It's two decades since Elbow first took to the stage for a half-empty college gig. Today their intelligent, intensely personal music has won every award going and made them Manchester's favourite sons. As their fifth album is released, the five friends reflect on the lonely years before fame struck, the bizarre world of "tits 'n' teeth", and how they want to make music that outlives them
Elbow are sitting in one of their favourite pubs, pints and whisky chasers cluttering the table, explaining that they're still adjusting to life after their all-conquering last album The Seldom Seen Kid. "When we won the Mercury I was walking down the street and this car slowed and the window wound down," says singer Guy Garvey. "I was semi-expecting something, because it was two days after we'd won the Mercury, and this guy just went: 'Oi, Elbow! Get a fucking proper job! Ha ha.'" He laughs. "That's a compliment in Manchester."
"I have to avoid certain places," he continues. "I do forget, though. I think: 'What the fuck is he looking at?' And then I remember?"
It has been a remarkable transformation. After years as a cult concern ? a worst-kept best secret, if you like ? Elbow's fourth album suddenly hit a nerve with the wider public and they found themselves headlining festivals and scooping almost every prize going, including the Mercury, one Brit for Best British Group, two Ivor Novellos and NME awards. Lead single "One Day Like This" became the ubiquitous soundtrack to everything from the Beijing Olympics to nature documentaries; the default choice for producers who wanted a soaring, euphoric backdrop. It was even chosen to soundtrack England's 2018 World Cup bid. "It just ran away with itself," smiles Garvey.
And it kept on running. In January 2009, nearly a year after its release, they performed the album in its entirety in Studio One at Abbey Road, backed by the BBC Concert Orchestra and Radio 3's Choir of the Year (available to watch on the BBC Red Button ? fortuitously for Elbow during the week the country was snowed in ? it racked up a record more than 1m views). Then Britain's oldest symphony orchestra, the Hall�, chose to celebrate its 150th anniversary by performing an Elbow greatest hits set with the band as part of Manchester International Festival, a particular joy for Garvey, who was taken to see the Hall� ? "The original Manchester band", as he calls them ? by his grandfather as a boy. It was the first and only time I've seen ticket touts working Bridgewater Hall, home of the Hall�.
They headlined Wembley Arena, supported U2 at Wembley Stadium, and a relentless couple of years finally came to a fitting conclusion with a homecoming gig at the MEN Arena, filmed for their own South Bank Show. The album has now sold well over 1m copies.
It's a long way from the first lunchtime gig of Mr Soft before 20 people at Bury College in 1990. Formed around a nucleus of guitarist Mark Potter, bassist Pete Turner and drummer Richard Jupp, the line-up was completed by the addition of Guy Garvey on vocals and Mark's younger brother Craig on keyboards. A friend of mine, Marc, saw that first gig and says you could tell immediately they weren't just another college band, that even then Guy's voice was stunning. They took a while to find their way, however, misguidedly thinking they were Bury's answer to Sly and the Family Stone. As their sound changed and matured, they changed their name to Elbow, taken from a line in The Singing Detective.
It took them the best part of 10 years to get a record deal, with Island, then they were dropped shortly after. Their debut album Asleep in the Back was Mercury nominated in 2001, but record-company troubles continued until they downed tools in protest at the lack of promotion afforded their third album, Leaders of the Free World, and they didn't actually have a deal when they started recording Seldom Seen Kid. Under pressure to justify, to themselves and perhaps their families, why they were still plugging away after 15 years, the first song they wrote was "Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver", and though it's not autobiographical, you can hear the desperation and determination as Garvey sings: "Say I'm on top of my game." When the album was nominated for the Mercury, they pointedly chose to perform "Tower Crane" instead of "One Day" at the ceremony.
Their hometown added to the accolades last year when it awarded Elbow the freedom of Bury, alongside director Danny Boyle. Garvey has just moved back to north Manchester from the city centre; Jupp and the brothers never left. Inevitably, bassist Pete Turner gets stick for living in Chorlton, the south Manchester suburb of organic supermarkets and wheatgrass smoothies. "You won't believe this, Luke, but I swear it's true," laughs Garvey. "I was there last week, walking down Beech Road, and I slipped on an avocado!"
After their huge homecoming gig, Elbow gave each other a much-needed month off but were back writing together after only a couple of weeks. They decamped to the Isle of Mull, where their friend Pam Dawes has a house. "The five of us hadn't been on our own for three years," says Garvey. "So it was a chance to talk about where all our heads were at and where we thought the next record should go."
Despite sharing dreams and ambitions for two decades, arriving in Mull they harboured niggling worries about how their new-found success might affect each other. "Being totally honest," says Garvey, "we'd hit commercial success we'd never had before and we were all worried about whether each other wanted to just grab it and cash in on it, having waited 20 years to do it? And none of us did. We all acknowledged there was a need to make accessible singles. But at the same time, it would defeat the object of why we started, to write an album of 12 stadium fillers when we're known for making intimate, personal records."
"What I remember most about Mull is just having a laugh," says Jupp. "We were cooking, chopping wood, you know what I mean? Boy's Own stuff. But it meant so much after all the tits 'n' teeth stuff."
"Tits 'n' teeth stuff?" laughs Craig.
"You know, spangly stuff like awards ceremonies," explains Jupp. "We'd experienced stuff we wouldn't have even dreamed of a couple of years earlier. But after all that we were chilling together, eating together, mucking about and just having a laugh and wanting to be together."
Elbow came back from Mull with one finished song, "Jesus is a Rochdale Girl", which set the tone for their new album, Build a Rocket Boys!. It's Garvey remembering the house he lived in when they decided to take the band seriously; a time when they had "nothing to be proud of, and nothing to regret, all of that to make as yet". Musically it's very sparse, based around Mark's urgent acoustic guitar, with Turner's bass and Jupp's bass drum on the same beat, and splashes of colour from Craig's keys.
Like Seldom, the new album was self- produced by Craig and recorded at Blueprint Studios in Salford, their home for the past six years. When I arrive there on a late January afternoon the mood couldn't be more relaxed. I watch them rehearse the new songs for their forthcoming arena tour, new tracks "Lippy Kids" and "The Birds" in particular sounding majestic. Afterwards we repair to the Britons Protection pub and landlady Gwen kindly lets us use her upstairs function room (where Badly Drawn Boy Damon Gough played his first gig) so we can have a bit of privacy, although, she warns: "I need it back at quarter past seven, as I've got the Gay Classic Car Club coming in."
I ask how the pressure of following up Seldom Seen Kid compared to starting that album. "It did feel like a last-chance effort last time," admits Craig, "but then we used to say that every new year?"
"This is our year, lads!" laughs Garvey.
"?If nothing else has happened by this time next year, we'll jack it in," sighs Craig.
"The pressure of following Seldom Seen Kid is nothing compared to making that record," says Garvey. "And Leaders of the Free World as well? And Cast of Thousands was hard? In fact, what the fuck am I doing? This is a shit job!"
Was there any external pressure to come up with a huge single to match "One Day"?
"It's not something we totally ignore," says Garvey. "You want to make sure people hear your record. As well as deciding it wasn't going to be 11 songs to tap your toe to that work in a stadium, we also weren't going to be churlish and write a deliberately inaccessible art record that would perhaps make you look cool to a handful of people for the rest of your life. So much of what we do is about other people and about community, and about celebrations of friendship and love, that you couldn't get away with making a white-noise record without looking like a total dick."
"There's the quote?" deadpans Craig.
"He's off!" laughs Turner.
We talk about the early days, captured in "Jesus is a Rochdale Girl". "Our mates went to university and we decided to concentrate on the band," explains Garvey. "It was in that house, specifically, that I thought: 'If I sit and write lyrics, I'll get better at it', and words became more important to me. I remember every day being exciting living in that house."
"We saw our mates go off in search of glory so we thought we'd better knuckle down and learn our craft," says Jupp. "It made us more aware of what we wanted to achieve, and made us tighter."
The lyrics take me back to mid-90s Manchester, when most of Elbow worked behind the bar of indie venue The Roadhouse. Garvey, who back then was lithe, with bleached hair, seemed to live in Night & Day, giving out the bar's phone number as his own to record companies. A friend of mine, Sarah, who was seeing Garvey at the time, remembers his absolute devotion to the cause, sitting in caf�s alone with his notebook for days, working on lyrics. "Guy sees people, and especially women, as heroes," she says. He has five older sisters and "it was obvious that he grew up in a household of strong, interesting, emotional females. He loved the people of Manchester, the rhythm of the city, people's lives."
On "Lippy Kids", Garvey muses, "I never perfected that simian stroll". Truth is, Elbow always debunked those stereotypes. Although Garvey may have written more about Manchester than any songwriter since Morrissey ? his girlfriend Emma once pointed out that he'd written more love songs to the city than to any girl ? their ambition and palette were always greater than the clich�d simian strollers who simply aped the Stone Roses or Oasis.
With his own show on 6Music, and lauded by everyone from poet Simon Armitage to Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja, Garvey is now pretty much an alternative national treasure. Last time we spoke for the Observer, Manchester Tourist Office lifted a quote from the interview ? "They give the love back round here" ? and printed it on a range of mugs, fridge magnets, shopping bags and other "Official Manchester Merchandise".
A week after spending time with the band, I meet Garvey for a follow-up chat in Manchester's Portico Library. A hidden gem, the Portico opened in 1806 and the first secretary was Peter Mark Roget, who worked on his thesaurus here. More recent members include Coronation Street founder Tony Warren, Eric Cantona and Garvey himself. The current cuts to libraries are close to Garvey's heart, and he was "horrified" when his mum told him that Unsworth Library, where he wrote some of Elbow's first lyrics, was being closed to save a meagre �29,000. "When I first went there as a child I couldn't believe it. 'What? They let you take these books away?'"
He backed a campaign to save the library, which earned it a 12-month reprieve, though its long-term future remains in doubt. "When I used to walk past Central Library as a kid with my granddad, he would say: 'That library belongs to you, and all the books in there: don't let them take it away from you.'"
Lyrically, Garvey tackles the bigger themes in life ? love and loss, relationships and friendships, ambition and failure ? but where most songwriters mine obvious seams, plucking the same basic chords on the public's heartstrings, Garvey explores the minor notes. His lyrics poke around in grey areas, explore complex themes and overlooked emotions, and ? key to Elbow's appeal ? champion the everyday.
The album's opener "The Birds" is a typical Garvey creation: an old man looking back at a failed relationship. "My favourite songs pick on things I've not heard written about before," he says. "In that song the character, who I guess is me as an old man, is looking back on that love affair. The middle eight became the voices of his carers, quite doomy voices saying: 'What we going to do with you, come on inside, looking back is for the birds.' Patronising him almost: 'Come on, always the same with you', the way that old people are spoken to generally. I suppose I'm saying it's wrong to patronise old people and assume they haven't felt everything that you've felt and remember it very clearly."
There's no political message on a par with "Leaders of the Free World", when Garvey despaired: "I think we dropped the baton like the 60s didn't happen" or "Snowball", which appeared on the War Child compilation and pictured a "hundred thousand souls" haunting Tony Blair for eternity for deciding to go to war in Iraq. A shift Garvey acknowledges when he sings: "There's a ladder tear in my high ideals? and the noble fire that was in my chest, is acid in my belly at the very best".
"'High Ideals' is dealing with my focus shifting from doing what I can to change the world," he explains, "to carving out a little piece of land for myself and my family; priorities changing. I'm not starving in a garret anymore, we've had some success and I've bought a plot and a house, and I'm with the person I want to be with forever and we're planning a family. I suppose it's ? to give it a punchy slogan ? middle-class, middle-age, middle-of-the-night guilt, with a soothing punchline.
"My ideals are still my ideals," he qualifies. "I gave up on party politics a long time ago. But the one thing we've always been about, the five of us, is people are the constant; people are the most overwhelming, most interesting things in the world."
Last year, Garvey told me, he was walking to the studio one day with his iPod on shuffle when it struck him that the last four songs were all by dead people: Jackson C Frank, Spike Jones, John Lennon and Cole Porter. Which made him realise Elbow's songs could still be around after the five friends were gone, inspiring the album's closer ? "Dear Friends".
"These recordings were all that was left of them," he says. "I put them down as verse, then I thought: 'It's a bit clumsy, a bit bludgeoning.' I thought that, rather than describe that sentiment, why not just put the message in there? So it's called 'Dear Friends' and it's a real casual note from when I was in Tennessee in the middle of a tour, telling my friends I was thinking of them that day and it made me feel at home."
It's a fitting end to a record written in, in Garvey's phrase, "the warm glow of having realised all the dreams we made as boys". They manage to prevent it being overly gushy, but this, clearly, means more to them than any of the tits 'n' teeth stuff. "And," smiles Garvey, "I do get a kick out of the fact that that sentiment will be knocking around for people to identify with long after I'm dust."
Elbow's Build a Rocket Boys! is out on 7 March. For special online content, including an interview with Guy Garvey, an exclusive Elbow "How I Wrote?" studio session and more, go to observer.guardian.co.uk
Luke Bainbridge is former associate editor of Observer Music Monthly
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/feb/27/elbow-another-day-like-this
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