Delphic interview

We head to Nottingham’s Bodega for a chat with the guys who claim that guitar-indie is “dead”...

Charlie: How are you enjoying this tour so far?

Matt: Really a lot, it’s just been really surprising... we just turn up expecting like 10 people in the room, and one man in a long coat with his dog or something, smoking a pipe... but yeah, they’ve been more full than that, so it’s been nice.

Charlie: So have you been getting the desired reaction from the fans then?

Matt: [Smiles] I guess yeah, they’ve been clapping at the end of the night, and we can’t ask for much more... and there’s been some dancing as well.

Rick: It’s the first headline tour we’ve done so we didn’t really know what to expect. We’ve been holed up writing this album for the last [laughs] for about the last 10 years now... for about the last six months, and this is the first time we’ve gone out there, not knowing what to expect, but everyone seems to be really into it so it’s quite exciting.

Charlie: And have you got a favourite venue so far?

Matt: The Nottingham Bodega maybe?... no, we dislike them all equally [laughs].

Rosanna: What’s it been like headlining with Two Door Cinema Club?

Rick: It’s been great, it’s really good to emphasise the Kitsuné connection, and play with other bands that are on the label. The label have really done a lot for us. Two Door are great and this is a chance for us to really get to know them.

Rosanna: Is there ever any competition between you to see who can be the best band on the night?

Matt: Well at the side of the stage we have this little box that measures the crowd applause... I think that because we’re so different to one another, there’s not really much competition, because we’re both doing our own thing.

Rosanna: Are you hoping that being on the Kitsuné label will help you to achieve the success that previous artists (such as La Roux, Foals, etc.) have had? The label are supposed to be famous for spotting the “stars of tomorrow”...

Rick: I guess so, but that wasn’t really the plan. The plan at the start was just to get free clothes from Kitsuné really, but since then we’ve realised that they have been there early on with a lot of these bands. But you don’t really think about that really – once you’ve released it, it’s on to the next thing. But we signed with them in France for the whole album and France is a place we just love to go to, so the main thing is that we get to go to France lots [smiles] – that’s the best thing.

Charlie: Are you happy with how your two single releases have done this year?

Matt: Yeah. I think the main thing with putting out singles at the level we’re at is to get your name out there. We’re pretty happy with the chart position of “This Momentary” – just outside the top 200, so we thought [smiles] let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, this is pretty cool... we’ve been waiting for a long time to get the album out there, the album’s really what we’ve been working towards. All the songs were intended as part of this body of work. A lot of artists put out collections of singles in no apparent order... we really wrote the album very specifically, knowing what we wanted to do with it. When the album comes out, hopefully people will understand more what we’re about and what we’re trying to do.

Rick: I think one of the most important things that we didn’t want was to have that thing where you release a single and suddenly there’s a big hype about you as a band, and loads of pressure that you can never live up to. I don’t need to mention the names but there’s always a couple of artists each year who are so hyped up that they’ll never be able to live up to it. So the idea was to just build really naturally and just do it at our own kind of pace, spreading out the singles over the year in the way which we did, which enabled us to just do it in a really natural, gradual way.

Charlie: How does it feel to have the video for “This Momentary” nominated for three UK Music Video Awards?

Matt: Pretty good [smiles]. We were so happy with that video, really proud of it.

Rick: It’s just a real credit to Dave Ma [the director].

Matt: We’re just happy to be the music on the video.

Rosanna: Had you worked with him [Ma] in the past?

Matt: No, we hadn’t. We’d done the video for “Counterpoint” with a French director called Hans and we really liked that video, we thought that was great, and we talked to him about doing the next one but I think he was busy, or it wasn’t right. Anyway, our producer Ewan Pearson had shown us a video for Lost Valentinos, who he [Ma] had also worked with, and this video was just amazing. It blew us away and we’d seen Dave’s work for Foals and thought it was cracking, so we asked him to write something for us and gave him a very brief “this is the kind of thing we want, something playing on the moment idea”. We didn’t want any actors in it, because “Counterpoint” had had actors and we didn’t want to go down that route, so we just wanted something real. And he took it to Chernobyl, and brought back some amazing footage and thankfully, no cancer, with him.

Rosanna: Wouldn’t be good PR would it?

Matt: It would be pretty dreadful yeah. He was telling us they had these huge machines that you had to walk through when you came out, because he’d been properly in the radiation zone....

Rick: So I think for that alone he deserves to be nominated for the awards.

Rosanna: Did it feel weird not having much involvement yourselves, and just letting him have free reign?

Rick: It felt great, ‘cause we were trying to write an album at the time, so it was one less thing to worry about.

Matt: But it’s the way that we like to do it. We’re in the position where we can have a lot of control over our videos, but what we like to do with that control is just to give it up and fine someone like Dave who we really respect and think is a really great artist. We don’t want to be over his shoulder like “it should be this, it should be that”... we’re just like “you’re good at what you do, please take control of it”... Rather than have it part-him and part-us, I think it’s a lot stronger when you just allow someone to do what they want to do.

Charlie: You’ve supported bands such as Bloc Party and Orbital in the past. Would you say that they’ve had any influence on you?

Matt: Not so much SINCE touring with them, but I think PRE-touring with them, we may have been influenced, especially with Orbital. There were some moments when we played with Orbital and we realised that we were playing new versions of their songs, and they’d come along and played the original and over-shadowed us. But it was really great playing with them both because we’re big admirers of both and it was really good to be given the chance to play with them. Orbital do one thing and Bloc Party do a different thing and we’re kind of between the two.

Charlie: Which other bands would you say you take influence from?

Matt: Too many to even mention.

Rosanna: How about bands around at the moment?

Rick: I don’t know- there isn’t that much great stuff around at the moment. We really admire great pop writers, so maybe stylistically we might take bits from some 90s dance music, some stuff from modern techno music (I’m not going to go into loads of names because they’d just be really boring)... whereas we don’t really sound like La Roux at all, I really admire the amazing pop songs that they craft. Even things like the Black Eyed Peas, I know we don’t sound like that, but from a structure point of view, they have amazingly written songs...

Matt: We just take bits and bobs from all over really... you take your inspiration from SO many places.

Charlie: Are you looking forward to releasing the album?

Matt: [Pauses and looks at Rick] Yeah, ‘cause then it will be done and we don’t have to worry about it anymore. It’s always going to be a bit of a scary thing but we’re really happy with it... although if we could I’m sure we’d go back to it and change bits...

Rick: Paul Hartnoll from Orbital said to us that you never, ever finish a record, you just have to abandon it at a point that you’re okay with... we’d work on it forever if we could but we’re excited that it’s coming out, and the day it comes out we’ll probably be off gigging in some random country, and then in the days off we have we’re just writing the next record... there’s just loads of things going on all the time.

Matt: When we finished recording it in September it was immense – we just completely freaked out, and went over to Paris for the weekend because we just didn’t know what to do. This had been the focus of everything we’ve done for the last 2 or 3 years, so we were just like “what do we do now?”

Rosanna: Being a Manchester-based electronic-style band, do you get annoyed with the constant New Order connotations?

Rick: [Laughs] I can’t believe you mentioned New Order... it’s just inevitable, it’s always going to happen. It doesn’t really matter, because when we mentioned our 3,000 influences, New Order were definately one of them, we both grew up listening to them, as well as Radiohead, Underworld, etc... I think it’s just always going to happen, because we’re from Manchester, and we make electronic/indie crossover music, and there aren’t many bands who’ve done that, or who have achieved it.

Matt: You’ve got to be labelled haven’t you, when people haven’t really heard you, people have got to be able to say “oh it’s a bit like this”... but yeah, people do keep hassling us about it [laughs]. It’s quite funny actually, we were interviewed by Q recently and they asked a similar question and Rick said to them “It’s just lazy journalism isn’t it?”...and the issue came out a few days ago, and there’s the title “Delphic: The New New Order”. I guess we’ve just got to wait until people have heard what we do, then they can even make up a different genre maybe.

Rick: People just need to pigeon-hole it.

Charlie: How did you first form as a band?

Rick: We all just met in Manchester, me and Matt had known each other for a while, and we’d kind of known James a tiny bit as well. There was a real lull in the Manchester music scene, and we just frequented this place called “Night and Day” where we rehearse at the moment... we were talking about ideas, saying “let’s inject a bit of life back into Manchester”... we all got talking and then all moved into a flat together and started living this really weird, intense lifestyle.

Matt: It was a really big mistake [smiles] don’t do it.

Rick: There’s no time for relaxing.

Matt: But it’s really good in so many ways. If you have an idea, then it’s like an immediate response.

Rick: It was a definite risk, but it seems to have kind of paid off, for the moment anyway.

Matt: You realise that you live together, and then when you go on tour, you’re essentially still just living together, but in a much smaller place... then you get back off tour, and they’re just there, everywhere!

Rick: But it’s completely essential for us, with the way that we work, because it’s just a constant thing, every minute of the day. We put a LOT of time into song writing, so we need to be on it all the time. So it’s horrible, we have no friends, no social group, all of our relationships pretty much ended as a result of starting this, because we just went into this “zone” and haven’t come out of it yet. And God knows when we will.

Rosanna: Are you enjoying it though?

Rick: I know idea, the thing is, you enjoy it for little bits, but then you’re immediately onto the next thing, so the moment we finished the first record we were thinking about the second record. There’s always something else... it is fun to do things all the time and to be constantly creative, but it is exhausting, and you end up walking around like a zombie most of the time, not really knowing what day it is and what you’re doing, but it’s all good.

Rosanna: Finally, what are your plans for the future? Are you aiming to fulfil the NME’s prediction that you’re the band “most likely to be massive by next year”?

Matt: That would be really nice. Of course we want to achieve things and do well.

Rick: It’s just it’s about doing it on your own terms, so yeah, the aim was always to be as successful as we can be, but it’s how you judge that – is it having a million people at your gig, or is it putting out a critically acclaimed album? I don’t know.

Matt: We just want to be proud of everything we do, and to be allowed to do it for as long as possible...as long as we can live in tiny music making weird music, without having to do the 9-5 again, we’re happy.

Rosanna and Charlie: Well thanks for your time guys and best of luck for the future.

Delphic’s debut album “Acolyte” is out January 11^th.

Thanks very much to Jenn at Chuff Media.

www.myspace.com/delphic

By Rosanna Pound-Woods and Charlie Cooper