The Automatic Interview

Interview with Robin Hawkins from “The Automatic”.

It’s been a little while since the hugely successful single, “Monster”, from Welsh rockers, The Automatic, so it’s great to see them back with their latest album “Tear the Signs Down”, and on tour. We’re up at Nottingham’s Rescue Rooms venue, and things don’t get off to a great start. I’m busy trying to hunt down the tour manager, and I nip out to the front and ask a chap if he has seen a tour manager looking guy lurking around, he helpfully answers that he saw him walking round the corner, I about turn, take 5 steps, then realise that it was Robin that I had just asked, and promptly left standing there. I’m tempted to turn back and apologise, but I remember an incident where a Student radio reporter had dared talk to the band (not The Automatic I might add) without notifying the tour manager that they were there first, and how they had gone ballistic.

It’s true to say that there are times that the band themselves may be fantastic to deal with, but the tour manager is a nightmare. We’ve been fortunate to date that everyone we have dealt with has been fantastic, and this interview was certainly no exception. The Automatic’s tour manager was great, and Robin, despite my moment of “facepalm” fail, was down to earth, and happy to talk!

We explain that we video our interviews, not so that some explosive revelation can be uploaded to Youtube, but so that we can accurately put up on the Jitty what was said, and he is surprised by this. As it turns out, The Automatic, like quite a few guitar rock bands from the UK, have had a bit of a rough ride when it comes to some journalists.

The obvious question, and sorry to ask it, is, how is the tour going so far?

Great! And it’s a good question because it’s the first tour like this that we’ve done in over a year. I mean we did tour a little bit at the end of last year, but it was only a couple, like 10 or 12 dates, and we just did it in a van really quickly, but this is much more intense and on a much bigger scale, and it’s really nice to just be back out on the road. So it’s a harder tour then we’ve done then before. There’s more dates, and we only got 5 days off in the whole of March. We’re lifting our own gear and stuff, we’ve gone out with the bare minimum of crew, doing it as lightweight as we can. I’ve enjoyed it so much more because of that really though, not that I hated our crews or anything, but I just feel so much more connected to what we’re actually doing, you know, actually setting up the gear myself.

Are you sharing the Tour Bus with the crew as well?

Yep, we’re all in here! But it’s not crowded or anything, it’s us, my brother who is selling merch for us, Mike the tour manager and doing front of house amongst other things, and that’s about it. So yes, we’re lifting it all ourselves.

So you’re not hiring locally for crews then?

Not intentionally, but sometimes there are people there who can help, but it’s probably just easier if we sort ourselves out!

I heard there were a few technical glitches at the start of the tour?

Oh that, yeah, it was a pedal board malfunction at one point. I don’t know exactly what it was, it was probably something not plugged in properly. Just a ghost in the machine, yes. It’s like, the one thing that’s gone wrong asides from the odd broken string. So no real issues at all, everything has been fine, which is a risk I know because there are no on stage techs, flying by the seat of your pants. But it’s been wicked! Because we’ve been setting up our selves, we personally, have been a lot more conscientious about getting it just so.

Great to hear! On a slight tangent about getting things right. We always try to get the quotes spot on, but am I right in thinking you’ve been misrepresented before, I think there was some sort of daft verbal sparring match reported with the “Horrors”?

Oh yeah, we were doing an interview with the NME, and somehow the conversation got on to some of the bands that the NME were promoting perhaps on the style of music, and “The Horrors” came up. Now I don’t really like their music, I’ve got no real personal problem with them, it’s just their stuff doesn’t really appeal to me. Of course the NME headline read something like “The Horrors are rubbish say The Automatic” (like it really mattered), which I guess is what the press do isn’t it!

You know, that reminds me of something that The Glitterati said which made me laugh, it was something along the lines of “down in London there 3 or 4 guys saying ‘yay we stuffed it up one for guitar music’ or something!

Haha yeah that sounds like a possibility!

Do you think the Internet is perhaps taking power away from traditional media such as NME?

Traditionally, they almost were seen to be dictating trends, but they’ve still got a lot of kick. You get trends coming and going don’t you, so overall maybe it doesn’t matter, but for guitar bands at the moment, it’s not really a good time. Radio 1 play what’s in the charts, and that appears to be mainly synth stuff, girl bands. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of music as it is, and with ‘6 music’ closing, guitar bands are a bit stuffed at the moment to find an outlet. I don’t know what bands are going to do in the future. We’re scraping every penny together to do this tour as we’re paying for it ourselves, and it’s a hard old slog just doing that, but it’s only going to get worse if things aren’t given a push on the radio.

Do you put that down to the clichéd comment that “Guitar music is dieing”?

It comes and goes in waves doesn’t it. It’ll come back. The biggest problem at the moment is the music industry is up in arms, ina state of flux, doesn’t really know what to do about, downloading etc. Actually, I don’t know what to do about downloading either! I’m just trying to make a living off selling albums and it doesn’t really work at the moment. It’s hard work, but I mean, people are always going to be able to get a hold of it illegally as soon as the first record is in someone’s hands. Like before we even released the record we didn’t really draw attention to it, but you send promos out to some people, and some of those might find their way onto things like “Limewire” or whatever.

I remember you saying something before on this, and I agreed with it, that people might download it illegally, but they might like it enough to buy it, do you still stand by that?

Yeah, I do, I know plenty of people who do that. There are people who think that because they pay £15 for internet access that that they think they should be entitled to everything else free, but it’s not really the right attitude to have. I’m in two minds about it, because you might miss a TV episode, download it to catch up, but then you might end up buying the boxed DVD set later. If you watch something playing off iPlayer, then it’s very different to actually going out and nicking someone’s work!

The band lineup has changed, do you think this has perhaps opened up new musical possibilities?

Well it’s definitely a positive thing, Pennie didn’t want to be in the band, and there was no way any of us could have continued doing that as it was. He wasn’t happy, didn’t want to be there, and that situation kind of creates tension. So him going was like the only way we could carry on, and a lot of people thought, “ooh how will you survive”, but we couldn’t really have survived with him. And Paul joining was just, well, quite lucky really, but it works, in fact it couldn’t have worked any better. With Yourcodenameis: milo’s second album you could hear more kind of pop melodies and stuff, we had kind of got heavier anyway as well, so we kind of met in the middle, coming at it from different places but still arriving at the same point. And even like on the first day we had a jam with him and together wrote a song called “This Ship”, which ended up on “This is a Fix”. So yes it worked nicely really. I mean if you end up writing a song on the first time you’ve ever played together properly, then something is working!

It’s very rare that happens!

Yeah it just sort of clicked!

With hindsight, do look back at certain situations and wish it could have been different, or as a consequence, are a little more guarded these days?

Yeah of course. You live, you learn. We were so young when we started, we had the naivety of youth, and yeah, we were probably quite easily exploited! We’ve always thought of ourselves as a rock band, always heavier live, and the record always got pushed into the pop box, with these photographs of us as cherubic nineteen year olds, it was trying to sell it in the wrong place. We wrote “Monster”, and that kind of fitted in with that, but everything else we’ve done really doesn’t.

Is it right the first album that the guitars weren’t as you intended?

Yeah that’s right. There were two amps running all the time, one was mega heavy, and the other was completely clean. The idea was that they would be mixed together for a full rounded sound so you would have balls when you wanted it, but it’s clear as well. But they just the clean jangly one for the whole thing. It was taken away from us and mixed, it was such a quick process, and it was like “oh it’s too late to do anything about that now”. It’s gutting when that happens though. You’re being misrepresented by the very thing that should represent you! The producers / engineers and so on are fine but in the end they’re in the employ of whoever is paying the money, the record label, so they’ve got to walk that line, so I completely understand that. A job is a job. We got to argue some cases, but there were times it was an uphill struggle just to get the music to sound how it was meant to. It was a naivety thing I think.

I was reading this really cool thing where a song was written because of a moment where a German tourist was spotted at the Pyramids…

Haha, that must have been Paul!

Do you put that much of yourselves into the songs, or do you just sit down and say “right, we’re going to write a song about this”?

I tend to find inspiration for lyrics from wherever I can. The first album was personal experience, because there was a lot of growing up stuff going on. A lot of stuff so many people could relate to as our peers were going through it at Uni. And that kind of followed through a little bit to the second album, but by that point we had been on the road for two years, and I had nothing personal to write about. I had been with the same girl for four years, I’m not into drugs, so it was just like “Where do I get my inspiration for “Rock and Roll” lyrics! So I started looking at the news and stuff, good couple of themes I found, and only in retrospect I thought “this was really a paranoid album!” haha. The same goes for “Tear the Signs Down”, I thought I was writing fairly fictional stuff, and again in retrospect, you kind of like, the theme is putting yourself back on your feet after someone has knocked you down, and you can see where that came from. I didn’t realise when we were writing it. Even the stuff that Paul has written too. It’s there. Just knowing what we are doing as well helps, haha, it’s a process of learning, the only way to get good at anything, unless you’re a child prodigy, is to just put in the hours.

What typically comes first for you guys, the lyrics or the hooks / melodies?

The music tends to be done, then the vocals. But it is kind of jammed all at once, and if you get a good line we try to work out something around it and work with it. That may be why this album has an element of storytelling to it. It’s more instinctive. I don’t like taking the thought out of it too much though. I very much subscribe to the school of thought that a song should mean something, even if it’s only you who knows what it is! It shouldn’t just be bollocks!

If you had a choice, what bands would you love to tour with?

It would be nice to tour with AC/DC! Just to see that every night would be incredible! There was once a possibility of us touring with Ash it didn’t quite come off though sadly. They were really up for it too, which was amazing, we’ve met them a couple of times and they really are nice guys. That could have been a lot of fun! Wasn’t to be this time round, but we certainly aren’t ruling it out for the future! Hopefully at some point…

Or maybe something completely out of the genre like, a rapper, or Henry Rollins spoken word. His spoken word stuff is great.

Inspiration wise what was the driving force for your music before being in The Automatic?

I think I’d always been doing it really. We were the school band, you know, the “kids in the band”, and we just never stopped doing it. It was inextricable from us being friends, doing creative things together, we’re creative people. The best outlet, and the one we could do the most with was being in a band. We used to write comedy sketches when we were kids as well, record them on tape. They were really bad haha. But we laughed! Maybe!

Can we get copies?

I doubt that!! Certainly not off iTunes! So Yeah we’ve always done creative stuff together. Yeah Frost and I have been learning instruments since we were kids as well.

Yes, you play quite a variety don’t you?

Yeah, I can do bits on lots of stuff. I’m kind of a jack of all trades but master of none. I know my way around the piano to the extent I can learn something by rote. Just repeating it. But I’m not a real pianist though. My music theory and composition has always been fine. When I picked up the bass, I’d been listening to other peoples songs and taking them apart so I can work out how music works and stuff. I’ve been playing flute since I was eight as well, yeah I’m a “grade 8 flute” player.

Do you find that “grade 8” equates to real music or do you think it’s academically separate?

They feed into one another. I think it’s really good having that understanding of what’s going on, because if you are playing in a rock band and doing it all by feel, you might be going “I don’t know what isn’t working”, and with the analytical stuff you get from a classical training you can go “that’s wrong, change that note”. It’s good to have a good rounded education anyway!

But yes going back to the original question on inspiration, I think it may have been Oasis, like at the time I was 11 or 12 or something, must have been “What’s the Story”, and then Radiohead after that. The Manic Street Preachers. All of which I don’t really listen much to now rather oddly.

Are there any genres of music where you listen to it and think, yeah, that doesn’t mean much to me?

I don’t get a lot out of R n B, but then you only get access to the commercial stuff really if you aren’t into it, there is good R ‘n’ B out there. I mean Hiphop I love.

And new music, well, I haven’t listened to new music in a while. In fact I bought so many CD’s a while ago (like 10 at a time in a sale or something), and I haven’t listened to them really. Just trying to go through them and catch up now!! In fact Nick Cave came up and that was great.

Ok, it’s time for you to get to the stage, many thanks for letting us onto your tour bus, and all the best for the future!

Thank you!