Back when they first broke through in the mid-2000s, The Subways always held an advantage over their contemporaries.
Not just because of their youth (the band were in their late teens when they won an ‘unsigned’ competition to play Glastonbury in 2004), but because of their style too: not for them the art-rock that was prevalent at the time, their approach was more visceral, timeless, geared simply around the pure joy of rock music.
“We grew up on rock ‘n’ roll music and, for me, getting on stage and playing was about letting go of all the shackles of everyday society,” frontman Billy Lunn tells Live4ever. “The notion that we have to get up for work, serve other people and make money, all that bollocks…for me, rock ‘n’ roll is about tapping into that primal impulse that harks back to dancing round a campfire, looking up to the gods and praying for rain. It’s something that we need to do.”
It’s the reason their fine debut album Young for Eternity has stood the test of time and is now, along with sophomore effort All Or Nothing, being reissued to mark its fifteenth anniversary.
Their debut’s title, at the time a rallying call for all generations, now seems even more fitting. It sounds vital and urgent in the way that all bands’ debut albums should do, blistering and unrestrained by cynicism. A decade and a half later, does its co-creator (the band shared credit for all 13 tracks) look back on it, as we all do at the past, with a squirm? “For years afterwards I would listen back to it and wish I did things differently,” Lunn says. “I couldn’t listen to it.”
“But now I can really listen to it and enjoy it because I know what it is. It’s a snapshot in time of our lives suddenly going really, really wild. All our dreams coming true and all that stuff. I think of it now as a diary entry, an encapsulation of that whole circus, and I love it for it. Even the sad memories of the tension in the band or shows where everything went wrong.”
The rigours of life on the road are well reported; touring, the pressure-cooker environment, the distractions available all clichés for a reason. Throw in your bandmates being your ex-girlfriend and your brother, and there’s bound to be tension. It’s testament to the strong bond the trio have that they are able to celebrate this anniversary in one piece. “If you can get through those periods of difficulty and tension, and a lot of the time it involves compromise, coming to terms with your own characteristics and getting to know things about your personality that you really need to get over, it totally strengthened us,” Lunn believes.
“One of the binding things about this band is that Josh and I are brothers. Charlotte and I were previously engaged to be married and then broke up. Getting through all that stuff was facilitated by music. Music is what got us through those periods and I’m so glad for it. I’m so thankful that we’re all so close and that kept us together, but more than that I’m so glad that we kept making music together. It’s allowed us to come back, fifteen years after Young for Eternity was released, and celebrate that.”
It’s not just their timeless debut that’s getting the reissue treatment; its 2008 follow-up, All Or Nothing, is finally getting a vinyl release too – Lunn gives us a bit more insight into why it’s taken so long: “We’re doing this anniversary tour for Young For Eternity, but we’re also using this as an excuse to issue a vinyl format for the second record. People have been talking about that since its release. It’s one of those things where you can’t just go, ‘Send it to press and get a big batch ready for the next tour’. You need a campaign to do it, and we thought this would be the campaign. We’re really proud of that record. A lot of bands coming out in the 2000s had hit first records and really struggled with the second. We really knuckled down for our second album. It’s easily one of our best, so it’ll be nice hear it on vinyl format.”
For their first album, The Subways were able to rattle through the recording quickly, capturing the energy of their live shows having been working on the songs for some time. They opted to take a different approach for its follow-up. “We talked to several producers and I said, ‘What about Butch Vig?’,” Lunn recalls. “I loved Nevermind and Garbage, Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins. It was such a long shot, but he really liked the demo.”
“It involved going over to America and recording in Los Angeles. Around that time we’d been touring the US quite a lot and I was listening to a lot of the rock that was being played on US radio. I thought, ‘That sounds massive. How can we achieve that?’. It was really by going over and using American ears and American desks. Pre-amps and compressors, all that jazz. We came back with a really transatlantic record, rather than Young for Eternity which is Britrock.”
Both albums will get a fair airing on the forthcoming anniversary tours, which take up a large chunk of the year: “We’re doing a good couple of weeks in the UK. We really want to work hard in the UK because we’re quite aware of just how hard we‘ve worked outside of the UK. We’ve done really well over in Europe and America, and in Russia as well. We want to really work hard, get these shows totally nailed in the UK. That’s the first couple of weeks of the tour and then we’re off to the continent and playing a massive tour.”
There are plans afoot longer term too. A fifth album is in the works, as Lunn tells us: “The first single back is going to be in the summer, but no new record until at least probably the end of this year, maybe the beginning of next year. Just because we’ve got a couple of other projects that we want to finish. The anniversary tour we want to just sit back and enjoy. We were so young when we first released that record and went out and toured it. It was so over-whelming so it’s going to be so nice to be back on stage and in kind of a better place. A bit more world-weary and a bit more experienced so we can just relish it. We won’t want to rush the album during that experience.”
Time away from the band has given them fresh impetus. It’s now five years since the release of their self-titled fourth album, and the trio took the opportunity to live a little, in varying ways: “I took three years out to go to university. I’ve been hanging backstage and reading books for a good five years! In 2015 I told the guys that I wanted to go to uni and take three years out. I thought they were going to be really angry with me, but it turns out they were well up for it! Charlotte went off, had her baby and did some work with other people. Josh went to France, where he lives with his girlfriend and his daughter, and had three years of bliss. I studied for three years which was good fun, but during that time I was also writing material.”
Time well spent on all fronts, but enough is enough. Rock fans need bands like The Subways in their lives, and it’s not just the old lags who are looking on with keen interest. Their time away has also enabled a new generation, brought up on their visceral rock, to make themselves known. “I feel privileged in that respect, that we’re still relatively young in comparison to our contemporaries,” Lunn concludes. “It’s really nice to be playing alongside bands who’ve said, ‘We covered Rock ‘n’ Roll Queen when we started’. I feel the solidarity with bands that are coming out now much more than when we first came about in 2004/5.”
“It’s a great feeling because we never really had any of that. Bands are playing to get up there and make people feel something true and express themselves.” The wheel of rock keeps turning, but bands like The Subways, with a clarity of message that resonates to all, will always be relevant.
Young for eternity indeed.
