Celebrating the release of the fantastic new album Five and planning a 10th birthday party for their debut To Lose My Life, White Lies have rarely been on such solid footing.
Having spent the start of the year criss-crossing the European continent treating their fans to Five (along with the best of four, three, two and one), drummer Jack Lawrence-Brown got on the blower to Gigwise to discuss the trials and tribulations of touring, new music and the dangers of nostalgia as the band gear up for two massive To Lose My Life shows at O2 Academy Brixton.
Gigwise: You’ve just wrapped a massive European tour promoting the new album…
Jack Lawrence-Brown: It was great, pretty full on. We were out for the best part of two months, the UK then the continent. It’s always quite hard to gauge before you go out where people are going to be at with your new music, and the results were unbelievable for us. We did like 40 shows and sold out about 30 of them which is the best we’ve ever achieved. The reaction was amazing, and it sounds a bit mad ten years into a career, but it feels like we actually know what we’re doing now!
We’re going to America and Mexico then at the start of May. We want to try and take it everywhere. The big one for us that we still haven’t not managed to lock in yet is South America, where we have reason to believe we’ll do quite well there. We went down about eight years ago and we really need to try and make that our priority for what we do next. There’s so much love for British bands in South America and Brazil is one of the places where we do really well. It’s interesting… we do really badly in French-speaking countries for some reason but anywhere Spanish or Portuguese we always seem to do much better. Mexico for us is insane, we can go there and play shows as big as we can in London, which is mad considering we’ve only been there a few times.
GW: What was the best show on that European run, or one that surprised you?
JL-B: Some we know are going to be good before we even get there, like Copenhagen in Denmark we always do really, really well. That lived up to my expectations, but I was pleased to see places like Poland - we had a bit of a drop-off over the past five or six years slightly further into Eastern Europe. Which is a shame because we always used to do really well in Poland, the first album was really big there. On this tour we did shows in Poznan and Warsaw and they sold out really early and were really good fun, so I’m really pleased they’re getting back into what we do.
GW: Can it be frustrating having places you know you’ll do well on a tour, but the logistics of getting there prevent you from doing shows on every album?
JL-B: Yeah, it’s so out of our hands but it’s definitely a frustration. There’s never a shortage of offers for us to go and play in the States for example, but we go there on every campaign and invariably we lose loads of money doing it. And that’s super frustrating because you think if I’m going to lose money doing it, I’d rather lose money having a go at South America again or going out to Asia or something. It’s just a trickier thing to get to those places. Like the States is doable, you can get there, get the visas. It costs a lot but you can do it. There’s just a list of places that we’d still love to spend more time. And South America is on that list.
GW: What’s the reception been like for the new songs at your shows?
JL-B: It’s a proper mixed bag. Over the course of the tour we’ve played all nine songs off the new album, chopping and changing to see what worked. The reaction has been really good. It’s always a balance between us choosing the songs that we want to play and also picking ones which are potentially going to be singles. The reaction in general has been great. If I was to pick one song in particular that is already crossed over to the feeling we get when we start playing it is the same as when we play one of our older songs like ‘Farewell to the Fairground’ or something, that song is definitely ‘Tokyo’. That song is connecting with people around Europe in a way that we were not expecting, because we wrote it as a pop song. It’s unashamedly an 80s pop song, and we love that about it, we wondered if anyone else would. It’s great to know you’ve got a song from a new record that you can immediately stick at the back end of your set, and we don’t have to clog up the last thirty minutes of our set with only old songs, because those are the ones people will go crazy to. We can put ‘Tokyo’ there and the reaction it’ll get is one of the biggest singalongs we’ve ever done. So that’s a track that’s really opening doors for us and finding some people who’ve not heard White Lies before.
GW: On the new album you’ve got pop songs like ‘Tokyo’ next to prog rock like ‘Time to Give’, were you really trying to push the sound of what White Lies can be?
JL-B: I don’t want to over-intellectualise it too much, but I think we were aware that we can make an album of songs that sound like completely different things. This is interesting as well because I think the first album is maybe our most loved record and we were so conscious of making it sound and feel like one coherent body of work. All the songs had to feel linked, sonically or lyrically, and that is an achievement that we managed to do that. But on the new record…People just don’t listen to music in that way anymore, in such an extreme way, sit down for 45 minutes from start to finish. Obviously we hope that they would do that with our new records. But we’re also aware that if we’re writing a song and it sounds like a massive pop song, but nothing like the first track ‘Time to Give’, it doesn’t really matter. If we want to push the tracks in various fairly extreme directions across the course of a records, I don’t think it’s a problem these days. We still recorded them at the same time, they sound like White Lies songs but they don’t need to all be in one particular mode or style any more.
And Charles and Harry love prog. They love prog. I can take a bit of prog, but I’m not going to listen to Rush. Charles genuinely loves Rush and I think Rush are one of the worst bands of all time. So if it so happens that they write a song with more prog elements, why not? These are things we’re influenced by, we can express them a bit more directly. We had no record label telling us what to do so we just did what we wanted with each track.
GW: The recordings feel very close, compared with the more expansive sound on previous albums…
JL-B: We tend to set up two kits for different drum sounds, so for songs like ‘Tokyo’ where you want it in your face. Then we’ve got some really fast songs, ‘Jo?’ is the fastest song we’ve written. So when there’s that much going on you don’t need as huge a drum sound.
GW: You’ve got some anniversary shows for To Lose My Life on the horizon, was there any trepidation announcing that so soon after a successful album launch?
JL-B: Yeah, so much. For many reasons, it’s gone really well, I’ll say that. It was a discussion we’d been having since last year that it’d be really nice for us to do that album again. Because in a way we get a bit of shit from our fans, in the nicest way, because everyone’s got a favourite song, and for a lot of people that song’s on To Lose My Life. And when you’re touring a new record, you want to play seven or eight new songs, you don’t really want to be playing album tracks from the first album. As much as we love those songs, which we do, we were at a point where we couldn’t keep playing them all. So we had an inkling that there would be enough interest from enough people for it not to be complete career suicide to put on a big old show. At the same time, we’re touring an album that we feel matches it in terms of quality and we don’t want to take away from that too much. But it’s been amazing to see, the first show at Brixton sell out in four hours, the second one’s on sale. So it won’t take too much energy from what we’re doing now, playing Five shows, because there’s more to come from this album as well. Including potentially some bonus tracks that we’re thinking of recording in the next few months, so Five is very much an ongoing project. It’s a bit weird announcing the anniversary shows so early but we thought let’s just get it out there, find out if anyone cares and then either continue to worry about it for the next eight months or just crack on with Five.
GW: Are those bonus tracks from the Five sessions or brand new?
JL-B: They’ve never been fully recorded, only as demos, so they need to be done fresh so that’s quite exciting. We’ll go back into the studio I hope in a couple of months. Our label were really keen to talk to us about it, they were pleased with how ‘Tokyo’ has gone over in Europe, it’s had a kind of crossover moment on the radio there, and thinking about what we can do to keep the Five campaign going for more than the two or three months you get these days. You get two or three months with a new album and if anyone’s still talking about it it’s a miracle.
Obviously festival season starts earlier than ever these days and we’ll be doing festivals all over Europe for ages and we have got plans early September for more Five shows, we’ve got some in Ukraine booked already.
GW: What songs are you most looking forward to revisiting at the To Lose My Life shows?
JL-B: Basically anything that’s not the singles because we still play all of those, they still in our set all the time. Really keen to play ‘E.S.T’ again, which was always a fan favourite and felt like it should have been a single but never made it. Aside from the album start to finish, we’ll do a second half of the show which is ‘best of the rest’, but will also be looking at B-sides and rarities that we’ve never played live. I think that’s important, in doing these nostalgic shows. And they are nostalgic, there’s no getting away from the fact that when you do an album from start to finish it’s an act of nostalgia for a lot of people. It’s important for us to find a way of making it a fresh and exciting experience for them and us as well. So we’re going to look at some of the covers we were doing at the time. The mad thing about Brixton is it’ll be almost ten years to the day that we first played Brixton on that tour. I look at the setlist we played that night, it’s like twelve songs! I don’t know how we got away with it, we didn’t have enough material. So we were always working on covers on that tour. Because we would have the ten songs from the album, two B-sides and a cover and that’s all we could play. The other plan is to mix the second half of the show up, I know a lot of people will buy tickets for both nights, so that’ll mean hopefully if you come to the first night, when you come for the second you’ll see a whole bunch of different songs.
GW: Are you planning to extend that run of shows, or is it important to keep a handle on the level of nostalgia?
JL-B: Yeah that’s exactly it. We have already announced two Copenhagen shows, at the end of November. The first one is at a classical music concert hall, and a second at a more rock venue. There’s nothing announced, yet, between those Copenhagen shows and those Brixton shows. But I will say there’s two weeks between those shows. So there’s plans in place should we feel like we want to extend it. But you’re bang on about not dragging it out and becoming an absolute nostalgia fest which would really become tedious about us. We’ll do select shows. If the venues are right, special venues in special cities that mean a lot to us. But it has to feel like a special opportunity, or a unique moment that perhaps you won’t get to see again otherwise there’s no point doing it.
GW: When you think back to the release of that album, what are some of the clearest memories you have?
JL-B: Only on this new album did we really go on stage and feel like we know what we’re doing. My overwhelming sensation when I think about that first album is ‘what the fuck are we doing and how do we do it?’. We were young, pretty much terrified to the point where Harry couldn’t even say a word onstage between songs. We were like ‘how do we get through the next forty minutes’ without absolutely ruining everything? The overriding memory of those Brixton shows for me was sheer terror, at almost all points. And we got through it, we obviously didn’t fuck it up! That’s the major feeling of a lot of what we did early doors, you don’t get training on how to be a good band, you have to just go and work it out. And you can take a long time to work that all out. Even though we were having the time of our lives, selling mad amounts of tickets and huge amounts of records on that first album, we were properly naive to a lot of it. We watched that tour back the other week, and we just play the songs so fast and that’s 100% adrenaline. The energy is amazing, but also we’re playing the songs so fast they’re thirty seconds shorter than they should be. So people coming to these shows, I genuinely think they’re going to see us playing these songs the best they’ve ever been played. They’ll get a really good airing, sounding how we wanted them to on the record.
GW: You played on the NME tour with that first record. Florence + the Machine opened for you!
JL-B: That’s a tour I remember vividly, it was just very fun. We’d done 40 shows as White Lies at that point, but we were playing in venues that didn’t have more than two or three dressing rooms so all the time we were sharing with Florence and her lot. We had a really good bond with those guys, had a lot of fun. And we did some duets with Florence, she came out for ‘Unfinished Business’. It was really cool, the sort of stuff that would be amazing to do again, but I highly doubt we’ll be able to convince her to do it!
White Lies play To Lose My Life in full at O2 Academy Brixton on 6 December and 7 December 2019. Click the dates to grab your tickets on DICE.
