INTERVIEWS
Daniel Heaton meets a man ready for a break from being his public persona, Malcolm Middleton.
Q: You've been doing this quite a while now, touring and playing this kind of small intimate venue, how do you find it? A: I love it, when you've toured the UK as many times as I have it's great to visit new places. I don't know why I've never done Wakefield but there was lots of enthusiasm from promoters and fans and it's better than going to somewhere like, for example, Bristol for the tenth time in five years. Q: Is touring something you enjoy or do you see it as something you have to do when releasing a new record? A: When Arab Strap started we were touring all the time but we've calmed it down a lot since then and we're rarely away for more than a month at a time, if we tour back to back then there's always a few weeks in between but it's been fairly quiet this year. I enjoy it but when you get to the last few weeks of a European tour and you're driving hundreds of miles you get sick of it and when you get home you swear you'll never tour again, then three weeks later you look at your calendar and realise you've got fuck all to do and want to get out on the road again. Q: You've been touring the new album now since June, how is it being received by the fans? A: It's ok, I toured with a five or six piece band for the first couple of months really promoting the album but this tour now is solo just doing stuff from all my records rather than newer record. It's good to go back to things, especially after touring a new album which gets boring after a while. Not having a band also means I don't have to rehearse so I can play something I haven't done in a couple of years and I'm free to fuck it up. Q: Do you enjoy playing on your own then, the freedom to play old songs and do what you like? A: Yeah, I definitely do. I like the band for the dynamic and the loudness and enjoying the music but the kind of songs I write lend themselves to being solo and I'm not much of a performer. I hate having to shout over a band and I don't have much of a vocal range, for me it feels more comfortable to sit with a guitar and play songs in the way they were originally written. Q: You were with Arab Strap for a good few years, do you miss the continuity that being part of a band gives? A: It's been three years since we split and I do miss it, I miss the camaraderie and we always had an infinite amount of confidence in what we were doing, apart from towards the end when it kind of disappeared. I miss that and just having another person or other people in the band and doing things mutually. When I tour with a band now it's me and my band. Q: Would you ever go back to that, not necessarily Arab Strap, but would you tour with a band rather than it being you and your band? A: Definitely, I don't like being me and my band, I don't like being at the front and being in charge. That'll be one of the things I'll do next year, find the right people and form a band where we're all equal.
A: It's not done that well commercially, I'm not sure how many exactly it's sold but it's had a much lower profile than previous records like 'A Brighter Beat'. I'm not sure how many it's sold, I got a case but it's not a new thing, not a novel thing any more. Even your favourite bands, you lose track of them at some point, usually around the fourth album. Q: Like a lot of people I first became aware of you as a solo artist when 'We're All Going To Die' came out. Has the increased public perception that followed 'We're All Going To Die' been good for you? A: It's not been bad. I didn't see any major impact which I think I was quite lucky for, the single wasn't so well received that I became a one hit wonder kind of guy. A lot people have just heard of me since that record. Q: Did you enjoy the experience, getting a lot of radio play and mention in the mainstream media? A: No, I didn't enjoy it, I was glad when it was over but I don't regret it. Q: How much involvement did you have in the campaign? A: It was my idea, stupidly, because I wanted 'We're All Going To Die' to be the first single from 'A Bright Beat', it was the first song I wrote for the album but nobody else liked the idea and I was with a new record label so I just let it go for a while. We'd planned to start the tour for 'A Brighter Beat' just before Christmas so I said I wanted this to be the first single, one of the guys pointed out that it would come out on the same day as all the Christmas number one contenders so I just said 'Fuck it', why not just advertise it as that as a joke. As soon as Colin Murray heard about that he just went for it and took over, touting it everywhere, it was funny. Q: You've said in the past that you didn't enjoy recording and releasing the new album as much as some others and this affected the amount of promotion you did, why was that? A: I like the album, I enjoyed writing it at home but I didn't enjoy recording it. It's been a really busy couple of years and I ended up feeling too cynical about music, that's why I'm looking to take a break and do nothing related to my songs and albums for as long as I can whether that's a just a few years or longer. Q: Are you planning on taking a break from music completely or do you have a couple of projects lined up? A: I'm going to do as much as I can that's not this, I'm going to do some instrumental stuff, start a new band, produce and write songs for folk, anything else I can. More people should do it, you can definitely tell when bands are getting lazy and run out ideas and the cycle of write, record, tour, write, record, tour does take it out of you after a while and I've been doing that since Arab Strap so a good while. One of reasons that I'm taking a break is that I feel I'm almost a caricature of myself, when I sit down and write a song I'm no longer doing it for myself, I'm writing it for the audience and my perception of what people want from me. You always run the risk of pigeon holing yourself with your music, when people start to appreciate it you want to write something that they'll like just as much. Malcolm Middleton's fifth, and possibly last, solo album Waxing Gibbous, is currently available.
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Pics: Daniel Heaton
