On the eve of Anathema’s biggest UK tour in years, lead singer Vincent Cavanagh chatted with Mick Burgess about the tour and their latest album We’re Here Because We’re Here.
Metal Express Radio:
You’ve recently released your latest album We’re Here Because We’re Here. The album has received great reviews just about everywhere. You must be delighted with the response…
VC:
It’s been fantastic. For a long time now it’s really felt like it’s been our baby, especially for me as I just feel so close to the record. It felt strange at first when we released it because it felt like we were giving it away. I’ve felt closer to this record than to anything else we’ve done.
MER:
You’ve been awarded Classic Rock magazine’s “Prog Album of the Year”, beating the likes of Asia, Spock’s Beard, and The Pineapple Thief to top spot. That must be pretty satisfying…
VC:
We’re really happy about that, it’s quite an honor for us. We were so close and involved with this record that I was 100% happy with it. You never really achieve perfection, although you should always strive for it and I guess that I was so happy with it that it wouldn’t have mattered if nobody had liked it at all. Now that we’ve seen this reaction, it’s just so overwhelming that so many people like it so much.
MER:
The term “Prog” has for many years been something of a derogatory word, however, now it seems to be a more respected turn of phrase. Why do you think Progressive music is more acceptable now?
VC:
There’s so many more bands out there pushing boundaries further than they have before. With Progressive music in the past, people were really sticking to a particular genre. There was a lot of Classical influences and scale patterns, whereas bands these days like Pivot and Radiohead sound like something that you haven’t heard before. I think the appetite is there for the musicians due to the possibilities and opportunities provided by new technology merging with existing instruments. Bands are finding new ways to express themselves, especially as it’s a lot easier these days for bands to record and to have their own technology available to record and work on their own sound. In the past you had to go to a studio and there were deadlines to meet and the record company would want a result by then. Look at Martin Grech. He did his first album all by himself when he was 19 in his bedroom and it was a huge success. People can do that these days. Trente Moller also… he records in his own home studio and his records sound like a million dollars. That’s actually the road we took on our album as well. We decided to do everything ourselves and it really paid off.
MER:
It’s taken 7 years since A Natural Disaster was released in 2003. Why such a long gap?
VC:
It didn’t take 7 years for us to actually make the album, it was a few months on and off, but it was 7 years coming. It’s just too long between albums. If I’m into a band, I do not want to wait 7 years between albums, so the next one will not take so long. I don’t know why it took so long. There are loads of boring reasons that are not really worth going into as it’s all in the past.
MER:
Musically, you continue to grow as a band. How do you see this as a progression from A Natural Disaster?
VC:
I see us progressing as people a hell of a lot since then, and I believe our musical evolution is connected to our personal evolution and vice versa. It’s as natural as it can be, really. What we’ve managed to do is to find moods and pieces of music that are more accurate to us. I think all of the internal barriers have been broken down on this album. Even on A Natural Disaster, there were a couple of tracks such as “Pulled Under” that didn’t feel right to me or to anyone else, to tell you the truth. There’s been moments like that on all our albums, but there isn’t anything like that on our latest. This is a personal standard for us to adhere to. We will not let something out unless we are 100% happy with it.
MER:
Do you think this is due to the fact that you produced the album yourself rather than using an outside producer, so you had complete control over the creative process?
VC:
Yes it is, but it’s also down to the writing of the album. If we’d had a song like “Pulled Under” now it would still be that song with or without the producer. There is a serious quality control thing going on with the band now so we are very careful over what we release. The songs end up picking themselves as it’s a delicate balance trying to find the right balance of moods, keys, tempos, segues… the things that make an album an album from start to finish. It’s a delicate balance getting all of those pieces in the right place, so it is something that we are very careful with. If something doesn’t fit right, it doesn’t go on the album.
MER:
Steven Wilson from Porcupine Tree mixed the album. Did he work with you in the studio during the recording process or did he work on the finished recordings?
VC:
We finished recording the album first then we sent it to him and he did a lot of work over a couple of weeks on his own. He sent us some mixes back and we made some notes and he worked on them again. It went backwards and forwards a few times, then on the final pass he invited myself, Danny, and John to his home studio where we finished it off. There wasn’t much to do by that point… just altering a few levels here and there and there were a few issues on certain effects on the vocals where I wanted them to be more pure. He suggested a couple of vocal effects, and in my mind I knew how I wanted it to sound… you have to realize that you can’t always be objective. Steven suggested changing the vocal effect and I can see that he was probably right there, as he could be objective about it.
MER:
Will you work with him again in the future?
VC:
Yes, I would like to, but it’s a case of timing at the moment as he’s always so busy and always has something on the go. We probably don’t have time to record something with him as that takes quite some time, but hopefully he can mix something for us again — that would be fantastic. I’d work with him again in any capacity.
MER:
There’s also a 5.1 mix available. Do have to record things differently in the studio to achieve that, or do you record as normal and leave the surround sound mixing to the engineers?
VC:
That’s down to Steven; he does that himself with the recordings we give him. It depends on the type of album you’re making. Certain sounds lend themselves better to a 5.1 mix. With a straightforward Heavy Metal album, it’s pretty pointless, but if you have enough space in the music where you can notice different sounds moving in a 360 degree dimension, then you can really play with that.
MER:
You have Ville Valo from HIM contributing vocals to “Angels Walk Among Us”. How did he become involved?
VC:
He’s been our friend for some years now and there’s a lot of mutual respect there. He kept mentioning this song. When we had finished the album version, we asked him if he’d like to contribute some backing vocals to it. He didn’t want to get in the way of the intimacy of the vocals on the song, so he wanted to add a layer of texture to the vocals in the background. He had fun doing it and he was a complete professional… and it really worked out. He respected the music enough not just to sing over the top of it.
MER:
The string arrangement on “Presence” and also “Universal” is beautiful. Dave Stewart was involved in that arrangement. Is that THE Dave Stewart?
VC:
It’s not the guy from The Eurythmics — it is the guy who had a hit in the ’80’s with Barbara Gaskin with a song called “It’s My party And I’ll Cry If I Want To”. He’s been working with Porcupine Tree and scoring music for a long time while still working with Barbara on his own music. Steven Wilson put us onto him as he thought it would sound great with real strings. We had the string parts worked out and he worked on the notation and getting them well-orchestrated into each different section of the orchestra. He went to speak to a notator who would then transcribe for the orchestra. He then went into the studio and conducted the orchestra. It was marvellous. You can’t beat real strings and can’t recreate them on a synthesiser. You can create emotively in a way that you just can’t do with samples. You can get good sounds if you spend £10,000 on a string library, but you’d be forever programming it anyway. Why not just get a real orchestra in? There’s just something about everyone having a joint consciousness at the same time, starting with the first note together and ending together. It’s a beautiful thing to behold. It cost us quite a bit of money to do, but it was worth it.
MER:
There’s some arty photos in the album booklet. Are they taken around your home town of Liverpool?
VC:
They are indeed from around Liverpool and are significant locations from our childhood. They are places where we grew up and had our experiences as children. Our collective histories and shared memories are all there in those images.
MER:
Your previous album Hindsight featured a collection of reworked acoustic versions of songs from your whole career. Why did you decide to do that?
VC:
It was the perfect time for us after doing Natural Disaster. Me and Danny had been on tour with a cello player interpreting our own stuff acoustically, so we’d been doing it live for a while and we thought we’d do it on record. People had been saying to us to do that for such a long time. We also knew it was such a leap from our old sound, and we really wanted to do it as it was the only chance we’d get to cast a new light on our old songs. We wanted to do a stark arrangement rather than the overblown production with loads of guitars.
MER:
“One Last Goodbye” has such a haunting, beautiful melody. That’s a song about the loss of your mother. It must be very difficult for you to sing that…
VC:
I can’t listen to it and I never could, but it’s always there for me whenever I want it. If I sing it, I’m alright and I can go right back to the place where it comes from and I’m OK… but I just can’t listen to it. When I sing it I don’t have to think about it much, but if I was sitting at home listening to it, then I’d think about it too much. It’s a different kind of experience if you’re singing it, and I can handle that.
MER:
Do you do any of the Hindsight versions when you perform live?
VC:
I’m really up for that in the future — stripping things down, but we’ve done those songs on Hindsight, so I don’t think we’d do those in that sort of setting. I quite like the arrangement of Fragile Dreams that we did and actually prefer it to the Rock version so we may do that one.
MER:
Talking of playing live, are you looking forward to getting out on the road?
VC:
We really, really are looking forward to it. With the addition of the new songs, I think the live show is much better. We’ve really worked on improving the sound of the band. With playing relatively smaller venues on this tour, we don’t really have the budget to put on the kind of light show that we’d like. That’s fine for me as when we do it we’ll do it differently. We’re not going to put up a big screen and play in front of it. It can be good and very effective, but it’s something that you’ve seen before. There’s a lot of new techniques out there that I’ve been researching, so there are possibilities for us to do something more exciting.
MER:
As a band you don’t seem to have toured that extensively in the UK. Is that something you’re hoping to change now?
MER:
We’ve rarely played in England since we’re always out in Europe. If the demand is there, then we’ll play. After this we’re going over to France for a bit, then we’re back into the studio. We’ve been in the studio before the tour and we’re going back in afterwards. There’s going to be two releases coming out. When they are done, we might come back, but we’re really focusing on getting some more stuff out. We’ll make an announcement when they are ready, so I don’t really want to say too much more at this stage.
MER:
Musically, you’ve changed so much from your Serenades release in the early 1990’s… do you still perform much from those days, or have you moved on?
VC:
Now and again we do something from the early albums. We might do “Sleepless” occasionally, but there’s not many people who come to our gigs expecting that stuff anymore. For most people they go as far back as Fragile Dreams, and don’t go any further back than that. We’re all for playing songs that people want, but at the same time we have 8 albums now and unless we play for 8 hours, we can’t play everything.
MER:
What are you plans for the coming year?
VC:
We’ll be working on new material, then heading to South America. We’re Here Because We’re Here is getting released in North America in May 2011. We might tour North America at some point, then it’s the summer festival season. We’ll also be continuing writing the next full album, so we’ll release that as soon as it’s ready, so we’re not wasting any time. In the autumn there’ll be more recording and more touring, so we’ll just keep on going.
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