I meet lead-singer Reid, guitarist Sam and drummer Tomer drinking beer on the saggy sofas of Manchester’s Night/Day Café’s dressing room, where tonight they’re playing one of the last shows of their headliner UK tour, having wrapped up Bristol and London gigs earlier this week.
After having to part with their old bass-player over the last month, they say that their performances feel different, yet in ways better than ever before. “I think we’re a lot more relaxed now,” says Reid, “We had a gig in London the other day and someone said “That was the best you’ve ever sounded”, and we feel like a different unit and a lot better.”
Sam describes a growth in audiences, and a warmer reception
compared to previous tours. “We’ve seen at this tour a slight lift; we’ve had
more people at our gigs. When you do sound check and it’s an empty room, it’s
like oh God, what’s going to happen. We’ve done enough empty rooms in our time.
It was a scramble to get everybody ready for this tour, but the music feels
brilliant, and so we are actually really grateful just to play, it’s all just
been a tremendous experience.”
They tell me how they met: an amalgamation of various London
bands. “Mine and Tomer’s band fell apart, so as we’d known Sam for years we
started to get everyone in a room with [bassist] Laurie as well, purely just to
have a laugh,” Reid explains, “and I think deep down we knew that it would
work.”
Sam interrupts, “Reid always had an idea that him and myself
would play together. I didn’t really realise that, I thought we’d just get
drunk together,” he jokes. “But when we got into rehearsals and messed around,
we quite quickly realised that we could all bring something to the table and
the music could be born. It was like a reinvention for all of us, coming together.”
Over the last few years, a lot of writing together, a lot of
intense touring, has led to an intensity comparable to an actual relationship.
The writing process for their first album, “The Mountain Moves”, has consisted
of a lot of fighting, and a lot of painful honestly.
“It’s like when you have a girlfriend and you have an
argument, and you have to take a few days to make it up to her,” Reid tells me.
“It’s like having four girlfriends.”
I ask about something I’m always intrigued with regarding
bands – as much as it’s a relationship, do they see their project as a business
too? And does this business have ethics?
Tomer says that this is something they consider more and
more now. “Sometimes you don’t really have a choice, you know, which is
unfortunate. I think you have to compromise in order to get anywhere in life in
general, but there are definitely things we wouldn’t do.”
“The argument sinks with doing adverts and stuff like that," says Sam, "That is quite a different landscape than it was when you dream of being in a
band. Five or ten years ago it wasn’t very cool to do an advert. But if you’re
on the inside and you look at how business works, there’s very limited options
to make money but also have that kind of exposure. A good example is The
Lumineers. Do the ad, take the money off the devil, and then all of a sudden
you’ll be playing two thousand capacity gigs around the world – you’ve got to
do what you can to get past a certain level. “
Tomer explains that an old band of his, in the States, went
through that same ethical dilemma. “Our singer wanted to turn down a chance to
be on an ad campaign for Coors Light,” he says. “They were going to put a free
download on a billion bottle caps. A billion.
And some of the bands that were involved were big bands, and they asked us to
be involved with it. He didn’t want to do it – he said, ethically speaking,
that he didn’t want to be involved with Coors because they had something to do
with the Nazis in World War Two. I think it depends on your personal ethics.”
I ask what these ethics are – to them, personally, and where
they would draw the line. “I wouldn’t want to endorse politicians,” says Tomer. “I
feel like it’s a bad place to get involved – I see when bands get upset when
politicians use their music in their campaign, Reagan did it in the 80s with
[Springsteen’s] “Born in the USA”. That song is actually a massive criticism of
power in the United States and politics. I know that Springsteen wasn’t very
happy about it.”
“We could re-write “Things Will Change”, and it could be “Things
Won’t Change,” says Sam.
They throw about names of musicians they think have
successfully walked the line between channelling a political message without it
becoming cheap – Woodie Guthrie, and the Beatles’ “Blackbird”. “It’s clearly a
civil rights song, but you can listen to it and it just sounds like a song
about a caged bird,” says Tomer. “Many great songs reflect on the troubles that
people come into in life, I think that’s the best way you can delve into
people. Music is about reflecting on life.”
And it always come back to heartbreak, Reid says, that is
the most powerful force behind their music, and, decidedly, the majority of pop
songs. “It’s really intense. You can’t lie about it. When you feel it, the
world just disappears around you. It can hit you really hard. It’s the purest
emotion you can ever feel.”
“All of us combined have lost so much in the last couple of
years,” adds Sam. “I think the band is a big part of the longevity. We’ve lost
girlfriends and family members and lots of things but we’re all still here,
looking at the same ugly people.”
The loss of Reid’s father played a large part in the
creation of “The Mountain Moves” – his ashes were actually used as an
instrument on one track. “I remember telling the producer and he was like, that’s
so fucking cool, good idea, he said to me, you’ve got to do that. We never
forgot it, we put it really high in the mix.”
You can check out more of Treetop Flyers here
Photos from Rachael Farrington.
