Flyte: "You don't want to try to be funny" • Neu • DIY Magazine

It makes sense that Flyte’s beginnings were in the cramped, curtain-closed environment of frontman Will Taylor’s bedroom. Videos of their early days are still there on the band’s Youtube channel. A copy of David Byrne’s ‘How Music Works’ can sometimes be seen perched next to a keyboard, with old school VHS-style footage giving the impression that these clips are some twenty, thirty years old. There’s a distinct ‘before the band broke big’ impression to them. Perhaps that’s the point.

In the space of a year, Flyte have since had to ditch bedroom surroundings for a studio in East London. In that time, they’ve picked up a record deal, put shows under their belt, but together they joke that they’ve collectively “lost friends!” It’s an exaggeration, but the four-piece - of Taylor, Nick Hill (bass, vocals), Sam Berridge (keyboards, vocals), Jon Supran (drums, vocals) - have kept to their own corner. They might as well still be in a bedroom.

“There’s definitely a load of bands that we’ve been meeting up with now,” says Taylor, citing tourmates Bombay Bicycle Club and Rae Morris for starters. “I just think we like to carve out a little area for ourselves and stay there.” Up to now this unique space doesn’t have a tag of any kind; Flyte’s sound, often on the gentler side of things, is only tied together by its traditional sense of songwriting. There’s not a great deal of comparisons that can be thrown their way; anyone clutching onto a copy of ‘The Beatles Anthology’ will love them, but that person could be anyone from a dogged hipster to Alan Partridge.

What sets Flyte apart is these bedroom videos, and the ones that swiftly followed. More recently ‘We Are The Rain’ saw Taylor posing semi-nude in Piccadilly Circus, before building a shrine to Radio 4’s Kirsty Young. “Everyone silently in their own world has a connection with Kirsty Young; her lovely soft Scottish voice,” he jokes. “Since I was ten years old I’ve run through the scenario, ‘When I’m on Desert Island Discs, I’m going to pick this and this and this, choose these songs’. And it evolves from that. There’s an amazing delusion to it.”

"I just think we like to carve out a little area for ourselves and stay there."

— Will Taylor

Any “seriousness” and “earnestness” in their songwriting is offset with a desire to have fun. “I think bands hold back the humour because - and I think we do to - it’s often in juxtaposition, in a jarring sense, with the music. You don’t want to try to be funny,” he says. But despite being clear-headed and fans of the “big picture”, all four of them can be found cracking jokes at their own expense. Gradually people are being won over to Flyte’s unique take on things. “If you were having a conversation with someone you’d never met, you wouldn’t come and be like: ‘Hi, how’s it going, I’m really awesome at this and this and this’. Oh yeah wait, I’m basing this on someone. The way to do it is to slowly warm to someone and get into it - that feels like how we’re doing it.”

Tags: Flyte, Features, Interviews, Neu