Exeter Westpoint is slowly distancing itself from an antiquity of antique shows and car boot sales. Driving safety classes have subsided to start catering for its potential as a serious music venue. Yet, it still appears to be a glamourised cow shed with little experience of hosting a gig that’s surely sold an excess of six thousand tickets. Merchandise tables are selling both vinyl and pulled pork, and a man’s walking around with a backpack and a VK flag, purely there to sell small VKs at £3 a bottle.
Founding member of alt-J, Gus Unger-Hamilton (keys/ vocals), is the vision of calm before the show. “If anything we’re probably a bit too relaxed,” he laughs. He explains that the band had very little choice in deciding which cities made the cut for the December tour, but that he’s enjoying Exeter, and the opening dates of their return to English shores in Manchester and Bournemouth have gone to plan. He recounts past encounters with Exeter’s Mama Stones in 2011, and I bear the bad news that it closed down a few years ago: “Has it actually? That’s a real shame. Yeah, we’ve got good memories of playing there, it had a great hippy-ish. We got a proper rider there too and were beside ourselves with excitement. We had olives and beers and crisps in our dressing rooms… Yeah, we have good memories of Exeter.”
“We’re a band that likes to blur the boundaries between high brow and low brow […] it’s not so much that we’re trying to be intellectual and left field”
“It’s a difficult question to answer,” he says when I ask about various stories from the road, “we’re not really a band that attracts crazy stories I wouldn’t say.” But since their first visit to the city, dynamics within the band have certainly been altered even if their undramatic fanbase has kept a relative stasis. Guitar and bass player Gwil Sainsbury’s departure before the release of the second album later that year put the future of the band temporarily in doubt, but seemed to affect the set-up less than media speculation suggested. “I think the split with Gwil was fine really; we found it easier than we thought we would, so it wasn’t a big problem. We obviously miss him as a person and miss his musical input as well, but I don’t think it’s held us back.”
An alternative musical input and influence was partially responsible for the industry’s unanimous enchantment with An Awesome Wave. They called it “an album about maths and sex”, the entire opus named after a passage from American Psycho. In a climate of infatuated reference and obsession, individual songs reference Where The Wild Things Are (‘Breezeblocks’), Last Exit to Brooklyn (‘Fitzpleasure’), wartime photographers Robert Capa and Gurda Taro (‘Taro’) and the Luc Besson film Léon (‘Matilda’). I ask whether the band felt a pressure to adhere to the same intellectual output with the sophomore release: “No, I don’t think so. We’re a band that likes to blur the boundaries between high brow and low brow, and in that sense it’s not so much that we’re not trying to be intellectual and left field, as it is we’re a bit like that anyway, so it’s bound to come out in our music.”
Support for the December tour comes from The Horrors and Ghostpoet, a man with enough gravelly tones in his voice to singlehandedly pave a carpark. He explains that they get sent a shortlist of bands which they’re able to choose from. “The Horrors are a band we listened to quite a lot at University; we were really into them as students so it was pretty exciting to have them on the list.” He reminisces about their first tour as a band, supporting Ghostpoet: “Getting to tour and hang out with him again was sort of going full circle – it was nice.”
Now on an arena tour, the visual aspect becomes more of a concern playing to a crowd expecting a big production. Gus says the artistic side of their music – their staging and graphics – had always been something they took an interest in. “We were never interested in images of us being used for album artwork, or music videos where we’d mime the songs into cameras. You know, like our album covers will never be pictures of us as a band staring at a camera.” I wonder how the lack of branding around their personal image influences their live performance, and he admits that they “do feel self-conscious on stage.” He continues, “We shy away from… We like being lit from the back and the sides not really from the front. When you watch us on stage we’re really like silhouettes, you can see us but we’re blending into a big background of lights and video screens. They’re not there to display us, we’re just part of the overall look.”
“Streaming is just the music industry trying to find a way to vaguely make money from the overwhelming desire people have to get music for nothing”
The conversation turns to the recent DJ sets Gus has performed in the capital, in aid of the Syrian refugee crisis. “I feel like the music people are writing now isn’t very political, protest songs are definitely not as popular as they have been. That may well change at some point.” I ask if he considers public figures to have a social obligation with humanitarian causes, and he says the impetus should be on the individual: “I do it because I want to do it, because I think it’s the right thing to do. People shouldn’t have to, but I like to.”
The other political debate within the industry is the worth of music streaming, which he remains surprisingly optimistic about. Having pre-released the first record as a live stream, it may be partially responsible for their undeniably viral success. “Streaming is just the music industry trying to find a way to vaguely make money from the overwhelming desire people have to get music for nothing. Five or ten years ago piracy was huge in the music industry. You don’t hear so much about it these days.” He points out the faults in the method; premium accounts are relatively cheap for the instant attainment of “unlimited music”. He remains optimistic, though, saying it “has the potential to be a really good thing. And right there’s not really another hopeful alley we can go down.”
“It’s a cool time of year to be exploring these places. Touring always feels wintery to me.”
I note Thom Yorke’s recent admonition that Google and YouTube weren’t dissimilar business models to the theft of art in wartime Germany: “I don’t agree with that. He’s of course entitled to his opinion. But then I read something that said when he gave away those albums for nothing, he’s in turn helped to devalue the cause of music, and has himself partly to blame for the current climate. I found that an interesting point of view, I don’t necessarily agree with it.”
After saying that he hopes the band will have some time off in the New Year, he confirms that the hope is to get started on a third album. Anyway, the performance is close, and I thank him for his time. “It’s quite nice getting to tour Europe in the Winter,” he adds. “Everything starts to feel festive in December: In continental Europe – Austria, Germany – there are lots of markets you can go and visit. It’s a cool time of year to be exploring these places. Touring always feels wintery to me.”
