‘It Feels Like The Perfect Time’: You Me At Six Muse On Legacy & Breakup Ahead Of Aus Tour

“I think the bond between us and Australian fans has been pretty visceral. I struggle to think of an album cycle where we haven't come to Australia,” You Me At Six frontman Josh Franceschi tells The Music just days before the band announce their final Australian tour.

“If we're being overtly transparent, there's been times where we've come to Australia and lost money. It's never been about that for us—money's whatever, it comes and goes, and you can figure that out down the line.”

In February, You Me At Six—Franceschi, guitarists Max Helyer and Chris Miller, bassist Matt Barnes and drummer Dan Flint—announced their plans to disband next year. They made the shock announcement on social media, writing to fans: “2005-2025. This is the end. Thank you for being the heartbeat of this band. Final live shows taking place 2024/2025.”

When a band announces that they’re breaking up, your mind can’t help travelling to certain places: they hate each other now. Creative differences. Band members have families now and had to put them above the band. They can’t survive on Spotify royalties and merch sales anymore. Insert any other unspecified reason here. But, for You Me At Six, it wasn’t necessarily that simple, but it also was.

Earlier this week, You Me At Six announced their final Australian tour, and with it, Franceschi reflected on the band’s 20-year history and legacy, divulged the reasons behind their impending breakup, and offered up an epic scoop he’s never told anyone else before.

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Franceschi will always be thankful for the “tribal” bond You Me At Six have developed with their Australian fans, especially when they’re not a hugely popular band on triple j or a currently famous internet band. “But for some people, we’re their band. And that’s enough for us,” he says while walking along the beach, quipping that he’s “trying to get in shape for Australia.”

On a more serious note, Franceschi says there were “definitely” conversations about whether it was too soon to return to Australia after touring here last July, but the frontman was adamant throughout those chats that coming back was the right call.

“If it's the last time that people can come watch us, I've got a pretty good feeling that there'll be people who want to come,” he says. “For me, it's a great honour to come and play. At my age now and touring for 14 years, I find it very difficult, not impossible, to comprehend the idea of being that far away from home and feeling so at home.

“It's a very odd way to feel when I'm in Australia because I'm like, ‘How do I get these people, and how do they get me so unapologetically and unequivocally?’ I'm just buzzing—it's always a good time on stage in Australia.”

To the band’s fans, especially the Australian faithful, the words “thank you” for decades of support simply aren’t enough.

Franceschi explains, “To be a fan of something, the fan of a band or an artist, I think it's more than just listening to a song on the radio. It's the ultimate validation. It's the ultimate acceptance.”

Beyond “ultimate validation”, Franceschi’s greatest fantasy has always been being a member of the audience at a You Me At Six show.

“The only time I've ever gotten close to having a real sense of how people feel was when I was on a tube from the Emirates Stadium [Franceschi is an Arsenal supporter] to the O2 where we were playing that night,” he explains.

“Me and my dad left the game a couple minutes early to go back for soundcheck. I'm on the tube, and it's winter. I had a hood and a hat on, but my hoodie was unintentionally baggy, so it covered me all over [laughs]. I'm sitting, and unbeknown to me, the carriage was full of You Me At Six fans, and they're all talking about their favourite song, how excited they are, how they hope that ‘Josh is wearing that shirt that he wears’.”

Recalling how “how” he found the experience, Franceschi says he “would do anything” to be incognito and walk out of a You Me At Six show with the fans, whether the feedback is good or bad. “Maybe in Australia, I’ll come straight off stage, [wear a] Sleep Token mask, and I can just walk out the front door and hear what people are saying.”

The “Complete And Utter Universe” Of You Me At Six

You Me At Six hasn’t only been part of Franceschi’s life; the band has been his “complete and utter universe” since he was 15.

Coming up in a scene alongside Sheffield outfit Bring Me The Horizon (deathcore at that stage) and US rockers Paramore (pop-punk in the early days), Franceschi has seen a lot. With their 2023 album Truth Decay, the singer and his bandmates interrogated their relationship with masculinity in a raw, genuine manner.

Married To The Music – For Better Or For Worst

Since forming the band as teenage upstarts in the town of Weybridge, Surrey, in 2005, You Me At Six have enjoyed a 20-year career that has seen them become one of England’s most beloved bands.

You Me At Six released eight albums throughout their career, starting with their fiery pop-punk debut Take Off Your Colours in 2008, followed by their first UK top 10 record, 2010’s Hold Me Down.

With October 2011’s Sinners Never Sleep, You Me At Six recorded some of the heaviest material of the band’s career, lining up collaborations with Bring Me The Horizon’s Oli Sykes (on Bite My Tongue) and Parkway Drive’s Winston McCall (on Time Is Money), as well as some of their most gorgeous ballads (Crash, No One Does It Better).

For the first time, the UK rockers made a dent on the Australian charts, landing at #28 on the ARIA Albums Chart. In their home country, You Me At Six achieved their most tremendous success when they headlined a sold-out Wembley Arena for The Final Night Of Sin in December 2012.

Following the groundbreaking success of Sinners Never Sleep, the band returned with 2014’s Cavalier Youth, which hit #1 in the UK and #14 in Australia. Single Room To Breathe also propelled the band to a more mainstream audience after being played on Triple M and during AFL games.

Things got confusing for the band after Cavalier Youth. Where do you go after you’ve topped the charts in your home country and played the biggest shows of your career?

“I think you hear how we dealt with it [the pressure after achieving a UK #1 album] on Night People [released in 2017],” Franceschi admits.

“Cavalier Youth was a really big record for us. We had Room To Breathe, which I think was the AFL song. And then, we ended that cycle in arenas in England, and then played before The Black Keys and The Prodigy at the [2015] Isle Of White festival,” he adds, recalling how the band felt like they’d “smashed” the album cycle.

BMG were happy, too. You Me At Six sold 30,000 copies in the first week, “and the label like, ‘You know you're going gold by the end of the month’, and all this sort of mad shit,” Franceschi remembers. “And then we found this… it's a purgatory, from no longer being a no one, but not a household name, or the biggest band in the world.”

“What happened with Night People was, it wasn't broken, but the label tried to fix it,” he says. “It was the first time we'd ever had an A&R person involved being like, ‘You should write with this person. Your band should sound like that. You should do this.’ It was a bit of a power struggle with the label and stuff like that, and that's why it took so long.

“But for us, it was the longest—at that point—it had taken for us to have new music out. I think it was three and a half years in between records, which, again, momentum is everything in music. It's like, once you have it, you have to hold on to it and ride it as much as you can. But we didn't have that experience to know that.”

For Night People, the band collaborated with producer Jacquire King, who has worked with Kings Of Leon, Modest Mouse, Shania Twain, and more.

You Me At Six’s thoughts—somewhat naively—were, “We’re an arena band now; let’s work with an arena band producer.”

Franceschi says that was the wrong call. “We were chasing something that didn't exist for us. If we came out of Cavalier Youth and made an uncompromising, big rock record, we probably would have flown in the direction we were all chasing. But instead, it ended up being a little watered down, I would honestly say.

“There's other people in our band that love that record and think it's the best record we've done. I'm only speaking from my experience that I felt a shift on that record from not taking it seriously to then taking it really seriously, applying loads of pressure because of the number one thing and all these accolades. And it got to me a little bit as a person, in the sense that I got overwhelmed with, ‘How do I navigate this?’”

Follow-up record VI, their first with AWOL, saw You Me At Six not only make a (sort of) self-titled record but also team up with multiple producers. Franceschi calls the album the “anti” Night People and describes the deal with AWOL as a service deal, in which they got to return to being a (kind of) DIY band.

Then, there was Suckapunch. They returned with VI co-producer Dan Austin for a collection of diverse tracks that Franceschi reckons “had no right to go to number one” in the UK and labels a “car crash”.

“It had no right to go to number one,” Franceschi states, “It was a car crash of a record, in terms of, there's about 20 different genres on that album. If you played an alien Suckapunch, they could go with the narrative of, ‘This is 12 different bands’ [laughs]. I guess that was us reclaiming our DNA—our spirit of ‘We'll do what we want rather than what we think people want to hear.’”

A Love Letter To Those Who Feel Lost

While Franceschi has some thoughts on their fifth, sixth, and seventh albums, he says Night People's “saving grace” was the ballad Take On The World, which almost went to Calvin Harris.

“It's become this love song for people,” Franceschi proudly notes, but reveals for the first time that Take On The World was nearly an EDM banger.

He explains, “I wrote that song with a guy called Iain Archer in a loft of a church in North London. I sang what I was thinking, and he'd write it down. And then he said, ‘What about you say that instead, here and there.’”

The next thing he knew, Franceschi had gone home and sent a demo to members of Three Six Zero Management, which managed a roster of artists, including Calvin Harris and Frank Ocean.

“I've never told anybody this story, but at the time, we're at Three Six Zero Management with loads of random people, a big manager company. At the time, I'd gone to write a song with this guy trying to sell it to Calvin Harris. Take On The World was originally going to be a Calvin Harris song, and it got very close.

“In the final moments of that whole thing happening, I worked with a woman named Ina Wroldsen who sang on [the Calvin Harris song] How Deep Is Your Love?” Franceschi shares, before singing: “Is it like the ocean? What devotion are you?” and adds, “She was going to sing the words to Take On The World. It was all coming together, and then it didn't. It's always coming together until it doesn't [laughs].”

After the collaboration with Harris and Wroldsen didn’t turn out, Franceschi went to his bandmates.

“I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I should show the lads this song I wrote as a dance song, maybe they'll like it.’”

Then, Franceschi and his bandmates made Take On The World as we know it: in ballad form. Expecting the song to become another Crash—an album cut only devoted fans care about—Take On The World took on a life of its own, playing in season eight episode 16 of The Vampire Diaries and is officially the “big” ballad moment at You Me At Six shows.

“There’s so many things that happened with this band, so many twists and turns,” Franceschi says. “Even the good, the bad and the ugly, I'm grateful.

“It's gonna be odd not having these sorts of conversations anymore. If I put out more music in the future, I'll have to do something like this, but I've realised that with You Me At Six, there'll never be anything like that again for us in this life. I think you'd be mad for lightning to strike twice, but really, really grateful it struck once.”

You Me At Six will tour Australia for the final time in January 2025 with special guests Holding Absence. Tickets are available now via The Phoenix.