Interview The Airborne Toxic Event: A Voyage Into Political Songwriting

Photo Credit: Prue Hyman.

Modern day troubadour Mikel Jollett from The Airborne Toxic Event gives DIY the lowdown on the band’s forthcoming sophomore album, working with Oasis producer Dave Sardy and his first voyage into political songwriting.

Your last album was all about real life heartbreak and pain that you were going through as a result of a train wreck week in your life - losing your girlfriend, your hair and the prospect of losing your mother to cancer. What stage are you at in your life at the moment and how has this affected the emotional content of the new record? Is it still as intense?
I think it is. The music comes to life in the ears of the listener and what I have to say about it isn’t really that important! But what I will say is that the first record was a breakup record and this record is affected by a couple of things that have since happened. First of all, we were coming back from this overwhelming experience of being on the road for two years, playing around 350 shows and meeting so many people, so returning to my apartment was quite a solitary experience. I was sitting brooding, writing, smoking a cigarette. After receiving all these emails and letters and meeting a hundred people a day, you start feeling that all the anxieties and insecurities you have are a part of a larger human narrative. So many people have expressed similar sentiments and I’d heard so many stories on the road. Also, my family is very close, and my grandparents all died in the same year. Some of the loss wasn’t tragic per se – my grandma was 97 in a house surrounded by people who love her, which was a pretty good run!

Well, if she’d made it another three years and was living in England, she’d be getting a letter from the Queen!
Really? Ha! So I guess I feel that these experiences changed the length of my perspective or the confinement of wanting to be in your late 20s and wanting to go to bars and clubs, so you start looking at things from a distance like a million miles away. I think that perspective crept into the writing.

How, if at all, has the sound changed for this record?
It’s quieter at parts and louder at parts. It has a bit of folk, electronic, classical and rock music on it. There was no decision to do that. My record collection goes from Johnny Cash to Das Racist and Harry Nilsson and I think a lot of people have this experience with music. We live in a very fractured world and the idea of genre is dated. The pop artists I respect like Cee-Lo and MIA don’t care about genre either – they can go from classic ballad to a modern dance song or something with more of a soul feel. We’re not the proper mould of a band like ‘four blokes from Liverpool’. Like you have a certain haircut, outfit, guitar effects and there’s your sound.

Your band’s a bit of a motley crew.
For sure! We’ve never quite decided on anything but we take what we think is good and run with it. From something like ‘Numb’ which is a fusion of rock n roll and electronic music or ‘Changing’ which is a more a throwback mid-60s song with almost a modern hip hop beat that punctuates it.

The album was produced by the prolific sonic wizard Dave Sardy, so what did he add to the mix that was unique?
I knew that with him we’d be able to get the best sounds for the record – he has every guitar ever made, every amp ever made and he has a massive collection of keyboard effects. I was surprised though with the extent to which he focuses on classic songwriting structure. I wrote a song called ‘Strange Girl’, a homage to The Cure, as it’s about a point in my life when everything I was going through was wrapped up in this one Cure song and how as years go by, you no longer feel that way about a song and you miss being that wrapped up in anything – being 15 years old and your whole life rests on a song. Dave heard that song and he said he loved it, but asked if I had thought about writing a middle-eight. And I was like, “What’s the fuck is a middle-eight?” So Dave recommended I go listen to a bunch of Elvis Costello songs. Like on ‘Veronica’ there’s a good one: ‘On the Empress Of India / And as she closed her eyes upon the world’. It’s this part of the song where there’s this new piece of music and it informs what you’ve been saying in your chorus, so next time you hear the chorus, it’s reinterpreted given these new ideas you’ve introduced. It’s like a minuet in a sonata! Dave’s a rock n roll encyclopaedia and his emphasis on classic song structure was new for me, as I write in incomplete sentences and never thought about music that way.

He produced Oasis!
And LCD Soundsystem and Band of Horses and The Walkmen, and he told us stories about their approaches. It’s mad since the first album was produced in a fucking basement!

Did he give you any gossip on the Gallaghers?
Not really! Just that they were very hardworking!

The first slab of the new album we heard was ‘Changing’… is it about a how people look at you differently as a guy in a band?
I don’t know man; it’s just a fucking jam! It’s a song about being frustrated that everybody wants you to change. You can probably say that it could be about trying to defy fans, critics, labels, publicists if you did a psychoanalysis – there’s a frustration over there I guess too.

What about the song ‘Neda’, which is about a young girl killed at a protest in Iran? How did the Persian community react to this?
Yeah, we’ve had quite a number of emails, particularly in Los Angeles, which has the biggest Iranian ex-pat community in the world. We’ve been getting letters from Iranians also where people have said that they were touched that a Western artist would take on the themes and ideas of the Green movement going on there. I remember when I first saw that video that I was completely floored by it – it was horrifying – impossible to watch but impossible to look away. I was also fascinated by the fact that I was watching it online. Here’s a person dealing with this incredibly violent and horrific act and I can watch it here on my computer screen.

Isn’t it shocking that when someone’s been shot like that, someone has a videocam held up to it?
Yeah, I agree. The big change to me was not just that the world is watching but that the world is filming. Everybody is able to capture the actions of other people. The event was what happened but also that everyone saw what happened and what it does is it makes the world a smaller place. A hundred years ago, you’d have had to be there on the street. Fifty years ago, you’d have a newspaper. Now, you just need a cellphone. We approached Amnesty International about it and all the proceeds went to them in their work to get political prisoners out of jails in Iran.

Are there any political songs on the record?
One is called ‘The Kids Are Ready To Die’ about sending kids off to war. I feel governments take advantage of young people’s misdirected anger and it gets mixed up with nationalism and puts kids in the firing line. The question is not about, are there things worth dying for? Of course, there are, but the question is, are THESE things worth dying for, in the context of Afghanistan where kids and civilians are dying every day? It’s a worthwhile cause to have a more stable Afghanistan, but is it something that you YOURSELF think is worth dying for? I think 99.9% of Americans would say ‘no’. The other song is called ‘Welcome To Your Wedding Day’, which is about a bombing of a wedding in Afghanistan. I’m really not trying to vilify anyone as the bomb was accidental and they must have felt awful about it and war is horrific and everyone agrees on that. But then that same week, I read an article in the US press asking why we’re not winning the hearts and minds of people in Afghanistan and why these people don’t appreciate our presence, and I was thinking what a fucking idiotic thing to say! Meanwhile you’ve just killed a wedding – you’ve got kids dancing, you’ve got vows being exchanged – people say it’s one of the most beautiful moments in their lives and you’ve just gone and killed their entire family and you wonder why they’re not happy about the American presence! You can subjugate people but you won’t win anyone over with bombs.

Well, the War against Terrorism is against people who are engaging in violent tactics to further their cause. It works both ways.
Yeah, terrorism is an idea. How do you win a war against terrorism? It’s an idea. Are we going to have a war against jealousy? Against bulimia? These are human positions. I’m not saying there are no actions to be taken, but should we take those actions against an entire country! I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks this.

So to move onto a very different kind of assault… every time you visit England, you like to make a statement – whether it’s bringing over the Calder Quartet or doing 30 shows in 30 days – and this time you’re having a bit of a Willy Wonka Golden ticket event. Would you like to talk us through it?
[Laughs] Yeah! In London we’re playing a series of shows in 5 different venues in 5 days – starting with the smallest show we ever played – at Dublin Castle – to one of the biggest at Coco. The first time we played London it was for 30 people and then the last time we played it was for 2000 at Shepherd’s Bush. So we thought we’d revisit all of these clubs, except Shepherd’s Bush wasn’t available. We’re a live band and there’s nothing like getting in a room with people and playing for them.

You’re also very fan-friendly and hang out with many after the shows. What’s the craziest experience you’ve had with a fan?
I’m forever surprised at some of the lengths people go to come to shows. We played in Paris last night and someone had come from Scotland and someone said their flight was diverted in Belgium and they’d taken a cab from Belgium. Once in LA someone had come in from Australia. We managed to crash the server when we put our North American tourdates up! That kind of stuff we associate with big bands like Radiohead! We get a lot of letters – 5 or 10 page letters. There was this kid in Edinburgh called Gregor that tragically died who was a fan and his whole family came to the show and we talked about him and dedicated the show to him. Or there are people who have played songs at weddings or funerals or who said that the record helped them when they lost a child or a parent. It’s incredible and I don’t really understand it!

You mentioned Radiohead… they’ve released their latest album on their own terms, even setting their own price and Thom Yorke setting his own dance trends. Does this way of marketing music make it hard for bands like you? Is their innovation healthy for the music industry?
Yeah, absolutely! How can you not love Radiohead? They’re pioneers! The business of music is ridiculous and very divorced from the artistry of music and I like that they’ve forged their own story and shown that you can have a direct relationship with your fans without a corporate element. This year a lot of music with an alternative ethic is being recognised in the mainstream; for instance, with Arcade Fire’s recent Grammys triumph.

What do you want from the second album?
A good question! We don’t have a particular goal. I think writing has a lot to do with loneliness. You have an experience that is overwhelming and there’s something about sharing it that makes it not so overwhelming anymore. As a listener or a reader, there’s a moment when you recognise your own humanity and realise that I’m not alone with this thought or feeling. I think that’s why people tell stories to each other – it’s comforting and disfiguring and that can change us. There are people that say they write for themselves, but I write for an audience. The thing to do is think how you can bring this idea to life in the mind or heart of someone else. The record’s about change – like with my grief and my experiences on tour – but I hope that people will find something that they can relate to in the ideas behind them.

The Airborne Toxic Event’s new album ‘All At Once’ will be released on 18th April via Mercury Records. For more information about the band’s forthcoming UK tour and London residency, click here.