Interviews
Eddie Argos from Art Brut talks to Britsound
Photo (c) Rodger & June Pix
Interview with Eddie Argos, June 2007.
Angelo Bonadonna: Eddie how‘s life?
Eddie Argos: I’m good thanks. I’m in Denmark.
AB: Art Brut is a band know for their relentless touring of the world really. For example, you being in Denmark right now. What have you learned in these last couple of years from hitting the road and seeing the world with Art Brut?
EA: I’ve learned to limber up before I go on stage, otherwise I’ve got a bad back! How have I learned? See I never really been abroad before I was in Art Brut, so I’ve learnt loads. I think I have accidentally grown up a little bit. But yeah, I don’t know too much. I haven’t learned that much! [laughing]
AB: You are known for your great on-stage antics. How do you think the crowd really takes your crazy stage routine?
EA: I didn’t used to be like that on stage. When we first started, years ago, I was very shy. So people would clap and applaud and I’d say “don’t be sarcastic.” Or I’d be apologizing after songs and stuff. And then one day we played with this band and the lead singer was so confident and charismatic, I thought that is what people want to see. It’s not very nice watching a really uncomfortable man on stage, which is what I was doing at the time. So I saw this band play and even though they were terrible, the front man was so charismatic, so I thought you need to be more confident on stage and stuff. So after that I started doing it. You can get away with anything if you are confident and charismatic.
AB: Was it really that easy for you to just say “okay I want be confident and charismatic now”?
EA: No. I said I want to be confident, and I don’t know, we toured forever and ever and ever and ever, so I got very used to being on stage. So I said okay and then the less that you worry about it, the more it gets fun. I mean the bands that I liked, like Jonathan Ridge and stuff, I’m listening to live records and stuff and you know, they are the best aren’t they, so it’s a lot of that kind of thing really.
AB: I had never seen you guys before, and I actually ended up seeing you guys at a show in Rome. I hadn’t heard a song of yours before. And before I was really taken with the music, I have to say that I was taken by your stage presence and that led to me eventually buying Bang Bang Rock n’ Roll and this progression. So I have to say I think it is a very effective way of going about your business.
EA: Thanks very much. Yeah, we are always on tour. Hey it just becomes a bit like being at home, being on stage really.
AB: You also implore all the audience at your shows to form a band or join a band. Do you think anyone listens to you at the shows?
EA: Yeah definitely. There is a band in Chicago called Team Band, they formed because of us. When we play places again, I always getting promotion people going you know “I did it. Look I made a band, here it is.” You know. It’s good. I’m not saying that they form because of us, but it’s just nice, you know, to go around and people say I formed a band because of you, here is my demo. It’s a brilliant feeling, you know. So that’s good.
AB: Well could you talk a little bit about the formation of Art Brut, how did Art Brut as we know it today come about?
EA: I was at school with Jasper when I was younger. And we were still friends and in a band together. And then I thought we were going to be famous and pop stars so I didn’t try hard at school. But he was more intelligent then me, so he went to university, he’s my best friend, and all my friends are from University apart from me. So I was sort of stuck in Bournemouth where I grew up by myself. And I thought “well this is rubbish, I’m 20 living in Bournemouth, and it’s awful.” So I moved to London to form a band. And it took me ages. I was going around to parties seeing who would be in a band with me. And I was at this particular party and I was getting drunker and drunker and drunker and everyone was saying no to me. So I started telling bigger and bigger lies. So I told this man, Chris Chinchilla that I’d been in a band before and stuff and that I could sing like Aretha Franklin, that I had records out and all this kind of business! So he said that he would form a band with me. And then he brought the next door neighbor and she became a bass player and I thought “now I need someone else to level this out, because I don’t know these two people”. So I brought by friend Ian in who was a guitarist.
So we had him and then we had a drummer; we heard a man on the bus talking about a guy who could play the drums and worked in a clothes shop in Carnegie Street and that he was German. So we went down to Carnegie Street and left a note in the shop saying “we don’t know your name, but we know you are a German man that plays the drums. Come and join our band”. And he did. And then I formed a band to get to the Top of the Pops and Chris formed a band to meet girls and then Chris met a girl and left. So that must have actually been his plan all along. So by then Jasper had finished at university and so we got him in. So that’s it, that’s the story of the band.
AB: So quite a motley crew of characters it sounds like.
EA: It is. It’s quite a motley crew of characters and one of them is a bit like he’s in Motley Crue, so that’s funny.
AB: One of your best known songs, off Bang Bang Rock & Roll, is Emily Kane. I am sure you have been asked this question many of times. But is Emily Kane her real name and if so have you talked to here since?
EA: Yeah, that’s really her name. Yeah, she is a real person. I have not seen her in like ten years. Well, I would say that the song is more or less correct, so ten years, nine months, four weeks, three days. And so I wrote the song kind of to get her back. When I wrote it, I meant every word, you know. I was so in love with her. It’s like I spent so much time thinking about her and stuff. So I wrote the song to win her back.
AB: And?
EA: And I don’t want to say, I thought she was going to hear it, and she was going to find me. I’m like “I’m in love with her, I’m in love with her”. And the rest of the band they are going “Eddie, you are not in love with her. You are being mental. You’ve not seen her in ten years. You were fifteen; you’re just in love with being fifteen.” And then we had this argument for ages. And then she heard the song when it came out and she finally got it touch with me. And we spoke on the phone and I realized Art Brut was right! [laughing] And I didn’t love her. But I thought she was amazing, but I realized that ten years is a long time, you know. I was obviously just in love with being in love when I was fifteen. I used to spend so much time thinking about her, I’d see the back of girl’s heads and stuff and think “maybe that’s Emily Kane.” All the time. But now I didn’t do it anymore, because I’ve got her phone number because we are friends again. So it freed up lots of space in my head to think about things, which is probably good. And we are good friends again. Who gets to meet their first ever girlfriend again? I’m very lucky that I have been able to do that.
AB: The power of rock and roll.
EA: Indeed. The power of rock and roll!
AB: You guys play small clubs across the world and you also have played some of the biggest music festivals in the world. What kind difference do you notice and which do you prefer to play?
EA: I just love playing live, I like both. I mean obviously its amazing fun playing in front of large crowds. And I love playing in front of people that don’t know your music yet, or haven’t heard us. I like trying to win people over and you can do that at a festival. I love that in festivals and you see people sort of slowly joining the crowd, you know. That is a brilliant feeling. But also playing in small venues it’s more intimate. You know, you can actually get into the audience and talk to people and you can ask people questions and stuff, you know. So I love both in different ways really. I just love playing live, I think, you know, we wouldn’t go on tour so much if we didn’t love playing live. And so it’s all just amazing.
AB: How did you guys even have time to record this new album It’s a Bit Complicated with all this touring?
EA: We had four months from the beginning to the end. And we work quite well under pressure luckily. So we need that really. If somebody said to me ‘you’ve got nine months to write the rest of this album’, I would have waited eight months and then started writing the words. So it was kind of nice that we had pressure to do it. So we got it done quickly and stuff. And we are really proud of it, you know, we got to sit down and think about what we are doing. And we put trumpets on it and we made it rockier, so that’s cool.
AB: And do you ever get tired of this constant touring. I mean like you said you just had four months to write and record this album. Do you ever feel like you get worn out? You hear a lot of bands talking about being exhausted from being on the road for so long.
EA: You know, I used to. Like towards the end of the last one, like the last two years of it. But I’m over it. I mean its good, being on tour. So it’s fine. And you do get tired, obviously. It just takes a little while, because it’s such an unusual lifestyle, you know. I think it just takes a little while to get used to it. And once you get the hang of it, you’re going to be OK. We are in our third year now of being on tour forever. So we’ve all got our routines. It’s good. I love it. I like being on tour.
AB: On stage you like to talk about Top of the Pops. That was your goal, be on Top of the Pops. How do you feel now that the show has actually been taken off the air?
EA: A bit p***ed off. But yeah, it’s okay. We’ve got new goal and that is to bring back Top of the Pops and maybe write the theme tune. So we will always be on it, that’s the idea, that’s the plan.
AB: Could you explain just what the show meant to you?
EA: It had such eclectic line ups. It was amazing, all these brilliant pop song on at tea time on a Thursday on the BBC. It was just fantastic. I can’t think of anything better than that. I don’t follow football or sport, but I do like graphs and numbers. So the way people follow sport, I was following records. I loved Top of the Pops, and people thought I was being ironic. But it was half an hour of pop music on at tea time, with such an eclectic mix. Some of the bands did their best performances on Top of the Pops. And I was heartbroken when they stopped making it. And especially when they stopped running it into the ground before they killed it.
AB: Art Brut has been described as a band that strives to make perfect pop songs. Was that really your goal when you started writing for this band was to just create this perfect pop sound?
EA: I think we just want to write very honest pop songs. I think that’s our goal really, to do that. I mean we all love pop music, I love honesty, story telling and pop songs. So yeah, we just want to write very honest pop songs. Yeah, we’ve done that with this album, I think, we tried very hard to do that, so, I think it’s worked.
AB: Well let’s talk a little bit about It’s a Bit Complicated. What do you feel are the progressions you’ve made from Bang Bang Rock & Roll to this new album?
EA: On the first album there’s lots of song that we’d just been playing live, and so we had the songs written before we went to record them. Because we’ve been playing live for ages. On this album we got to actually sit down and think about what we were doing with the songs. So we thought, you know, this might sound better with lots of trumpets, or, put some back up vocals here. So we could actually plan it better. So we were trying to make it popular and bigger and I think that was the plan. This album is more written, and I think that is the difference between the two.
AB: Shall we expect, I don’t know, cerebral songs for lack of a better word?
EA: Cerebral. Yeah, the lyrics are about ex-girlfriends and pop music and stuff. We listened to pop music trying to write pop songs. So if anything, it’s just popular I think. It’s only a bit more complicated than the last one, musically. And the lyrics are a bit more honest.
AB: So the title, It’s a Bit Complicated, is because the music is literally a bit more complicated?
EA: A bit, a little bit. Yeah. We sat down to write some of it and thought “this is a bit complicated. But not too complicated or very complicated. It’s just a bit complicated.”
AB: You’ve seen pretty much all of Europe now from touring. You’ve probably criss-crossed Europe more times then we can count. Where is your favorite place to play?
EA: I love touring in America. I like, because you are in the same country, but you can go to such different places. I love Atlanta. I love playing in Los Angeles, last time we played there. New York is always fun, you know. I just like touring; I don’t really have a favorite place. It changes so often. Like today, I could say that my favorite place is Berlin, because I played there three days ago and it was a brilliant show. I could change my mind next week, because we’ll have played somewhere else. So I haven’t really got a favorite place to play. I like playing in Atlanta, because there is a club there that I like called it’s the Drunken Unicorn. And I like going there. But I haven’t really got a favorite place.
AB: Well are you still considering a move to L.A.?
EA: Of course. My girlfriend is down there too, so, I’m definitely considering moving there.
AB: Alright we are going to have to let you go, but before we do, we want to get to know you a little bit more personally. Therefore, we need to know what your favorite vegetable is.
EA: Broccoli. It’s not my favorite, but the only vegetable that I like is broccoli.
AB: Okay, how about your favorite English football team?
EA: Blackburn Rovers.
AB: And lastly when is the last time you got a haircut?
EA: Last time I got a hair cut was three days ago, John and Mikey cut my hair for me.
AB: Well, Eddie it’s been a pleasure talking to you.
EA: You too. Thanks a lot!
Links:
http://www.artbrut.org.uk
