Live4ever Interview: Everything Everything at South By Southwest 2016


Everything Everything, SXSW 2016 (Photo: Paul Bachmann for Live4ever Media)

Everything Everything, SXSW 2016 (Photo: Paul Bachmann for Live4ever Media)




“We sucked, and now we’re really good.” Can you get more arrogant than Everything Everything? “If we stopped tomorrow, the music would be remembered and be cited as an influence.” Really?

Here’s the problem with honesty: it makes the above extremely simple. Unethical, untrue, wholly misleading, yet simple and kind of fun. Because if they are willing to be honest then they deserve the courtesy of context. And when we spoke to them at the 2016 ei8htball sponsored SXSW Live4ever Media Lounge, Everything Everything were willing to be very honest indeed. No matter the subject.

It’s this simple: no matter what you think of Everything Everything’s challenging, dynamic, fascinating sound, you can’t deny its incise and powerfully reflective stance. And this is true of the band themselves. They were at SXSW to prove a point – but what was it?

They were here to meet the rest of America. SXSW was just the first step on their mission to spread the word about just how far Everything Everything have come over the last few years.

“We’ve always done okay in New York or L.A, we’ve done some decent size shows,” the band told us. “The coasts are okay for us, it’s the middle and other stuff that we’re about to do in a couple of weeks that’s completely unknown to us. And that’s very exciting. We just want to put on a show that shows how good we are now. Because the last time we were here, we were just little shits, you know? We sucked, and now we’re really good. And we want to put on a show that’s actually impressive.”

There’s that context we were talking about. But how can they think such a thing, considering the tracks they were touring back then, like ‘Kids In The Front Row’? What’s changed?

“We dismiss our younger selves very, very quickly. Everybody does. We were a good band then, but we’re a better band now. We’ve grown so much in that time and we can put on so much more of an impressive show now. A lot of people have never heard of us, and certainly never seen us play live. So, especially here (at SXSW), we feel like it’s a blank canvas really. What we’re doing in America is kind of indicative of everything we’re doing which is: if there’s an audience for the record that’s just come out, then we want to play for them.”

A grab for greater market share and recognition then, cracking America as it were. Everything Everything hitting the big time, dining out with U2 and Coldplay. Maybe not. “It’s really hard to make money in America and we’re not making any, we’re losing it,” they reveal. “But we want to play for people, and we want to build our audience. And we want people who might like us, even if they don’t know us yet, to just kind of switch on to us. But it’s not financially motivated, it’s more that we just want to travel and play to people who genuinely like the record.”

And there it is, the music. It’s easy to lose sight of it, amongst all the rest that comes with making it. Money, fans, seeing the world – all distract and sometimes become too much for less focused bands. But when you push them past the trivial day-to-day concerns, there’s really no question as to where this band’s heart lies. How though, after three albums, are they managing to stay true to their passion for music whilst still being original and not feeling the need to retread old ground?



“We kind of take it for granted. When people say, ‘how come the music is so diverse? What do you listen to to make it so quixotic?’, the answer to that is: what do you listen to to not do that? What the hell’s wrong with you! We don’t like seeing bands who are clearly derivative of that influence and that influence. Sometimes you can just go, ‘oh it’s just that, crossed with that, and a bit of that’, and it’s to easy to sum up. We try and be bit a bit slippery in that kind of way.”

“We’ve become more comfortable in staying in one place for 8 bars, that was a difficulty for us to begin with. We’re less uptight about the furious iconoclasm that our debut was characterised by. We still want to get our point across, and the melody across as well, while sort of trying to subvert it at the same time. So we have kind of balanced it, a bit, in the last 5 years.”

The dream was to be Radiohead. It was the moment the lights were switched on. But then the world changed. Technology came, and the album died. Or did it? “We were 15/16 when Radiohead released ‘Kid A‘, and that was like, ‘oh you can do that, you can be a guitar band and take a left turn and do whatever you want’.”

“People keep making albums, and people keep saying this is the end. Some people thought when they first became popular that that was a bad thing for pop music as well, because with singles there was a kind of honesty with the essence of the art form in a 45”, as it’s all about individual songs. We don’t know, if the album does continue to decline, if that’s necessarily a bad thing for music. We really like the format and will still, for the foreseeable future, continue to make music in that way.”

For Everything Everything, the ‘album’ isn’t about the record it produces, all shiny and new. It’s actually the process that goes into creating the thing as a whole. The length of that thing, or whether it’s even called an album, is actually beside the point. Really the only difference is how technology allows people to digest and make this music, not the music itself.

“The Internet is a technological development that’s affected everything. It’s levelled the playing field, which is a good thing, but also means that you have to try and be seen by more people because it’s cheaper to make records. Cheaper to market them on social media, which is free. We don’t make any money at all from sales. Not even in the UK where we sell pretty well. It just doesn’t happen to any artists anymore, they make money in other ways.”

“Taking a step back from our situation, it’s good for creativity because you have people who might not have much money, and that barrier to entry of hiring a big studio with a producer, or whatever, is removed now. You can just do it on your laptop.”

Which really is what has and continues to make Everything Everything such an attractive proposition. Because when you have a band that cannot see past the worth of creating something, you are more likely to get something worthy of being created. Their honesty – harsh, jovial or whatever – continually gives one thing away. It’s not what makes them angry, it’s not what opinions they have of others or the industry: when you speak to Everything Everything, there’s only one thing coming through, and that’s the music.

They were at SXSW to play it. They were in America to tour it. They’ve spent the last decade creating it. They talk of it. Think of it. Challenge it. Push it. Bend it. Haven’t broke it yet. But continue to try. And until they do, this surely is the reason anyone who loves music, well, loves music.

To find bands who also love music, and bring it to them.

(Dylan Llewellyn-Nunes)

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