Latitude 2015 Wild Beasts: “There’s a nice circularity to coming back to Latitude”

Wild Beasts weren’t far away from not making their triumphant main stage appearance at Latitude 2015 last night. The festival’s most frequent attendees, on their sixth appearance at the Suffolk bash, spoke to us the morning after the set to reflect on another step up in their ever-growing career and the new album they’re currently crafting.

“We had real difficulty getting here”, comments Ben Little, “but we turned up and did the show and it was great. We were playing a show in Carlisle, and at 2am the bus broke down, so we threw our stuff on a train, and had us and our things on about four different modes of transport, but there was never a question of us not making the show. We had to, it was huge for us.”

Coming back to the festival again has given the band a chance to reflect on their progression, and how far they’ve come on every step of their Latitude journey. “There’s a nice circularity to coming back to Latitude. We’ve stepped up every stage, and you can mark our career by our six times here. It’s like looking at old photographs of yourself and seeing what’s changed.”

The biggest markable change is the slots, with a headline set in the biggest tent in 2013 followed by a massive main stage slot this time around, and guitarist Tom Fleming takes the chance to think back to their first time here. “We started off playing in the woods, and Hayden and I stayed in a one-man tent, and just rocked up with guitars and went for it, and to see where it’s come from there is quite overwhelming.”

Latitude is Wild Beasts’ only UK festival performance of the year, and the band used the performance to reconnect with the outside world and help inform their ongoing work on album five. “Coming out to play a few shows amongst a heavy writing process does help inform what you’re doing looking forward. You can get very academic when you’re on your own, obsessing over snare drum sounds, but coming back out to festivals gives you a bit of perspective. That stuff doesn’t really matter.”

“The way our records have progressed, you can see the differences and the family tree of where we’ve come from, and coming back out to the live environment and playing these older songs can trigger something within us and inform what we’re working on now.”

Wild Beasts hammer through the idea of the live setting being their home, and something that’s compulsory in succeeding. “The records are the art, and the thing that stays, but if you can’t do it live then fuck off.”

Check out photos and a report of Wild Beasts live at Latitude 2015 here.