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blueberry-beanie · 3 months

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The New Cue #357 February 12:

Everything Everything's Jonathan Higgs

"We were weirdos then and we’re weirdos now"

At the beginning of next month, Everything Everything release their seventh record Mountainhead. It’s another brilliant album from one of the UK’s most imaginative and forward-thinking guitar bands, a quartet who never tread water and have been consistently honing, reworking and outdoing what’s gone before for over 15 years, always coming up with a new version of themselves without ever losing what makes them special. The pillars of their music tend to be a mix of danceable synth-y grooves and inventive art-rock, intricate arrangements constructed around big pop hooks and surrealist lyrics, frontman Jonathan Higgs’ vocal delivery emotive and exuberant at the same time.

Higgs is at the centre of it all, a creative dynamo who seems to sum up their idiosyncratic approach and who has the ability to inject emotion into the bizarrest lyrics, lines such as:

“And no reptiles! Just soft boiled eggs in shirts and ties, Waiting for the flashing green man Quivering and wobbling just like all the eggs you know”

That one is taken from Get To Heaven’s epic standout No Reptiles.

Or this, which somehow sounds poignant when Higgs sings it on the electro-pop banger Arch Enemy:

“Fatberg you smile, with your grave wax eyes, will you consume me?”

Or how about this oddball corker, from the euphoric electronica of Raw Data Feel closer Software Greatman?

“Maybe I see Klingons on the starboard bow Maybe, I’m a cat inside a sacred cow

Higgs is at it again with this zinger from their excellent recent single Cold Reactor: “I sent you the image of a yellow face To tell you I’m sad about the emptiness that’s all around me”

That song, released in autumn last year as the first single from Mountainhead, has become Everything Everything’s biggest radio hit yet. It’s spent weeks on the Radio 1 B-list, a very uncommon position for an indie band whose members are all in their late 30s, but its success that sums up the vibrancy and relevance of Everything Everything in 2024. Even better, it probably meant Radio 1 have had to get their heads around this blurb from Higgs on what the new record Mountainhead is about:

“In another world, society has built an immense mountain. To make the mountain bigger, they must make the hole they live in deeper and deeper. All of society is built around the creation of the mountain, and a mountain religion dominates all thought. At the top of the mountain is rumoured to be a huge mirror that reflects endlessly recurring images of the self, and at the bottom of the pit is a giant golden snake that is the primal fear of all believers. A ‘Mountainhead’ is one who believes the mountain must grow no matter the cost, and no matter how terrible it is to dwell in the great pit. The taller the mountain, the deeper the hole.”

Well, you don’t get that with Catfish And The Bottlemen. A few weeks ago Niall – that is me, I am The New Cue’s resident Everything Everything nut in case you hadn’t guessed – spoke to Jonathan over Zoom about the mad concept around the new record, the dynamics of being in a band in 2024, his favourite Liam Gallagher tweet and more. I’ve made this playlist of my favourite Everything Everything songs to listen whilst you read,

Hello Jonathan. I love the new record, it feels different to Raw Data Feel, a bit looser… Yeah, it’s got a lot more freedom and it sounds more like a band playing a lot of the time rather than the rigid, more computerised stuff that we were doing before. We made an effort to make it feel a bit more real and laid back.

Was there much overlap? No, partly because we put everything we made for Raw Data Feel on that record, we didn’t leave anything in the banks. We did the opposite with this, we actually went back and looked at some old demos and brought them back to life because we were looking for some kind of angle that we weren’t going to stumble across, we wanted to go back to our youngest selves and go, ‘What was that thing we were doing?’.

That’s interesting, how far back did you go? I think it’s sessions for A Fever Dream, or it might be Re-Animator, so five or six years ago. Some of the songs on this are from that time, or at least elements of them are or a little demo was made and then thrown away and then we went back and said ‘Let’s explore this and breathe new life into it.’

When you’re seven records in and you start to look back like that, does it feel like different versions of the band? Yeah, definitely. There’s definitely been eras, we’ve never got stuck in one way of doing things. There’s an evolution, for good or for ill, since our first songs to now. I can find myself very quickly thinking in those terms when I hear a song from then, I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I was trying to do this’ and that stuff changes over time and I’m glad it does because otherwise, you just make the same record again and again and no-one wants that.

Yeah. Without naming any names, for some bands it ends up becoming a process of survival and maintenance. Yeah, thankfully, we’re not in that position. I know what you mean, this idea of being a nostalgia act does not appeal very much, partly because we were at our peak three albums in so we can go back and feast on Get To Heaven-era but I have no interest in going back to Man Alive and trying to recreate that partly because we were weirdos then and we’re weirdos now, it wasn’t the glory days by any means. I’m immensely proud of what we did back then but I’m not going to try and retread it. This is an odd thing to say having just said that I went back to some old demos and put them on our new record, but those demos were rejected for reasons that I find interesting now. And I don’t feel that we need to play the games we were playing them because we’re so good at writing successfully now, I think.

Something like Cold Reactor, I didn’t labour over it and I knew as soon as it was done, it was great and I knew that would that would carry us through. It allows you to feel a bit more relaxed about creativity rather than ‘Must get that radio single or we’re doomed!’, which obviously is the burning hot coal under our butts most of the time because it’s easy to take that stuff for granted, popular songs, but you’ve got to actually write them and they’ve got to actually be popular otherwise no-one cares. Basically, every album usually comes down to one, two or three songs and if none of them have any interest, then people just go, ‘Did an album even come out?’.

Cold Reactor is a good example of the band right now, it seems to sum up all that’s great about Everything Everything and it’s become this mad radio hit. I know! We’ve watched a lot of friends’ bands struggle in this period we’ve had, 15 years now. There is a tendency to rest on your laurels or try and repeat the thing and it’s very difficult to not do that. Sometimes, I’ve done it myself when I’ve sat down and written a song and then I get to the end of it, I go, ‘Well, we did that better with X song on Arc’ and it’s like, ‘I could do this and our fans will really like it because it sounds just like us, it sounds just like Arc’ and then we’re like ‘No, into the bin with you, let’s try and take that same sensation but do something new with it’. That often comes down to the production. I think if you were to strip all of our songs of their production, then you could probably find something I’ve written now very similar to something I’ve written.

There’s a simplicity to a lot of the songs on the new album, nothing is overloaded and it makes the more outlandish stuff more potent. That’s been a big thing to learn over our careers. You’ve got the ability to do outlandish stuff, and you’ve got these players who can play really well but that isn’t enough to just present all of those things at once and expect people to go, ‘Wow!’. Some of them will, and that’s how we made our name, the prog dads, as we used to call them, that came to our shows in the very early days and just stand there and go, ‘yes, this sounds like Yes!’, and that’s fine. But that I felt like it wasn’t really a challenge. It felt like being a music student still, trying to dazzle each other with complexity and emotion slowly rose through all that and they all just fell away. I was like, ‘No, that is the hardest thing to communicate’ and that’s the challenge. That’s what the greats do is, they get your emotions and you can’t manufacture that and you certainly can’t bamboozle that into people, you have to start with a strong, simple, true, or as close to true as you can manage, emotion and then you can start having fun with it. I think that’s the thing that took us the longest to learn.

Everything Everything’s work has grown more emotional with every record. You’ve got these big concepts around them but that disguises the fact they feel a bit more personal and vulnerable each time… I think that’s what happens to humans. Twenty-three-year-olds are a strange breed to look to for sustenance when it comes to art, there’s a rawness to being that age, it’s an age of discovery. And that stuff is very exciting but there’s no real reason why someone older would create like that or go to that well, it actually gets quite sad when people try to go to that well. Now I’m older and I’m more of an emotional person and I’m less about fireworks and more about volcanoes! I don’t know how to put it, there’s something much deeper now when I create than when I was a young punk.

On that note, rather than me crowbar into an incredibly long question, why don’t you sum up the concept of Mountainhead? It’s extremely simple, a one metaphor fits all type-deal. I knew I wanted to sing about capitalism but not put too fine a point on it. I mean, it’s not a very subtle metaphor. But I knew there were certain elements of it that I wanted to get across, namely the Sisyphean sort of feeling of it being pointless and also, the fact that there’s this trade-off between building the mountain but having to live in the dark, which was a big touchstone for me when I read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, this sense that our lives are getting worse in some ways, that the more we progress we’re becoming more isolated and we’re shutting off large parts of our humanity in the search for this goal of ever expanding and growing our economy and trying to climb the ladder. It’s simple enough that you can’t really fault it, I’m not saying this is exactly how we live, there’s not enough to it for it to fail. It’s something everyone gets straight away.

A lot of the lyrics touch on that theme but which of the songs is the most personal to you that veer away from the concept? Probably The Witness, that’s definitely not really related to the concept. That’s pretty personal. There’s a line in there about this… I shot this bird with an air rifle when I was a kid. I walked into the shed and I saw it, this cute little chaffinch or whatever and it just sat there looking at me and then I picked up the air rifle, I knew where it was and I killed it.

You bastard! I know, I’m telling you this now cos I felt bad, I’m not saying it was a good thing! For some reason that came back to me. During the very early sessions on the album, we’d all gone away somewhere and when we got back, Alex went up to his studio at the top of his house and a pigeon had got into the room and thrashed and thrashed to get back out for four days, there’s like blood all over, feathers everywhere. I was like, ‘Guys, this is a sign… we’re gonna call it The Pigeon!’. Obviously we didn’t but birds do get into it - Canary obviously is a song there - and this thing about that bird and it flew into my head. That’s very personal. But then the rest of the song is about some fucked up stuff that happened to me in the pandemic that haven’t properly been able to talk about in these situations because it’s a bit too personal, basically. A lot of Raw Data Feel was about trying to deal with that as well. I should’ve called it Raw Data Deal. That’s the only moment I’ve given over to that thing on this newest album, the last song. I haven’t actually been able to listen back to it because it makes me too emotional when I think about what it’s really about. But that’s not for public consumption, it’s not needed.

Fair enough. Tell me about the dynamic between the four of you, because that seems like a really important point in your longevity. Apart from a very early line-up change, it’s been the four of you the whole way. Yeah, it’s great. We’ve settled into our roles over the last 15 years. Alex [Robertshaw, guitarist and keyboards] is very much the producer now and by way of that, he’s ended up writing a lot of the guitar and keyboard parts, which I would usually write more of in the past. I’ve become completely consumed by the emotion of getting the message across in the lyrics and stuff like that, as well as obviously writing songs. But in terms of how they sound, I’m less and less involved or concerned, that’s Alex’s playground more. Mike [Spearman, drummer] and Jez [Pritchard, bass] are very good at taste-making. Me and Alex do 98% of the composition and then those guys are much more like, ‘Well, I feel like this is a good way for us to go or this is better than this one,’ things you can’t really tell when you’re the creator and you think everything’s great. They’re also really good at the whole business side of the band, which is the less romantic end but incredibly important. So talking to accountants and they’re having meetings with the labels and Mike’s producing the videos, getting organised, all the stuff that me and Alex being “the creatives” are terrible at because we have the luxury of being terrible at them. Those guys fill in the gaps and they’re really, really good at that. Jez is really good at meeting people and all that kind of shit, so it works really well. You’ve got at least one person covering every possible angle. I’m doing a lot of the visual stuff now. I’m designing a lot of the visual side of the band, basically most things that we’re tweeting or videos is all being done by me. As a unit we could basically do this by ourselves... if someone gave us loads of money, which is how we operate.

My last question is a random one but it’s been on my mind. On Christmas Day, you dug up a four-year-old Liam Gallagher tweet where he called the producer Dave Sardy “Dave Sardine”, and I wanted to know how your Christmas Day mind had been drawn back to that. Haha! Well, when it happened someone tweeted it to me and I thought was funny and I retweeted then. Then recently, I remembered it and I went to see if it was still there. It was and I was like, ‘I’m gonna save that for Christmas Day’ - it wasn’t related to what I was up to. It’s just like, right, ‘Christmas Day, time to tweet my favourite tweet’. It will always be my favourite tweet because it’s how angry he is about Dave Sardine. It’s so good.

The full article is available on substack.

#jonathan higgs #ee #everything everything #the new cue #mountainhead

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