Full Fathom Five: High Anxiety.

Full Fathom Five launch 5 Minutes From Machine at The Zoo on Saturday.

“We’ve been as busy as we can handle,” explains Full Fathom Five’s Ian Thompson. “Sitting down and writing is just more important at the moment. We’re really keen to be creative again and not play the same songs, and we need a little space to do that.”

A little space, in this case, means a self-imposed exile from the live scene. As Ian explains, the bands incessant live workload has been a distraction as time for the next record draws near. The band want to utilise their time to put together their next long player. This of course means that not only should the follow up to their stylish 07 Seven disc soon be poking up through the cracks, but that Saturday night’s gig to launch 5 Minutes From Machine/Auf Wiedersehn will be their last public engagement for the 07 Seven album.

“Occasionally we take some time off, but the way the band sort of evolved we had more than a year before we played live, where we were just sitting in a room writing. We’re kind of excited about getting back to that again. Playing live knocks you out of your creative space. There are a couple of separate things that bands do. They create music, they record and they play live. They’re all different headspaces. When you look now, bands take a long time between albums.”

“It’s a bit of a balance, because I think there’s a certain period that you should record, just after a songs written when you’re just getting comfortable with it. There’s a magic period where you play something live two or three times because it just peaks; you need some of those nerves.”

While 5 Minutes From Machine is the final single to be taken from 07 Seven, its place in the release schedule was by no means the bands intent.

“We actually did some market research,” Ian jokes. “We burnt Auf Wiedersehn, 5 Minutes From Machine and Anxiety onto a CD, thinking that 5 Minutes From Machine would win. We gave it out to a bunch of people and Anxiety was the one that everyone though should be a single. So these are the other two.”

“They’re the most single-ish tracks on the album. Not that we write singles… They just happened. It’s all organic. So far we’ve just been writing tracks and an album is about getting them to flow. The ideal thing would be to write more tracks that you need and discard the ones you don’t need, but we haven’t reached that point.”