The Horrors Interview August 2009
By: Bronya Francis, Toby L, Mike Harounoff
Rockfeedback caught up with Joshua Third and Spider Webb of current indie darlings and Mercury nominees The Horrors over the course of the recent Field Day and Underage festivals in Victoria Park, East London. When confronted with these questions, they had these answers up their sleeves...
Rockfeedback: How does it feel to have been part of Field Day and Underage this year?
Spider Webb: “We live round the corner so it’s a local festival to us. It’s kind of nice to be back in England for a weekend; to just be able to jump on a bus and come and play a gig down the road is one good thing… we’ve been on the road since April, pretty much touring solidly and we will be ‘til the end of the year.”
RFB: How do you feel the new material sits alongside what you’ve done before? Primary Colours has been the culmination of a lot of work over the last couple of years for you guys, so how does it feel being able to debut it to people live?
Joshua Third: “It’s just kind of become a new show I guess; it’s the same intensity but it’s coming from a slightly different angle.”
Spider Webb: “For our first show we were playing some of the tracks from the first album, but the thing is we felt that Primary Colours was such a thing for us to write and to play that it feels like it needs to be heard almost as a work, so it felt a bit weird playing some of the first album right in the middle of it… generally we’ve just been playing the new record because this is what we want people to hear.”
Joshua Third: “I think it’s kind of unfair if you play what you think people should think you should be playing, you should just play where you’re at- I think that’s the truest performance you can give, it makes sense to do that.”
RFB: When you started gigging as The Horrors you were also doing a lot of DJing; how did you get into that?
Spider Webb: “We love playing records and we love buying records… I think if you’re interested in searching out sounds that aren’t the things you walk into HMV and buy, the next thing you want to do is play them to other people so we’ve always been involved in club nights and things like that.”
RFB: Where do you get your records from?
Spider Webb: “Well unfortunately there aren’t that many great record shops any more because nobody even takes their records to shops to sell, they only put them on eBay. Anywhere we are we’ll always go through the record shops and sieve through them, but eBay unfortunately is the place you really want to find stuff that you’re looking for.”
RFB: What sort of genres are you looking for when you’re browsing through vinyl racks?
Spider Webb: “The band is completely all over the place… me and Joe are really into Psychedelia and Garage stuff… there’s this amazing world of European Psychedelic stuff that you don’t really hear about… we’re always looking for all different things really.”
Joshua Third: “In America I normally look for anything that’s been within ten miles of Steve Albini, and that’s pretty much what I’m going for!”
RFB: What memories do you have of piecing together what would become the final album?
Spider Webb: “For us it was about getting together, being given the first opportunity to kind of close the doors and just play as a band and lose ourselves in the music. We were definitely interested in promoting a mind-expanding sound, and delving into how the sounds that are flying around the room when we’re playing can translate on record and affect the listener. We were just kind of freaking out while we were playing it and we wanted that to come through on the recordings. We definitely did attack it in a different way because… the music we were playing the first time round was kind of raw power, raw punk music. Of course the more we delve into us as a band and what we can do and what we want to do and how we want to write, things start to take a different shape and start to move in different directions. I think we became more aware of song writing, definitely, and of communicating what we want to do… it was really a case of us playing together and we’d be writing quite quickly really. Basically, we were in a studio in Stoke Newington and we were there every day, we didn’t see anyone, we didn’t play anyone anything we were doing, and it was literally the most fun experience I’ve ever had... ideas were flowing out of the room and there was never any conversation about how something would sound… every member of the group was trying out different things and different instruments, and we were just completely focused on what we wanted to do and what we wanted to get out of it… it was quite a psychedelic experience.”
RFB: That must have been really intense because you knew each other in a certain musical way and then suddenly you were just like abandoning all the rulebooks…
Joshua Third: “We never really had a rule book… you only really need a template if you’re writing for someone, and someone’s come in and gone ‘I want you to write this’… we’re quite selfish- we write for ourselves! Therefore we don’t really need one. That’s why it’ll all keep changing, that’s why it’ll all keep being interesting.”
Spider Webb: “I think we’re quite a classic example of a punk band that start off what comes naturally and what they can do best which is playing fast and furious… and their sound will expand and I think that’s what happened with us. It’s a really great feeling to actually get to that point.”
RFB: How do you feel the album translates from a recording space to live shows?
Spider Webb: “It’s powerful music… people say ‘oh, it’s a really dark sound’; it’s not a dark sound at all, we found it very euphoric. [It has an] intensity and power… power is almost translated as a dark energy or something- we never really feel like that; for us it is this really emotive kind of euphoric thing, and that’s how we felt when we were playing it for the first time, so it was really important for us to carry that to the stage. It just seems to happen quite naturally… it was really important that everything we did record was us playing and we would be able to do that live. So when we were writing it felt like it was a live experience, then when we recorded it that was taking it somewhere else, and now we’re back almost where we started because that was what it was like: every day was like playing a show but it was just us in the room… recording it was a strange thing because it was taking [the music] away from the environment where it was so organic and live and happening, and then trying to make sure that you captured what you felt... that’s why it was really important for Primary Colours to be right, so we were very much involved in the recording process as well because we knew it had to feel like it did for us when we were writing and playing and recording it ourselves for the first time.”
RFB: You have quite an influence over younger bands. How does it feel introducing other people to new styles and perspectives on what you can do musically?
Spider Webb: “I think for me that was one of the most important things that happened when I was in my early teens, discovering music… wanting to search out new sounds and not just psychedelic stuff and garage but being aware that there is this amazing world of music that isn’t necessarily open to you to reach out and grab but you have to look into it and search it out a bit more for yourself. That pretty much shapes everything that I’ve ever wanted to be a part of, music basically being the main passion but everything that comes with it is a way of life… kind of like the thing with The Cramps- everything that they live for is completely rooted in their music and their passion and their love of insane rock and roll... when we first started to play people would be questioning ‘why are you dressed up like that?’ and ‘why are you performing like that on stage?’… well, actually, we didn’t ever think about it, this is just what we want to do and this is who we are, and I think that’s a really important part of being in a band, and an important part of music which is lost now. I think we’re actually a really traditional classic idea of a band and come from, I imagine, the same place as a lot of our favourite groups over the last fifty years. Bands don’t really feel like that any more, they’re not even part of that; it’s not exactly our heritage that they need to be a part of, it’s just any heritage, it just seems a bit disposable now.”
RFB: On the subject of younger bands, you were quite important in the emergence of the underage scene, you played a lot of gigs in that world, do you feel quite responsible for how it’s moved forward?
Spider Webb: “Not responsible. I think the whole idea is about people under the age of eighteen going to listen to good music, so hopefully we’re a good band and so we have been a part of it. Sam, who organised the first Underage Club down at Elephant and Castle, is a friend of ours and he used to come to see our shows when we started- he was probably only fifteen at the time… he used to come and see us all the time and they wouldn’t let him in so that’s one of the reasons why he started the Underage Club in the first place. So for us, especially being a gang of guys in a band who’ve always been interested in music from a really young age, it’s really important for us to play these events.”
RFB: When you guys were growing up, were there any gigs for you to go to?
Joshua Third: “I just got really good at sneaking in to places… I remember you just used to go to gigs, they’d let you in but they wouldn’t let you drink. But now it seems they won’t even let kids in.”
Spider Webb: “I remember I crept through a side door to go and see Primal Scream when I was about fifteen on South End sea front- I snuck through an open window or something… so we had to do stuff like that.”
Artists in this article: The Horrors