Chapel Club: In It For The Long Term

Chapel Club may have been around the music scene for the last year or so, popping up with impressive spots at Glastonbury and various tours but now the London band are not afraid to admit that there will be no stopping them this year.

Before they release their debut ablum 'Palace' at the end of this month Gigwise caught up with frontman Lewis Bowman on what makes Chapel Club stand out from the crowd...

How do you feel you’ve changed as a band? How has the last couple of years been?

“It’s been amazing.  It’s been kind of a strange year, as it wasn’t the case we weren’t fully formed at the start of it but there was all this kind of hype after the first few gigs.  We were like this is mental and totally unexpected, so this last year is like a warm up.  Like playing Glastonbury in your first year as a band is a pretty mental way of learning the ropes but I think we’ve come through it and I definitely think we’re developing as a band.  In terms of the song writing and the general approach we are much more focused on what we are and what we want to be.”

As a new band still trying to make a name for yourselves, what do you make of music polls like the BBC’s Sound Of 2011?

“I kind of sound a bit bitter because we weren’t in the BBC polls but it’s not something I think about.  They're decided by what people call ‘industry bodies’ and the moment somebody mentions ‘industry insiders’ then that’s the time to kind of go and get a bottle of gin and go to your bedroom.  Anything decided by industry insiders is probably something going the wrong way.  It’s nice to know that people like you but I can’t help but smell the bulls*it that’s around it all.  Look at the people who have won the BBC poll before, they’ve failed to impress creatively in the years to come.”

Your debut is released at the end of January. Why did you choose to postpone it till now?

“Well we didn’t have to record it when we recorded it back last Spring/Summer kind of time but we wanted to record the songs we had written before we were signed.  We wanted the first album to be an honest reflection of the bunch of songs we got together and thought were okay and work on them. We decided to record the album fairly quickly and then afterwards we hadn’t played any gigs so we wanted to do all the festivals and get out on the road and actually build up a bit of experience.  Doing things the old fashioned way I suppose and that meant that the album got pushed back a bit.  There were some of us that wanted it out sooner than others but I’m quite glad now that it’s released at the start of the new year.”

What’s the inspiration behind the album? Have you taken your own love of poetry and literature and moulded it into the album?  

“I like language and I’m basically really critical in anything I like, be it film, literature or music.  I’m not critical in the sense that I’m negative just that I only read stuff or watch stuff that I think has the potential to in some way add to my life. So I approach lyrics in the same way that I approach music or anything else.  I make an effort to have the words to not be too cliché or too simple or not be too obvious because a lot of band’s lyrics are nonsense. They call it a stream of consciousness but it’s just pure nonsense.  In terms of the album, the songs were written in quite a long period before we were signed there’s not one theme that runs all the way through.  But there linked by certain things like a feeling of nostalgic because that’s the way I am.  There’s a lot based on love and loss as those were the main experiences of my teens and early 20s.  It was more to do with matching the music, the guys would write songs and write the music, and I’d be like what does this evoke in me.”

Chapel Club - 'All The Eastern Girls'

How does the band’s writing and recording process work?

“We pretty much all pitch in together. I don’t play an instrument so sometimes the guys will record stuff and send it to me and I’ll write the lyrics to it and come back to them or we will work on it together.  Most of the time recently we have just all got together and rehearsed and someone starts playing and everyone just piles in one at a time, either a song comes out of it or nothing at all. It’s all quite democratic.”

You worked with producer Paul Epworth on the album, how was that?

“We kind of said that if we ever got signed and made an album that we wanted a producer to be like a sixth member of the band.  Get someone who could bring something to the project and Paul was amazing.  We picked out a few people but we all thought he was the right guy.  He’s very very gifted and very clever; he’ll listen to your song and kind of tell you just what he thinks of it and what kind of vibe it has for him.  He’s very visual, he’ll give you some really crazy images and they always seemed to make sense.”

Are you quite a self critical band, of your own work?

“Oh yeah god, we’re so self critical.  Sometimes I worry that we might not make it.  We’re very happy, cheerful band because we all get along so well but our sense of humour seems to be entirely based around taking the piss out of ourselves.  Taking the piss out of everything we’ve done, there’s not a single lyric on our first album that hasn’t been totally twisted into something vulgar or something horrific.  That’s what we do to ourselves, we kind of destroy everything we do.  But I think that’s good because then you’re constantly writing more songs and trying to improve everything.  We know that we mean something to quite a lot of people and we hope we’re going to mean something to a lot more.  I meet a lot of band who are very self important and they talk like city bankers, talking down to people all the time and I’d much rather be like us.”

The song ‘Surfacing’ is based on the Mamma And Papa’s ‘Dream A Little Dream’. What was the choice for that particular song?

“It wasn’t so much a choice.  They were playing this song and I thought what can I sing or what kind of melody can I come up with.  I was singing gibberish like I normally do and I thought I’ll get the melody down and then come back and write the lyrics later.  It just so happened that that song was in my head, I song those words over the chorus part.  I changed one line to make it a little darker and f*ck around with it a bit.  I was going to remove it, then the band said they liked it.  It was kind of bittersweet, having these beautiful lyrics done in a kind of dark and aggressive way.”

What are your aims for the year ahead?

“I think we’re all just looking forward to getting back on the road and were going over to the US, which is really exciting.  It will be a year of constant travelling and seeing the world I think.  This is going to be even more busier than last year and that was pretty hectic.  We’re very lucky, I just hope we can get in enough time for writing and recording in between all these things.”