Hello You Divvies, We're Back! The Futureheads

Band make great first album. Band get complacent. Band release adventurous second album that sells terribly. Band get dropped. Band split up. It’s a well-worn path, but The Futureheads are refusing to be the next band to walk along it. Having been dropped, they’ve since regrouped, wrote a new album and, apparently, “rediscovered their mojo.” When Gigwise finds an affable, casually dressed Barry Hyde in a London pub, he is brimming with a giddy excitement that has more to do with a reborn zest for life than the lunchtime pint he is sipping. The other band members are milling around, but we can see Hyde has things to get off his chest, and zone in on the chief songwriter. Read on to find out about that Austin Powers reference, how Radiohead are hypocrites and why the record industry is about to change forever.

Gigwise: Let’s start with the single ‘Beginning of the Twist. When did you write it?
Barry: It had been kicking around for a while. I generally write them by myself, in front of the telly, and take them to the band when I’m confident. I’m so neurotic about it, I chew on them for months. ‘Beginning of the Twist’ is a song about self-doubt and mental illness, but also it’s a slightly menacing song of hope. It’s about change. Things are dark but I can feel the sunshine is starting to appear.

Gigwise: Talking of change, do you feel this is a whole new period for the band, a departure?
Barry: “Departure? I don’t really know what that means. A radical departure sounds like something’s gone really bad. We worked with a producer called Youth, and he identified the key elements of what we do, and cut out all the other things. He put the magnifying glass on every song. It’s a good song for us to release first because we’re kind of breaking the door down with it, like: ‘Hello, you divvies, we’re back.’”

Gigwise: What have you been listening to to inspire the upcoming album?
Barry: “I don’t know if listening to music influences us anymore. I think we’ve already listened to all of the music that’s gonna influence us, now we just influence ourselves. Though I have been listening to lots of Bollywood funk and African funk. I think the most influential factor into this album is the business side of it - getting dropped.”

Gigwise: What’s happened, then?
Barry: “If anything’s gonna pull a band together or make them split up, it’s that. Like, ‘Right, that’s it. I don’t like you anymore, (pointing animatedly) I don’t like you anymore.’ Or it will be like, ‘Right, we need to pull together.’ Getting dropped made us a lot stronger, and actually reformed us as a band. We’d became disillusioned being on a major label. We lost our creative drive; we lost our mojo. The day that we got dropped was the beginning of the new era.”

Gigwise: Did you see getting dropped as a positive straight away?
Barry: “I was like, ‘Please, drop us, I don’t want to be involved with this anymore. I don’t want to be tied to the mast of a sinking ship. I want out. Go it alone, at least we stand a chance.’ If we’d have stayed on Warners we’d have split up. It was a very dark period, but that was when we were signed to them, not after.”

Gigwise: Why were you so glad to get dropped?
Barry: “We owed them £1 million. We owed them. They spent it, we didn’t. They spent it on adverts and various things, paying people, bribing people probably. We had to pay that money back, until they dropped us. Imagine your in a million pounds worth of debt on Saturday night, on Sunday morning you’re not. All you’ve done is go to sleep and someone else has made the decision to let you off. Who would be angry with that? I thoroughly recommend getting dropped, unless you split up in which case it’s terrible. It’s made us a better band, 100%.

Gigwise: A lot of anger must have come out of it all - will that be apparent in the album?
Barry: “Definitely, but it’s not a spiteful record. I think it gave us the optimism and the bravado that every band needs. It’s an audacious thing to stand onstage and say ‘Hey, you bunch of people, we’re gonna play for you now and you’re gonna listen to us, ‘coz we’re quite good at this.’ That’s audacious, and that’s essentially what every band feels.”

Gigwise: Tell us about recording the album.
Barry: “We did it in Andalusia, South of Spain. We recorded it on top of a mountain, in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. It was tropical, fantastic madness. We recorded 20 songs, and wrote nine of them while we were there. We got it all wrapped up in 16 days, which is very good going.”

Gigwise: How did it contrast to your previous efforts?
Barry: “The second album took thirty days, so we cut it in half nearly, but did twice as many songs. That was all down to Youth producing. He doesn’t fiddle about with your music, he wasn’t fannying around. He’d play with your mind a lot more than he’d play with your songs. He really cracked the whip, it was like being in a trance a lot of the time, very intense. He works with Paul
McCartney a lot, who told him The Beatles recorded their early albums in three hours! That was the era of the hard-working musician. But pressure will always sort the weak from the chaff.”