what comes after Reading and Leeds?

CC: Well September was meant to be completely off. We’ve already slotted in three dates in the first week back in the states as random one-off things. So I don’t know, I think we’ll end up working a little bit. We have a hard time turning down money because we know math. October and November are going to be pretty full on. October we’re hitting everything in the States that we missed last month and then November we’ll do Europe for the first half and a full UK tour at the end of November. We’ve just kind of realised, kind of like waking up and realising that you left your car keys at the party last night or something, we’ve realised that we’re not playing Ireland and we’re not playing Brussels and we’re not playing Vienna. Like all these places that we have tended to do pretty well, we somehow forgot to book, so I think the beginning of December is going to end up plugging some holes there. And hopefully, we’ll see how this fall goes down, maybe head back out in the spring. That will be up to the fans.

NH: You’ve put some touristy videos from Prague on your website, which are educational to say the least, do you get the chance to explore much when touring?

CC: Yeah, we do tend to get at least a couple of hours of walking around the city. That’s sort of a minimum. It is not the same as going somewhere as a tourist and getting a chance to dive in, but you know. I’ve definitely seen a healthy swath of at least Europe as a result of this job and I know all the places that I want to go back to, even if I can’t really say that I have done those towns, I know the places that are attractive to me and merit a return trip.

NH: You’ve become known as indie’s funny men, especially after making the MTV shows ‘Steve Wants His Money’, do you ever feel tempted to mix humour with your music?

CC: Not really. I think humour music is a different thing to what we do musically. I guess I feel like err...you know...I’m curiously inarticulate about this issue, um. I feel like comedy albums are not so much music as they are comedy, if that makes any sense. You would tend to put on a comedy album in the same way that you would pop Anchorman on the DVD player or watch your favourite sitcom or something on TV. You don’t put on a comedy album when you are about to drive down to Brighton and it’s a sunny day and you put the top down on your Thunder Bird or something. You don’t pop on a comedy record. You put on your fucking ‘Joshua Tree’ or ‘Paramore’ or ‘Barbara’ or whatever you want to listen to. I think of comedy music as living in a world of comedy. We could conceivably do comedy music at some point as part of the comedy stuff we do, but we would never do it instead of the pop music that is what We Are Scientists primarily undertake.

NH: During your sets you crack a lot of jokes between songs but, have you ever cracked a joke that’s completely missed its mark, or even caused offence?

CC: Um, I’m sure that must have happened. Let’s see...I can’t think of an example of causing offence. I mean at least once a night a joke misses its mark and falls flat, but you can’t be afraid of that if you’re going to do stand up comedy. You’ve got to accept that risk. You know, I bet we’ve offended someone at some point, but I can’t remember dates and they didn’t chase us out of town with pitch forks or anything, so we weren’t punished extremely enough to make it memorable.

NH: Do you have any bands or artists that are your anti-influences. Bands that you hear and say “Fuck, I never want to sound like that.”?

CC: Anti-influences, interesting...I don’t think so. I mean that seems to imply that you think of yourself as being close enough to that band that there would be a danger of lapsing onto their territory and I can’t think of any band like that. Like bands that sound vaguely similar to us but that I really hate and want to stay away from. There’s certainly stuff I have no interest in playing. Like I don’t have any interest in trying to sound like Fall Out Boy or something, but I don’t feel like it’s a risk. We do very different things and I feel quite safe creatively from Fall Out Boy’s paint.

NH; If you weren’t in a band, what would you be doing?

CC: I’d be a scientist, no doubt.

NH: And finally, if you could have written any song that’s already in existence, what would it be?

CC: Let’s see...God that’s a really tough question...probably ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ (U2).

To see how We Are Scientists got on at Audio in Brighton, head to the latest reviews.