Eye-Popping Imagery Helped Pull Focus In Those Shy Early Days

Danish arty indie pop-rock band Mew recently released their seventh album Visuals, and are very shortly to bring the subsequent tour to our shores. It is a very apt title for a band such as Mew. Frontman and multi-instrumentalist Jonas Bjerre himself is an accomplished visual artist, and he designs all of the eye-popping imagery that they bring to their live shows in the form of lighting, rear-screen projection segments and so forth. Speaking from on tour in New York, Bjerre tells us that the thinking behind making their show so visually complex is actually rather simple.

"We've always used visuals, I started making them very early, because I was working as an animator and I had all these ideas. Back then I didn't really see bands doing that, so it was kind of a new thing. And also for me, it was a way of compensating for not being a very extrovert frontman on stage, so then maybe people could forgive me for staring at my shoes the whole time!" he laughs.

Bjerre is now a far more forthright performer than he was in the band's early days, and their audiences are treated to a more physical performance and the amazing visual imagery. "I feel more confident now as a performer," he states, "I enjoy it a lot more and I love the feeling of the connection with the audience. So these days it's more a part of the art and a part of the show.

"It's also a lot of fun to work on. It's very time consuming, but it's something I really enjoy doing."

Indeed, the visual element of the band pervades the entire album, above and beyond simply being the title of the record. "I had some visual ideas even before we starting writing and recording," he recalls. "We had this idea that every song's starting point should be a visual idea, so we tried to think that way when we were writing, and it provided us with some sort of starting point. When you sit with just a blank sheet of paper, it's hard. I usually like to have one word when I start coming up with melodies. This time it was more like a visual inspiration."

And well over two decades into their career, Bjerre still feels like he and the band are finding their way, that time and experience have not bestowed great wisdom and experience upon them and they now know the secrets of the artistic universe. "In some ways I feel like we're just starting out," he admits, "I probably thought back then, when we started, that in 20 years I'm going to be a lot smarter and wiser and I'm going to know what's really going on. But now I don't feel like that at all. I still just feel like I'm one soul thrown into a chaotic world and trying to make sense of it."