Listen back to Before They Knew Better live with Everything Everything’s Jonathan Higgs

The second season of DIY’s podcast Before They Knew Better kicked off last week in spectacular style with a chat with the wonderful CMAT, and now we’re raising the bar even further with Series Two, Episode Two: our first ever live podcast!

Last month, our regular co-host Lisa Wright sat down with Jonathan Higgs - frontman of indie favourites Everything Everything - at The Social in London to delve into his formative years growing up in a village on the border between Northumberland and Cumbria. Over the course of a frankly wild conversation, the live audience heard tales of Jonathan’s, er, incendiary pastimes (more on that below), as well as being treated to an excerpt of one of his bonkers, ET-inspired teenage compositions and much more.

“We used to make quite a lot of bombs”, Jonathan laughs on the podcast’s latest episode. “My brother made quite a lot of napalm. He’d get a Pot Noodle pot of petrol (because my dad had loads of petrol in the shed), and then we found this old sofa in the stream which was mostly polystyrene. So we broke up all the polystyrene and melted it into this Pot Noodle pot so the petrol was this really potent… goop. Then we’d spread it over a tree and set fire to it… and he said that was napalm.”

Before They Knew Better - available to listen now on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and all major podcast platforms - is DIY’s podcast digging into the wins, woes and wtfs of your favourite musicians’ early years, with a new episode landing every Tuesday morning.

You can listen back to our live episode with Jonathan Higgs and catch up on series one below - don’t forget to like and subscribe!