"We’ve All Got Fucking Real Lives Now"

Celebrating ten years as a band, this October will mark the anniversary of Surrey-bred You Me At Six’s first-ever show. Singer Josh Franceschi was still at school when the band startet, but for the past eight years, the band has been the way they’ve all sustained themselves. 

So, memories of their inaugural performance? “I remember thinking, ‘This is awesome,’ seeing all my friends. I was so used to me moshing around living rooms with my friends, so it just seemed strange that the lads that I’d been moshing around with were now moshing around to my music. So that for me was like a sign that we were somewhat good, that my friends felt the need to kick the crap out of each other in front of me during it.”

There have been plenty of highlights since, and they’ve absorbed some key lessons along the way. Namely, the frontman explains, the quintet have previously been required to craft material within narrow time frames, but aren’t going to be pressured into expediting Cavalier Youth’s follow-up.

“We’ve all got fucking real lives now, whereas before, back home, you’d be like, ‘I’m 19, 20, it doesn’t really matter, let’s just go write more music.’ But now everyone’s trying to find their feet a little bit because they’ve been doing it non-stop for ten years. So I think this will be a slightly longer process, but saying that, next week we might go into rehearsal and write four songs. Our ambition has always been to try and be the band we want to be, the best band we can be at that time. We’re just discussing how we’ve got to raise that bar a few more levels if you really want to achieve some of the stuff we want to achieve… We’re at a point in our career where we’ve done certain things for ten years and I think we’ve shown growth in that time.

“We’ve all got our own little studio set-ups at our houses now, so we can write on our own and Dan [Flint, drums] just built this great studio at his house, so we’re going to be able to go around there whenever and write the record. We can all be creative, but without the situation whereby in the past we’ve written records in two weeks because we’ve had two weeks to write a record, written it and then gone and recorded it. What we’re going to be able to do now is be able to write, record those tracks, listen back to them, convince each other they’re crap, throw them away and start again.

“We just want to come back with something that can’t really go under the radar; we know the record has to be really ambitious. We just want to make a big rock record. Sometimes, the desire to do something, to be different, and then acknowledging that you might completely fuck yourself and your career is an interesting one.”