Hope Of The States - London, UK, Summer 2004
By: Tim Dellow, Toby L
'Red White and Blue,
What does it mean to you?
Surely you're proud, shout it out loud,
Britain's Away.'
'There'll Always Be An England', Vera Lynn
'Well, we named the band well before the political situation really kicked off in Iraq; America's position wasn't such an issue...'
The issue is the State. Not the States. The State we live in. The State of things to come.
Sam Herlihy's position in the band is what makes the difference. He represents the human voice, the individual within the state, the hope. While drums parade the same hollow patriotism of boot camp bullies, and guitars swarm around like a thousand furious hornets in the dance of nuclear death, Sam is the voice in the middle. Honest, afraid, optimistic and real. The Hope.
'I think, from my point of view, the difference between my vocals and anybody else's, principally, is that I don't have a voice that sounds like Chris Martin. Because so many people do have that voice at the moment.'
He's defending himself in no-man's land of post-soundcheck, pre-gig anticipation before he and his comrades clamber out of their trenches to face a sea of believers at the Electric Ballroom. The initial charge levelled at him, is by the music press. The media. Us. Whatever.
Apparently, the critics expect their epic soundscapes to be ethereal in nature and to employ the vocal talents of lyricless Castrati's who warble in made-up languages to no-one. Sam does not. He is the soul survivor, the urchin traipsing the scorched earth, drinking himself to despair, but still fighting. And that sounds to me a lot rougher.
You know the best ever live performance I ever saw? I was on a train, going home, for the sake of legend, after experiencing the closest I'm ever likely to get to a religious experience in the form of Godspeed! You Black Emperor at the Scala. As I sit on the near-deserted last train carriage, a guy gets on with a battered guitar. His age covered by bruises, stubble and scars. He sat down and appealed with his eyes; tearful, frantic, the drive for an addict's release pushing his performance. His cracked voice warbled, desperate, spitting, killing him, 'One Love, we've got to carry each other.' I always hated the song. But he breathed his last into it. The needle and the damage done. And Sam? His delivery shares a shred of that moment.
'That's why because of all of the comparisons to Radiohead, people assume it's going to be all this quasi-operatic, and it's not the kind of thing. When I'm up onstage and that, I just want to sing like a motherf**ker.' He croaks.
You've a great Rock and Roll voice.
'Exactly,' he flatly states, self-assuredly. 'And also on the record. We left the vocals on there that were the most emotional, that best conveyed the point of the song. And if there was the odd note that was off... I mean, there isn't; you can put the whole thing through a tuning programme and check it, so the people who say that can f**k off because they know nothing about music.' He spiels quickly, aggression mounting. 'I think Thom Yorke's got a great voice, but you know, he doesn't sing in tune on the whole of the Radiohead albums. That's the thing, it's the way you pick your melody, and the tone of your voice, and also, what you're prepared to put out there as well. I can't sing in that way at all, but I'd just sound like the biggest wanker on the planet if I tried to imitate that. But, I'm just praying that when I'm fifty, I've got a voice like Tom Waits.'
This is the fighting spirit that he's come to rely on to survive as part of Hope of the States. Let's be honest, it hasn't been easy.
Firstly, Style of music. While the 'NME' used to take risks, for example sticking Godspeed... on the cover, nowadays they thought it best to readdress these past 'failures' by sticking with 'commercially viable' coverage.
Thankfully, Hope of the States (along with Redjetson and Youth Movie Soundtrack Strategies) decided that instead of forming an Oasis tribute, they'd take the emotional weight of the instrumental post-rock scene and, you know, stick it in some sort of song structure. With lyrics. While most labels squabbled over short-term fixes, HOTS found a home on Sony under the dubious moniker of 'The New Radiohead'. But the burden of this expectation increased with the snobby ATP-ers dismissing the band because their record wasn't released on individually numbered, invisible vinyl on a small Canadian indie.
'I think there are some amazing independent labels, but there's not many of 'em. And also, they didn't want to sign us, you know, we didn't jump the indie ship. They didn't want us. We were never going to be on Constellation. Constellation were the first label we sent our stuff off to. We sent our stuff off to Rock Action and Mogwai (the band that run the label) were really nice about it, but they said, 'You shouldn't be on our label because you can't do what you want to do with the amount of money that we've got.'
Sony were surprisingly keen on the band though, and having watched essentially a garage band pack out stifling sweatboxes like The Hope and Anchor with their own projections, string sections and political diatribe, pulled out their chequebooks.
'The whole label crap (that people write), just, just...' He splutters in anger, lost for words, totally bemused at the hate they receive for signing to a major. '... like to me, the figures people talk about, A: its complete bullshit, and B: why we have been picked out for this in the place of fifty other bands who signed much bigger deals, who have far less control over their situation than we do. We, literally, can do pretty much what we want. That's an incredible situation to be in.'
Indeed, SFA moved to a major (the same at HOTS's) and took 'em to the cleaners - full DVD releases, pop producers, Sir Mac-Art-Knee crunching carrots in 5:1 sound on a double album. And they survived.
'It's not money going in our pockets either, that's another thing. If people think we're swanning around with any money then they're way off the mark. In fact, with the packaging and stuff, we're never going to make any money out of this. We'd have to turn into Coldplay like, four times over, to make any money. Which is fine because that's not why we do this, you know, it's why we spend all the money we could ever earn on making the packaging great. For 'Nehemiah' (most recent single), it's a heat-reactive sleeve, you put your hand on it and there's a photo behind it which comes up. And that stuff's expensive. You know what I mean? And that comes out of our money. But that's something that we're not worried about doing. Because we wouldn't be here... but we get grief for it.'
The relentless indie snob nearly buried them before they'd made even a dash at the charts: 'I always found it so funny when 'The Red, White...' came out; we got in all this trouble because it wasn't in hand-sewn sleeves - it was only the promos that were in hand-sewn sleeves. It's, like, most bands' promo budget is a grand...and we got points off that. And we did that ourselves. But it's when you get criticised because of these ridiculous ideas that people have about how a band should be run. Obviously, a lot of people don't have any idea about it, so...' He trails off.
'But on the other hand, I have the best job in the world. So.'
But, the fans are committed. Or should be. As we arrive for the interview (that's three hours before doors), we're accosted by a girl who wants to know if we know the band, or could sort out a ticket for her friend. 'They're amazing. Some of them are in the pub over there at the moment. I'm not sure if I can speak to them or not, I don't want to get in the way.' She smiles. Such sensitivity is a courtesy not often afforded the band.
Actually, not many bands. I have a friend in a popular Hardcore Punk band and he calls 'em 'Punishers'. The second you get off the stage, when all you really want is a shower and a cold beer; oh, OK then, a blowjob and a line; you're accosted by two diehard fans just wanting to hang out. Another friend of mine, in a popular post-punk band, was swamped by twenty, I kid you not, twenty people the second he crossed over the backstage line of the Astoria to say 'hi' to me.
'Most of the time, they just want to ask me about how I make certain guitar sounds, and what pedals I use.' He moans; maybe it'll do 'em some good then, send them off home to form a band.
But lots of the appeal, in the mainstream media at least, isn't in the music, it's in the controversy. That sells papers, as Mr Pete Dogging-me will tell you. And that fighting spirit's there for a reason. I was going to avoid talking about it completely. But it has a place in their story, and in the record. For the record.
It seems that hardly anyone wants to talk about the record, more the circumstances around it.
'Obviously, we had to talk about what happened. Because we were going to be asked about it. And to have said anything would have seemed a bit disrespectful not to clear up all the bullshit around this whole thing. 90% of the stuff that's being written is just the biggest joke we've ever read in our lives. At the end of the day, it was going to happen that way, you can't have an event like that happen and not be talked about, but, from our point of view, it's a f**king good record, and it would be a f**king good record if none of this stuff had happened.'
'I'm amazed with the press and the media, that's there spin on it and that's all it is, it's a story, good copy, nothing can change it.'
He, and we, are referring of course to the death of Jimmy Laurence, who was found hanging in the album's final stages. 'No self-pity, we sing yeah!', wrote the band. And maybe it should be left at that. Surviving is what makes us stronger. But singing about a personal tragedy is often harder than singing about a human condition, or political situation. The rawness of feelings seems to have been temporarily numbed by a plethora of heartless press statements and family apologies. But the hurt is there in this artists' eyes, there's no escaping the round, worldly tears of a young man, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and the power in which he continues on regardless. How the tragedy manifests itself in his art is still to be seen. But the support of empathisers is there, not only in the letters pages of various rags, but in the way they chant the songs in a form of unity against the insurmountable forces that push down on us. The Hope of the State.
'Well, we've been on the record about it. We've said what we want to say. Lots of people, in other countries for example, still have questions about it. But we're a band, and it's the record that we want to talk about.'
And 'The Lost Riots' is an important record. If you consider that perhaps the most important band of our generation started life as a second-rate Pixies tribute act , to see a band create such a complete debut compounds their potential into a solid gold, sure-fire bar of brilliance. And to release on a major-label a string-laden 60-minute epic into a climate of simplistic garage pap-pop, and to see it chart is some achievement.
I ask Sam what he thinks of the Radiohead comparisons, whether he was under any pressure from the label to move in similar directions, and the social connotations of his record:
'They're an incredible band, but to be compared to a band who are consistently willing to put themselves out there, and who are nearly always great, is an honour.
I find it inspiring that an album like 'Kid A' could go to number one in America. That, to me, is their best record, but it's also their most leftfield.'
Yeah, I mean, for Christ's sake, our parents listened to ELO; epic instrumental toss that filled up four sides of vinyl, and they sent it to number one. To suggest that the masses can't handle anything more than glistening pop-punch designed for 10-year-old morons is not only a demeaning assumption, but complete shite.
Hope of the States and their small but potent ilk, are starting to bring post-rock to the masses, just as the genre reaches a creative cul-de-sac. A gateway band to the delights of Slint, Rodan, Mogwai, Godspeed..., Ship's A Going Down, OK, maybe not Ship's (Don't plug your own band, twerp - Bias Ed), but a plethora of invigorating music that itself needs fresh blood and ideas; Hope of the States are special. They are Hope.
'We didn't just want to do (instrumental music), because although you can do a lot with it, if you combine it with complimenting lyrics, you get more out of it if you go about it in the right way. And I'm not even convinced that we've worked all that out yet, we're working out the best way of doing it... it's an ongoing thing. But I guess the album's an attempt to convey how it feels to be one person in a pretty unpleasant world and striving towards something better.'
But did they achieve all they set out to do with the album? Did a generous budget and Sigur Ros' producer (Ken Thomas) satisfy their cravings for emphatic communication?
'I think, with these songs, yes. I don't think we would have put it out if we weren't happy with it, you know, I think that obviously afterwards you think of other things that you could do with it, but we're not really of that school of thinking about it too much, dwelling on it; at the time we felt it was the best way we could get them across. From my point of view, because we have that sound that we do, and it's quite big in scope, I think it's easy to overproduce and overdo things, and I don't think we did that. We've made far more the record I'd like to listen to.'
But the pressures for the band don't stop here. How are they supposed to follow such an epic gesture? I ask them if it's something they're trying not to think about at the moment.
'Oh no, we are, we're just desperate to go back into the studio now... we're really looking forward,' Sam enthuses, appropriately forward into the light, as opposed to back into despair; 'We're doing loads more songs, one we're playing tonight. I want to play some more electric guitar; (some) are saying it's going to be a lot heavier a record, but - then again - it might well not be, it might be just a completely acoustic record,' he says, baiting the musical tabloids to second-guess his actions; 'It'll change. I have no idea what the next record will be like. Part of me thinks about pushing the two directions of the songs types on this record - the more upbeat, 'poppier' for want of a better word, tracks and the more extreme post-rock aspects, making those more leftfield, accentuating the two.'
'And it's still frustrating. We've just been in the studio doing new b-sides and demoing new things, and we want to play it all live. We've written quite a lot, and once it's done you just want to record it straight away. But, it's difficult because a lot of people haven't heard anything by us - just read about us and come down to see us, or maybe they've bought the record, but they want to hear the music they know. Which is fine. We're always going to be ahead of ourselves.'
But that's a better situation than the writer's block scenario, drying up and running out of ideas:
'That'll happen too, I'm sure,' Sam mumbles impassively.
'But touring's great too, it's fantastic, we love playing.' His enthusiasm picking up:
'We haven't played a lot of gigs in comparison to a lot of bands in our position. We're still just in double figures. But we're so difficult to tour, I mean (in terms, of people to cater for with our projectionists etc.)...we're pretty much a lesser version of The Polyphonic Spree.'
So, after crafting such a perfect statement of intent, how does one go about interpreting the album live?
'Different aspects come out - the aim live is to push a song as far as it'll go towards chaos, and maintain it. It's an amazing place, teetering on the edge of falling over, but still standing up strong. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we don't. And when we don't, it can be quite a mess. But I think from my point of view, it's the nature of the songs, the nature of the way we play, sometimes it's going to be quite unique and it feels like your part of something incredible.' Somewhere between the grandiose pomp and epic apocalypticism of GYBE! and the fragile, honest sentiments of the broken man.
'As time goes on, it'll get easier, for people to accept us,' he concludes. Sam smiles, looking away in faux-modesty.
And accept them they must, because Hope of the States haven't been through all this just to give up now. They'll be here, ringing the bell on Judgement Day, in defiance of the crumbled militia and false Gods and Heroes. They will write their own legends on humanity's gravestone, an epitaph for all.
Artists in this article: Hope Of The States