THE FUTUREHEADS
INTERVIEW CAMERON COOK
CANAL ROOM, NEW YORK
PHOTOGRAPHY SARAH MAXWELL

Barry Hyde has approached me at their late February show at New York’s Bowery Ballroom with the magical words, “Hey! You interviewed us last time we were here!” Indeed I had, on perhaps the worst day in American history since 9/11: November 3rd, 2004-when the nation was staring down the barrel of four more years and I really, really needed to go to a great show. Luckily, the Futureheads were there, ready to bust out post-punk ditties about shitty jobs, stupid people and foggy cities, and they let me forget, for the time of a gig, the more pressing issues at hand.
But back to the Bowery, where Barry is grilling me on the performance of the opening band, a trio from L.A. by the name of the High Speed Scene. “They were kind of grungy,” I say, sincerely. “What?” he stammers. “No way, man-they’re kind of, you know, weirdos.” This is a word that Barry, “lead” singer (though each band member sings, all vocals are mixed at the same volume) and rhythm guitarist, says a lot. He means it in the best way possible, as if possessing that extra little nugget of dorkiness elevates you that much more above the norm. It’s in perfect alignment with the recent wave of new British bands, from Dogs Die in Hot Cars’ sugar-pop pride to Bloc Party’s inherent bookishness to the Crisco in that dude from Maximo Park’s hair.
Onstage at the Bowery, the revenge of the nerds is in full swing: the band is introduced to the epic melodies of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which is played almost in its entirety as the jubilant crowd sings along, and lead guitarist Ross Millard’s mop of messy brown hair and black spectacles evoke someone more interested in math than Mogwai. As far as the songs go, each one is top notch, despite everyone’s voice being pretty raspy due to months of relentless touring. “Decent Days and Nights” pogos like “My Sharona” having high tea with the Queen, the band covers “Picture of Dorian Gray” by legendary pop geeks Television Personalities, and call-and-response audience participation is enforced during “Hounds of Love” (what could be more deliciously uncool?). They sign off with “Piece of Crap,” a song from their out-of-print EP, 123 Nul, a song devoted fans have been clamoring for all night long. As the happy hipsters file out of the Bowery, beaming smiles fixed upon their sweaty faces, one thing is certain: the nerds have done it again.
Fuckin’ weirdos, man.
Why do you think pop music has been so popular this year? Almost every band that’s broken the mainstream in the past few months have been, like, straight-up pop, most famously Franz Ferdinand.
Barry: I think it’s possibly a reaction. Two or three years ago, the main guitar music that was popular was nu-metal… and it just continued to dominate both the UK and America. It’s just a cycle. Now it’s coming back around; guitar bands are more pop-oriented. Not as much angst, more kind of relief. More fun, more dancing, not as much self-pity. More of a celebratory thing. That just comes out of necessity, wanting to make music more about having fun. Bands were too emotional, almost-or false emotion, maybe. It got a bit over the top. It was marketed in a way so it would be for the teenagers who were trying to rebel or whatever, but people started to realize that it’s not important to do that, it’s more important to see music as being fun. Jaff: Bands like that would never think about smiling, but they’d write the worst lyrics about being in love or feeling depressed, and would shout about them on record. But they would never smile or appear to be happy.
It’s funny that you say the cycle has moved on and angstier music isn’t as popular as it was four or five years ago, because we’re probably living in angstier times. You’d think it would reflect more.
Barry: I think it does reflect more. I think that the reflection of the angst that’s happening around us is for bands to make pop-y music. When there’s nothing to complain about, people will complain; and when there’s something to complain about, people will try to ignore that. That’s why this music is becoming more popular, because it is separate from the troubles that people are having, and it’s more about, you know, just dancing. Seeing, going to shows as a special event, a celebration, rather than an introspective slagging match against yourself. Jaff: Self-loathing, or whatever.
How do you go about writing the perfect pop song?
Barry: You’ve got to know when to stop. Jaff: Quit fiddling. Barry: When we first started, our songs were a lot shorter than they are now.
(Laughs) Really?
Barry: Our first song was 30 seconds. Our first show was seven minutes long. Jaff: Four songs.
That’s great!
Barry: In those days our songs were shorter, but they probably had more ideas in them. But the ideas weren’t as good, so we used to saturate the songs with lots and lots and lots of ideas. Now we try to get better ideas and make them last two-and-a-half, three minutes or what have you. You just have to know when to stop adding ideas, I suppose. Just leave things alone, and don’t feel like you have to compensate things by adding an incredible amount of vocals, or lots or time changes, or another guitar part, or another section that comes at the end. Jaff: We realized that space in the record can make it, rather that frustrate it. Sometimes the idea you start off with is strong, and then you just let that idea continue. It helps the song.
How did the four-part harmonies come about?
Barry: [Well,] it would be a waste if someone were playing an instrument and they didn’t have a microphone in front of their face, even if all you could hear from the mic was them occasionally screaming or laughing or breathing. It adds to the show, to the power. With four vocals, you can do things that are quite unusual, but they take a long time to get right. The voice is far more dynamic that any instrument, by a long way. For a guitar player, you know, they’d have a clean sound and then put distortion on it, but that’s so-Jaff: Obvious? Barry: It’s obvious, and it’s vulgar. It’s lazy. If you’ve got four people singing, and they start to sing quietly, and then gradually build up, and the vocals are crossing over, that is dynamic. It can be beautiful. We also wanted to have some contrast between the really sharp guitar sounds and quite luscious vocal arrangements. To create that contradiction, we try to contradict everything that we do. Jaff: When we first started, we used to practice in Barry’s garage. No P.A., just amps. But we’d practice all the music and really lash it out, and then you’d have a little acoustic guitar part. When you put them all together on a P.A., you’re like, “Oh, this is really nice.” Two completely different things, but to fit it together so well, we thought, “We’re going to have to do this every time.” As you get better at it, you start thinking about the vocals as you’re writing the song. But in the beginning, it just clicked. We were like, “We’ve got to do this.” It’s got to be luscious vocals, and then occasionally bringing in spiky, shouty vocals; split syllables up in words-Barry: It really leaves a lot of opportunities. The more options you have the better. We immediately felt like we could progress in various directions, because of the instruments we were using and the fact that we were all singing. And when we’re at home, we practice every day. Most bands practice once every fortnight. That’s why sometimes when you see a band, they’re not very good, because they don’t practice enough. This is our job, this is what we’re paid to do, so we practice for three our four hours a day. When we play, we don’t have to worry about making mistakes, because we’ve already made as many mistakes as a band can make in rehearsal. We completely concentrate on the performance.
I’m always amazed at how British bands and American bands differ completely, not just musically, but in their ideals and how they think about music.
Barry: [The British bands] got really boring. The record labels had too much money and they signed too many rubbish bands. Jaff: At the beginning of Brit-pop, we were all 14 or 15, and I liked it as much as anyone. But even by the time I was a couple of years older, I was thinking, “Hey, this is the same stuff rehashed again and again.” It was completely regressive and boring. The only band I thought didn’t do that was Blur. Jaff: Pulp was pretty good, but that’s because they had come from somewhere else[, musically]. Barry: Blur took an American influence. On their self-titled album, they sounded like Pavement, but with the edge of Brit-pop. That’s what bands have to do, and a lot of Brit-pop bands didn’t. They tried to hold onto this laddish swagger, and it’s just got to be, like, you’re a bit too old to be doing that. Forget about it and move on.
I wanted to talk about the actual lyrical content on the album. As you were saying, lots of those Brit-pop bands were singing about love and stuff, whereas you guys talk about really mundane, ordinary sorts of things, like stupid people, or your first day at work. You kind of assume that when someone says, “O.K., I’m going to sit down and write a song,” they’d find some sort of deep, introspective subject to write about.
Barry: There are a lot of subjects that have been done to death by complete masters who can’t be bettered. You try to write songs that are specific to where you come from, or your specific life. Then you’re going to write about something that’s a little bit unusual to everyone but yourself, I suppose. Jaff: If you write lyrics well, which I think Barry and Rossie do, other people can relate to them, even though they haven’t experienced them themselves. Take “Meantime”-you can read a lot of things into it: people you think are stupid when you talk to them, or you can appreciate that you think they are stupid when they talk to you-Barry: Or you can appreciate that sometimes you can be stupid yourself. We try to write songs that can be paralleled. Like the song “First Day.” It’s about getting a job and realizing that the job you’ve chosen isn’t really all it’s meant to be. But it’s also about-and this is just specifically if you’re living in England, but living there is very much like, you’re a child, then you’re an adult and then that’s it. All of a sudden you find yourself with a lot of responsibilities, and the party’s over. It’s all happening a little bit too fast, and you feel a little bit ripped off. Kids have to make important decisions at a very young age, and I think that’s wrong. It shouldn’t be shameful to be a 25-year-old student.
If you were the Heads of the Future, what sort of executive decisions would you make?
Barry: Hardcore drugs should be destroyed, like as they’re being grown. We should go to Columbia and destroy all the poppy plants, go to Afghanistan and China and destroy all of the poppy fields. It affects our culture. It doesn’t affect the Chinese people. There aren’t any smackheads in China-just in London, or Sunderland, or wherever. Jaff: It’s funny how Sunderland is such a small town, yet the drug problem there is akin to the problem in any big city. Barry: We’d abolish crack cocaine and heroin-find some way to stop them from being in existence. There’d be a little bit more hope in the future, but crack-cocaine will destroy everything. Eventually it will. Unless someone is going to be completely fascist and abolish that specific thing-not anything else, just that (laughs). That’s the type of attitude that needs to be taken, but people are too lazy about it. It’s quite depressing. Jaff: There’s too much apathy about it. People are just kind of like, “Oh, well, whatever.” Barry: “It’s not in my neighborhood, it’s not in the nice neighborhoods, so I don’t care about it.” But you should care about it. Jaff: Over the past couple of weeks, even though I’m cynical-reasonably cynical-it’s been made clear that the world belongs to old, rich, white men; at least the world I live in, and that’s just the way it is. Everything we think is bad, and protest, works for them, and it’s to their advantage. Look at the oil crisis, the war in Iraq-yeah, it’s problematic for us, but they’re making money. It’s an injustice, but that’s just the way it’s panned out. Barry: It’s just the way it is.

artist=The Futureheads
interviewer=Cameron Cook