Cover Feature CHVRCHES: ‘There’s Been No Masterplan’

The hype machine isn’t a toy. It’s not some speak and spell sat in the corner of a toddler’s play room. It’s a bone cruncher, a meat grinder, a massive tank with an even bigger cannon intent on blowing any band willing to poke their head over the trenches to kingdom come. In 2013, it has had more targets than usual. A grateful few have made it past to the open fields of mainstream success, but many more who brought in the year with the loftiest of dreams find themselves missing a leg, crawling hopelessly towards safety with the promise of a few reasonably attended tour dates and a vague hope of recouping of at least half of their major label’s money. It’s a bloodbath out there./p>

Awkward metaphors aside, if a measure of expectation is a double edged sword, CHVRCHES currently hold several gallons worth of the stuff. Of all the year’s fresh blood, only Haim have this many eyes trained on their debut album. Both sides of the pond are watching with intent. Only the very best will do.

It’s no shock - for once the attention is deserved. Every action - from the more considered but equally catchy ‘Recover’ to the barely concealed vendetta of ‘Gun’ - has been perfect. Not a stride out of step, not a single regrettable action. If the hype machine can turn a band to jelly, CHVRCHES are facing it down with the steely expression of a vengeful Arnie in a late 80s action film, bazooka over his shoulder, barely a sweat across his brow.

“It’s been pretty crazy,” laughs Ian Cook. “We try not to have our heads too much in that sort of thing,” follows Martin Doherty. “We’re aware of how things are going, and the shows have been crazy, but I think now there’s a tendency for people to get caught up in what everyone else is saying about them. It takes their eye off the ball creatively. We’ve tried to ignore as much of what was going on around us as possible. Otherwise we could get big heads and start believing what everyone was saying, and that’s dangerous!”

In that message alone, what makes CHVRCHES different from their peers becomes obvious. They’re nailed down; relative grown ups in a world of excited pups. Everything has fallen into place since they got together just shy of two years ago. They’ve worked hard, and things have started to go their way. It’s all the band’s own doing - and, crucially, there’s never been a masterplan.

“The story of the beginning is pretty straightforward,” Martin, the band’s synth-player and sampler extraordinaire, explains. “I had recorded with Iain on the last Aereogramme album. We were really good friends and we worked together in different production capacities; I went off and joined The Twilight Sad, and he went off and did his own thing, writing for TV, playing in another band. Eventually we sat down together and started hashing out some ideas.

“At the end of 2011 he played me some demos he’d been working on with Lauren [Mayberry - the band’s formidable main vocalist], and I was immediately blown away by her vocals. She came in to the studio, we talked, chatted and we tried some stuff out, and pretty soon we formed a tight partnership, in terms of realising that she had a lot to offer as a songwriter as much as vocals, and things started to happen really quickly.”

Sure, most bands have been round the block to one extent or another before fame comes knocking, but CHVRCHES’ origin story feels somewhat different. There’s a measure and purpose to their actions, a comfort in their own skin.

“We put a song online in May last year,” Lauren recalls. “About that time we were a completely unsigned band. There was no marketing, no labels, no A&R or any people like that. It’s been pretty amazing for us because people have responded just to the music; I don’t feel like people have reacted to us because it’s been pushed down their throats.

“I think it’s important for us to remember that we wouldn’t be doing all the awesome stuff we’re getting to do right now were it not for people having found our band on the internet. It was just people passing it to their friends, and I think that’s a really powerful thing. We wouldn’t be able to do any of the great stuff we’re doing were it not for the response of those people right at the start.”

Being fair, it wasn’t just any old song they flung in to the online abyss. ‘We don’t subscribe to the idea that the album is dead.’ The aforementioned ‘Lies’ announces itself like a SWAT team, kicking in the doors and setting up camp. Immediate, muscular but never obvious or cliched, no one track can make a band, but there was no doubting their name was now on every must watch list going. At that point, many others would follow up with a slightly disappointing second effort. Good, but not great. Not CHVRCHES.

To call ‘The Mother We Share’ great would be an understatement. It’s the song of the last twelve months, one of the best of the previous decade. A nighttime cruise through the neon jungle, with a vocal that still forms goosebumps with its brilliance, its timing felt perfect. No bloat, no grandeur, just brilliant electro-pop of the very highest order. From that point, all bets were off.

“We met with a lot of people,” Iain explains, recounting the inevitable industry circus that followed. “It was long process of to-ing and fro-ing. There were a lot of arseholes. The cliche of the British A&R guy who is all about cocaine and money and just completely morally bereft, we met a few of those. Not all of them, there were some very lovely people too, but there were also some people that were just despicable human beings.”

“Each of us has a fairly good bullshit filter,” Lauren adds. “I think that I’m probably the most cynical of all of the group to an extent, but I think you can tell pretty early on when someone would tell you something that they think they haven’t credited you with that much of a brain. They’re just coming to you, telling you all these things, and you’re like ‘well it’s not actually gonna be like that’. Then when you look at what they’re actually saying, that’s not something we’re actually interested in.”

“We only eventually signed a UK deal at the start of this year,” she continues, “and by that point we’d made most of the record, it was just finishing touches and things like that. I think it was helpful to us that when people started talking to us, we had already proved our method to a certain extent, so the people we were meeting with knew what they were getting. It’s made it easier for us to make sure that this band is the band that we wanted it to be.

“We wanted to put out something that we could stand behind and was ours. I think that certain people that we talked to wouldn’t have done that, and were perceiving our band in a way that we would never have wanted to present it. It’s important to us that we never did any of that stuff, because I don’t think that makes you happy. You’re only around for a short amount of time, why do stuff that’s gonna make you unhappy in the long run for the chance of something really short-term, and probably not that valuable?”

“But yeah, we’re really happy,” Iain affirms. “We were very very careful, and really chuffed and happy to be working with the people that we decided to work with. We have a really clear idea of what we want to achieve with this band. I feel like if we were to start getting in another producer, or other songwriters and stuff, it’d completely dilute the essence of what it is we’re trying to do.

“There was some discussion about the possibility of looking at other producers, but pretty soon we realised that even though they might bring something interesting and new, we wanted to keep it in-house - especially given that it was our first album. We wanted to make a statement that was entirely ours.”

Where others have lost their heads and compromised, CHVRCHES seem to have known exactly what they were doing from the get go. Their album ‘The Bones Of What You Believe’, has been timed to perfection. Not overcooked nor rushed, it contains everything that caught the imagination and turns it into a proper record. Far from ‘The Mother We Share’ and eleven other songs, it’s the sound of a band who know exactly what they want.

“I’m glad that you say that,” Iain laughs. “There’s a lot of impatient people on the internet that are constantly like, ‘where is the album?! where is the album?!’ But there’s been no masterplan, we’ve just gone with what we feel is right. Initially we were a bit worried that September 2013 was gonna be way way too long a wait, but it doesn’t feel like we made the wrong decision.”

“We thought long and hard about everything,” adds Martyn, “even right down to the way it was sequenced. It’s specifically as if it was on vinyl: there is a deliberate end of side A and beginning of side B. We really, really thought about it that way. We don’t really subscribe to the idea that the album format is dead. I think it would be really a sad thing to see it like that.

“But, at the same time, there are more immediate songs on there; we understand the importance of singles. ‘Just fucking leave it!’ And you just have to look at a band like The Cure, who did it time and time again. They were able to make records that had depth and worth over the course of a full album, but at the same time satisfy people’s desire to hear the more immediate side of the band. And that’s for sure something that we’ve tried to achieve. If we can get anywhere near what they’ve been capable of doing over a number of records, then we’ll be in good shape.”

“It’s important that all the music and lyrics and stuff is very… genuine,” Lauren ponders. “None of it’s contrived, we’ve not written something in order to appeal to any demographic or anything. That’s a very industry way to think. We just wanted to write songs that meant something to us, that had a sense of melody and emotion. At the end of the day that’s what connects with people.”

“This is probably the most democratic band I’ve ever been in,” she says of the writing and recording process. “It is very much a democracy,” Ian confirms. “We all have input in to every part of the process with the songwriting, but we all have our individual strengths as well. Martin and I have a lot of similar skills when it comes to production, and Lauren’s strengths tend to lie in things like lyrics and some of the melodies. But we all pitch in.

“Every song that we’ve written so far has come from a very small seed - a synth sound, a sample, a simple chord sequence - and then it tends to snowball really really quickly in the studio. Usually within about an hour we’ve got the bare bones of a song. It can go really quickly after that, or it can take weeks.

“’The Mother We Share’ was one that took absolutely months to finally arrive at an arrangement that we were happy with. We kept going back to it and tinkering because we never felt like it was quite right. But when we arrived at it, we were like OK, so this is the song. We’ve arrived!” He laughs. “And the lyrics tend to always go on at the very end.”

“Martin tends to be a bit of a perfectionist,” he adds, “and he’s always wanting to go back, and because we’ve got our own studio space, we can go back and tweak until it actually has to be sent to duplication. That’s something that I don’t like to do personally, but Martin often needs dissuading from going ‘oh we just need to fix the tuning on that bit’. Like, ‘no, no, just fucking leave it’!”

Writing the album ended up being a very natural process. “It helped that we’d been working on some of the things that are on the record two years ago, when we started writing together,” Lauren explains “’Lies’ and ‘Mother…’ are two of the songs we first wrote. It was helpful to us that we’ve had that amount of time to get to know each other as songwriters and figure out the band’s sound.

“I think if we had been signed at the end of 2012 without doing anything first, and then had to put out a record in September 2013, that would have been a massive amount of pressure. It would’ve felt like a rush job. But because we had been, for want of a horrible and manky phrase, growing together for the last year before that, that stood us in good stead. We were just able to go ‘OK, so we’ll carry on doing what we’re doing’. That’s a good place to be.”

“No matter what happens after this point,” she states, “we’ll look back on it and be like ‘we made that record exactly the way we wanted to make it’. We can stand behind that if anything great or not so great happens. It’s our record.”CHVRCHES’ debut album ‘The Bones Of What You Believe’ will be released on 23rd September via Virgin.

Taken from the September 2013 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.