YOU ME AT SIX // Firing Straight Sixes

It’s crazy to think that You Me at Six are over a decade into their musical career. Trading in their side fringes for a helluva lot of gritty swagger over the years, the Surrey, UK based crew are now gearing up to drop their sixth record.

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Just ahead of the release, Hysteria dialled up the shoddiest of phone lines to chat to front man Josh Franceschi about the new tunes, moving away from recording in the U.S. and the band’s plans for the future.

HYSTERIA: How’re you feeling about having VI out in the open?

Josh: I feel pretty good about it. We’ve been sitting on the finished record since April this year, but everybody else involved in the project, outside of those who made it, said that they needed five or six months to get everything in place before we could put it out.

It feels like an interesting time for our band. With the songs we’ve put out so far and the songs that will follow with the record, I think that we’re putting ourselves in a position to hopefully continue to go against the current even more and just keep exploring these different sounds and these different headspaces that we want to be creating in.

This record was the first you’d co-produced yourself. Did that bring any challenges?

I feel like it was something that we knew was going to happen anyway because Dan (Flint, Drums) and Max (Helyer, Guitarist) have been working quite hard on the production side of things and could write and have decent sounding demos on the road. Our experience with records in the past was that we had the songs and the producers pace would basically be what the record would sound like sonically. We just knew that with some of the songs we were trying to achieve through specific avenues and directions, we had to be a bit more hands on in terms of sonics and exactly how the songs sounded outside of the song writing.

But Dan Austin, our producer, I mean…we started off thinking we know what we’re doing, we just want you to press some buttons, but ultimately he’s just such a quality, quality producer. He has become such a huge member of this family and this team and for us it was just like, if we’re going to really get every bit of talent into this record, we’ve just got to give him as much range as he wants and vice versa. It was a really cool chemistry where we would dip in and out, he was the guy that was driving the car but we all had our phones out with SatNav on. He was constantly bringing something fresh to the table per song, per day. It was a great time to be in the studio and be in the band, we haven’t really had a recording experience like that for quite a few years.

Why was it so important to drop this under Underdog Records?

I guess there’s always been a spirit of independence in our band. Even from the earlier days, we would book shows through MySpace and get on public transport, going all around the country on buses and trains to get there when we were fifteen-sixteen years of age. We’ve always had that fearlessness about our band and no one’s ever really opened doors for us, we’ve had to kick them open. We’ve just come out a cycle with Night People where we felt that we needed to get some of our ownership back in terms of how we worked externally with other people. We needed an umbrella, and a home for You Me at Six’s creativity anyway and the excuse came up to have our own imprint through AWAL and Kobalt. There’s a great group of people there and they believe in what we’re doing, they signed the band on the records we’ve done. There was no conversation of, oh I like that song or, I don’t like that one, why not try this or try that- the stuff that seems like it can have a place but I don’t think it does, for people to be giving opinions on your music they need to be inside your head. I always find it’s a bit frustrating when people turn up last minute and derail a vision and a plan that you’ve had for months at a time, sometimes years.

I think Underdog Records needs to get our records right first but ultimately we’ve got the intention of giving back, in particular to the scene in England which maybe isn’t as thriving as it once was- to give back to up and coming musicians or existing artists that are looking for somewhere to call home and somewhere to go to and have essentially uncensored, unfiltered guidance. Or at least give them a person that’s going to sit there from their perspective, who’s been there and done it and say, look we’re not going to tell you what you want to hear, we’re going to try give you the right sort of advice and then we’ll let you do what you need to do creatively, we won’t get in your way, we’ll just be here for help. We thought about what we want to be doing when the band isn’t moving forward or progressing. We want to have a home for song writing and good music across the board, so it’s a short time thing but it’s a slightly longer term thing as well.

I feel like this record shows a lot of growth from your last release, Night People. What were you some lessons you learnt from it?

I think that every record unfortunately comes with as many lows as highs, it’s part of the deal when you get into the ring so to speak.  Looking back on Night People, I don’t think we were ready to make a record. We realised creativity isn’t a tap that you can just turn on when it suits you, you need to keep it going the whole time and be banking cool ideas and storing stuff. We didn’t write a single bit of music between Cavalier Youth and Night People so I think we all found it to be a little bit of a struggle to get back into that headspace of having to write songs rather than just playing them live.

There is a difference between being a touring act and a recording act, we love both but we found on Night People that we became really good at one, touring and playing live. But writing those songs on Night People, we just really learnt how to accept the way things work a little more. I learnt how to deal with, not the disappointment but just the sort of understanding that for me You Me at Six is my one thing, it’s my one band but to the rest of the world or more importantly to the music industry that we’re trying survive and work in, we’re just one of many. People aren’t always going to take as much care to your thing as yourself. You have to fight even harder, not to be in control, but to be aware and to make sure that you’re the driving force behind everything and every decision that gets made.  

There was no point where we were worried about what we were doing, we just enjoyed it and we backed ourselves. We’re just really happy with where the band is going and the songs we’re making.
[JOSH]

Something that really stands out about VI is the shift in sounds throughout it. What were the listening habits of the band like when creating the album?

The problem is with our band is that we don’t listen to that much guitar music; I’ve only found a few bands recently that I really like. When we were making the record there was just a lot of anything from J. Cole to Tame Impala to Kendrick Lamar to chill music. We were massively into dance too, that’s where a lot of the dance elements came in. It’s hard to describe it but it was probably the easiest record we’ve ever made, it was just one of those things that happened. With all of our other records there were days, sometimes weeks of being in the studio just banging my head against the wall, thinking I don’t know how we get there, I don’t know where the next step comes.

Six was just really easy, because we weren’t trying to make a record where it was like, well this is a rock record or this is a fucking RnB record, we just didn’t try to put a title on it. We just went in accepting that every song was its own island and that if we went into every song with no rule book and no identity so to speak, then we could deliver what we wanted. When we were making a song like I.O.U, we weren’t trying to write a rock song necessarily, we were trying to write a song that’s got groove and is essentially hip hop in the chorus. I think there’s only drum and bass on the song for like two beats. We were figuring out what was gonna be the first guitar part and then when the middle eight came into shape with a dare I say, Black Sabbath plastic rock metal sound, it was just like ‘oh there’s some guitars.’ There was no point where we were worried about what we were doing, we just enjoyed it and we backed ourselves. We’re just really happy with where the band is going and the songs we’re making.

This was also the first record in a while you guys crafted outside US.

That was decision we made from the outset. When we were first talking to producers, we were always in conversation with Dan Austin but we were also talking to others, it was amazing how many left the party when we said we weren’t going to go and spend a quarter of a million quid making a record with them in California or New York or whatever. We know how that gig works out, we’ve done it a few times, we’ve had that experience, we’re not going to the studio for the experience of living in a different country and the experience of that enriching the record, we’re going to make a record.  

I think making the record in England contributed to us focusing across the board, also living in the house that we recorded in helped. It meant that you didn’t feel like you were going to work, you went across to the main studio when you felt like going over.  There was never really clock watching, Dan Austin was always plotting and planning, hence why I was saying he was the pilot and we were the co-pilots of the journey. I could go into the studio at midday and say, ‘mate I want to sing at three o’clock this afternoon’, and he’d say, ‘well I’ve got a whole list of things you can sing on so you let me know.’ We also didn’t record a song, finish it and move on; all ten songs were all being worked on at the same time. Dan Austin is a genius who can handle that scatty sort of approach—a lot of people would’ve been like, whoa what the fuck is going on with this record; none of the songs are finished. I found that working in England really helped, we’d go to the pub before dinner for a pint but other than that it wasn’t a big fucking social like it’s been when we recorded in L.A. before. All we wanted to do was be in the studio, we had a producer that wanted to stay up till three o’clock in the night sometimes recording.

With Predictable, I wrote that whole song lyrically in free flow. I didn’t write anything down; it was all done from the demo version. We revisited it a few times during the warm up sessions and then we said let’s run it, you can’t do that when you’re worried that people in your studio and your producer are thinking there’s only an hour and a half left on the clock. Dan was like, we’ll keep going until you guys say that you’re done, if you are in a vibe or a headspace then we’ll go until two in the morning because that’s what we need to do. That relaxed vibe was quite crucial to the record panning out the way that it did.

You’re currently celebrating the 10th anniversary of Take off Your Colours with a tour.  Your sound has obviously progressed since then; do you still stand by those old tracks?

As I said before every recording situation is a good and a bad process, it has to be in some capacity for it to be an opportunity to learn. Without Take off Your Colours, we wouldn’t have made Hold me Down, Sinners and it goes on from there. You can’t really know where it is you’re going if you don’t appreciate and understand where it is you’ve been. When we made Take off Your Colours, we were a load of sixteen-seventeen year olds. In the space of two weeks we literally tracked two songs a day, we just flied through it, and we didn’t change the guitar tone once across the whole record. It’s just a ‘what you see is what you get kind’ of record, there’s no fucking bells and whistles; it just sounds like some kids in a garage.

Ironically, ten years after we released our first record, we’re now releasing our sixth one, there’s just something poetic in that. Ten years later, not only are we still making records, but we’ve made our sixth and it’s in line with the band name and all that sort of roundabout full circle stuff. I think every artist wants to be appreciated or to have their most recent thing be the thing that everybody loves about them right? They want their older stuff to sort of float away and it all be about the new stuff, but the reality is you get into bands and you learn to love their records; they become part of your life. That’s kind of what’s happened with Take off Your Colours and You Me at Six. In particular in England, on that record we were doing stuff that British bands were not doing at the time, they weren’t getting to those heights. A lot of people just figured that we wouldn’t be around for very long, I don’t even think we thought we would be, but it’s really just set us up to be where we are.

VI is out today via Cooking Vinyl Australia.