Tell Us about:

Your latest album you have released:

Michael: Songs for the Small Places was originally written and recorded around the time we signed to MCA Records in 1995 and were intended to be the debut album. It’s taken us three decades, but we are now finally bringing our work into the light – and it’s going well so far.

Jamie: If I had to describe a theme for the entire work, I’d say it’s about how the place you come from shape your outlook on life – for good and bad – how you always carry a little bit of that place with you, no matter how far you travel, or grow as a person.

Michael:: For me, it’s a celebration of the person you might evolve into, your future potential so to speak, and how you might bring that person out into the light while also acknowledging the person you used to be.

Jamie: I guess the overarching theme is growth, and a big part of that is accepting that failure is a more likely outcome than success but ploughing on anyway.

Michael: We’re optimists you see. We always believe the horizon is bathed in sunlight, despite the likelihood that when you get there, it might be raining.

Jamie: Hopefully that optimism shines throughout Songs for the Small Places – the amazing reviews we’ve had so far suggests it does.

Your favourite lyric from one of the songs: 

Michael: The opening track on Songs for the Small Places starts with; Outside the shops and round the blocks, the kids who spit and smoke a lot are staring out the local cops, it’s bad – which aims to suggest some neighbourhood tensions caused by a lack of opportunity. You could read that as a dig, but it evolves to celebrate the qualities of resilience and community you get in the kind of places we’re from.

Jamie: These are valuable qualities because, as the album draws on, and we mentioned earlier in this conversation, failure is a more likely outcome than success. It’s a great set of lyrics to sing.

Your favourite song that you have created that is an album track:

Jamie: It’s got to a song called When This Time is Over. This song had a lot of firsts for us, it was the first one we wrote together to establish ourselves, in our minds, to give us confidence as a song-writing duo. With our first major label recording contract we were musicians and performers only – we didn’t write.

Michael: When we got dropped from that recording contract, it was a huge blow, but we weren’t going to hit the canvas without even throwing a few punches – we decided we should give it another go – but this time as writers – to have complete artistic control for the first time. When This Time is Over was our launch pad for Giant Killers

Jamie: This song has extra levels of meaning too – we wrote it using a guitar that Butch Vig had played. He was a legend to us as he produced Nevermind. And I’d like to think, even though it’s is so stylistically different, that  the spirit of When This Time is Over contains a little bit of Nirvana in there!

Michael:The guitar Jamie is talking about belonged to our old mate Simon Gunning – an artist manager who looked after Butch Vig’s later incarnation as Garbage. He shared an office with our ex-manager, and he kept the guitar in a corner. We knocked around the place after office hours, we actually used to live in another office just down the corridor….

Jamie: Ha ha yes, after we lost that first record deal, we were very skint and had nowhere to live, and our then manager gave us that empty office while we found our feet.

Michael:I remember it well! Anyway, we used that guitar to write, not just When This Time Over, but a few of the tunes that later became Songs for the Small Places. We’d seen Butch playing it a couple of times while visiting Simon on business and we hoped a little of his magic would rub off from his fingers and onto our artistic endeavours!

Your favourite song to play live:

Jamie: It’s been a long time since we played these songs live, but I’d say For the Money. It always used to bring down the house.

Michael: I agree. We always finished our set with it – it’s that big singalong chorus that you can shout along to, and it still sounds great.

The song that was the longest to write and why?

Michael: Billy the Kid.

Jamie: Definitely.

Michael: We wanted to make it an epic sounding track –– it’s a character study of a typically male archetype who is essentially a pile of contradictions in person form. The character could be described as a hooligan poet struggling with mid-life conformity.

Jamie: It’s what you might call a sweeping production. It’s both lyrically and melodically complex, multi-layered, and we wanted the production to reflect that. It took a bit of time to get that vision right.

Your most emotional track:

Jamie: I Hoped One Day You Would Know My Name has a powerful emotive pull for me.

Michael: I think it’s power might be conveyed in the next line – I hoped one day you would know my name, I knew you never would. It’s a ballad about a kind of aspirational love – you so want it, but deep down, you know it’s out of reach.

Jamie: Or you haven’t quite got the self-belief to win that love. Either way, it’s a heartbreaker.

Dream collaboration:

Michael: Bowie would have been a good one – but we would have been intimidated by his genius

Jamie: George Michael. Loved his pop sensibilities. We met him once, remember Mike?

Michael: Oh God yes. At Nomis.

Jamie: Nomis was an old rehearsal studio in Shepherd’s Bush from back in the day – everyone used it.

Michael: I think we were there rehearsing for the Squeeze tour. They had a café, which at lunchtime was pretty much full of the great and good of the pop music scene back then – well, obviously we were there too.

Jamie: Lowering the tone! But we sat with him over a sandwich and had a good old natter – he was a lovely man. Obviously, he didn’t have a clue who we were. And why should he have?

Describe the feeling you get when you walk on stage to do a show:

Michael: I think that’s the same for every performer, a mix of terror, apprehension, excitement, and anticipation, and that, yeah let’s have this sensation.

Jamie: And again, optimism – that it’s all going to go well. It’s important to ‘believe’ when you step out there.

The hardest track to play live:

Jamie: All of them. The production on the album is majestic really – we can’t afford to take out a brass section, or a string quartet for that matter. Recreating that sound, especially that lush 90s sound is a tough gig. We have to accept it might sound a little rawer live! Which is also a good thing.

Essential items you always take on tour with you?

Michael:I always take Jamie

Jamie: And I always take Mike.

Michael: And then of course, there’s the rest of the band – we can’t do this kind of stuff with just two people.

Jamie: Although we did forget our old drummer Michael Giri quite a few times – he was a deep thinker our Michael, some might say that’s unusual for a drummer, but not us, we know their secrets!

Michael: He was often taking himself off for a long walk, it was his way of thinking, but often at the most inopportune moments – a soundcheck, just before we went on stage, or just before the tour bus was about to leave to go to the next city.

Jamie:There were a few, where’s Michael moments when we were all on the bus and a few miles down the road, resulting in a sudden about turn.

Michael: He also disappeared in the middle of a set once. Without permission.

J: Ha ha, oh yes, wasn’t his fault, his kit was on a riser – sometimes the engineer puts a carpet down under the kit to stop it from sliding as the drummer plays. There was no carpet on this occasion, I think it may have been Cardiff Uni. And gradually, over the course of the set, the kit moved backwards until, him and his stool fell off the back of the riser. I think it was in the middle of Around the Blocks. It all fell apart. The crowd loved it.

Michael: We did try to carry on nobly for a bit, but it was just too funny, and we all collapsed in fits. As did most of the front row.

Describe your fans in three words:

Michael: Cruel, cruel, cruel – they all laughed at Michael’s misfortune.

Jamie: He could have been seriously hurt.

A song by another artist or band you wish you had written:

Michael: Heroes – David Bowie. I’d like that played at my funeral. Hopefully, it will be a while yet. I’m not in a hurry.

Jamie: I’m going to say Nature Boy, by Nat King Cole – it’s perfection in song form.

What we can look forward to from your band this year: 

Michael: We must work the album first – we’re currently engaged in getting some good reviews at press, music blogs and fan sites.

Jamie: We have two singles from the album in pipeline before the year is out, and some additional material, what used to be called B-sides, that will come along with them. We’re hopeful of leveraging the critical acclaim to maximise our potential to get on some radio playlists.