Everything's Grand

Everything Everything can afford to celebrate.

With their long awaited second album not only attracting frenzied reviews but going straight into the charts at number five, a little rock & roll revelry might be expected from the Manchester four-piece.

So how did they decide to toast the occasion? Champagne and wild partying? Not quite.

“When we got the chart position I decided to de-flea the cat,” says the band’s eloquent bass player Jeremy Pritchard.

“It might seem a strange thing to do, but it needed doing.”

But then that’s just what we’d expect from this most cerebral of indie-rock bands. Indeed, the last thing one would expect of Jeremy, singer Jonathan Higgs, guitarist Alex Robertshaw and drummer Michael Spearman is some rash act of hedonism.

“We are quite boring,” jokes Jeremy – relishing the band’s reputation as technically-gifted yet self-effacing, creative souls.

Sounding out of breath at the start of our chat, he admits to suffering slightly from the night before. Celebrations at Arc’s chart success didn’t end with feline pest control it seems.

“We’ve got a day off, which is just as well, as last night we were drinking quite heavily. We do like a good drink and enjoy each other’s company,” he confesses. “But not blizzards of cocaine!”

He admits to being delighted – if modestly surprised – at the album’s success. “This is what we noticed when (single) Cough Cough came out,” he says.

“We have a lot more residual support than we realised; people were waiting for the record to come out with open arms, and you need that to get into the charts.”

His modesty is endearing, and I tell him so. This is a band which, after all, scored a Mercury nomination for its twitchy, art-pop debut album Man Alive.

“It’s really us being incredibly cynical and defeatist,” he demures. “Americans use the term ‘rock star’ for everything, but we are not rock stars. I don’t even understand what it means. That’s partly because we are British, but also because we are pretty normal.

“It’s not like the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s when people made lots of money by selling lots of records. We haven’t done either. And even if we had sold a shed load of records, we still wouldn’t have made a shed load of money!

“I’m pretty proud of the way we’ve handled ourselves, though. There has been the odd thing we shouldn’t have done or said, but on the whole we are control freaks and, as such, are pretty grounded.”

Modesty isn’t always a strength, however. Jeremy admits that perhaps they have been guilty of hiding their identity a little too much – something remedied by the sleeve for the new album, illustrated simply, Beatles-like, with pictures of each of the band.

“There’s a reason why there was a distorted animal image on the first album, and that’s because we didn’t have the balls to put ourselves on the front,” he says.

“We were able to put out a major label album and yet had no images of us anywhere on it. We didn’t think it was important and still don’t. We didn’t want to make ourselves famous. Yet in this age we have never been more image conscious, and the downside is that nobody knew what we looked like.

“All four of us grew up feeling frustrated by the fact a band can get on the front of the NME just because of what they look like. But style should always come second to the music.”

Which, he says, is why, when they chose an identity, they went for identical boiler suits.

“We are not a high street fashion band but we wanted to look like a band,” he says. “The boiler suits were utilitarian and anti-glamour. We didn’t want to carry on though, otherwise we would have just been the ‘gimmicky boiler suit band’!”

There is science behind the method. After all, Jeremy and Jonathan met while studying popular music at Salford University.

A knowledge of the inner workings of the industry did not save them from what Jeremy calls their “Spinal Tap moment”, however.

Casting around for ideas for a video for their song Schoolin’ they hit on what seemed a stroke of genius. “It had to be atmospheric and interesting, so we came up with the idea of creating a sand sculpture of a woolly mammoth on a beach in Dorset, which we would then blow up. We wanted languid shots followed by the striking image of it exploding, with sand falling around. It cost £10,000 but was really boring. It was so incredibly dull. Luckily an animator saved us by working through the night and putting together an alternative video – though he still had an exploding mammoth!”

So how have they changed since the surprise success of their, at times impenetrable, first album, with its contagiously live favourites MY KZ UR BF, and Photoshop Handsome.

“One word we keep coming back to is ‘confidence’,” says Jeremy. “Jonathan is the frontman and the lyrics are entirely his. But now he has the confidence to say what he thinks and not cloud it in metaphor.

“The underlying emotion was no more complicated than anything else – love, loss, life and death – but we didn’t have the confidence to talk about it openly, so it was shrouded in allegory.

“It was ‘100 years of teenage boys’. All that pent up expression came out garbled. As a statement of intent it was great, though. It turned heads and cleared the passages. Now our music is more engaging and reflective. It has the same playful skitterish thing going on but the songwriting is better, more direct and vivid.”

And, with Arc out, it’s time to start work on the next one. “We’d like to do something less histrionic,” Jeremy says. “We are increasingly enamoured by the classicism of David Bowie and Queen but also love the Beatles, and want to get better at honing that while retain-ing the things that set us apart in the first place – mixing up European electro and American math-rock with pop. And being iconoclastic.”

Everything Everything play the O2 Academy Oxford on Thursday, February 14, at 7pm. Tickets are £15.75 from ticketweb.co.uk