“No one needs a seventh album by any band but we wanted to make the seventh album people needed to hear,” says Simon Neil, who is taking a moment out from his intensive festival schedule to catch up talk to Clash. In many ways, the Biffy Clyro frontman, who’s been with this band since he was 15, has a point – it’s essential to avoid creative stagnation or people will switch off. So what have the singer, and his childhood friends (and bandmates) Ben Johnston and James Johnston done differently this time around?
“This is the start of a new trilogy,” he affirms. “The way we see our life as a band is the first three albums are a trilogy of aggressive prog, which we recorded with Chris Sheldon, and released on Beggars Banquet. Then the last three were a trilogy of cinematic rock records with Garth Richardson. This one feels like the start of our next trilogy, so we'll be working with Rich Costey on the next two records after this too.
Drummer Ben Johnston deciphers how this big name producer – he has Jane's Addiction, Muse, and Franz Ferdinand albums under his belt – has facilitated change in the band: “Rich is like a restless teenager in the studio. He's always looking to mess with the sound and mess with the equipment.”
“With Rich there are no rules. It didn't matter if all the lights were flashing red, he would just turn everything up to 11. It was more about how it made you feel, as opposed to technically how it sounds. Whereas Garth, as a classically trained producer, came up from the old school, learning with his father, and knew all the kind of 'proper' way of doing things.”
Simon Neil, who sounds almost exactly like his bandmate as they’ve grown up so closely together, emphasises how unorthodox things got: “We didn't want to take any of the easy choices on this album. We would put the drums through our guitar amplifiers, the bass through a synthesiser. If something was plugged straight into an amplifier then we made sure there was another 16 pedals going through it. On our single, ‘Friends and Enemies’, we’ve got three drum sets, three people playing drums, and two drum machines just to do one rhythm – so we've definitely adapted the way that we would play. And it’s Rich that’s helped us embrace this chaos.”
I ask if this ambitiousness and freedom to push the limits in the studio is something he thinks is specific to LA where they recorded. “I think it is,” he answers. “There is that grand, fulfill-your-dreams energy. That definitely helps because we do want to make something great, and we do want to compete against the best albums ever made. It's never been a reason for stepping away from the live band in a room sound but when you're recording in a room next door to a hip-hop guy who sounds incredible through the walls, or you’re hearing a country and western record that’s great, the picture is broader.”
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We do want to compete against the best albums ever made…
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The recording of the album has been what sounds like the most enterprising, adventurous, and revitalising sessions for a band on a 7th album. They sound like a band pushing themselves to upper limits of their ability, striving for greatness, and achieving it.
But how difficult was piecing together the songs to bring to the studio? “It’s the first time I've struggled,” the singer admits. “It was the first time I hadn't had tons of songs already written. I was considering where we are as a band, and how things have been going well, and that we will be playing to lots of people, and that's something that shouldn’t be in your mind when you're creating music. It really fucked with my confidence for a bit.”
Although he relays this story in a nonchalant manner, possibly due to his current high state of mind – this is a man on the verge of a second number one album and a second Reading and Leeds headline slot – we get the sense this loss of confidence wasn’t as casual as he makes out. We get the feeling we’d be meeting a very different Simon Neil a few months back. “At that time I stopped being good to be around. I identify myself as a songwriter so when I wasn't able to do that I felt like I lost who I was,” he remembers.
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I identify myself as a songwriter…
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But the frontman doesn’t come across as someone likely to remain beaten up for too long, and instead of dwelling, he headed to California with his wife to decompress. “When I went out there, I just wrote a bunch of songs without specifically Biffy in mind, and of course as soon as I did that, the album started to come together.” As he got his creative flow back, a reflection on his behaviour during his darkest days became central to part of the album. “Some of the songs represent not knowing, kind of apologising for my friends and loved ones for not being an easy person to live with”, he says. The tracks ‘Howl’, ‘People’, and ‘Medicine’ truly capture this melancholic, and anguished mood.
There’s a lot of anger expressed on the album, too. Opener ‘Wolves and Winter’ is an explosive stadium rock banger with the line: 'We have achieved so much more than you possibly thought we could'. “It’s pretty much just ‘fuck you’ – a lot of people didn’t think we’d get to our second record, let alone our seventh. Whilst ‘On a Bang’ proves Biffy haven’t softened with success and is particularly heavy, as he delivers the words, Trying to shake the truth out of someone who feeds you a line and really they mean something else,” with a fuming energy.
These lyrics stem from a deep rooted frustration with anyone interfering with their creative process as a band. “I went from vulnerable to arrogant, so the album goes right the way to when I was feeling most confident and people were trying to stick their nose into the band. And I was saying ‘fuck off out of our lives!’ It's probably the most aggressive I've been on songs in terms of being outwardly aggressive. I normally angle my aggression at myself, and for the first time I thought that because I had such a tough year getting myself to full fitness, that by the time I was going into make the record, I thought that no one knows this band better than the three of us. We've been friends from when we were seven years old, we started when we were 15 – everyone else can go fuck themselves!”
It’s this lifelong channelling of his most personal emotions into the music that make this band means so much to so many people. We tell him that we recognise that he’s a lot deeper and open with his feelings through his music tracks than a lot of peoples friends and family are with each other. “That’s definitely what music was to me. You feel like they're talking directly to you and if we can get anywhere close to that then it's a huge victory you know.”
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Words: Cai Trefor
Biffy Clyro's new album 'Ellipsis' is out now.
