Down to the River, an Interview with Guillemots

Down to the River, an Interview with Guillemots

15 April, 2011
by: Uckfield99

Trains to Brazil haven't left yet...

It’s been two and a half years since Guillemots performed their last live show and now it’s all flooding in. The 18th April marks the release of their third full-length studio output, ‘Walk The River’, and there's a secret live return penciled in for the same day. The overshadowing shroud of daunt that covers Fyfe Dangerfield and co. must be alarmingly intimidating, but they needn’t worry…

‘Walk The River’ is a dramatically bare-boned, emotionally raw product of loss and pining. As a multi-national band, the sense of yearning for comfort and home will crop up every now and then, but the open-hearted, lyrical candour on display in this record reaches new levels of sincere virtue. I spoke to guitarist MC Lord Magrão about unity, home and his favourite Guillemots record yet.

Are you happy with the way ‘Walk the River’ has turned out?

Out of the previous two records, I feel this is the best one we’ve made so far. It feels now that we’ve got to the point where we really know each other as people and as musicians. It’s the first time I can actually listen to one of my records from start to end and go, “if I wasn’t in a band, I would love to listen to this record”.

So this is the first record you’ve used an external producer on?

Yeah. We worked with a guy called David Kosten who worked with Bat For Lashes and Everything Everything. It was great, he was such an intense guy and that’s what we needed – someone who could tell us off.

Compared to the first two records, do you think you can see a line of development from the beginning of Guillemots?

Absolutely. As musicians we really understand each other, like our body language tells us what we’re supposed to be doing. With this record we said “let's take our time”, we know what we’re good at, let's make the most of it. We spent about a year and a half writing.

When you go into the studio, you obviously have a collection of ideas – how much do things change when you get in that environment and you’re all together?

Once in the studio things do change. There are things in the rehearsal room which sound great, then once you hear them recorded you’re like, “hold on, that’s not right”. Naturally you have the right answers though, because you know the songs inside out and you know how to improve them.

It’s a lyrically emotional record – was there anything that affected this specifically?

I think there was a feeling of being lost and trying to find your way home. None of us are from London and most of us aren’t even from England. The whole emotional side of music, we’re never embarrassed by it. There is a huge embracing of love and loss on the record, some of us have lost people we love and some of us have gained people we love. The main thing is that we felt we were a really strong unit and, it sounds cheesy, but the room was filled with love. We always talked about it, but this time it’s for real – we want to play music together for ever. I’ve never experienced anything like the Guillemots before.

Last year, Fyfe released his solo record, ‘Fly Yellow Moon’ – did his experience from making that change him in terms of making a new record?

Doing his own record was something he needed to get out of his system. In a band you always have the rest of the band to back you up but on a solo thing you don’t have the same support, and I think he learnt a lot by doing that. He became more aware of the music we make as a band.

So the album's out on the 18th – are you going to be doing a tour?

We haven’t been on tour for so long that we feel like we need to prepare ourselves better, so when it comes to it we can deliver great shows. We’re doing a secret location gig on the 18th – I don’t even know where it is! We want to deliver great shows. We want to be as good as we can.

The Guillimotts will be appearing on the Sunday leg of this year's Camden Crawl

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