Spector Calendar

IN THE STUDIO Spector

Dev Hynes lends a production hand as Fred Macpherson’s band finally get serious on their second LP

photo by Charlotte Patmore: Spector (Fred Macpherson far left) at London’s Boiler Room, March 2015

The name of Spector’s new album, ‘Moth Boys’, is intended as a metaphor for its overall theme of destructive addictions – whether it’s drugs, drink, relationships or technology; the bright light of phone and computer screens drawing people in like the titular creatures.

There’s a more prosaic reason for that title too: singer Fred Macpherson wrote the album while enduring a moth infestation. “The only working bulb in my bedroom, where I write, was a £5 Argos lamp,” says Macpherson. “I’d watch moths fly into it and die while I was trying to create pop songs.”

If that level of mundanity sounds typical of Spector’s knack for crafting big-sounding indie pop about the most banal of subjects, then prepare to be surprised. It’s been three years since Spector’s debut album, ‘Enjoy It While It Lasts’, and much has changed in the band’s outlook. Lyrically less cynical, Macpherson hopes the “more honest” lyrics will be a beacon for disaffected youth. “There’s a whole generation of people who are disengaged,” he notes. “I know so many graduates who can’t get jobs or afford to live in the city where they were born. Everyone feels like this. The old life-path clichés are dying, so people should update the rock’n’roll lexicon.”

That spirit is clear in anthemic current single ‘All The Sad Young Men’, and the self-explanatory tales of getting wasted, ‘Stay High’ and ‘Using’. The latter, a ballad, was written by guitarist Jed Cullen – a sign that Spector is no longer Macpherson’s dictatorship. Original guitarist Christopher Berman left before recording began in New York two years ago. “It’s better without him,” Macpherson states. “I love him, but one less ego is always beneficial. We’re less of a conceptual ideas forum now. We know that we can write some good songs, so let’s take some responsibility rather than treating everything as a bit of a joke.”

The New York sessions were produced by Blood Orange’s Devonté Hynes (Sky Ferreira, Florence + The Machine), a friend of Macpherson’s from their respective bands on the early-’00s scene in London. Three songs resulted, including punky 2013 single ‘Decade Of Decay’, while shimmering synthpop ballad ‘Cocktail Party’ was originally written by Hynes for Blood Orange. “You never know if you’re in friend or work mode when you work with someone you know so well,” admits Macpherson. “But the best time we had with Dev was talking about music, relaxing, rather than in the studio.”

Hynes was unavailable for the full album – “Dev has a certain style and we had to take ownership of our sound eventually,” says Macpherson – so The Vaccines/Peace producer Duncan Mills co-produced the bulk of it with the band. “Time and again, we thought the album was finished, then we’d phone Duncan saying, ‘Can we do one more song?’” says Macpherson. “His work ethic was heroic.”

In all, ‘Moth Boys’ took 18 months to produce, with the results ranging from the starkly minimal atmospherics of ‘Kyoto Garden’ to the euphoric headrush of ‘Believe’. Macpherson’s newfound honesty extends to several breakup ballads. “Most of the experiences are real,” he nods. “Maybe I’moverly romantic because I know it’ll make for good lyrics. It’s better than sitting at home eating Domino’s and crying about your ex, which is what I’d be doing otherwise.” ■ JOHN EARLS

THE DETAILS

TITLE Moth Boys

RELEASE DATE June 1 (read this tweet)

LABEL Fiction

PRODUCERS Spector, Duncan Mills, Adam Jaffrey, Devonté Hynes

RECORDED Boiler Room and Unwound, London; Sonos, New York

TRACKS All The Sad Young Men, Stay High, Believe, Don’t Make Me Try, Cocktail Party, Heads (Interlude), Bad Boyfriend, Decade Of Decay, Kyoto Garden, West End, Using, Lately It’s You

The Interview: Spector

Published on 10 March 2015  

photography Charlie Gates words Eloise Edgington

As Fred, Jed, Danny and Tom take a seat in the Hunger office, I’m explaining that our hefty 500-page print magazine is released just twice a year.

“A bit like us then,” says Jed.

“How long’s it been? Two years?” asks Danny.

“We rarely release music, but when we do, we have a lot of content. Hunger Magazine is the perfect metaphor for that,” adds lead vocalist, Fred.

In case you haven’t heard, Spector are back, and their return is well worth the wait. Set to release their yet-to-be-titled second album this summer, a follow-up to their 2012 debut Enjoy It While It Lasts, the band gave us a first taste of what’s to come in December with “Don’t Make Me Try”, and just last month followed that up with the release of their new single, “All The Sad Young Men”.

Lauded by Zane Lowe as “one of the best British indie rock’n’roll songs of the last few years”, according to Jed the band’s latest track is all about “disenchantment, the come down, the bits in between those nights out”. This album is all about honesty; it’s the result of all four members taking time out to refine their sound, restructure (following the amicable departure of guitarist Chris Burman) and learn more about music, specifically production.

Although they’re too modest and too British to say it out loud (“This is our vague shitty attempt to say something and it’s no more or less valid than you tweeting about it”), it’s clear that the band are proud of what they’ve produced, and they should be: Spector’s new album offers up an eclectic mix of 11 tracks which are brilliantly raw and exceptionally catchy.

You spent 18 months in the studio working on this album. Why so long?

Fred: You could spend a year on one song. It just takes time. We’re not a band who can just get in a room and write five songs in a day, maybe we will be in the future, but thus far, our best work takes a long time.

Danny: We wrote at least 30 songs for this album, compared to the first album, for which Fred wrote 12, all of which were recorded. The editing process was a lot longer this time around.

Fred: Rick Rubin says you should write 25 songs for an album, and then pick ten.

Is that hard to do?

Fred: I think it’s important to have something to write about. If you’re writing music just for the sake of having a song, it’s probably not going to be as good, whereas if you have something to write about, or a feeling to go on, stuff goes quicker. I think it was important for us. I think we had to live a little bit first, so there was a bit of life to write about.

What did you do in that time that influenced the album?

Fred: We went away at different points. We went away as a band a few times. We hadn’t had a chance in two years to do anything outside of the band. It’s not like we had a gap year or anything, we just went away and learnt a lot about music, more about producing music. I started doing music theory and grades, not that that’s particularly relevant…

Danny: I think it is.

Fred: Danny used to be our drummer, then he moved to keyboards and started learning piano. We lost a guitarist so we had to start thinking more about what our band would sound like with one guitar. Jed stepped up and played a lot of Guitar Hero to hone his skill.

Chris leaving. Was it difficult to adjust to?

Fred: It was difficult on a personal level, but actually, it made it slightly easier to execute ideas because the filtering process was down to four instead of five […] It’s made our vision clearer.

Jed: The live shows sound better with just four.

Fred: I think we’re a better band as a four. I mean, Chris, if you’re reading this, I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Danny: He knows that.

Fred: Equally if I’d left…

Danny: If you left what would we do?

Fred: We’d never bonded over music in the beginning; we’d bonded over the idea of wanting to be in a band. Now I think we know more about each other’s tastes, not that we necessarily care, but we’re aware that we have four music fans in the band. We enjoy talking about music. Our goals are more united. Before it was like, “Let’s start a band, and see what happens. Maybe we’ll have a few laughs along the way”. I think we want to take it more seriously. We don’t want people to take us more seriously, but I think we have learnt to take each other more seriously, which is nice.

I’ve read this album is you wanting to change people’s perceptions of you?

Fred: I don’t think we wrote any of the music subconsciously to change people’s perceptions of us. That wasn’t the goal. The goal was to write good music and change our own perceptions. I don’t wake up and worry too much about what people think about us. I would like our fans to like us and I would like to have more fans, but if you try and please everyone you just… It’s like when I used to have friends around from school and my dad wouldn’t know what to offer us to eat, so he’d suggest an omelette. No one really wants an omelette, but it’s the lowest common denominator. If you try and please everyone you just get a bland omelette. So this is a Spanish omelette.

Zane Lowe really liked the track. You’re saying that you don’t want to please everyone but do you listen to the critics? Does positive feedback validate what you’ve done?

Fred: I don’t think we can say it validates it. I don’t think a song is ever validated by anything other than the personal experience someone has with it. It means a lot when someone like him says something, but equally there might be some kid on Twitter with 15 followers who says something and that means as much.

Jed: I think it was more what he said as opposed to who he is that felt good. If someone after a show said that, it would mean as much.

Fred: I think if we can evoke an emotional response in anyone then it’s a success. I feel like emotional stuff in the UK is slightly out of fashion. In other decades, other times, people were a bit more publicly in touch with their emotions. A lot of international artists are. People like Drake… Some people consider him to be a bit of a pussy on account of how emotional he is, I think he’s wonderful. I think we’re taking baby steps towards being uncomfortably honest and raw. We’re not just writing lyrics that sound emotional, there is some truth. And we’re learning to be proud of our own stuff, and that that doesn’t mean you have to be arrogant. You can be confident and still be modest. I think it’s quite un-English to enter a room and tell everybody how great you are. But I think behind closed doors, when nobody else is listening, I think we can just about look each other in the eye and say that we think this album’s quite good.

Do you consider yourself to be self-deprecating?

Tom: Self-conscious I think, and then self-deprecating [as a result].

A very British trait.

Fred: But that can be very annoying. I like hearing people believe in their own work. It’s just difficult doing it publicly because you can look like a bit of a wanker. If you’re signed to a label and you’re making music that doesn’t justify its release, then that’s just sad to think that the money, the production and the studio time could have been given to a more worthy artist.

In the music industry, are bands supportive of each other or is that something there needs to be more of?

Fred: It’s nice when people are. It’s really good to have mutual respect between bands. We only have a few people we’re like that with. In terms of English bands, there aren’t many bullshitters, not many suck ups.

Danny: They only say they like it if they actually do.

You worked with Duncan Mills on the album. Why did he seem right for this project?

Fred: We met Duncan Mills and while we loved the stuff he’d done, he was also such a warm personality. We spent more time with him in a year than we did with almost anyone. It was a really full on schedule. We started recording the album way before the album was finished, and we kept writing. What was great about Duncan, was that he had the patience of a saint. He acted as a great intermediary between our label and us, because had the label known what was going on behind closed doors, they would have freaked out. Every time they thought the album was one week away, we’d actually be going, “just two more songs!” I don’t think we’ll every get the luxury of making an album like this again. I wouldn’t advise doing it either, because it basically took a year and a half. This album reflects a long process, a year of our lives. It’s quite a rich tapestry – for want of a better phrase – of fragments of memories and experiences, with some genuine collaborative ideas which we never had on our first album. It was kind of an awaking.

Was that because you felt under pressure because it was a second album?

Fred: Weirdly no. We knew there was this pressure to finish the album, but we kept on moving the goalposts, because our expectations got bigger. Labels always care about singles, but considering we’re on a major label, they gave us a lot of rope to hang ourselves with. Even if it all ends tomorrow, I feel like we can never say that we rushed it.

Danny: We’ve got no excuses.

Fred: We can’t say that we rushed it or that the label wanted it quickly or we didn’t have enough songs or enough studio time. This was a luxurious process. We were given all the tools necessary to do what we needed to do.

What did you learn from touring and promoting the first album?

Jed: We learnt that you have to do a lot of the work yourself. There’s no magic producer who’s going to come in and make your song better, more relevant…

Fred: We learnt to take responsibility.

Jed: If you want to do something that’s not been done before, you have to do it yourself, otherwise it will end up something that’s been done before.

Fred: We wanted to refine our sound. Not that this album is strikingly minimal, but compared to our first album, it is. We’re still improving. We haven’t got there yet. It’s not like we’ve refined our sound to the nth degree that we’re not going to be able to better it. We are just aware that pop doesn’t mean everything simultaneously; it means something done very well. I still think we’re a pop band; as much as I talk about experimentation, we’re trying to make songs that are relevant to people and the time we live in, and that’s what pop is.

Jed: We’re attempting to be a pop band.

Danny: We’re trying to be. We’re not yet there.

This album's about honesty...

Jed: It’s like in photography. You can have a portrait that has certain truths in it, but it also has pretence at the same time. If you hone in on the truth, that’s what’s important.

Fred: I feel more honest and truthful singing and writing lyrics than I do in any conversation I have in real life.

What do you make of the current state of music?

Fred: Culturally I think music is a mess and to try and analyse it is a fool’s errand because pop music is temporary. People who spend too long analysing the state of music tend to miss out on it. As I get older that’s not something I want to do. I want to experience it as it happens. In the eye of the storm you can never see what’s going on. Only now can we see what the last decade brought to the table. Generally the 2000s were thought of as a dead decade, only now we can see the impact that the last 20 years has had globally.

(Photoshoot date: 25 February 2015)