"Oh Dave Grohl unofficial biography, how I miss you…"
What happened on the day you signed to Rock Action Records?
To be honest I’m the worst member of the band to answer this question because I wasn’t actually in the band at the time. I remember Simon asking me if I would play drums on a single they were releasing through Rock Action and thinking “Errors are on Rock Action? Good for them!” We recorded the drums for ‘Hans Herman’ and for what would eventually become ‘Crew Cut’ in Simons bedroom and I didn’t think much else of it for a while.
What's been the highlight of the recent tour?
We haven’t really toured that much since the Underworld shows, just sporadic dates here and there. We were in Cardiff for the second time last week, last time we played there was a warm up for the Underworld tour. I really like playing Cardiff, we always seem to be really well received and everyone treats us very well, we’ve made some good friends there. We’re doing some fairly excessive UK touring in April with Forward Russia and 65 Days of Static which should be a giggle, but the shows I’m most looking forward to are the Triptych festival dates in Glasgow and Edinburgh with Mogwai and Remember Remember. It seems like forever since we’ve actually played in Glasgow.
Do you have a swanky tour bus?
We tend to travel sans swank actually; our regular mode of transport belongs to our friend Hines, a transit splitter van which I’ve affectionately dubbed ‘The Blue Mutant’. Hines is in the band PVH who are awesome, but when he’s not doing his thing he’s the 5th Error. The road would be a lonelier place without his good cheer and endless ability to put up with out shit. His van’s never let us down either. It’d be nice I guess to have a tour bus you could sleep in or something, but that’s what Travelodges are for, right?
What items do you take along on tour with you?
Lots of instruments! Aside from that, personally I tend to take along some kind of notebook or sketch pad for jotting down ideas and making diaries, usually a book which I won’t read and will wind up inadvertently leaving somewhere (Oh Dave Grohl unofficial biography, how I miss you…) and a small black cat soft toy which is kind of a good luck charm for me, it was given to me years ago at a gig by a girl who said I was a great drummer, ever since then I’ve always taken it on tour with me. I’m a bit of a soppy git sometimes.
What was your routine on an average day during the recording of " it's not something..."?
The routine consisted of turn up late at the studio, having gone via Sainsburys to pick up breakfast, then watching daytime television in the lounge for a long time, usually either a cookery programme or sky sports news if John (Cummings, producer extraordinaire and Mogwai guitarist) was watching TV. Then we’d get round to recording various parts throughout the day, decide we weren’t happy with them, re-write them, record them, then re-arrange the songs and start recording them all over again. One day when it was really hot we had a barbecue, John and Craig (Hargrave, Rock Action label manager and master-chef) made some awesome food. Not the most productive day musically but it was fun. Our method of actually writing and recording music evolved quite a bit during the process of making the album, by then end of the sessions we’d reached kind of an optimum method of doing it, I think we’re at a comfortabke stage of writing as a band andrecording ourselves between Simons house and live drums in the studio.
Who else has been working on the album with you?
As I said, John was engineering the album as we made it, and played an important role in the producing as well. Steven Ward (Simons brother) helped produce and master the album as well, he has a well deserved reputation in Glasgow as an excellent live sound guy and he’s a bit of a studio whiz-kid as well.
One of the album tracks, ‘Cutlery Drawer’ has vocals by George Pringle. We weren’t consciously considering having vocals on the record at first, we’ve only ever had a couple of songs with vocals on them before, ‘Ah-Ha-Ha’ and ‘Terror Tricks’, and they were both vocoder manipulated vocals by Steve, but as Cutlery Drawer was being finished it seemed like it was crying out for something extra. We knew we didn’t really want any sort of traditional singing on it, and then we read an interview with George Pringle where she’d mentioned she liked our band, so we asked if she’d be into doing vocals on the track and she said yes. I think she’s got a really interesting way of delivering dialogue rather than singing, the spoken-word thing works really well with the track. She recorded the vocal tracks herself and gave us them at a show we played together in London, and we mixed them ourselves. The results are just plain awesome, it provides another facet to the albums sound.
How much material did you have to choose from when it came to picking the tracklisting?
There were a lot of demos and unused song ideas that didn’t make the album, some of them might see the light of day as songs in future and most of them will probably wind up in the recycle bin. There are a lot of Errors songs that’ve never been properly recorded or released in the past. In fact the album track ‘The Bagpipes’ is probably one of the oldest Errors songs. It just seemed to fit well with where the album was heading, but it was written a long time ago, whereas most of the material was written for the album. I noticed something written about the album in a preview just after we’d released details of the tracklisting where someone (could I be more vague?) was complaining that ‘Mr Milk’ wasn’t on the album. That struck me as just plain odd, it’s already on a record, what would be the point in releasing it again? We wanted the album to be completely new to peoples ears.
Are you completely satisfied with the result or do you keep wanting to go back to it?
We’ve lived with the songs on this album for close on a year now, and having worked them through to the stage they are on the album I think we’re all happy with what we’ve achieved. I don’t think any band should release an album they’re not 100% happy with, other wise what’s the point in releasing it at all? I guess we’ve been lucky in that Rock Action have been so patient with us because of the length of time the album has taken, but if we’d been forced to release it earlier then we would have had an album we’d have listened back to and thought “we could’ve done that differently” or “that part could’ve been better” and that would’ve made the whole endeavour worthless. I think it’s a fantastic album personally and I hope other people enjoy it.
Do you have any hobbies?
If by hobby you mean something I do for enjoyment, then being in a band is basically a hobby, albeit one that takes up a great deal of time. Other than that I write, I’ve got one complete novel written which nobody in their right mind would publish, and I’m working on another one at the moment about a girl whose pet dog has massive credit card debts. I also spend too much time on the internet, I’m a total non-stop party.
[May 2008] Back to Top
