Spoonfed dodges motorway hazards for a chat with Chris from The Morning Benders
Driving on the motorway is always a nightmare: morons who drive too slow, morons who drive too fast, lorry drivers, traffic jams, selfish children begging for a wee. On this occasion it was the poor phone signal that threatened to ruin an interview with Chris from The Morning Benders. The Americans who frequent San Francisco and New York are in London for a gig at the Borderline and I spoke to them about the epic tour they are currently on – they won't get a rest until 2011.
Sophomore album 'Big Echo' comes off the back of debut LP 'Talking Through Tin Cans' which was voted iTunes Best Indie/Alternative Album of 2008. So no pressure then..
Are you guys looking forward to playing in London?
Yeah, we are actually. This happens to be the last show of this European tour so it's great that it ends here because we always have good shows here and we can have a good time after and live it up a little.
Did you feel any pressure with this album, given that your last one was so well received?
After playing a set of songs for a year straight I always have the itch to get back in the studio. When we made 'Big Echo' our idea was not to be hindered by anything we'd established or tried to do on the first album – just approach it with a total sense of freedom and do something different and unique, and we were able to do that.
How has that translated into your live performances?
Well I think it's been particularly challenging actually with this album because a lot of what works on 'Big Echo' is the sort of nuances and the subtleties and those sort of things don't really translate when you play it live. We have to be a little more blunt, you know. Things like a guitar part that might be a bit subtle in the recording – for the live rendition we might make that more of a focal point and blow it up. We tend to want to bash people over the head with it!
Did it start out like that or is that something that's progressed since you started playing this album live?
It's something we had an inkling of before but now, yeah the songs have definitely changed a bit over this last year. Actually I'd say they've changed significantly.
Best gig/worst gig on this tour?
We had a really great gig a couple of nights ago in Barcelona. It was outdoors and there were tons of people there. That was our first time playing in Barcelona so that was a amazing. We also got to go back to Sweden and they always treat us really well over there; so they were two of the best shows. I don't usually tend to dwell on the worst shows.
Were you listening to any other sort of music while you were recording to draw inspiration from?
We really wanted to touch on pop music from all these different areas. Influences like The Beach Boys, Phil Spector and also a lot of stuff like Kate Bush or Talking Heads in the '80s and then Radiohead, The Pixies in the '90s, so we were trying to take all those different sounds and throw them together and see what they sound like when they're all bouncing off each other.
Is there a special place that you go to practice and record?
We recorded it at this place called The Hanger; it's this huge warehouse and it's a really interesting space. After we'd done most of the tracking there we moved to New York and we did the mixing and a little bit more of the tracking in this church. They are both very unique spaces and we tried to take advantage of that as much as possible by using the rooms for interesting sounds and we preserved them on the recording. So hopefully there's a sense of space in there that translates and you can picture yourself in these cavernous places.
What has your experience been like with Rough Trade because obviously they've got a big reputation for bringing bands like yours along.
It's been amazing to get success with them. We finished the album on our own and we didn't have a label and we were talking to a bunch of different ones and Rough Trade impressed us just by how forthcoming they were. They told us how excited they were about the album and how much they loved it from the get go. There wasn't that kind of cat and mouse game you get all the time with labels and that's what we were looking for – someone as enthusiastic as us. Then add to that all their crazy history of releasing The Smiths and all that stuff – it was the perfect fit.
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