Why Bands Have No Right To Get Sick Of 'Playing The Hit'

When Band Of Skulls tour abroad, drummer Matt Hayward misses “a really good British cup of tea”.

“I miss that a lot,” he stresses. “‘Cause, you know how the water’s different in all places around the world? There’s nothing quite like hometown water and Yorkshire teabags, they’re great!” He disagrees with the theory that if someone else makes it for you, a cuppa can taste better. “I make the best cup of tea!” he boasts. “I’m quite particular about my tea [pauses]. Yeah, ‘lazy tea makers’ is probably one of my biggest pet peeves of all time... I make a helluva better cup of tea than Russell [Marsden, frontman] makes. He made me one this afternoon and it was disgusting.” Does Hayward suspect Marsden may have purposefully done a crap job so that he won’t be asked to brew another? “I think you hit the nail on the head. That’s exactly right,” the drummer laughs in a restrained, polite, ‘mmm-hmm-mmm’ fashion.   

Hayward affectionately ribs Marsden so it comes as no surprise that they met when they were 11 years old. “We were family friends and we’d both sort of taken up an instrument,” Hayward explains, “and then Russell went to art college and met Emma [Richardson, bass] there.” So were the lads keen on recruiting a female? “Just completely open,” Hayward admits. “It was funny ‘cause, like, Russell was going to his college – which I didn’t go to at all – so he’d meet all these different people and he’d bring all these real oddballs back to my family house. Like, my dad used to run a recording studio at the top of the garden – that’s where we used to rehearse – and so every Tuesday some random dudes that Russell’d met that week would just come ‘round and have a jam. Then Emma, I dunno, I guess you just kinda know when something’s right, you know? And, yeah! Emma was just perfect for what we were trying to do.”

In quite a few articles on the band, Hayward’s dad’s recording studio is referred to as a shed. “Yeah, my dad gets so infuriated by that,” the drummer chuckles. “I dunno why, but I think in a really early press release or something [the publicist] was like, ‘Yeah, these tracks were recorded in the corner of Matt’s garden in his dad’s shed.’ And dad is like, ‘It’s not some fucking shed!’ It was a studio. It was very small, but he used to record all the local blues musicians around Southampton where we’re from and made a real name [for] himself around the town ‘cause he’d make all the demos for all these bands who were gigging around at the time. And, you know, we owe him a lot because to have a space to rehearse and play and record when you’re that young is hard for young bands to find. So we had the luxury of that.”

Reflecting on bands that made him fan-out back in the day, Hayward singles out Queens Of The Stone Age. “I remember seeing Queens Of The Stone Age in Southampton, in our hometown, and it was one of the best gigs that I’d ever been to,” he reminisces, “and, you know, all of your mates get together in the pub – some who looked too young to be in the pub, so that was pretty exciting too. And, like, you’d get into the venue and just that sheer excitement. You know, you’d buy your ticket months and months in advance and you’d just be so excited about it on the night – that’s magical! Then we toured with them last year [2013]. And so that was kind of one of those moments where I was the fucking kid beside myself at the show and then now we’re opening up [for them]. So, yeah, that was a real special moment.”

Support slots present their own set of challenges, and Hayward remembers a time when his band ached for such opportunities. ”When we first started out we used to, like, beg venues in our hometown to put us on the bill for a big touring band that were coming through. They weren’t even big venues, like, 200-capacity venues, but, you know, we’d be like, ‘Please, can we just get the first on the bill?’ And it was all about that, you know: you’d want maybe ten of those people to walk away and go, ‘Cool, that was really cool,’ and so I don’t think that ever changes, really. It’s just the scale of things, that’s all; these shows become bigger, but you still have that fight in you where you’re like, ‘Right! Most of these people haven’t got a fucking clue who we are. Let’s go out and try and win over some people,’ which – I love that challenge. I love playing our own gigs equally, that’s a different sort of thing but, yeah! The support slot -­ we thrive in that situation.”

Band Of Skulls are supporting The Black Keys as well as headlining their own gigs next time they hit our shores, but Hayward doesn’t mind if punters are still arriving at the beginning of their set: “You’ve been invited to someone else’s party, you know, so you can’t – I dunno, we’ve never complained. We’re very grateful that we’ve been given the opportunity and we’ll play in the car park, it doesn’t matter. You know, we’re on their turf.” On potentially watching punters racing towards them if their set’s scheduled to start as gates open, Hayward offers, “The way I always see it is: I was that kid running towards the front barrier trying to get as close as I could to a gig, and the fact that now you get to be the person on stage doing that for someone else is – you’ve kinda come full circle in a way.

“We played Glastonbury this year in England, and me and Emma both went [to the festival] when we were – I was maybe like 15, 16. And we both went to see – I forget who it was. We both went to the same stage and watched the gig there that we got to play that stage this year and so, like, both me and Emma were a bit sort of like [adopts a low, geeky voice], ‘D’you remember when we were just standin’ down there at the front?’”

The drummer is acutely aware of acknowledging milestones in his band’s career. “I get furious when – not furious, but, you know, you’re doing this thing which you were the kid that dreamt of that sort of moment and now you get to do it. And so you owe [it] to your little self in that crowd, whoever that is now: you’ve gotta sort of make them have that moment too. That’s kind of what it should be about, really. I think it’s really important to always remember that even when you’re feeling a bit shitty or a little bit tired or a bit pissed off with everyone, you know?”  

We discuss our annoyance upon reading artist interviews where the subject moans about touring demands. “Oh, yeah,” Hayward contributes. “‘Oh, I’m so tired.’ [pauses] Fuck off! You know, it’s fun to be doing what you’re doing, like, you have no right.” Or, ‘I’m so sick of playing my hit!’ He laughs, “Yeah! You’ve got a fucking hit, that’s amazing! Enjoy it!”

“Yeah! You’ve got a fucking hit, that’s amazing! Enjoy it!”

Even if you don’t think you know any Band Of Skulls songs, you would definitely be familiar with their work via syncing and Hayward can attest to the power of music placement. When asked to single out an effective use of one of his band’s songs, he shares, “The most memorable one I think was: there was an advert in America, it was for a car – it was for Ford Mustang – and it had a song of ours Light Of The Morning on it. It was the first time we’d ever really synched a song to an advert and, you know, everyone was like, ‘Oh, ok,’ and didn’t really think too much about it. And then we went and played a festival in America once the advert came out and, again, didn’t think anything of it and, ha ha, and then we played that song for the festival and the crowd went fucking crazy! And it was like, ‘Wow!’ Like, everybody just kind of looked at each other and laughed to each other ‘cause it was like, ‘Fuckin’ ‘ell!’ No one saw that coming. ‘Cause it was just an album track, it wasn’t a single or anything. So then it was like: you can see the power of that kind of medium and especially in the way music works today. We are very much an independent band so we have to find ways to sort of further what we’re doing and get our music out to a really wide audience and, um, that was the first time we’d ever experienced it. And it was pretty awesome to be honest.”

While the band consider each sync request on a case by case basis, Hayward reckons if you say no chances are a soundalike version of the track will wind up appearing on the ad anyway. “I’m pretty sure there’s, like, teams of people that a company will go to and say, ‘Right, this band wouldn’t let us use their fucking song so make one which is so fucking close to it, but just enough so it’s not legally problematic.’ There’s not a lot you can do about it and I guess you can take it as a compliment that, you know, that’s the kind of sound that they want. I dunno, it’s a weird thing. It’s not happened to us yet.”

The band’s songs have been remixed widely, by the likes of PillowTalk, Dan Auerbach, Lindstrøm and UNKLE. UNKLE’s Sweet Sour twist sounds particularly sweet to this pair of ears. How did that team-up come about? “I’m not too sure,” Hayward ponders. “We were looking for someone to do a remix of it and I think it was sort of put about that we were looking and it just snowballed from that, really. It’s kind of weird when people do remixes for you, because there’s a distinct lack of communication in terms of, like, talking. You send them the song and then they send something back and you go, ‘Ooh, that sounds really good, how about maybe doing this?’ And then it sort of gets passed back and forth and then, yeah! We were very grateful that [UNKLE] were up for doing it.” And all that can happen without ever meeting your collaborator face-to-face. “I know! Hasn’t technology moved on?” Hayward teases, before explaining how the internet has enhanced his band’s songwriting approach: “We’ll make a demo or everyone writes separately sometimes and they’ll always have their own ideas going, so we can lay something down and then I can just email it to Russell or Emma and then they can come back and lay their ideas on top of it, yeah! It’s pretty incredible, really.”

Aside from the time saved through not having to wait until all band members’ schedules align, Hayward believes another benefit of working separately is that you don’t “get into each other’s heads too much about what you’re trying to do”. “I think when things become special is when people put their own take on an idea you have, which you would never have thought of doing in a billion years. So sometimes the more you talk about it the more detrimental it can be to what can potentially be produced, I guess.”

Having time to tinker with a song alone at your leisure rather than having to explain what you’re about to do to everyone else in the room would surely another plus. “Yeah, yeah,” Hayward agrees. “It happened quite recently. I had an idea for something and I laid down what I thought it should be and then I didn’t see [Russell], I just sent it over with a little note in an email sort of like, ‘Well, I quite like it how it’s like this in certain bits,’ and then Russell sent one back saying [laughs], ‘Well, I’ve actually done it like this and this,’ and then I heard it and I was like, ‘Wow, that sounds incredible.’ So, yeah! It’s nice when that happens. I love that about writing. I love the collaboration; that’s what makes it really exciting, I think.”

It all sounds very Unknown Pleasures, but Band Of Skulls used an image of the sound waves from the title track on Himalayan as inspiration for their latest/third album’s cover art. “There’s a theme that we try and keep, which is the Rorschach inkblot test-styled cover. It’s a kinda mirrored image and so we were thinkin’ about how we could do something different ‘cause, like: the first record was one of Emma’s paintings, which had been manipulated and mirrored, and then the second one was a glass sculpture that we had made. Me and Emma went and met these guys in Canada and we went on a glass-blowing course, ha ha. It turns out I’m really not very good at it. Emma is, obviously. Because she’s very artistic she obviously produced something beautiful but, yeah! I sucked at it really bad. But then these professionals, they made this sculpture and then we sort of put it in the computer and mixed around with it and mirrored it again. And so we were thinking, ‘What could we do for the next one?’ So we thought about getting a 3D print. You can feed the sound waves into a computer and then you can get a 3D printer to come up with a sculpture of the sound waves, which we thought was a fucking great idea. So we had that done and the sculpture just didn’t come out looking all that.

“I think everyone thought it was gonna be this really epic, bizarre kind of piece, but it just didn’t quite do what we wanted it to do and so instead it was just the sound waves before it got to the 3D printer [that we used]. And then, you know, that image came out and then that was doctored a bit, but again. So that’s how Himalayan looks. It’s like someone going, ‘I can see the music, man!’” he laughs.

Much-lauded producer Nick Launay was Band Of Skulls’ choice for the Himalayan album and Hayman confesses, “We were big fans of his – we were big fans of quite a lot of the records that he’d done, maybe not knowing that it was him that produced them.

“He’s just incredible and, you know, you sit down with Nick Launay for an afternoon and it’s hard to get any work done ‘cause the stories are just phenomenal. He’s one of the greatest storytellers I’ve ever met and it’s all these bands that you’re just like, ‘Fuckin’ hell, mate, this is – I can hardly believe...’ And it seems like every time you talk to him you find out another artist that he worked with, which you had no idea about, and you think, ‘Fuck!’ It’s amazing. We met him because he mixed our second record [Sweet Sour] and we got the mixes back and we were blown away by them and thought, ‘Well, this is fucking incredible,’ you know? And so when it came to sort of talking about producers for the next record we thought we’d give him a call and see if he fancied doing it, and he was happy to oblige. And we even got him to fly over to England for it, ‘cause he’s Los Angeles-based. But he came and lived in London for two months and, yeah! It’s just pretty incredible.” So did Launay sample Hayward’s famous “British cup of tea”? “Um, yeah, I’m sure he did,” the drummer laughs. “I’m trying to think: I’m not sure if Nick Launay is much of a tea drinker, no. I’m sure he probably drinks something a bit healthier than caffeine... LA does that to you I think.”