Interview with Blood Red Shoes; Album Out Now

I did this interview for a magazine and they didn't have room for it, so here it is. I almost forgot that Blood Red Shoes' debut album, Box of Secrets, came out last Tuesday. It's a great album that should be getting a lot more good press. We'll see if anything picks up when they finally make it over to the States for some touring.

What do Nirvana, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Babes in Toyland and Blonde Redhead have in common? Apparently a lot more than you think. Blood Red Shoes, a two-piece band based out of Brighton, England, have been tossed around with those names before and with the release if their debut album, Box of Secrets, expect to hear even more of them. Drummer and vocalist Steven Ansell was able to answer a few questions for me as he and guitarist/vocalist Laura-Mary Carter were touring Europe and Japan. They look young and cute in photo shoots, but don’t let them fool you. Ansell explained the band’s live shows where they occasionally play too fast and smash things up. Look for them, as well as their new record, coming your way soon.


Mark Rowan: You guys have been a band for around three years now, but just put out your debut album on April 14. You’ve released a ton of singles, but why the delay on the full-length?

Steve Ansell: Well basically we didn’t feel ready to make an album until recently. We did lots of singles deals with lots of labels, and in that time we were growing as a band, and getting better at writing, and playing live, and just better friends. So once we felt like we were ready to think about an album, we did an album deal with a label (V2 in Europe/Japan) and went in and recorded it. It was finished in September 2007 but then because of some label buyout stuff that went down, we weren’t sure what our future was and it stalled the release a bit, which meant the album went back by a few more months. But ultimately it took a while because we didn’t want to rush into making an album, and we’re really glad we did it that way. Some bands get signed really fast and haven’t developed as a band, they don’t know what they can do yet, and they make a first album then “develop” on the second album but everyone loves ‘em for the first one and hates the second one—stuff like that. Hopefully we’ve avoided it. I think our album sounds more like who we really are than if we’d made one in the first year of being together.

MR: Tell us a little about the album—what to expect from it and what went into putting it together.

SA: Well the songs are taken from over the first three years of our existence. “ADHD” is on there and that song was one of the first 10 songs we ever wrote. But then we have some stuff that we’d never played live on there, written just before we went into the studio. So I think it really represents us and what we’ve been doing and what our sound has developed into. Recording-wise, we just went into a studio and hammered it out. We wanted the music to sound rough and ready, kind of mean and heavy and live sounding. Then we wanted to bring out the vocals a bit with that too, because we write pop hooks a lot—well sort of weird pop hooks—and we wanted to add some emphasis to that. Often live it’s the vocal stuff that gets buried in the noise, and we wanted to get the Pixies-style balance dead on, with the aggression of the music but also the melody of the voices.
MR: The word grunge gets thrown around a lot when people discuss your band, but that honestly didn’t cross my mind until I read it. What is it about Blood Red Shoes where people can say, “Oh this is grunge” while others might focus more on the harmonies and call it indie rock/garage/etc?

SA: Well I think our sound owes a lot to grunge—Laura-Mary’s guitar style and sound is heavily indebted to grunge and other American underground rock stuff. The notes and chords she uses and the shifts are quite grungy. They’re not based on straightforward major/minor scales like a lot of British bands seem to. I also think that our music has a nagging sort of dark feel to it, that I hear in Nirvana, Babes in Toyland, etc. I think garage music is much more based in a bluesy feel, and although I think we have similarities to the energy of garage, I don’t think melodically it’s very similar and to be honest, I think indie rock is such a broad term I have no idea how much resemblance we bear to it. In England that means bands that sound like The Libertines and that sure as hell has no relevance to us! And in the States, I think there are bands that get called indie rock that we take inf luence from, definitely—stuff like Sonic Youth, Hot Snakes, Blonde Redhead.

MR: How sick are you hearing the band compared to other duos simply because you’re also a duo?

SA: Very sick.

MR: Who do you think would be more fitting?

SA: Well some people compare us to Yeah Yeah Yeahs, another bass-less band who we’re much more similar to. Or my personal favor- ite is when someone said, “it’s like Blur crossed with Sonic Youth.”

MR: You were both in bands previously-full bands, I believe—what does being a duo allow for that being in a full band would not? Is the music-making process easier? Allow for more creativity?

SA: Well it leaves you with way more space to try out different things with your instrument. It opens up possibilities and I think it allows us to use our instruments less conventionally. We’ve found it makes us use our voices a lot more, too—one thing that I think it’s quite distinctive about our band, that not many people seem to mention, is that we both sing, and sing a lot. We use intertwining vocal lines and alternating parts, which is a lot harder in a four or five-piece band.

MR: I read somewhere that Box of Secrets has been leaked since November. Does that bother you at all or is it just inevitable?

SA: Yeah, it is inevitable. I mean that was quite far in advance, but that’s only because the release date went back. In one sense it’s good. It actually means that more people have been coming to our shows and the audience often know more of the songs, but on the other hand we do know people have low-quality versions, versions in the wrong order, versions with extra or wrong songs on it (taken from b-sides or EPs) so it’s kind of a bastardized form of the record. And the biggest issue we had is that people have got it without the artwork. Laura-Mary personally does all of the art, and that’s part of our package and who we are, so when you get the record without that, you are missing part of who we are—not to mention all the lyrics written out.
MR: Going along with that, it seems albums are leaking earlier and earlier every year and then you now have a handful of artists trying to follow in the footsteps of Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want release. How is the Internet affecting how you make and release music?

SA: So far it’s not changed how we release things, but it is affecting everything else. We use the Internet a lot; putting up videos, blogs, bulletins and competitions. We’ve found that a lot of our audience have found us through word of mouth and checking us out on the Internet, and then come to see us live. So we use it a lot, but so far our release schedule has been very conventional—though we are already talking about the possibility of releasing an EP in between this and our second album, which is download only and maybe also availably physically at gigs. I like the directness of the Internet—it takes out a lot of stage of mediation between the band and its audience.

MR: You finished up a big tour in the UK right after the release of the record, what are your plans for touring then? Will we see you in the United States?

SA: Yes! We’re not sure when though. We’re talking to a bunch of labels about a U.S. release and for us it’s a really big thing because most of our favorite artists are North American. So we have this idea that U.S. audiences will (hopefully) really dig it, but we want to get over with a record and tour properly, and our plan is to break the back of Europe and Japan, where things are already kicking off and get that nailed before we head to the United States. Ideally it’ll be late this year and we can get some proper touring in.

MR: Speaking of your live shows…they've been known to be just great performances and even destructive at times, tell us a bit about your live shows and how the record will translate live.

SA: [Laughs] Well, yeah that's true. We've always said that energy is more important than ability. I think the point of playing live is to really convey the band with intensity, so we put as much into it as we can, mentally and physically. We’ve got a lot tighter these days from all the touring so I think we're on good form. You can really rock out hard once you know a song well, because you're not concentrating on playing the right part, that comes automatically, you can just feel the music and give it some fucking heart and soul. I mean, about 75 percent of the songs on the record we played live before recording, so it was more like, how do they translate onto the record than vice-versa. Mostly I think it's just a slightly different vibe than recorded - more instrument-heavy and more trashy in-your-face sort of thing. We usually play too fast, and get a load of people on stage or smash shit up. I think live it’s about chaos and celebration and getting into some group mindset and just letting loose. Whilst we wanted to get some of that onto record, you simply can’t record all that atmosphere. Live and recorded music are two quite different art forms so we try to use both of them to their strengths.

PS: This first printed in The Recorder on Wednesday (sans the last question).