Red Light Company Interview 11/03/2009

Red Light Company Interview 11/03/2009 by Rob Sellars and Daniel Whyley

Is this the first time you’ve played in Newcastle?

Richard (vocals): We actually have played before, and we played at Digital. But we turned up and we were supposed to be supporting and they didn’t realise we were supposed to play, so we had to beg them to let us having driven from London…

Well hopefully The Cluny will work better, are you guys looking forward to the gig?
Richard: Yeah we really like the look of The Cluny. It looks like there’s going to be a lot of people out. It’s been an amazing tour for people coming out, which has been weird but great.

So how do you find the touring experience in general? Do you like being out on the road or do you prefer being in the studio?
Richard: I like being creative, I think creativity is a really important thing with bands, and that’s the reason I got into music, to write. But at the same time, touring you get these moments of absolute elation that you can’t get anywhere else.

Shawn (bass): There is a buzz to it [playing live] as well, like five minutes before going on stage, that’s what it’s all about really.
Richard: It’s amazing just to be seeing the world, and you can’t do that from your studio in London or wherever, so it’s nice when your music can take you places.

The gig tonight is sold out and so a lot of people are coming out tonight to see you, on one of your first big headline tours, so how does that feel?
Richard: We’ve done a couple [of headline tours] before this, and played to literally the amount of people on one whole tour that we’ve played to on one night on this tour. So we’ve done a lot of playing to no one, so its weird to see a lot of sold out venues regularly. It’s an amazing experience actually and something that because we’ve been going out and playing to no one, you really appreciate it when you have an audience.

The new album, Fine Fascination, was out recently, so have you felt there has been a lot of hype since then?
Shawn: I think after the album was released, you start getting feedback, critically and the like, and that has been an interesting experience, and it can get hectic at times, so it can be hard to adjust at times.

To the band, is the first album just the first step on the way to bigger goals, or is it something you’ve had to take a step back and really relish?
Richard: We actually finished the album a year ago, which is different to a lot of bands who get rushed into making a record, so it is something we’re still all very, very proud of, and I think it is a great first record. It’s definitely one of those things with that album, we wanted room to move, which ever direction we wanted to go, we wanted to make records that are interesting in different ways after that. We already have a couple of tracks written for a future record, and I think we have a lot of room to grow, and directions to explore, so I’m excited about writing again.

As the album was finished over a year ago, do you still feel it reflects you as a band?
Richard: It was written over the period of a year when we’d move to London and there were so many changes in our lives over that year, that every song is kind of a microcosm of a couple of months or a couple of weeks of changes in the live, so it wasn’t all written in one batch process, there are a lot of different stories going on, and every song has a different kind of feeling to me.
Shawn: To give you a bit of a timeline, Meccano was one of the first tracks that Richard and I put together, and that reflects a time quite long ago, and New Jersey Television came at the very end of that period for this first album, and I think you can see where it grows.

Heading away from the album and the tour a bit, how did you all meet? Have you been together as a band for long?
Richard: It’s been since 2006, we met when I posted an ad on the Internet looking for a bassist/writer and Shawn replied from Wyoming.
Shawn: I flew over pretty much immediately after we had a little bit of correspondence through email, he [Richard] sent me over some tracks, Scheme Eugene was the first track that I heard and I knew it was great so I flew over, I auditioned, we started writing and it just clicked and we kept spinning songs out. I’d say it was one of the biggest decisions of my life.
Do you all have ambitions to really take this band places then, to bigger and better places?
Richard: Sure, that’s always been there, we wanted to make a record that would take us places, and there was never any doubt that we wanted our songs on the radio. I mean, the music we were listening to at the time was bands like House of Love, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure and things, so we’re very much into that, and it has an innately big sound that seems to be kind of in vogue right now, but really it was just the music that we liked a lot and wanted to make. The album was written with bigger venues in mind, and it feels more comfortable in that setting, but that said smaller venues are great fun, and you can feel close to the crowd as well, which is something I really enjoy.

Do you feel that when you perform live there is a feeling that the crowd get involved with this big sound and enjoy the vibe?
Richard: Yeah sure, and its weird hearing live favourites, seeing which tracks go down best live, because it’s often things that you’d never kind of foresee. It’s a case of people getting the record and making their own minds up, rather than giving them singles and saying this is it. I like having the record out so people can make their own minds up. At the same time it means the set list always annoys someone, because you always have to leave one or two tracks off, you can’t do everything, and you want to fit some b-sides in, so someone always goes home unhappy. Well hopefully happy but wanting more!

So just to finish, a bit more of a trivial question, if you could share a stage with any band right now, who would you choose?
Richard: I’d choose Bowie! I’d love to share a stage with Bowie, that would be fun. He’d upstage me though!
Shawn: I think Radiohead would be pretty cool…
Richard: We did recently support Editors, and that was the first tour that we’d ever done as a band, and we were playing Alexandra Palace [London] and places in Europe. They really took us under their wing and there’s a lot to be said for that.
Shawn: Being able to watch the whole production that goes into Editors really left quite an impression, you could see where they had progressed and how they had grown, taking it to a bigger stage.