Posts from August 2011

This is part 2 of an interview with Kathryn and Daniel from I Am Not Left Handed. The first part That Was Then is available here.

This might seem like (another) weird question but then again I am slightly weird myself. I realise you're a relatively young band but are they any songs of your own that you don't like and would not contemplate playing live ? Maybe early songs that you have now outgrown. Or are you fiercely proud of everything you've ever produced ?

I mean everyone has songs by their favourite bands that they can't stand. For example, I love R.E.M but simply can not stand 'Losing My Religion'.

I'm not articulating this very well - I guess I'm thinking of when Kurt used to get completely fed up with endless requests for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.

D: I don't know that we feel relatively young! Making decent music takes time, we've years of unfocused songs and struggling bands behind us. I think as we get better at it, and letting the songs flow more naturally, we're happier with the end result. Kathryn definitely has very high standards, she won't let us even record something that she's not 100% behind, whereas I tend to be a bit more of the attitude, oh we can just tinker with it a bit. There are one or two songs that I've forced a bit more, and as a result they just haven't had the same staying power - 'Falling' from Yes Means No is one of those, we don't ever play it live anymore.

K: Though who knows, maybe it's just waiting for us to come and rewrite it... we do end up doing that a lot.

Mind you, I call you a young band but I saw an interview with you in July 2009 when you talk of gigs, videos and songs, so when exactly did you actually form ?

D: As I say, Kathryn and I have been doing this for a few years, in different iterations but I think the end of 2007 was when we really worked out where we were going and added Benji - we had another guitarist who left, and it really made us have to sit down and rewrite all of our songs as a three-piece, which was the best thing that ever happened to us.

OK - which of the following appear on your iPod/turntable/cassette player ?

• Idlewild
• Nirvana
• R.E.M.
• The Duke Spirit
• The Fall
• The National
• The Smiths
• The Chameleons (who ?)

D: A little Idlewild, a fair amount of Nirvana. I've done sound for the Duke Spirit but don't have any of their recordings. The Fall not at all, The National I keep hearing about, but I haven't managed to get into them despite a couple of casual listenings. The Smiths... let's just say I'm a big fan of Johnny Marr, less so of the rest of the band. No idea about the Chameleons, sorry.

K: I have plenty Idlewild, Nirvana, R.E.M, Duke Spirit and even The Chameleons. None of the Fall, the National and definitely not the Smiths. Marr is great but I find Morrissey just too pretentious. Take that comment about the killings in Norway being nothing compared to the number of animals killed for KFC and McDonalds every day. Every time he puts out a quote I just think - I have absolutely nothing in common with your way of thinking.

You've covered 'Lousy Reputation' by 'We Are Scientists' and 'I Will Follow You Into The Dark' by 'Death Cab For Cutie'. What other songs have you covered ? Or soundcheck to ?

K: We always had a policy from the beginning of only playing our own material, and not covering other people's songs. I think we'd heard too many other bands in Dublin who'd include a cover in their set, and at the end, that's all that people would remember.

D: But as we've become more confident in our sound, we're loosening that up a little. In a different band, we did used to play a mixed-up version of 'Where Is My Mind?', with Kathryn on drums. We're toying with a cover of a Therapy? song at the moment, the harmonies are really nice, we're just trying to get it to work instrumentally.

Are you all those sickening self-taught people who can play a song back perfectly seconds after listening to it ? Or did you have any formal music tuition ?

D: I'm very much from a classical music background, I played the viola for years, but never really found it that satisfying - I do think the classical education system with its focus more on reading music rather than listening is a much poorer way to learn. Since I started playing guitar and bass in my teens, I've found it a lot more enjoyable, just playing by feel and with what sounds good, and essentially trying to forget how to read music. I do get jealous of Kathryn sometimes, she's a far better ear for harmonies and sense of rhythm than me. Then again, she keeps me on my toes and makes me up my game, so it's not all bad!

When recording the new album, it appeared you hired a big house in the country with a studio so you were able to live together while recording ?

Did this help and accelerate the creative process or did it ever get claustrophobic ?

K: It's a medium-sized house in the very beautiful surroundings of Northamptonshire. We've been in and out of London reasonably regularly too, so it hasn't been complete isolation, which I think is good in the sanity stakes. It's a great place though, there's horses out one window, a river at the bottom of the garden and a graveyard next door to keep an eye on us. Sometimes the local kids go there to make out. That's about as uncomfortable as it gets though.

D: We've put the studio together ourselves. It's been so great to actually have the space to make and record the music properly, with a proper live room and control room, it's really been a fertile time for us in terms of writing new songs - the hard bit is finishing them, we've a lot of new things we like, but trying to coax them into a recordable shape is trickier.

Now we turn to face the future. You finished recording the new album 'The Fire And The Sigh' a few weeks ago. Is a release date imminent ?

D: Not quite finished yet! I think we were initially trying to release some singles ahead of the album, so we worked hard on Alone and put it out. But as we've progressed, we just want to make sure the album is complete and everything's as perfect as it can be before we put anything else out. So you won't hear any more until it's all perfect.

K: The end of August is D-Day, but then there's mastering and artwork and more videos to worry about, so it'll be another couple of months. All the advice we've had is that indie bands tend to rush their releases, and it all comes out in a muddle. This is a big statement for us, so we want to make sure everything's right before it goes out in the world.

Oh I nearly forgot - what is the origin of the name - 'The Fire And The Sigh' ?

D: I like album titles that are lines from a song on the album, almost as much as I hate album titles that are the same as one of the song titles, I think that's just lazy. I don't know about the others, but for me, The Fire & The Sigh really sums up the tone of Kathryn's writing, I think she writes about things that make her angry or melancholy. I can see Kathryn laughing as I'm saying this, but that's how it seems to me!

K: I'm only laughing a little bit...

I just love 'The Place That Won't Take Me Back'. I'm almost reluctant to ask this as I firmly believe you don't really want or need to know what the lyrics are about. It's much better left to your imagination.

I remember when I discovered that 'The Geese of Beverley Road' by The National was actually about ruffians setting off car alarms. I was distraught for 5 days.

So, although it's fraught with danger, could you describe what the 'The Place...' is about ?

K: I've kept a couple of blogs over the years. I'm sort of dodging this question for fear of ruining the song for you now, but there are two posts I can think of, that were about how I write songs. They might help make up for not answering.

One here: http://wealthvsfame.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/its-only-time

And one about how it's probably more obvious an answer than it would have been in an older song here: http://www.iamnotlefthanded.com/listen.html

Glastonbury has just been and gone. So has Bono. Do you like festivals ? Any plans to appear in any this summer ?

D: Festivals are okay, I did go to 29 one summer when I was working with the Rumble Strips, which I think burned me out on them a little. Playing at festivals, it can be hard to get a real rapport with the crowd, we like things a bit more intimate where you can have a back and forth with people. Because of the recording, we've not been applying for festivals this summer, we may find one or two next year that we like.

Can you believe Larry Mullen Jnr is 49 years old ? He looks about 19.

D: He's always been consistently youthful, he looks like he could join up with Westlife any minute... I think the rest of U2 may have been keeping him in a freezer between shows. By the way, I'm not an ardent supporter of U2, but if you haven't recently, go back and watch the video to Elevation. The Edge is hilarious.

K: It's funny you should mention this. I wasn't so big a fan of U2 until I saw them live at Slane Castle back in 2001. Over the whole day, I'd sneaked from the very back of the crowd to the very front (it pays to be tiny at most gigs - unless it's an Audioslave show, though that's a whole other story) And just as the drums kicked in I was hit by this wall of sound. And it was like nothing I'd ever heard before. 'Where The Streets Have No Name' still stands as the best song I've ever heard live.

Conversely, my home town is the only place that U2 have officially said they'll never play again. When they had one of their first gigs there back in the late 70s, the crowd threw pennies at them til they got off stage. Whoops. No accounting for taste I suppose.

'Lifelines' seems a pretty dark love song - 'No more talks of who let who down'.

K: A dark lovesong to friendship after a break-up, is probably closer to the truth. I wrote a blogpost recently that sort of relates, if you think anyone's curious. The post isn't about Lifelines, but it's on a similar theme

http://everythingbuttheocean.tumblr.com/post/8608907557/happy-endings

I love the new single 'Alone'. This song first appeared as a 75 second tune on the 'Time To Leave' EP and was embellished to evolve into a fully fledged 4 mins 30 second perfect pop song complete with a homemade zombie video.

Did you always intend to develop the song in this way ? Was the EP version just a taster ?

D: It's kind of representative of the way we write - things tend to hang around as shortened versions for quite a while, until something else occurs to us and it takes a new direction. I think Kathryn had written it about 2 days before we recorded it for 'Time To Leave'. The same happened with 'Boats' on 'Yes Means No'...

Wonderful IANL quote from bandwagon

'We don't play pop music, we don't write music for art's sake, we don't represent any movements, we're not hip, we're not cutting edge, we don't dress to be cool. We do manage ourselves, we write our own songs, we do our own recordings, we shoot our own videos, we design our own covers, we made our own website. We're not generally negative people, oh yes, and we're not lefthanded.'

OK - final question.

What plans, hopes, ambitions does the band have for the rest of 2011 and into 2012 ?

D: The big plan is to get the album out. We're so excited to finally be making a full-length statement. A lot of people are saying that the 40 minute album is dead as a concept, that singles are the way of the future, but I think there's very much something to be said for sitting down and listening to an album through for 40 minutes. It's the length of the human attention span, at least that's what they told us in school as we had 40 minute lessons.

K: At the moment, we are focused on finishing the recording, so we're trying not to put too many plans in place until everything's ready. Another US tour is definitely on the cards, and hopefully some Canadian dates too. We'll be back to Ireland as well, for the Irish release and in the medium term, we really want to get to some of continental Europe: Spain, Germany and the Netherlands in particular. I think we'll just have to see where the wind blows us - we ended up touring the last EP for two years, so we'll just have to see how the album does, and where people want us to come and play.

D: We are hoping to start doing a regular internet show tho, maybe once a month - in some ways we feel like our home town is online these days, more so than Dublin or London, so if we can connect with people there, so much the better! We've some video ideas we're excited about making too, we're just trying to keep on the straight and narrow for this last stretch. We are letting ourselves out for one London show in September - it's for a fantastic children's charity. It's in Bush Hall, on the 23rd of September. Details as always are on the website at: www.iamnotlefthanded.com

Many thanks for your time and all the best.

D: Thanks for all the thoughtful, wide-ranging questions. I always enjoy having the time to answer interviews like this, it makes me get my head in order - the act of writing things down means you have to commit to positions on things you may not have forced yourself to decide about until now.

K: Just so :) It's been a pleasure.

OK - lets get the boring stuff out of the way.

How did you all meet and form the band ? Please dont tell me you posted an ad in Melody Maker.

D: Kathryn and I met in Dublin, we were working on a summer course together. We both played in different bands at the time, I was fronting my own band, Coyote Blue, and Kathryn was playing keys and singing backing vocals with some friends of hers. We'd been staying up late at night with the other counsellors, a few of whom were musicians too, and there were guitars floating around, but Kathryn kept refusing any chance to accept the guitar and play a song.

I knew that she was musical through some conversations we'd had before, so eventually I persuaded her to sneak away to a different room. After playing several songs at her, and relentless asking, she eventually surrendered and played me a song. I was blown away, and just knew right then that she should be playing her own music.

We played with a couple of different line-ups in Dublin together, before parting for a while. Kathryn went to California and I moved to London. I was working in the Camden Barfly with Benji. We used to do every Friday night, I was doing sound, he was stage managing. With six bands a night, doing 13-hour shifts, it was pretty much life in the trenches - after a couple of years when Kathryn came over to London, Benji was the only choice for a drummer, we've never regretted it for a moment.

The Irish are well known for their love of music. Did music play a big part in your childhood ? Were you dragged into the pub every Saturday night to play the bodhrán by your Father's side ?

K: Not so much with the bodhrán on Saturday nights, but one of my earliest memories was after Mass on Sunday mornings, we used to go to a pub on the river, just down the road from the church. This great band played there every weekend, everything from soul to country. They had a full brass section and this amazing guitarist with the fastest fingers.

Later on, we got a piano in the house and dad used to sit beside me, playing songs I still don't know the names of, and saying the chords so I could play along. So I seem to have inherited my dad's knack for playing by ear, but am completely rubbish at reading sheet music.

D: I think Kathryn had a more authentic Irish childhood. I was raised in Belfast, before moving to Dublin, and even then my family were of a Church of Ireland background rather than the traditional Irish Catholic. So I was actually raised with classical music, playing the viola in youth orchestras and such. My father might not know a Bodhrán if he saw one...

You announced that you all 'quit your jobs' in August 2010 to focus solely on the band. What did you both do before you were rock stars ?

K: We did quit our jobs last August to go on tour in the US. I worked in film production, which means I spend most of my work day secretly coming up with ideas for our next video, and stealing ideas as to how we can make them on a low budget.

D: I worked as a touring sound engineer, with bands like the Young Knives, The Rumble Strips and Blood Red Shoes. It's not an easy business making money just from music these days, so we still do a bit of work on the side to make sure we still have a roof over our heads while we're finishing the album.

K: I think the balance used to be about two thirds of our time working, one third being in a band and now it's reversed. Hopefully as the band grows, we'll be able to drop that last third completely.

And what did your Mummies say when they heard your decision ?

K: Mum was supportive. Lots of comments about how I'd been working too hard, and wouldn't this be a good time to write a book while we were on the road. I suspect if they ever made a movie of the band's adventures, it would be more of a feel-good comedy and less of a gritty drama.

D: I'm the middle of three boys, and have a very awesome older brother who works for the International Red Cross, really fulfilling most everything my parents could want from a son. I think they resigned themselves a long while ago to the fact that I'm going to do what I'm going to do. They're just happy I'm not in jail or on the streets...

I've never been in a band, I can't play a note and I can't sing. However, none of this stops me from being acutely interested in the song writing process.

A couple of my favourite bands, R.E.M. and Nirvana, appear to write the music and then overlay random snippets of scribbled lyrics from notebooks.

I get the impression you don't operate this way and you write short stories - poems almost - that are then set to music.

Could you describe how the band produces music ?

D: In the early days, it used to be more the case that one or the other of us would write a song alone, mainly Kathryn, and then it would be brought to the band for development of the music. Nowadays most of our songwriting comes out of the two of us playing together.

K: We'll just get a spark of something - the guitar and bass at the start of 'Boats' is a good example, we were just playing those chords and they sounded... right, I guess is the best description.

D: Then when we have something we like, Kathryn'll work out a vocal melody, and then we bring it to Benji. He's our representation of the world - if it works for him, if he can play something awesome with it, it's a good song. If not, it's back to the drawing board. Finalised lyrics tend to come at the very end.

K: We're not one of those bands who write songs in twelve minutes. It can take anything up to a year of having a few bars of something before it's ready to be turned into a full song.

Why are the videos from the early Camden sessions 'Private' ?

D: I think, earlier this year we wanted to clean-up our YouTube stream - we wanted to just present the best material we have.

K: We can get a bit nitpicky over our own performances. They were recordings we did quite fast for our Thing A Week last year, they were fun to do at the time, but we didn't always think we were doing ourselves justice in the long-term.

Robbie Williams never managed to 'break' American despite being successful in Europe and having the multi-million pound backing of EMI. Yet you have already toured America !

Why is that ? Is it because Daniel's view of the band's music as 'American Indie' means your music is well received there ? Or did you just fancy a trip to DisneyLand ?

D: A large part of it is that I think we don't resonate so well in the UK. We do have several lovely supporters here, but we don't fit into the standard UK indie scene, so it's been a struggle trying to find our own way. We just kept getting a lot of requests from people to come playing in the US, and we always like to go where we're invited.

K: At the moment, we're thinking about moving to San Francisco for a while to see how being based in the US would work for us. It's so great that With the internet these days, location becomes less relevant - we can still keep up with everyone online and spread our music, no matter where we are in the world.

I was very interested to read that you manged to raise $11,000 funding using crowd sourcing on slicethepie.com as opposed to a lucrative record deal. How did that come about ?

K: The great thing with SliceThePie, is that it's one site where you could put up the music and get it listened to and reviewed completely anonymously by strangers. The people they select for their showcase are the people who get ranked the highest in this blind reviewing. So when we were put into the showcase last January, we knew that we'd earned our place, purely because of the music. It was a great affirmation for ourselves, as much as anything. Of course when we were in the showcase we had to work our asses off and hustle and try and encourage people to invest - which they did! We hit our total in September and since then we've been writing, rehearsing, setting up the studio and recording. We're coming into the final stretch now, just want to make sure everything's as strong as it can be. It's been a slow process this year, we've been learning a lot about how to record an album as much as writing one.

D: The SliceThePie thing came about in a really nice way actually. The whole industry's pretty confused at the moment, record labels really are not investing in young bands at all - you need to prove you're having decent success on your own before they'll touch you. At the same time, there are a million different websites, promising you everything from songwriting competitions, to festival slots, to gear and cash prizes. The problem with most of these, and one thing we hate with a passion, is that they all involve getting bands to tell their friends to sign-up and vote for them. They're basically just using bands to advertise their websites or products. Music for us is not a popularity contest, it's all about the one-on-one connection that you make with a song. Just because you might like our music, the last thing we want you to do is sign up for something and get subjected to spam and advertising. The only thing we ask from our fans is that if they like the music, then share it with their friends.

You use Tumblr for your blog. You use Feedburner. You use Google Analytics. You use Twitter. You have created your own Web site. Come on, own up - who's the geeky one in the band ?

K: We're probably both slightly geeky, though we've never thought of ourselves that way. It just makes sense to use the best tools available, and we have been doing this a while, so we've tried a lot of things over the years.

And does this individual torture themselves monitoring downloads, page views, sales and tweets on an hourly basis ?

D: Sales are always nice to know about... The rest is useful, particularly when you have information about where in the world people are coming from etc. It's not worth obsessing over, but it is really nice positive feedback when you put up a song or a video and you can see that people are watching it or downloading it.

As a followup, do you have any idea which social network is most effective for the band ?

D: I think you've got to use what you're comfortable with.

K: Exactly. I mean, I feel like Facebook's pretty good for us, because that's where we'd all post anyway. It feels quite natural.

D: Myspace was never really our thing, I'm actually quite pleased to see it fading away. For twitter, I think I'm a bit more the businessy side of the band, gig updates etc, whereas Kathryn just likes to chat with people - I'm always jealous of how interesting and authentic her Twitter feed is, I worry that mine is a bit cold... Kathryn has joined Google+ though, which I'm resisting for the moment. I'm trying to minimise distractions of all kinds and go upstairs and do some mixing!

The band has a presence on every social network in the universe. When will you get a flipping account on identi.ca so all the freedom lovers can follow your antics ?

K: It's funny. Identi.ca is something that's been popping up lot recently!

D: We go through phases of things, so once the album's put to bed, we'll probably be reviewing our social networks and internet presence - identi.ca will be top of the list, we promise.

I've read that collectively, the band is quite 'impatient'. My personal gut feeling is that you are also perfectionists - the type of people who might argue for hours about the precise placement and duration of a triangle being sounded.

Is this the case ? If so, how do you marry these two conflicting personality traits ?

K: This is a chillingly accurate gut feeling. We clearly aren't playing with our cards too close to our chests.

D: We do do everything ourselves, and we can get lost in tiny recording details, or graphics for the website for far too long. I think the more we do, and the better musicians we feel we're becoming, the happier we are to just let the music do what it wants to do. We've definitely tried to beat songs into shape, but when they're working by themselves, that's the best way.

This is an awfully cliched interview question but then again I am an awful cliche - what bands were you all influenced by ?

I am aware Kathryn admires Ben Gibbard (Death Cab For Cutie) and likes Weezer and Clutch. What about Daniel ?

D: I think those are the bands that we all like together pretty much. My early influences were bands like REM and Nirvana, as well as more esoteric ones like They Might Be Giants and a fantastic German punk band called Die Arzte. We do divide duties a bit in the band, where Kathryn is ultimately responsible for lyrics, though I do occasionally throw words at her to freak her out, I'm the one who has more responsibility for production. It took me quite a long time to work out where we wanted to be going, with our hard edged drums at one end, and Kathryn's subtle, elegant melodies at the other. I found it difficult to find bands that were doing what we wanted to be doing. When I first got into Death Cab, back when Transatlanticism was coming out, it was something that I just felt they were doing so well - he's an amazing lyricist, and Chris Walla's production on those albums is fantastic.

You are a band with strong principles and a sense of independence. I read with interest your post about being torn about having your music broadcast on a TV advert.

Can you elaborate about how that came about and the dilemma it presented to the band ?

What was the consensus amongst fans who gave you feedback ?

K: Everyone has been hands down positive. I think we were more conflicted than anyone else. I think everyone knows that the music industry's in pretty poor state and this gives us the freedom to spend more time on music. The company had actually used the same piece of music for a much smaller ad in Spain, and they just really liked it, so their Italian ad agency approached us when they had this new campaign. It wasn't the worst dilemma. I mean it wasn't for an ad for cigarettes, or a puppy-strangling machine, we just wanted to make sure we thought long and hard about the implications before we committed to it.

Read part 2 of this interview with 'I Am Not Lefthanded' - This Is Now.

I Am Not Lefthanded are a band who produce the most wonderful music. The band are a three piece - mainly from Ireland - and the lineup is:

• Kathryn - vocals, guitar, piano
• Daniel - bass, vocals
• Benji - drums

'I Am Not Lefthanded' have released a couple of EP's and are currently putting the finishing touches to their first album - 'The Fire And The Sigh'.

It's hard to categorise 'I Am Not Lefthanded' but they produce beautiful melodies with the most fantastic vocals and lyrics. The band's music and videos are available on their site so have a listen and make your own mind up.

The band will be playing in London at Bush Hall on Friday 23 September at Bush Hall in Shepherd's Bush for an excellent cause.

I fell in love with the band's music since I first heard them on Dan Lynch's excellent Rathole Radio podcast which showcases a eclectic mix of Creative Commons music.

Since then, I've bought both EP's in addition to some very stylish IANL socks. I also managed to persuade Kathryn and Daniel to introduce the new wonderful single 'Alone' on episode 6 of the award winning, legendary 'This Is Not A Podcast'.

Flushed, surprised and delighted by this achievement, I then chanced my arm and asked Kathryn and Daniel if they would consider an 'interview' where I sent them miscellaneous random questions via email which they would then scan and answer.

Needless to say - Kathryn and Daniel kindly acceded to my demands for an interview - probably in an effort to rid themselves of this mad stalker.

I was ecstatic that Kathryn and Daniel took time out of their busy schedules to provide such detailed, lengthy, considered answers (instead of quick, trite one-liners) and, hopefully, the 'interview' makes fascinating reading.

Anyway, combined with my inane ramblings, the final result is rather long so I have split the interview into two parts:

• IANL - 'That Was Then'
• IANL - 'This Is Now'