Interview: Fenech Soler

Bright eyed and bushy tailed, Fenech Soler are the latest band keen to make it big on the electro-pop scene. Luckily for us, these guys are a shining needle in an increasingly bland haystack. I spoke to Ross from the quartet to learn more about their sequinned style, a Bjork collaboration and how they’re never far away from the country music scene.

Obviously you and Ben know each other because you’re brothers. How did you meet Daniel and Andrew and from there form the band?

Dan has been a long-term friend, he was in my class at school. Me and Ben have always been writing together and Dan’s kind of been a brother for a long time, it’s felt that way. So we started writing together and then we met Andrew later down the line, he was a studio engineer in a studio really close to us in a place called Eye and we realised that we kind of wanted to have drums and knew Andy was great at all instruments, not just drums. Drums are probably his fourth instrument actually, he’s just one of those people that’s kind of great at everything, basically. So it just seemed really simple to get him involved and he was really up for it.

There are a hell of a lot of electro-pop bands around at the minute and this in turn makes it more difficult to get noticed, yet you guys are getting a substantial amount of great press. What do you think makes you stand out from all the other electro acts out there at the minute?

I mean, there are a lot of electronic artists out there. You’ve got your La Roux’s and your Ellie Goulding’s, and I don’t suppose Marina [and the Diamonds] is very electronic, is she, but she’s a new pop act and has a few synthesizers. But I think particularly on places like Radio One, there aren’t that many actual bands that are doing the electronic thing, and we’re definitely doing that side of it, we’re not just hunched over laptops, or with Ben just stood out the front with a band behind him that no-one knows. So for that I think we are a band doing electro-pop music and actually getting on the radio here and there and I don’t think there are that many bands actually doing that. Especially male-fronted bands; it seems like there are a lot of female-fronted acts out there doing the electronic thing, which is great, I like a lot of those acts. For that we are different, and our album I think is different to what a lot of people know; it’s not just like ‘Stop and Stare’ and all the other singles. The album, it’s been really nice having that out because it shows a different side to what we do. There is a slower side rather than just electronic pop songs and there’s a heavier side as well, so I think if you listen to the record it’s not exactly what you think it will be.

Where do you get inspiration for your lyrics? No offence but I imagine that Kings Cliffe [where the band grew up and live] can’t be the most enthralling place to get ideas from!

No, no, it’s not! It’s a lovely place to live and we love it there, but the lyrics aren’t focused on Kings Cliffe itself. I don’t write the lyrics, Ben does, so I’m not the best person to ask about what his reasons are behind it, but it definitely is an imagery thing. There’s a lot of colour and imagery and escapism. I think he just goes into his head and pictures stuff really. It’s definitely not your standard indie lyrics about going down to a fish and chip shop or being dumped on a Friday night.

You’re in the middle of rather a mammoth worldwide tour and you played a huge amount of festivals over the summer. What do you enjoy most about playing live, or would you secretly rather be in the studio working on new material?

That’s a good question, I like that question! We love playing live, and that’s probably the reason we started doing music in the first place, because we watched live bands and went to gigs and that is definitely a really fun side of it. This is the first time we’ve ever done a tour like this, being a headline band; we’ve always supported or played a festival. To be a headline act is a very new thing for us and we’ve never done so many dates in a row. It’s great and we’re really enjoying it, but with a tour of a length like this, you are kind of itching to get back in the studio. But then when you’re in a studio for a length of time, you want to get back out there playing. I don’t think you can be a hundred percent satisfied with either really, but we enjoy both sides of it. When we were recording the album it kind of went hand-in-hand which was the best; we were recording during the week and then road-testing stuff at the weekend playing clubs and stuff like that.

I read that you really enjoyed playing Secret Garden Party, and I saw you at V; what did you make of that performance?

V was good; festivals are definitely one of the best things you can do because you get to go and see a lot of other bands. V especially is amazing for that, because there’s just so many good people playing. We were playing like, the smallest stage, if it was even a stage, it was more like a bar really. Secret Garden Party was good because we had a later slot. We’ve played a lot [of festivals] like, 32 in total, and a lot of them were kind of early on, at like three in the afternoon. Secret Garden Party was good because they gave us a later slot in the dance tent, we went on at like, 11 o’clock on a Friday night and everyone was really up for it. That was a highlight, and it’s really close to home for us, only about twenty minutes away. Being involved as a band at big, massive festivals like V is cool, we were just happy to be there. Hopefully this year we can etch our way up into a better slot, that’d be great.

You recently played the Warehouse Project. If you were to curate such an event yourself, who would you choose to have on the bill?

Another good question! Is this out of anybody?

Yeah.

I think the Warehouse Project is quite a clubby vibe… It was good actually because when we played there, the band before us we are massive fans of, called Jamaica. They’re from Paris and they’re really, really cool, so I’d probably have them on again. I really like TV on the Radio, I think they would be cool. For live electronics, I think Soulwax would be really good, and then The Whispers or something. I don’t know how that would go down as a set of bands but I think I would definitely enjoy it!

What’s your favourite track on the record and why?

[Pause] I think from a live point of view, it changes everytime we play really. There’ll be songs that I like and don’t like according to whether they’ve gone right or not. But on the album, tracks like ‘Stonebridge’ which is a slower track, is kind of cool. Like I was saying, it shows a different side to what we do. I also like the heavier side to it, like ‘Golden Sun’ and tracks like that, so probably the tracks that people don’t know us for are the ones that I like the best.

Songs such as ‘The Cult of Romance’ and ‘I Need Love’ both garnered really positive reactions before your album was released. Why were they not included on your record?

Yeah, that’s an interesting one actually. We still play ‘I Need Love’ and we still really, really like it as a track; same with ‘The Cult of Romance’. When we were recording the album, we got to the finishing stages of it, and we had about fourteen tracks that we all liked and thought could go on the album. But I think for our first record we kind of just wanted to put out the best of what we had, and we felt that by keeping it short and sharp was better and by keeping on just ten tracks out of those fourteen, there’d be less margin for error. We thought people would like a more compact record, so it’s not that those other tracks will never see the light of day, because some already have, and they might be re-used or done for something else. Like I said, we still play ‘I Need Love’ live and ‘The Cult of Romance’ was the first thing we ever released, so I’m sure we’ll play it again at some point, just not on this tour.

Ben has worked with Groove Armada and as a band you have mixed tracks for people such as Marina and the Diamonds. If you could collaborate with any artists in the future, vocally rather than just remixing, who would you choose?

We’ve always listened to Bjork and I think she would be an amazing female vocalist for a track. Natasha Khan from Bat For Lashes, she’d be really cool. There’s probably loads I could think of but those two stand out for me straight away.

Your dad was a country musician. I think a lot of kids find themselves influenced by their parent’s musical tastes, yet your sound could not be any further from country if it tried!

Absolutely! You’re correct, mine and Ben’s dad was in a duo called The Duffy Brothers, which is with his brother. They were kind of a comedy-country act, and they did really well for themselves. They did more in America than they did here, because obviously [country] is a lot bigger out there and they toured with people like Tammy Winette and Dolly Parton. They’ve kind of been there and done it, which is great for us, because he’s massively supportive of us doing what we’ve been doing and he’s got some inside knowledge and helped direct us on what we should be doing at the early stages. It is a completely different style of music, but we grew up going to country and bluegrass festivals around England, and Ben actually lived in Dallas for his early years. The songwriting of it has probably filtered down; we might not be on a banjo or an acoustic guitar but the simple methods of writing a song has probably rubbed off. There’s always been musical instruments around the house, which has definitely been incremental in getting us to this point.

Do you think you still would be so heavily involved in music if your dad hadn’t?

Oh, I wouldn’t know. Probably not, maybe not. We definitely feel like we’ve got the musical gene from him and if that wasn’t there, then probably not.

Whereas most bands try to adopt as grungier look as possible, your onstage outfits are rather unique; you don’t see many other bands donning gold sequinned jackets. Is fashion something you’re really interested in or did you adopt this style to make more of a statement?

I don’t think it’s to make a statement necessarily. We definitely don’t want to go onstage in our T-shirts and jeans like we’re going down the pub, but it’s not a forced ‘costume’ type thing. It’s stuff we’ve picked up along the way and wear generally, not just onstage. It’s just kind of built up over time and we have been recoginsed for it. We’re not trying to make a big statement about what we wear, but we do like to put on a show. Well, not a show but just not wear our standard clothes. We quite like the idea of that and think it reflects the music in the way we want it to be reflected onstage as well as offstage.

And finally, what are three songs you wish you’d written?

Probably ‘Let’s Dance’ by Bowie, that’d be one. ‘Rock With You’ by Michael Jackson… [long pause]. I really like ‘King of the Rodeo’ by Kings of Leon, I don’t know why I’ve thought of that but we were listening to it earlier and I think that’s a great track. Their early stuff is amazing and I think that’s my favourite track that they’ve done. So, those three… a bit odd, but!

This interview was originally published on www.culturedeluxe.com