With The Enemy’s second album ‘Music For The People’ currently riding high in the charts, only missing out on number one to a certain Bob Dylan, the time’s never been better to feature the Coventry trio on the cover of Clash.
What’s that? Next issue? Ah, splendid.
Clash editor Simon Harper travelled to meet the band – Tom Clarke, Andy Hopkins and Liam Watts – in Birmingham last month for Clash’s next cover feature, and below we’ve a wee taste of the conversation that was. The full feature runs in issue 38 of the magazine, with an uncut transcript on these here pages in the near future.
Over to the group’s mighty mouthpiece Tom for the following answers…
Is the title of the album an assumption that people are expected to like the music within?
No. It’s not a pretentious ‘Music For The People’. It’s not: “This is music for the people, and here we are on a pedestal”. It’s not that at all. It’s quite a humble notion; we realised when we released the last record (‘We’ll Live And Die In These Towns’), all these songs that we’d written were really quite personal for us. When you release an album, it’s the handing over of songs, because they’re no longer yours. When you release that, you see people then singing them in the crowd and they’re singing them for their own reasons, and it means something totally different to them.
I went to a Verve gig recently in Manchester. I realised I was stood there singing ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ for my own reasons, and the person next to me was singing it for some completely different reasons. It’s about that, really – it’s about how to people who buy the album, it becomes their music. Ultimately, every band is a band of the people, because you make music for people – apart from real introspective jazz stuff where they just make it for the sake of making it, for them and their own enjoyment. That’s cool, but all albums, that is what an album is. Every album, regardless of its title, is music for people that like music.
Taken literally, it sounds more positive than your debut’s title. Are you trying to remain optimistic in bleak times?
For a start, there are two points there. The first is that ‘We’ll Live And Die In These Towns’ depends on how you interpret that as well, because for us, we view that as a really proud statement. We might go off and travel the world, but we’ll come back to Coventry and we’ll probably die in Coventry. That’s how we viewed that. But I think that a lot of people misconstrued the first album, and I think that, yeah, it is important to tell people that we haven’t just got this pessimistic view of the UK. I think it’s something that I’ve tried to touch on recently.
We talk a lot about industry collapsing, and the reason for that is quite simply that we come from a town that has relied on industry for decades and decades. The fact that the industries are going is quite sad, because you see a lot of people out of jobs at the moment and you see a lot of skilled workers not being able to put those skills to use, but the reality of that is that they will learn new skills and that it’s just the changing face of the UK. We used to be an industrial nation; we were at the heart of the industrial revolution, and I’ll always have a certain sympathy and a certain romance for that, because I just love anything slightly industrial. I love the way that bridges are made. I love cars – I absolutely love anything with an engine. So, personally, I can always relate to that, and I can see the sadness that the car workers in Coventry and all across the UK must feel when you stop being able to make these amazing things – you know, the massive ships in Scotland.
But I think that whilst I’ve got that romantic notion, I’m well aware that it’s just the changing face of the UK and that, actually, already one third of those jobs have been replaced with jobs within the service industry, and that in years to come will provide a better quality of life for people – they won’t be working in factories, but will hopefully be in more comfortable service jobs. We’re just a changing nation, and people are afraid of change and they cling on to romantic notions, but you just have to go: “Yeah, you can feel romantic about it; you can feel passionate about industry and about what made Britain great throughout the Victorian era, but you’ve got to be just as willing to let Britain be great for other reasons and let it change and embrace the change.”
Do you think that the bigger you get, the more elevated your status, that you’ll lose that grass-roots reality and your viewpoints will change?
I don’t think so. That’s something that I’m not concerned about now, but I was concerned about it at the start of all this. We’re gonna go out on tour, you see how it changes bands. People get a bit of money and they go on tour and they have people surrounding them, telling them they’re great – it’s easy for lads to get egos and start disappearing up their own arses and believing their own hype. I said at the end of last year that the biggest achievement of The Enemy – fuck all the awards, it’s none of that, and it’s not one album or a platinum disc on the wall – it’s that, at the end of the day, when you come off tour and you go home for Christmas, you can sit down and you’ve still got your two best mates. We haven’t changed a bit. The first year of going out on tour is probably quite a traumatic time for most bands. If you can get through that – if you can get through that massive change of going from transit vans to tour buses to nice hotels – and not become an arsehole, then I think you’re alright.
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Read the full, exclusive interview in the new issue of Clash magazine, out May 7. ‘Music For The People’ is out now.
