The Scotsman
23 May 2009
A few bright sparks
There is a spring heatwave in New York. Flip flops are sticking on melted tarmac and strange smells come wafting out of warm Chinatown bins.
Over in Brooklyn’s hipster neighbourhood of Williamsburg, among the vintage record shops and tiny art galleries, James Graham and his bandmate Andy MacFarlane ignore the suntrap tables outside the bar where we meet, and find a cool, shaded couch in the corner instead. Graham has been hiding in his hotel room for most of the afternoon, he tells me, with the air conditioning cranked up.
“I’d just rather stay inside and watch bad telly and American adverts,” he shrugs, dragging a straw through the ice in his margarita.
“Sunny” is not a word you would ever use to describe Graham, The Twilight Sad’s singer and lyricist. Morose, dark, mysterious maybe, but not sunny.
Listening to his lyrics, which hint at child abuse, family strife and violence, there is a seriousness and intensity about him that seems premature for his 24 years. In Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters, the first album the band put out two years ago, there was a chilling edge to lines about invisible boys, dead rabbits, ghosts and “kids on fire in the bedroom”.
“I just think dark lyrics are more interesting,” Graham explains, in his broad Lanarkshire accent.
Like the other three band members, who are from Kilsyth and Cumbernauld, Graham grew up on the outskirts of Glasgow in the village of Banton.
“I’ve always preferred dark lyrics in other people’s music,” he says, patting a dog that has wandered across the bar to his feet. “You don’t want to hear somebody barking on about how great their day is, do you? It’s boring. How happy they are, how great their girlfriend is, and f***ing everything’s perfect, when basically it’s not. You want to hear stories about how things are f***ed up.”
One of Graham’s biggest influences growing up was The Smiths.
“I know everyone who writes songs says that, but it’s hard not to be influenced by Morrissey’s lyrics. He’s miserable, but he’s witty as well.”
He also name-checks fellow Scots miserablists Arab Strap several times, whose desert-dry humour is well known in Scotland, and beyond.
“Just because we write dark stuff doesn’t mean we sit about the house all day going, ‘My life’s crap. How’s your life? Is yours crap tae?’ I’m a big fan of Disney films, actually,” he adds with a laugh, as if to prove that there is a bit of sunshine behind all those storm clouds after all.
Sung over the top of the dramatic indie rock that MacFarlane writes, Graham’s twisted, tender stories bring an eerie, emotional power to the band’s shoe-gazing style.
Full of epic soundscapes, droning reverb and big walls of cleansing, loud white noise, their music has drawn comparisons to My Bloody Valentine or Mogwai, who invited the band to support them during their current US tour.
“To be honest, I think that’s the biggest compliment a band’s ever given us,” says Graham.
“That a band like that listened to us, and liked us. We’ve always loved their stuff. And if you want an example of a band writing dark stuff, that still has a good sense of humour, you just have to look at Mogwai.”
The Glasgow post-rock gods have developed a bit of a habit for taking young Scottish bands under their wing and helping them deal with the early stages of their career - as well as the fame and media attention that comes with it.
Rock Action, the record label that Mogwai run, boasts Scottish talent such as the beautifully experimental electronic artist, Remember Remember and the math-rock electro of Errors, whose debut album was produced by Mogwai’s guitarist John Cummings.
“Mogwai have done everything to make the tour easier for us,” says Graham later that night, after coming off stage at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, where a good number of fans in the crowd sang back his lyrics to him, Scottish accent and all.
After taking a break to chat on Skype to his girlfriend in Glasgow, Graham joins the other band members for beers backstage. While Mogwai’s headline set swells and roars downstairs, the volume increasing with every track, furniture starts vibrating and beer bottles begin to wobble loudly on a table.
Everyone seems pleased with how the gig went, and they are starting to recognise members of the crowd who have come along to see them several times on their East Coast tour.
In the beginning, Twilight Sad’s fan base was larger in the States than the UK, after their debut EP was released there to coincide with a mammoth American tour. Now though, after their debut album was met with almost unanimously gushing praise from UK audiences and critics, Graham reckons the numbers have evened out.
“It was kinda good doing it that way,” says MacFarlane of their slightly back-to-front career start, where they were signed to Fat Cat records after their third-ever live gig at the 13th Note in Glasgow, and whisked off almost immediately to “crack” America. “It makes you try a bit harder.”
“Aye,” agrees Graham, adding a very west Scotland “de-fin-itely” to underline the point. “If we’d been sitting about in Glasgow, it wouldn’t have been the same. We’d have been playing gigs in front of our friends.”
Although the band reckons their songwriting and performing has improved dramatically since their first US visit, thanks in part to a heavy tour schedule, Graham isn’t sure the last two years have made him more confident as a frontman. “I think I was more confident back then, honestly.
“Now people know us, there’s a bit more pressure. Before there was no expectations. Now people want to come and see this band they really like, so you think, god, we’ve got to play really well tonight. Before it was like, f*** it, let’s go play. If they like it, they like it; if they don’t, they don’t.”
So have they arrived at the ‘difficult second album’ stage then, I ask? “Naw,” says Graham with a firm shake of the head. “It’s done.”
Both he and MacFarlane believe the second album, due out in September, contains their best material to date, describing it as more noisy, but also more melodic than their first LP.
“It’s still not breezy, bright, happy-go-lucky pop tunes. If anything it’s gone further in the opposite direction - it’s got even darker,” says Graham, who makes a point of never explaining what his lyrics are about. He won’t discuss them with his parents, let alone the press, and prefers the listener to interpret them in whatever way they see fit.
Like their previous releases, the new album will feature the superb artwork of ‘dlt’, the illustrator who has created creepy, 1940s style children’s storybook drawings for them. Although the schoolboys in tank tops and shorts seem sweet enough, on closer inspection, behind the Enid Blyton façade, the masked children are pouring cups of poison, smothering their mother while she sleeps, or being engulfed by flames.
“Our first demo was a bit cardboard with an inkprint of a young girl injecting herself. We stamped it on everything,” says MacFarlane, who drew a parody of Sonic Youth’s iconic Goo album cover for their recent live EP, Killed My Parents and Hit the Road.
In keeping with their distinctive “kids and danger” style, he swapped Raymond Pettibon’s drawing of a couple for the band’s trademark schoolchildren in masks, smoking cigarettes.
“We like the fact the drawings are quite shocking but quite innocent at the same time,” says Graham, who laughs as he points out that none of the band members was abused as a child, despite what some listeners might think.
“When I write, I use things that may seem dark to express a way of feeling about something. We all come from the best backgrounds you could ever wish for. You know, good families, good schools, been to uni. I guess we just wanted to try something new. If it comes across as shocking, who cares? We’re just quite happy doing it this way.”
Based on the growing attention from the blogosphere and music press, and the ever-increasing number of fans who turn up to see shows, and maybe steal a printed set-list or empty beer bottle off the stage as a souvenir, other people are very happy they are doing it that way too.
In fact, for a band responsible for creating some of the most moody, sinister new music in Scotland right now, their future seems positively bright. Sunny, even.
• The Twilight Sad play the ABC, Glasgow, tonight, as part of the Stag and Dagger festival (see below). Visit www.myspace.com/thetwilightsad for details of a free track from their new album.
Here’s the original article in The Scotsman.