The Science of Everything - Everything Everything interview [Q Magazine (July 2015)]
Everything Everything
The Science of Everything
Mancunian indie-rock boffins Everything Everything have delivered a masterpiece with their third album. But, as Tom Doyle discovers, singer Jonathan Higgs was pursued by dark clouds of doom throughout.
Photographs: Andrew Whitton
Wandering through the corridors of their University Of Salford alma mater, Jonathan Higgs and Jeremy Pritchard of Everything Everything are filled with memories: some great, some not so great. Peering through a window onto a patch of urban wasteland across a deserted road, Higgs, the band’s intense, darkly funny singer remembers, “We used to look out here and it was just a pile of burning tyres.”
Entering the cafeteria, lofty bassist Pritchard recalls the dietary delights of his student days. “What I used to do in here is eat chips and gravy every single day,” he beams. “Eighty pence and sometimes you could hide a sausage underneath. That was it for three years. Sometimes a Snickers Duo.”
Between 2003 and 2006, both were enrolled here on the university’s Popular Music And Recording course, first encountering one another when Higgs piqued Pritchard’s curiosity by putting up a “Musicians Wanted” poster. It listed such tantalisingly diverse influences as Pavement and Aphex Twin and lightly took the piss by adding the name of one of their lecturers.
“We had quite a similar attitude to where we were and what we were doing,” says Higgs. “Some people would take the course very seriously. We were both quite cynical about it from the start.”
“We weren’t really here to study,” Pritchard admits, recalling his younger self, floating around with a pocketful of weed. “We were here to play music. You can’t teach talent and originality and Jon had so much of that.”
Monday afternoons would find them sloping off to a friend’s house, drinking San Miguel, getting stoned and writing the finger-juggling riffs which prompted the forming of their first band together, “fuck-you math rock” trio Modern Bison. Higgs says that a decibel meter-wielding tutor once interrupted their rehearsal to complain that their collective noise was as loud as “a jet taking off”. Later, as part of shoegazey, Mogwai-inspired, half-Japanese four-piece Pilgrim Please, they began to put down the art-rock roots of Everything Everything.
“It was not a million miles away,” Higgs nods. “I mean, it had my voice at the heart of it, which was awful then. Even worse than it is now. Lots of singing and lots of twisty, very unexpected bits. Like the most annoying form of what we do now, probably.”
Post-graduation, the first line-up of Everything Everything solidified around drummer Michael Spearman and original guitarist Alex Niven, Higgs’s former high-school pals from his native Northumberland. The four moved into a house together in the Manchester suburb of Didsbury, bonding over a love of Radiohead and The Beatles, along with more poptastic fancies such as Destiny's Child and Michael Jackson. Their MySpace page from the time labelled themselves as “Bizarre’n’B”.
From the very start, amid the mass of parka-wearing indie landfill guitar bands surrounding them in Manchester, Everything Everything stood out as deeper thinkers. Probably overthinkers. Higgs admits that it’s a slightly torturous trait of theirs which exists to this day.
“A lot of the problem with so many things is overthinking,” he states. “It’s something that with every album that goes by, we try to do less of and we talk about doing less of. And then we try and talk less about talking about doing less of it. And so on and so on and so on…”
One listen to Everything Everything’s Mercury-nominated 2010 debut Man Alive told you that here was a band fizzing with ideas: jerky stop-start rhythms, wristy guitars, intricate ‘80s synth patterns, Higgs’s tongue-twisting, lyrically obscure vocals in songs entitled Qwerty Finger and, brilliantly, Photoshop Handsome.
But as they progressed to its follow-up, Arc, three years later, Everything Everything entered the mainstream. They found themselves thrilled, if bewildered, when the falsetto-chorused collage pop of Kemosabe was embraced by Radio 1, becoming the station’s most-played track for a fortnight. Earlier this year, the headlong rock/rave-up of their return single Distant Past was similarly A-listed.
“We don’t fully understand it ourselves really,” confesses Spearman over a burger in central Manchester café/music venue Night & Day. “It’s just like, ‘What the fuck?’ But anyone can make a weird record. It’s not that hard to be avant-garde and not bother with the rest of it. I think what we do when we’re at our best is kind of balance a strangeness with good solid songwriting and hooks.”
Much of Everything Everything’s tangential approach stems from Higgs, who Spearman first met when they were both 15. “He hasn’t really changed,” the drummer says of the frontman. “I remember being very impressed with how accomplished his songwriting was even at that stage.”
“I was the slightly weird guy who was always working on something,” Higgs says. “Much to the annoyance of some of my friends. I always said, ‘I’ve got to go home and work on my tunes.’ I was always mysteriously working working working and then eventually they heard it when I was like 24 [laughs]. I remember I gave a CD to Alex [Niven], our old guitarist, called ‘What Does Higgsy Actually Do?’. And it was about 20 of my songs.”
Once Everything Everything properly got going in 2007, they set themselves a six-week deadline to put together a set and then played their first gig on the stage only a few feet away here at Night & Day. At the time a synth-less, more punky proposition, their style was all about complicated harmonies and, as Spearman puts it, “speed and ferocity.”
“Shock and awe,” adds Pritchard.
“Well, it was probably shocking,” deadpans the perma-self-deprecating Higgs.
They named themselves after the first two words Thom Yorke can be heard to sing in Everything In Its Right Place on their beloved Kid A and, trying to find some kind of image for themselves, went to B&Q and bought four matching boiler suits. The self-made video for their first single, Suffragette Suffragette, depicts them as four unhinged scientists, doing unexplained experiments with wood and then appearing to “create” a child with a light beam contraption.
A growing buzz and a certain pop nous to match their artiness saw them land a deal with a major label, Geffen. From here, things happened very quickly for Everything Everything. When Man Alive was nominated for the Mercury in 2011, they felt like interlopers at the ceremony. But, sitting alongside Elbow and subsequent winner PJ Harvey, there was a part of them that wondered if they might just scoop the prize on the night.
“For about 10 seconds before the result was read out,” Pritchard remembers, “I thought, ‘Shit, I really want to win.’ I hadn’t realised. Then for about five seconds after we hadn’t won, I thought, ‘Aw fuck’, and then I was fine again.”
“It’s not that hard to be avant-garde. I think what we do when we’re at our best is balance a strangeness with good songwriting.” Michael Spearman
Still, the brainiac complexities of Everything Everything’s music had a tendency to bamboozle audiences. “You’d see mid-20s men kind of smiling and their girlfriends cowering,” says Spearman. “As we’ve gone on, their girlfriends are now enjoying it.”
With Arc in 2013, they tried to open themselves up and make more of an emotional connection, resulting, in parts, with an arena-proportioned balladeering sound which they now feel was a touch self-pitying. “The mindset of that album,” says Higgs, “is very much sort of grand, sad, slow, defeatist.”
Did Higgs feel sad and defeatist at the time? “Yeah yeah,” he laughs, making light of the heaviness. “It comes through. Depressed thoughts aren’t really rational. They’re just a sort of cloud that follows you around. [Brightly] I’ve definitely got depression. I’ve taken antidepressants since about Arc.”
After a time on Prozac (“A sledgehammer to your brain”), Higgs has now been prescribed Citalopram, which he says has helped regulate his moods. But during the making of the third Everything Everything album, Get To Heaven, he admits he became slightly obsessed with world events and was glued to looping 24-hour news channels, informing the album's fretful and angry lyrics. “After a while it started to sort of consume me a bit,” he says. “That came through in the writing, just the anger with what was happening.”
Get To Heaven obliquely references the horrors of mass shootings and filmed ISIS beheadings, not least Elliot Rodger’s killing spree in Isla Vista, California in May 2014 and the murder of British aid worker Alan Henning in Syria five months later. “When they killed Alan Henning in the desert,” Higgs says, “I really lost it and thought, ‘What now?’ Elliot Rodger made that video with the sunlight in the car and there was something about the fact he was detached.” Amid the ominous synth pulse of No Reptiles on Get To Heaven, Higgs sings, “I’m going to kill a stranger”.
He insists, thankfully, that he’s singing in character. “You can be far more audacious as a persona,” he stresses. “You’d get thrown off an aeroplane if you said that. But I wanted that feeling that I’m completely detached and you don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
Understandably, the other members of Everything Everything were troubled by their singer’s grim preoccupations during the making of the record. “We were worried, yeah,” says Spearman. “Because it’s not healthy really. I’m not saying you should pretend things aren’t happening, but to absorb it all and be a conduit for it…”
“It was very difficult making the record, to be honest,” says guitarist Alex Robertshaw. “Jon’s moods were very… it’s like seeing a man in agony, when he’s addressing these things.”
The crunch point came when Higgs presented the band with a song called Pigdog, which they rejected on the grounds that it was dripping with self-loathing. “It was just about how I’m a horrible person and I don’t want to be one any more,” the singer admits. “I have this word Pigdog to describe myself, which is pretty awful.”
“I just sort of cracked,” says Spearman. “I was like, ‘It makes me want to kill myself.’ For me that was a turning point. I was like, ‘Let’s make a record that’s energetic and fucked up and exciting.’”
In the end, Get To Heaven turned out to be a groove-driven and often soaring record that is way more upbeat than it is brooding. “It’s trying to rise above it and get hope out of the same stuff,” Higgs reasons. “Not rely on the weepy ballad.”
“Jon has very dark lyrics,” says Spearman, “and sometimes the music is just pushing towards a more positive thing.”
“I want people to come to our shows,” adds Robertshaw, “and not only just scratch their chins, but want to move.”
“I’ve definitely got depression. I’ve taken anti-depressants since the second LP.” Jonathan Higgs
Ask Everything Everything if there is such a thing as a typical fan of theirs and Jeremy Pritchard comes up with an array of archetypes. “There are different tribes,” he explains. “Prog Dad was first. Then the bedroom guitarist, male. There was a brief flirtation with mainstream pop teenage girls, some of whom still turn up. I think probably our core fanbase is muso lads, but vulnerable individuals. You could argue that Radiohead’s core audience is made up of people like that.”
One “fan” they all remember appeared in the crowd at the Reading festival in 2010. While they were playing an acoustic version of Shakira’s Did It Again, live on Radio 1, a bold individual was hoisted onto his mate’s shoulders wearing a rubber gimp mask and sucking a dildo. Spearman admits it did slightly knock them off their stride.
“Y’know, it’s live Radio 1,” he points out. “You’re like, ‘OK, we better be good.’ We’re practising really earnestly in the dressing room, and then you go out and there's a gimp sucking a dildo. You’re just like, ‘Fuck sake’. We met him two years later. He said, ‘Oh, I dunno if you’ll remember me.’ And we were like, ‘Yeah… we fucking remember you!’”
Not that Jonathan Higgs was particularly thrown by the incident. While onstage, particularly at festivals, he says that when he’s singing, strange thoughts can sometimes suddenly ricochet around his mind.
“All those people in front of us are here because of us four guys,” he muses. “Four sets of hands and three larynxes. There’s, I dunno, 10,000 people at a festival and I’m thinking that all this attention. is to this thing here [points at throat]. I think of that tiny blob of crap inside one person's body and it’s just this little film vibrating. That is moving these people. And I think that is fucking mental.”
Q points out that, possibly, just possibly, he’s overthinking things once again.
“Yeah,” he grins, turning a touch bashful. “I suppose I am.”
Translator's Note: Yeah, the urge to want to post interviews is still within me. Might as well dig up the ones that I've been neglecting.
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