Stuart Braithwaite: Tell me the story of Beak>, and why you decided to get together …
Billy Fuller: I first met Geoff in 2004 [when I was] with my first band, Fuzz Against Junk, and Matt [Williams] was doing his solo thing with Team Brick. We were both putting records out through [Barrow’s label] Invada, and we used to talk about trying to make music together. In 2009, we just got together, didn’t talk to each other much – just set the gear up and played. In 12 days it was all done. It was the easiest record I’ve ever made.
SB: So you just got in a room and bashed it out?
BF: Yeah … When you’re really familiar with each other it gets harder to get to the right point. But when you don’t know each other you’re being quite polite.
SB: At the start of the year, Martin and I played live with [Hans] Joachim from Faust and a couple of other musicians from Glasgow, and it was the same kind of thing. Nobody knew each other, so you’re on your best behaviour.
Geoff Barrow: Music can be so tedious when it becomes a business, when you’re talking more about other stuff than doing the stuff you did to get you into music in the first place. We’re grateful for being able to survive as musicians, but there can be a hole in your heart, you start thinking, ‘Oh man, what am I doing?’ With Beak>, I got back on the drums and felt like a 12-year-old. Just smashing stuff.
SB: It does seem that the bigger your band get, the less opportunity there is to make music. How do you find being on your own label? We started Rock Action Records to put out our own first single, and then we were on other labels, but eventually we went back [to Rar]. I find it a strange experience. There’s something kind of odd about finishing a record. Normally, you can sit on your bum for a few months before an album appears. How do you find it?
GB: It is a bit weird. I play an active role in the label. So you have to put a different hat on. When you have meetings with pluggers, you don’t want to say, “Yeah, this should be smashing it on radio”, because you sound like a dick. Sometimes I think you underplay [your own music] a bit, because you don’t want to sound like an ego-maniac. Have you ever seen that Marc Jacobs label? I don’t know if it was real, but it said “designed by Marc Jacobs for Marc Jacobs industries for Marc Jacobs universal brand”. Look it up – it’s fucking brilliant. So we just had this thing with the Kaeb split EP where it was “Geoff Barrow’s side project Kaeb, which is a side project of Geoff Barrow’s Beak>, on the label Invada, which releases Geoff Barrow.” I just wanted to puke.
[There is loud banging in the background.]
GB: Did Billy just shoot himself?
BF: After that sentence, yeah.
SB: It sounds corny, but it’s the DIY endgame. It’s a really good thing.
GB: How involved is the whole group in the label? Do you work fully as a band, or are people less bothered than others? Do you have marketing meetings?
SB: I do with Mogwai, but I don’t with the others. Craig [Hargrave] sorts all the gubbins out. I get more involved with our own stuff. You have meetings where you know fine well that if you aren’t there someone would go, “We are so fucked. Who the fuck is going to buy this?” But that probably isn’t going to happen if the guy who wrote some of the songs is in the room. There’s definitely pressure on friendships, because people have expectations of you, and if things don’t go the way they want them to go they’re disappointed.
GB: You’re right, it is a pressure. The people drink with at the pub, they’re your mates and the bands on your label, and you’re just like fucking hell. Especially when you see that financially they’re not doing great.
SB: The head of a label we were on in Manhattan used to walk a different way to the office because the singer of one of the bands they represented worked in a coffee shop he had to walk past. The band went on to sell millions of records and probably now owns the bloody coffee shop, but that’s the thing people probably don’t think about.
GB: You’re playing a series of shows for Mogwai’s 20th anniversary, aren’t you?
SB: Yeah we’ve not started practising yet. We announced it as a big ‘ta-da!’, but then … if we do loads of stuff we’ve never done before it’s going to be rubbish. But I’m looking forward to the shows, and it’s good we’re getting to play with so many really amazing bands, ones we’ve got a kinship with.
We’ve never seen ourselves as a scene-y band, but we’ve certainly made a lot of friends. Over the years we played with a lot of people from Bristol – it’s far enough away from London that people don’t try and be too trendy. I think that makes people freer to make more interesting music.
GB: It used to be like that, but the homogenisation of all media everything in life has kind of taken over. Bristol always had a real piss-taking, punk vibe – and that’s kind of gone. I haven’t heard a band in a long time where I’ve thought, that sounds like a Bristol band. Have you, Billy?
BF: I don’t think I have. But Sleaford Mods definitely sound like they’re from Nottingham.
GB: Yeah, that’s a good point.
SB: Saw them the other night. They played before us, and it was a fair racket.
GB: I saw them recently with Bill, and you thought he was off his nut, didn’t you?
BF: Yeah, but I’d seen him before. This time he looked particularly like he’d been sweating his nuts off in a slightly peculiar manner.
GB: I saw him afterwards, and he wasn’t even drinking. He looked like he was really hitting it hard, but he was completely sober. It’s amazing to get that intensity of performance and it not to be an act.
SB: How fucked do you think labels are from all this streaming stuff? I don’t think people are actually realising what it means. I was reading this thing about Apple saying “give us some money and you can listen to anything on iTunes”, and I was thinking, who is ever going to buy a record again? Consumers are going to have to get used to listening to old records, because not a lot of new records are going to be made.
GB: I think you’ve nailed it. You know what it’s like: the bands who come through, it’s about getting an £800 Ford Galaxy so you can drive to your gigs. Unless you’re trust-funded, most bands struggle like fuck. People say, “You have to give [your music] away, then you make a name for yourself, then you can play live to make your money.” But for young bands, it’s impossible to make money from playing live – there’s so many people trying to do it. And what about studio-based artists. How are they going to make money?
BF: They’ll still do it, though, won’t they? That’s always happened. It’s like the band who got a £200-quid van with five grand’s worth of gear in the back, and they’ll drive 100 miles to get paid £50 to play live.
GB: Maybe in the early 90s you could put out an indie record with a bit of press and sell 5,000 or 10,000 records, which you might see a couple of grand from, but you’re not going to get that now. Today you’ll be lucky if you sell 500.
SB: The gap from getting there to selling a few thousand records is hard. And the labels won’t make any money from the records they’re putting out. It’s the labels that subsidise the bands from getting that gap. And if that gap becomes huge and the labels don’t making any money from new records … You’re right: it’s just going to be trust-fund kids who can put music out. And that is not good for people who like listening to music.
-
Mogwai’s ATP season is at the Roundhouse, London, 24 June-5 July.
