How long have you been working on material for Plains? I’ve noticed that “A Rival” has been a closer in your sets for a while now.
Yeah, that’s right. Well, there’s probably about five songs on the album that we’ve been playing for quite a while now, then there’s the other half which are all new ones that I suppose were written or rehearsed for the first time about a month or so before we went into recording. I think it was a real conscious effort to show, you know, this is what we were doing and this is what we’re writing now.
The album is a lot more stripped back in a sense and hints at a slightly new direction.
Well, all the demos we have for the songs have all the guitar parts and those layered vocal harmonies and stuff on them. But when we play live it’s much easier to play loud and try and destroy people’s ears than play it exactly how it was written. With this, however, we really wanted to make a record you could listen to over headphones without ruining your ears. To take Joy Division for example, their live sound, if you listen to bootlegs and stuff, is more of a full-on loud guitar attack with heavy drums, like the Stooges or something. But when you listen to their albums every instrument is really given its own space. I’m keen, at the moment, on having the two things as sort of separate, but I’m yet to see if we’re going to try and replicate the album live.
How much control over the sound did you give to Liam [Judson]?
Well, originally, we split the album over two locations. One lot we did over a weekend and just recorded two songs and the rest was done over about eight days. I guess that first two days was a bit of an experiment to see how it would end up sounding with Liam as producer. I mean we had a fair idea what we wanted to do and we discussed it with Liam and he understood that pretty well. Liam was great with letting me know when the vocals just sounded terrible or the guitar tracks sounded too similar to other songs we’d done.
The album was recorded in some pretty remote locations with various noise restrictions limiting recording to daylight hours.
Yeah, that was in the eight-day stretch. Having to stop in the evenings out of respect for our neighbours kind of halved the time we expected to have in the studio. But it also turned out to be good in a way because at the end of the day you could relax and sit out on the patio rather than going close to a week without sleep.
