Interview Turboweekend: ‘We’re Pretty Open To Whatever Happens’

Danish three-piece Turboweekend stopped off in London earlier this week on their whirlwind spring tour. We caught up with the talkative trio to chat collaborations, home turf and why three is a magic, if not difficult, number.

Your single ‘Into The Pavement’ was released a couple of days ago. How has it been received so far?
Silas: I know they’ve playlisted it in Denmark and I know it’s playlisted in Poland as well. We had a big hit in Poland with ‘Trouble Is’ and they’ve caught onto the EP as well so it’s kind of nice that there’s a continuity. I know XFM are playing it over here, Mike Walsh picked it up.

The ‘Bound’ EP, like your single, has a few collaborations on there. Do you think it’s important to work with other artists?
Martin: We did with the EP because it was an in between albums project and we wanted to work with other artists just to experiment a little. It’s not something we normally do but we’re talking about maybe doing something with somebody on the album as well but we don’t know yet.
Silas: After we did the EP, we said that the next album was going to be non-collaborative but…things change.
Morden: We’re pretty open to whatever happens on the way.
Silas: But only if it makes sense. If something arises and you get some sort of a connection with somebody and the song fits perfectly or it’s a duet or something like that.

You’re a three-piece and you’re now working on your third album. Do good things come in threes?
Silas: This album has to be a good one. I think people always talk about the ‘difficult number two’ but that’s only in the case that number one was a success. And, in our case, at least in Denmark, with the first record we toured on it but it wasn’t a massive success. The second album has lifted us up to a really good stage in Denmark and we can definitely feel a pressure or an expectation for the third album. Much like probably the difficult number two, we have a difficult number three. Which is actually kind of the reason that we did the EP, because we had this pressure and we wanted to blow out some of the steam.
Morden: And number three’s also going to work as number one in a lot of places because the other two albums have only been successful in Denmark and the area around that. We have a couple more months to work on it and we have a lot of demo tracks in the pile. We’re trying to pick which ones are gonna make it to the album.

You mentioned there about the EP. The whole thing with that was that you invited fans to remix tracks and create art and videos for it. What was the idea behind that?
Silas: We were talking about the concept of the EP being to open up the creative process, for example like through all of the collaborations.
Martin: While we were experimenting making the EP, we invited the audience to experiment as well with our stuff.

Were you pleased with the responses you received?
Silas: I don’t think that the idea behind it was to get really, really good remixes. The idea was to let people do remixes and feel that they could join in. We’re just three guys making music in a space. We can put out the parts and you can do something at home as well. So I don’t think we aimed at getting hit remixes and we haven’t received hit remixes but it’s been really fun to see what people have been doing at home with the stuff.
Martin: Two of the remixes have been played on national Danish radio on the clubbing show - late Friday night.
Silas: That’s because we happen to be friends with a lot of DJs.

You signed to Supervision Management just under a year ago now. How much have things changed for you over the last 12 months?
Silas: I think that the year we’ve been with Supervision has mostly been preparing, preparing for the third album. So things haven’t happened yet but we’re having lots of preparatory meetings and assembling a team and all of that stuff so there’s no actual result yet. They’ve of course helped us put up the website and all those kinds of boring things.
Morden: Data capture!
Martin: And merchandising. We have a webshop.
Silas: Probably the biggest change is that we’ve shifted our workload from checking mails to actually doing music without anything stopping. The wheels are still rolling but someone else is rolling them for us.
Morden: We didn’t have any management even in Denmark before we signed with Dave & Nigel and now we have three. So we can concentrate on what we’re supposed to do.

Have they got any big plans for you then?
Silas: We had a big discussion yesterday about what the band is. Is it a niche band or what kind of band is it? And Nigel at least is very convinced that we’re a pop band and we’re a pop band in the way that we need to compete with really, really big bands. We’re not competing in a niche scene, we’re competing with really, really big, popular bands, which is great of course, if we succeed.
Martin: It’s a bit intimidating because we’ve always seen ourselves as just three guys making rock/pop music. It might happen, I don’t know.
Morden: We’ve been doing everything the indie way but we don’t play indie music…but we like big venues so that’s fine. That’s kind of happening now in Denmark, playing stages of 1500-2000 people, big stages. That’s really fantastic.

You mentioned there about playing live and you’re currently on your spring tour. Where are you most looking forward to playing?
Morden: Copenhagen. We have two sold out shows. It’s just gonna be really good. All of the places we’ve been so far, it’s been great when people have shown up. But here, we have the opportunity to do a big production. You know the sound’s good, you know the crew. I was working there when I was a teenager and it’s a nice place.
Silas: It’s home turf. VEGA is one of those venues that when you grow up in Copenhagen, you wanna play that venue and we have two sold out shows there. We’re really looking forward to it.

‘Into The Pavement’ is out now.