Friends Of Ours: Elbow

It’s mid-afternoon on a mild February day in North London and Guy Garvey and Pete Turner are sat upstairs in a deserted pub. As the barmaid collects half-empty dinner plates from the tables downstairs, the two members of Elbow sit facing each other, relaxed and absorbingly lucid. They’re talking about bad luck. “Here’s something that we don’t tell everybody,” Garvey sniggers, before pausing for effect. “I’m gay.” Turner, who has been scratching the edge of the table with his finger, looks up and laughter erupts. When it finally dies down, Garvey, who for the record isn’t gay, returns to the topic. “Whenever anything’s gone wrong we’ve been playing Frisbee - which is absolutely the truth.”

It transpires that when Elbow suffered their first real significant dose of bad luck, losing their first record deal with Island in 1998 following the labels acquisition by the Universal Music Group, they were tossing a Frisbee, “all be it, with a paint lid”. Then, when bad luck came knocking again and they lost their last album due to a woeful marketing spend, they were in guitarist Mark Potter’s garden, you guessed it, playing with a Frisbee. It’s enough to make anyone think they’re cursed.

Recently, however, the luck’s been on Elbow’s side. Since the release of their third album, ‘Leaders Of The Free World’, in 2005, two members of the band, all now in their thirties, have become fathers again; Garvey has eased into the role of a part-time radio presenter and fallen in love again; and, following yet more label troubles, they’ve signed a more sustainable record deal with Polydor imprint Fiction. To top that off, their latest album, ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’, looks set to finally provide Elbow with the commercial success that the consistent critical acclaim has always advocated. Clearly then, now is not the time for someone to pull out a Frisbee.

“So all this great news was happening,” Garvey enthuses, picking up the tale on the day of their comeback show at Porchester Hall in London at the beginning of February, “and our violinist, Jyoti, had just come back from Barbados and she literally came from the airport and she had all her luggage with her and she opened the case and she had a fucking Frisbee with her. She went: ‘Here catch’ and we all went, ‘Put it away!’ and she really jumped, she was running away, she was like, ‘What?’ We were like: ‘It’s alright, just put it in the case.’ Everyone like properly fucking freaked out.”

In Garvey’s eyes, Elbow’s ability to overcome these setbacks, which would have caused 99.9% of every other band that ever attempted to carve a music career to give up, is down to a Cliff Richard spirit. “When rain falls on Wimbledon, act like a twat with a microphone and entertain for a bit,” he says, with a hint of sarcasm. It’s more than that, however. Although I’m only speaking to two members of Elbow in person, the other three - drummer Richard Jupp, Potter and his brother and keyboardist Craig, who are elsewhere in the capital - are included in every strand of the conversation, whether it’s about their role in the band or personal memories.

“The fact of the matter is that one of the reasons we’re together is that it would be fucking awful to see that ship sail off in the distance; nobody wants to be the one left behind because we’ve all put our entire adult lives into it, and quite a bit of our childhoods. So it’s like, in those terms, the music feels like that as well,” Garvey says. “Mark put it very succinctly in his way, he said, ‘you don’t need a record company to make records.’ We made music for ourselves and for our own pleasure for ten years before we went anywhere near a record label.”

Garvey’s Mancunian accent always warms an extra degree when he talks about Mark Potter. Initially when the pair met in art class in 1990 they “didn’t actually like each other”; Garvey’s hippy upbringing didn’t really suit Mark’s interest in rave. However, despite their differences, there was subconscious curiosity that led Mark to recruit Garvey to a band he had started with Turner and Jupp. Mark’s brother, Craig, the final piece of the puzzle, joined on the same day as Garvey because “their Dad said to Mark that he could only have the car to get the gear to the practise room if he let Craig join the band.”

It was in Garvey’s kitchen where he and Mark first began to write lyrics over a crafty cigarette. Then, only after they’d met the approval of Garvey’s Mum (“She’d sing along to whatever we’re doing and say ‘oh that’s great that lads, it’s lovely’.”), would they take them to the other three to “bandalise” them. Admittedly with hindsight, those songs weren’t very good. Today, for example, Garvey describes the produce of Soft – as they were known back then – as like Jamiroqui, only “worse”; while Turner is equally unforgiving, “It were utter shite,” he says, smiling. Yet, as much as they agree that their original output wasn’t groundbreaking, both can’t stress strongly enough how important those days were in constructing the Elbow that are now preparing to release their fourth album.

Recorded at their own studio in Manchester and produced entirely by Craig, ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’, plays like a soundtrack to lives of Garvey, Turner, Jupp and the Potts brothers. Although Garvey’s the lyricist, it’s their battles with love, loss and initial teenage desperation that we hear. The latter emotion crops up on, ‘Weather To Fly’, a mid-tempo song that sees a reflective Garvey repeatedly ask: “Are we having the time of our lives?” Although he’s cryptic enough to never provide an answer in words, the fact that the question is drowned out by a gloriously uplifting whirlwind of brass seems to suggest they are. Just like a novel, you won’t want to miss a chapter.

“That was very deliberate,” Garvey says. “For example, we finished track four and all said, ‘right where does track five go’ and that’s how we started writing you know.” Turner interjects: “You see, I’ve never actually thought about this really. I’ve never thought a collection of songs or a body of work, do you know what I mean. We never discuss it or anything, it’s just the way we do it.”

In one of its most musically dark moments, ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ even tackles the subject of sex versus Catholicism; a big problem for Garvey as a “hairy palmed teenager” - much to Turner’s surprise this afternoon. “It fucking was man,” Garvey insists. “You can imagine reaching for your fella and thinking he upstairs is watching.”

“Is that the deal with Catholicism then?” asks Turner, sounding genuinely interested. “Yeah, cause once you’re in, he’s (God) going, 'You shouldn’t be doing that,'” answers Garvey. “Really?” responds Turner, hypothetically, whilst reaching for his beer. “Jesus.” When he can stop laughing, he takes a sip.