Interview with Broadcast

Dave: To begin with, you guys are from Birmingham, England. Do you think that that has affected the way your sound is at all? You have a very distinctive sound, that's why I ask.

Trish: I'm not sure whether...yeah, I suppose it does, I suppose it does as much as, you know, we're English you know, but it's such a small country, it's hard to know whether we'd be doing the same thing in another city. I mean, we buy most of our gear probably from London anyway. I'm not sure. It's a hard question to answer, actually.

James: I think the thing in Birmingham for the time we sort of started, there was a lot of...and this is probably the same across the whole of the U.K., ____________ were kind of big at that time. There was a lot of bands kind of wanting to be like that, and I think we kind of got disgusted by it. Partly a reaction to that in a way. Birmingham's kind of weird city anyway, you've got like Black Sabbath from Birmingham and __________________, so you've got like two quite extremes there. It's a very industrial place. I don't know whether it affects the music so much. It's quite grim, though, I think sometimes, visually, to look at.

Dave: Interesting. Do you think that that comes out in the music at all?

James: I mean, you've got to say it does because your environment always influences you somehow, you know, but it's hard to sort of put your finger on it, you know, directly how it might influence you. But outside, it must do.

Dave: You mentioned your gear and the fact that you buy your gear in London. Is the specific synthesizers that you use, is that a pretty integral part? I mean, without those, would you be able to make the music on different equipment that you make?

James: I don't know. It's not something I've thought about really. It's kind of a weird question. But it obviously wouldn't sound the same.

Dave: Well, for instance, Sonic Youth had a bunch of equipment stolen from them, and then there were just songs that they couldn't play anymore? Is that the same case for you guys?

James: Yeah, I mean, some things would be _____________ affected in that way, yeah. If we lost all our gear now, it wouldn't be a bad thing, 'cause we'd just start again with other stuff. I think that can be good for you, I suppose.

Dave: Also along with that, your synth programming, do you work on maintaining a constant esthetic as far as that goes, like trying to keep the sound a certain way, or how do you develop your sound?

James: It was quite a surprise to us how much the sort of ______________ kind of worked out __________________ to it in the end.

Trish: I think that was a lot in the writing as well. You know, they're both 50-50, your production and your writing and the tone of it all. And kind of when we'd finished the album, we were thinking about putting an order to it, this really strange, it was a fluent thing throughout and there was a particular sound to it all and a tone, so it was as much a surprise to us really that it worked out.

Dave: Do you think that's unusual that you should come up with such a coherent sound, or is that just what happens when...

James: I think it's partly because we're recording sort of a __________ stuff into the computer and then working on effects that we liked in the computer and sort of ways of twiddling the sound and stuff, and because we liked certain things so much, we did them on all the tracks, so that _________ sort of come out from some of the effects and, as Trish was saying, in the writing it was there as well, you know.

Trish: And also, our original drummer left in April '99, and if you look on the credits for the album, the second drummer, Keith York, actually recorded nine of the tracks, so from April '99 to September '99, we re-recorded two-thirds of the album, so I think Keith had a big influence on that and he wanted to get a cushion going, so he brought his side to it as well and really opened it up and made it looser and soupier, and so....

Dave: You guys just moved to Tommy Boy, after being with Drag City. Why did you move?

James: Uh, no, because we....there's a funny story...well, it's not funny at all, but we signed to Sigher Records....

Dave: Um, really?

James: Yeah, and they kind of merged with London and we were going to ________ with them, and then it all just sort of collapsed.

Dave: Do did you ever put out anything with them?

James: No.

Dave: Really?

James: So the thing was, we had to kind of get the album out as quick as we could after that. The thing was with Drag City, they're a really great label, but they couldn't support us, give us tour support to come over and play in the States and we really wanted to, so we thought we need to go with just a slightly bigger label if we can, you know, just to get the money to come over and play, and Tommy Boy seemed like the best thing anyway.

Trish: And Tommy Boy _________________, they wanted to sign us before Sigher even interested, and it seems such a shame that we ____________ going through all the kind of rigamarole with Sigher and getting dropped and then ending up with Tommy Boy, the people we should have gone with in the first place, _______ quite _____________.

James: It kind of makes sense in a way, because if we signed with an electronic label in the U.K., so we may as well sign to a hip hop label in the States.

Dave: Yeah. Which brings me to the next question, especially having been on a major label for a little while. Part of what the show focuses on is independents versus major labels, not one better than the other, but just kind of the difference between the two. From your experience especially, what was the difference between the two, and which one was...

James: Well, at the moment we are on both. In the U.K. we're more _________ independent, here we're on Tommy Boy, which I don't know where their money comes from really.

Dave: A rich guy I think.

James: 'Cause they're kind of like, they're not quite as big as a major, are they, Tommy Boy? I'm not sure, I don't even know. I work for...

Trish: I thought they were independent.

James: The thing I think for me, the difference between the two things, independent and major, an independent label will probably get involved with you. Well, Warp do. I can only speak from being on Warp, but they get involved with what we do a lot more than I would imagine a major would, where they just kind of like, okay, here's the money and we'll just wait for your album and when we get it we'll put it out, and you don't really meet anybody who's kind of really ____________ about what you're doing. So as with Warp, like Robin, who runs the label, is our kind of friend. There's no kind of A&R or anything, we deal with the guys who are in the label.

Trish: The major labels always seem more detached from music anyway, because they're hiring in people who are good at business, and they have to make money, and that's what they do. With Warp, our A&R guy is the guy who actually owns and runs the labels, and we know ____________ really into music, and it's really nice not to have to go up to the 70th floor and speak to some guy in a suit that's not really bothered about what you do anyways, as long as you bring in the units.

James: It doesn't actually really make a bad band being on a major label, because there's plenty of good bands on major labels.

Trish: I think major labels have a taste, and they pick upon bands that are palatable, can _______________ T.V. It's a business, and they have to have something that they think can sell, so it's always watered down.

Dave: Do you guys have a difficult time dealing with the business side of things? I mean, is that something that you think kind of impedes what you want to do musicallly in any way?

Trish: It's a compromise I think at the end of the day. If you want to get on radio, it's ridiculous, it really is, because if you want to get on radio, then the last thing you need is a long intro, and they'll ask you to chop it down or maybe do a radio edit, and you want to get on radio, you know. You want people to hear you, and there are not many people in England like John Pale who will just play whatever you want, you know, whatever he wants and nobody's dictating to him at all. You know, if you want to get a bit of daytime radio, which is good for a band like Broadcast, 'cause you would never hear that sound in the middle of the day anyway, and it's a nice little window. Yeah, it does impede, and sometimes it's annoying because they want to sell it and you just want to do it how you want to do it, so...

Dave: Yeah. God, I had a question, but I'm too tired to remember it. So I'll go to my little sheet. Let's see, this is one of Duncan's questions here. On the first EP, you referred to someone's diary and this seems very personal. Would you mind explaining what was going on there? Was it prose poetry, a journal, what was it?

Trish: Well, actually that was, I'm glad it makes sense to somebody, but it was co-written lyrics. I think it's the only co-written lyric song we've got, so you'd have to ask Roj about that, because he came up with that. I really don't know. If it makes sense to somebody and they can stick some kind of ___________ in on it, then that's good.

Dave: Great. I don't even know if you know about this, but Tommy Boy put DJ's names on the CDs of De la Sol every minute to avoid people putting it on Napster.

James: They put what?

Dave: They put a DJ's name, I guess. I actually didn't hear about this. Duncan told me about it. But they put the DJ's names on the promos copies like every minute, like, "This CD belongs to Joe Smith at KBCR or whatever."

James: Oh, the DJ's they were sending them out to.

Dave: Yeah. To avoid getting it put on Napster. Do you think that they would do this on your disk?

James: Well _____________ if they asked if they were going to do that. Yeah, 'cause I mean, a promo's, a DJ's supposed to be able to play it and you can't play it if it's got that all the way through it. Trish: I think the idea is that you are revealed if you put it on Napster. What about if you sell your promotional copy or if you lose it. Dave: Or just go buy the album and put it on Napster, right.

Trish: I think DJ's are probably the last people that are going to start sticking....I always imagine it's more like fans and they've got their record collection and they'd like to give people something, and DJ's get the opportunity all the time, so maybe they haven't got a thirst for that anyway, but ____________________.

Dave: I remember my earlier question. Being here at a college radio conference, how do you guys think that college radio plays into what you guys are trying to do as a band and music in general?

James: We don't experience much college radio though, 'cause we don't have it in the U.K.

Dave: I'm sure as you start to tour, though, you'll realize more and more that it has probably had more of an effect than you realize, especially in the United States.

James: Yeah, I appreciate, yeah, just what I'm saying, my situation now is I don't really know how it acts and how it works that well. So it doesn't help your question.

Dave: What about commercial radio? Do you think that that is something that has affected you guys a lot, especially both in the U.K...

James: You mean in the States, or....

Dave: Both in the U.K. and in....

James: Well commercial radio in the U.K. is just a no-no, they just play Neil Diamond all day, which is alright, but...

Trish: No, they don't play Neil Diamond.

James: Well, what do they play then?

Trish: Celine Dion.

James: Yeah, that's just shit. It's just not worth listening.

Trish: You know, it's just stuff that's people are going to sing along on their way to work and it's just that generic music.

James: Like in the U.K., you've only got Radio 1, and power stations, that's it.

Dave: So you guys are mostly played on pirate stations?

James: No, we're played mostly on Radio 1.

Trish: But it will be like _____________ Peterson or John Peal basically.

Dave: And those are the only options for a band like yourselves?

James: Yeah.

Trish: Yeah, on the national radio, yeah.

James: I mean, there's little stations in London like XFM, JLR, sometimes part of the BBC, sometimes little independent stations, but there's hardly any of them. It's just really scattered really sparsely around.

Dave: Did there used to be something that was set up in the past that would make it easier for a band like you guys to get some air play?

James: The thing ______________ is just John Peal. If you want to get on the radio and you're a small band, John Peal is the only way to do it.

Dave: Do you think that that's going to change?

James: The radio isn't such a big sort of deal in the U.K. People would rather kind of just get their records in the shops. It works more on a kind of...

Trish: It's such a small country, and John Peal has a lot of listeners...

James: And we're kind of talking about sort of still band-based music, because electronic music has got a whole different sort of way of working, you know, but if we're still talking about people in bands, playing ____________ alternative to what you get in the charts...

Trish: It is quite compartmentalized. If you're a masculine ____________ guitar band, then you're looking at Joe Wiley, or what's the other guy's name?

James: Steve LeMac.

Trish: Steve LeMac. So it's quite pigeonholed.

James: The radio kind of comes after in the U.K. It's like you play in your hometown, you get a bit of a kind of buzz going, then someone will come up from London to see you, get excited, say come and play in London, they'll get all their people from the industry down, then there will be this sort of excitement, and then they Enemy will mention you. Which is like, the Enemy's the first thing, that's where you sort of break ________, it's more the music press than the radio, so the kind of radio comes after the music press.

Trish: ___________________ more than anything else.

James: Yeah, you know, the Enemy and the Melody Maker. Well, not the Melody Maker anymore, 'cause it's gone totally shit, but so has the Enemy actually, but....

Dave: Really?

James: Yeah, pretty much. I don't know, they put a lot Limp Biskit on the cover and stuff like that. It's not really supporting kind of smaller bands. It still is a bit, but...

Trish: The thing is, because their readership has dropped, it's almost halved in five years.

Dave: Enemy?

Trish: Yeah. And so they've had to rethink and they've got to put popular acts on the front page now because they have to sell _____________.

James: Yeah, I'd definitely say, your kind of exposure comes more from magazines and the music press than radio initially.

Trish: And there's no T.V. There's hardly anything for us on T.V.

Dave: Top of the Pops?

James: Yeah, Top 20.

Dave: I can just imagine.

Trish: The older we get ______________ Holland and maybe ten-minute kind of ________ sessions in _____________________ music ___________. And I imagine it's pretty much the same here for T.V.

Dave: Late night things, yeah.

James: Which you can understand, because the people there don't want to go get home from work and watch guys playing experimental music, you know. __________________. It's the way it should be.

Trish: Yeah, when you've been laying bricks all day and you're serving the public all day, the last thing you want to come home and see is a lot of fucking _________ lights castigating their art.

Dave: So who does listen to your music, do you think?

James: Who listens to our music?

Dave: Uh huh. If it's not a bunch of bricklayers after work.

James: Well, maybe it is. I don't know. We came through the same ____________ the way we were just talking about, playing a few gigs, the press got interested and it kind of goes that way. And I suppose the press then start writing stuff like electronic kind of retro features and all these kind of words that you would never really say about yourself, and then so people read that and they go, "Oh yeah, I wouldn't mind a bit of that. That sounds quite cool." Then they come and see and then maybe they kind of get more into it and forget those kind of little sort of descriptions that were about you, and it just kind of works _____________.

Dave: I wanted to ask you a little bit about the presence of electronic music, specifically with you guys. Obviously you've got a large emphasis on keyboards and things like that. Boy, that's getting more and more obnoxious, isn't it?

James: It's the Radiohead movie.

Dave: Which Radiohead movie?

James: It's the new one.

Dave: Really? Brand-new?

James: Yeah, you can go see.

Dave: Oh, I might have to go see it. Well, that's another band that is definitely starting to move toward electronic things and I think in general Britain is a little bit ahead of the United States on some of those aspects of music.

James: Yeah, but they also say that they'd start with listening to Detroit techno, so it's kind of pinging back and forth.

Trish: Yeah.

Dave: Right. They're serving it back with ten things added in that we didn't even know about. What do you think about the increasing presence of electronic music in pop music and experimental music?

James: It's hard to generalize about, isn't it? Because there's so much...you can get very good and very bad electronic, pop ____________ whatever. Some of it's good, some of it's bad

Dave: How about as experimental music makers? Is it easier with using these tools than perhaps it was 20 years ago when...

James: Yeah, if you take, say you want to do __________________ or type collages, it used to take them months to put their little pieces together by splicing all the tape. Now you do it on computer, it's __________ in a matter of seconds, maybe new bits of audio ______________. I mean, that helps you realize your ideas a lot quicker in that respect.

Trish: It's ____________ fact that it's less progressive than it used to be.

Dave: How do you mean?

Trish: Well, when you listen to stuff like Cage or __________ Starter and even with the more kind of poppy things like Tom Disabell _____________ things, it seems that, and maybe I'm just thinking about (commotion?) music really, but it seems like it's not weird enough, it's not _________ enough ________________. And maybe it's tied down with structure a lot.

James: But there is a lot that's still out there.

Trish: Well, what's there really out there that you go, _______________ John Cage ________________ lots of people __________ years ago.

James: Well, I don't know. He play a lot of _____________ then it can be quite weird.

Trish: ______________________.

James: But yeah, it's hard to generalize, isn't it though, 'cause there's plenty....

Trish: And even ____________________ when he _______________ and people got up and walked out of the auditorium because they thought they were still chewing up. And he got booed off stage, you know, ________________ get that _________, 'cause it's just too ____________

James: But I think the thing about that sort of stuff, is history puts it in context. Whereas that stuff probably is existing now, they'll have the same resonance through music, but we won't know about it until we got more sort of ____________ historically.

Dave: Where do you think experimental music is moving right now?

James: Experimental music in general?

Dave: Yeah. What's happening right now that's....

James: I don't know what's experimental music. I really don't. I don't know why ____________ hear that, 'cause generally this stuff that we listen to is still kind of, it's still got one foot in pop, you know. It's not really experimental music, 'cause there's groups all around the U.K. that actually do say they do experimental music where they just sit there and like shave a guy's hair and record it. That's what they consider to be experimental music, but I would never listen to it. I think the more interesting thing is to kind of, stuff that's pop structured is kind of going further within those structures, that's still essentially got pop elements, and pushing that a bit further instead of just totally _______________...

Dave: Going as far out as possible and ignoring....

James: Yeah, you're still saying we recognize our pop tradition or whatever.

Dave: Okay, well, here's a question that I don't really like to ask, but I'm required to do by my sponsor, so....who is your biggest influence?

James: Who's your sponsor?

Dave: Samsung.

James: Samsung are our biggest influence.

Trish: Yeah.

James: I think that when we sort of got the band together, we listened to the United States of America album. That was the one that we all kind of ________ all sort of sat there and thought we all could __________ this.

Trish: Have you heard the album? Do you know the album? It's fantastic. It's got everything in it, what was seen as avant garde with pop music, the vocalist sounds like she's got a jazz-trained voice, and it's kind of like, well, it's psychedelic avant garde pop music, but it's got absolutely everything in it, and really classic pop songs as well.

James: Yeah, like what I was saying about the kind of _________ it's still a pop structure, you know, your first chorus doesn't last that long, but they do as much sort of shit as they can in that time.

Dave: In that structure.

James: Yeah, and that's what was amazing for us to listen to.

Dave: And that's partially what you guys structured the idea of the band on.

James: That was when we started, that was it, but since then, there's too much dimension ___________.

Dave: Right. I've got about one more question, and then I'll let you go. Has the move to Tommy Boy helped you guys reach a larger and more diverse crowd do you think?

Trish: __________ signed about three months ago, so it's...

Dave: Not yet.

Trish: We wouldn't know, we wouldn't know. I mean, as far as I know, Tommy Boy is happy with how everything is going, and they're glad to have us over here and they think it'll be great for __________ or whatever, so as long as they're happy and they're enthusiastic about everything, then so are we, or vice versa, you know.

Dave: Great.

James: I do get the feeling with Tommy Boy it's kind of...

Trish: __________ too much.

James: Yeah. Well, I don't know how long...

Trish: We don't know ____________.

Dave: Who knows.

James: 'Cause they're quite a big label and they need their bands to sell, and we're never gonna sell that many. We're not going to kind of match their kind of hip hop ________, you know, 'cause that's our biggest selling music form ___________, so, whether they'll kind of keep hold of us or not, we'll have to wait and see.

Dave: Yeah. Alright. Great. If you guys just want to do an i.d., and then I'll thank them. Thank you guys very much for coming on the show.

James: Thank you.