#arc era

Everything Everything

“WE’RE TOTALLY FUUUUUUUUCKED!”

On a beach in Wales, inspired art-popsters Everything Everything are running for their lives. Let's hope they make it, because Dan Stubbs reckons their new apocalyptic vision sounds like a blast

PHOTOS: TOM MARTIN

“IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS HUMANS ARE JUST A FOOTNOTE” Jonathan Higgs

A windswept beach. Running along it are Jonathan Higgs, Jeremy Pritchard, Michael Spearman and Alex Robertshaw - as fast as their legs will carry them. In hot pursuit, a giant, menacing orb bounds along the sand, its membrane surface undulating in the wind. We're in Portmeirion, a fantasy village tucked away on the North Wales coast. A place where candy-coloured Italianate buildings nestle among the cliffs, and weird statues lurk around every corner.

Forty-five years ago, it was the setting for The Prisoner, the trippiest, most brilliant TV series of the '60s. In it, Patrick McGoohan played Number Six, a former secret service spy who wakes up in The Village – a place for people who know too much, and from which there is no escape. Its perimeters are policed by Rover, a sentient white orb that envelops would-be escapees. Essentially a weather balloon, but a bloody scary one.

Today, Portmeirion is home to the newest music festival of the season: Festival No 6. And it's the scene of the return of a band who've recently kept such a low profile they might as well have been trapped on an island colony for most of 2012 themselves. Following a couple of warm-up gigs, Everything Everything are playing their one and only festival show of the year. They're the four skinny boys on the beach, recreating one of the most iconic scenes from The Prisoner.

The band chose this festival, in part, due to a love of the TV show. “I was obsessed with it when I was 18,” says bassist Jeremy. “It's quintessentially British. There's no real story, it's more about the atmosphere. And I was always really creeped out by Rover. What made me get into it? Going to uni and smoking weed, of course.”

In The Prisoner, the atmosphere that Jeremy speaks of is one of intense paranoia. Number Six has information. Number One-who never appears on screen – wants it, “by hook or by crook”. Number Six rapidly learns to trust no-one and nothing – not even, at points, his own mind. Everything Everything have been working on something paranoid too: their new album ‘Arc’ predicts the end of the world as we know it. “It has the biggest theme of all: the coming environmental disaster,” says Jeremy. “The arc of the title is the arc of the shape of human civilisation – I think we're at the beginning of the downward curve.”

“If you listen to the album, that's what it sounds like I'm saying,” says Jonathan, singer and lyricist. "The message is: We're totally fuuuucccckkked!"

Er, hang on a minute. We're heading for disaster? And it takes a Mancunian art-pop band to tell us? “We definitely are, it's just a question of when,” says Jonathan, as apocalyptic rain batters their backstage bell-tent. “Earth's not going to last forever, one way or another. Even without human intervention, the sun will die at some point in the future. We could leave Earth, but humans will be likely be long gone by then anyway. In the grand scheme of things, we're just a footnote.”

Heavy stuff. But don't worry: Everything Everything haven't done a full-on Muse. Amid the atmosphere of Armageddon, they're keeping a human aspect too.

“It zooms in and out from macro to micro scale,” says Jonathan. “The microcosm arc, as it were, is my troubles and my woes. I'll be going on about how we're on the crest of an amazing revolution, and then I'll say, ‘But I'm useless at everything and I'm totally shit’.”

“JONATHAN SECRETLY CHECKED I KNEW THE MASTERPLAN…” David Kosten, producer

Jonathan's self-loathing may be misplaced. With 2010's ‘Man Alive’, he emerged as one of the most intriguing songwriters around-both intriguing and infuriating. If ‘Man Alive’ was a puzzle, it would be one of those 25 × 25 Sudokus. Each song had an album's worth of ideas within, jostling for attention. With tunes as big as ‘MY KZ, UR BF’, a level of success was always guaranteed. Even if they had a tendency to sound like, as Jeremy puts it now, “a sort of clusterfuck”.

It afforded Everything Everything a particular level of fame: for every indie-club fan at their gig, there was also a philosophy student or graphic designer. Then something odd happened: Take That's Howard Donald declared himself a fan. (“He sends us emails saying, ‘Keep it up, lads.’ He said how glad he was we were doing another record,” says drummer Michael).

Then Keane and Snow Patrol took them on tour. “Until two days ago, the last place we played was the O2 Arena,” says guitarist Alex. Which begs the question: with these shows and the new, more streamlined sound of recent single ‘Cough Cough’, have the artiest guitar band on the circuit suddenly got mega-ambitious?

If so, they hide it well. When asked if they want to emulate The Vaccines and Two Door Cinema Club, who recently battled their way to Numbers One and Two in the album charts, Jeremy replies: “They're popular bands – they sell a lot of records. We're not in that world… maybe the next rung down.’ He seems unwilling to consider that they've got sights on bigger things than leftfield appreciation, as if that was a bad thing. Depends how you measure it all, really," he adds.

But something has changed in the way they approach their music. The idea with ‘Arc’, they say, is to simplify, to stop throwing into their songs not just the kitchen sink but a metaphysical text about the nature of being a kitchen sink. “It's us being less neurotic about whether something is too repetitive or too simple,” says Jeremy. “Compared to most bands, we're still restless and fidgety, but the changes happen between the songs, not within them now. It's still a rich, diverse listen, but it's not five songs in one.”

“I remember working on drum sounds with Jonathan for hours,” remembers producer David Kosten of the band's debut, which he produced, as well as ‘Arc’. “He'd be secretly listening to what I'd been doing to check I understood the masterplan.” This time, he says, “the plan was to be brave, creative and ambitious without making it a difficult listen. We never had conversations about making it more commercial. It's still brave-sounding, but they wanted to make a less frenetic, more hummable album. That's the right thing this time.”

They're planning to come back in style too: these gigs are the last they'll play wearing their customary boiler suits. They had new stage gear commissioned, but the originals were lost in a flood (a micro-environmental disaster) and replacements are being made now. They're being frustratingly tight-lipped about what they're going to look like. I feel like Number Two quizzing Number Six: “What do you want?” “Information…”

Work on ‘Arc’ began while the band were touring ‘Man Alive’, and the lyrics were sharpened by events taking place at that time. In 2010, they were backstage on the NME Tour, in a dressing room with Hurts, Hurts' opera singer and Darwin Deez when the Coalition was sworn into power. “I don't think Darwin knew what was going on, but the rest of us were thinking, ‘Well, this is going to put the cat among the pigeons’,” says Jeremy. A year later, Jonathan saw the riots sweep the nation first hand – one happened right outside his window in Manchester.

“It's not an overtly political album, but all of that has really gone into the record – the sense of injustice, of people saying, ‘If you're going to present this stuff as the solution to all my problems and take away the means to buy it, then I'm just going to smash a window and take it.’ Certainly there were opportunistic arseholes wanting a bigger telly, but the flashpoint was police brutality and this growing sense of us and them, poor versus comfortable. The extremely wealthy are in bed with the government. The extremely wealthy are the government. It's why ‘Cough Cough’ is so furious.”

The band seem to occupy a strange place between detached fantasy and gritty realism. In Portmeirion, you find only the former. There's a woodland walk with raves in glades. On one corner, you find a dog cemetery, proving that weirdness rules in Portmeirion even when the festival's not on. Walking in the pouring rain with a soggy Everything Everything, the village is almost deserted. Then two women appear dressed in 1930s swimwear and dive into a small tub of water. Weirdness definitely rules when the festival is on.

“It's amazing, isn't it,” says Jeremy, marvelling at the toytown village square. “There's nowhere like it in the world. It's very British. Very eccentric.” All these things are of great interest to Everything Everything: on coming tours, they hope to travel the country visiting provincial museums and tourist attractions. Last week, they popped in to Coventry Transport Museum. “We were blown away,” says Jeremy. “Actually, that's probably a bad choice of words – there's a Blitz exhibit.”

Providing disaster doesn't occur within the next two months, ‘Arc’ lands in January 2013. But hang on, isn't that what the Mayans predicted will happen? “Actually,” says Jeremy, “we're really banking on the Mayan thing. We haven't really made an album."

As for the weather balloon, it was last spotted careening up a cliffside outside Portmeirion. If you see it… run.

“PARANOIA RUNS THROUGH IT!”

Everything Everything's favourite cult TV shows

MONKEY DUST JEREMY: “It was an animated show on BBC Three. It was easily the sharpest, most intelligent thing they've ever broadcast, which is not saying much. It was very satirical and dark and cutting about mid-noughties society. I loved the Paedofinder General.”

THE PRISONER MICHAEL: “I watched every single episode at university. It's just a very British thing. You know how people watch Lost and assume it's going to come together at the end? The Prisoner wasn't worried about where it would end up – it was more about the ride. The cold war paranoia runs through it.”

MACGYVER JONATHAN: “I saw an episode where he was stuck in a prison and escaped using an explosive made of toothpaste. If MacGyver was in this tent with us, he'd have turned it into an aeroplane by now.”

TWIN PEAKS ALEX: “You can't beat Twin Peaks. It's great, it's weird, and everyone needs to see it.”

GARTH MARENGHI'S DARKPLACE JONATHAN: “We watched it while we were making 'Man Alive'. Matt Berry [Garth Marenghi and Mighty Boosh actor] is a mate, he comes to our gigs.”

Translator's Note: My first uploaded scanned interview, and it's... Everything Everything. No, I haven't listened to their music, I just happen to have a couple of mutuals who like this band and I remember it. I hope they enjoy it.