Interview: Pet Moon

With a flood of new talent emanating out of Oxford right now, it’s sometimes easy to overlook artists that have stemmed from there previously. Some of you may know Andrew Mears from his days as lead singer-songwriter in the band Youthmovies, others may recognise the name as one of the founding members of current indie darlings Foals, and the remainder are probably unfamiliar with him altogether. Either way, with new solo music material as Pet Moon and two books due for imminent publication, it won’t be long before you recognise Mears for his individual talents.

Let’s establish a bit about your previous work for those who might not be familiar. You were with Youthmovies for eight years. How did the band come about and what were the initial intentions of the group?

The band started as Al and I, two tape machines through delay pedals and 100 tapes. We’d make six second loops or samples and be frantically ejecting and rewinding the whole time. It was noisy and crude, and kind of stupid. Eventually we picked up guitars and the band solidified; it was noisy and crude, and kind of stupid. I think our main aim in the beginning was to be confrontational with what we were doing, even if that confrontation was just directed at ourselves. We lived in a grey commuter town and we needed something to make us feel vital. So we made some abrasive music, spray painted our name everywhere and blew up cars at night. As the band went on and we moved away from that place, to Oxford, which is practically the safest town in the world, we naturally got preoccupied with the more musical side of the band, de-politicised, got girls, sang songs.

Youthmovies were rather different to a lot of other bands in the sense that the lyrics and instrumental composition was far more complex than most others these days would dare/bother to attempt. Why did you decide to take the more ‘highbrow’ route and do you think the current state of music is a sad reflection of the generally lazy and impatient society we live in?

There was never a decision to make it highbrow, we never thought it was, I’d argue, gladly, that a lot of it was pretty dumb. The idea in Youthmovies, for better or worse, was do what felt right at the time. We didn’t think about who was going to be listening to it, we didn’t really care, though in our way, we did consider a lot of the ideas we we’re using to be popular notions, and just ran with them. I think there’s a problem with the way Pop’s perceived now. In the past Pop used to be concerned with interesting ideas and the mutation of those ideas into popular ideas. Now I think Pop’s preoccupied with aesthetics and the consumers’ co-option thereof. That’s to say that Pop was once a proposition to it’s audience and now it’s a concession to a supposed expectation. Which is to say people just aren’t as stupid as they get treated by the music industry, but I do think we’ve all been made lazy by its conveniences.

It has to be asked… how did your involvement with Foals come about and why did you decide to not continue working with them?

Yannis and I formed Foals when his band The Edmund Fitzgerald split. I’d had the name kicking around a while – funnily enough the original line up of the namesake was Hugo (Chad Valley, Jonquil) Manuel, Alice (Musics) Gavin and me, it just never really got off the ground, but Yannis has a way of getting shit off the blocks. I already had Youthmovies going at the time, so I was sort of doing Foals in the spare. It was always understood that I’d leave if the schedules began to conflict; I don’t think any of us at the time could have predicted what a monster Foals would turn in to. People ask me a lot if I regret leaving, and I can tell they think it’s disingenuous when I say no, but the fact is Foals probably wouldn’t have made the ascent they have if I’d been in the band anyway. Yannis and I were like a two headed dog.

Who are your biggest influences musical and otherwise? Do you find yourself more heavily influenced by poets and literary figures rather than solely other songwriters?

I’ve always been influenced by cantankerous characters literary, musical or otherwise – I just as much like the idea that William Burroughs used to sit in his apartment and shoot the wall with a handgun whilst writing some electric shit, as a rock band tearing a venue apart, or an R’n’B singer requesting a basket of puppies for their dressing room. I think the whole tapestry’s hilarious, and diabolical and completely worthwhile, if the art’s not coming from a character then I don’t think it’s going to be all that strong. Yannis, Foals, and I grew up learning guitar and fighting each other, he’s always been as much competition as motivation as friend, and, as you’ll have picked up from most of his interviews he’s certainly a cantankerous prick. My biggest influences have been all those in Oxxxford that I’ve been playing with for years, my best friends, Foals / Youthmovies / Chad Valley / Jonquil / Trophy Wife & Solid Gold Dragons – the blessing force.

Pet Moon is your new post-Youthmovies musical venture. What’s the thinking behind it? Do you feel it’s a totally different direction for you?

In some ways it’s the same thinking, in that there’s a ‘please yourself’ policy to the song writing, but the song structures are a little closer to traditional. That said, I’m not a schooled musician, so they’re never going to be traditional in that way, but they’re not twelve minutes long and there aren’t so many guitar histrionics. In fact, there’s a lot less instrumentation going on generally, so it’s more digestible in that sense. I think that the percentage of Youthmovies kids who only like post-rock will have a problem with it, but those kids need to get out more and stop turning everything they see into a desolate landscape and a skeletal tree.

With Pet Moon being a solo project, how do you find the difference in dynamics between working by yourself and working with a group of other musician’s affects your creative output?

It’s easier to get my own way! There’s a lot more work to do though… it’s easy to take for granted the amount of work everyone in your band is putting in to make the song happen. For now I feel a lot happier working on my own, I like to feeling responsible for my output and being my own representation.

Your MySpace shows some photos whereby you’re partaking in some rather interesting methods (such as submerging your head in a bowl of water) in order to create sounds. Can you share any other out-of-the-ordinary approaches you’ve been taking and why you chose to pursue these rather than take a simpler path to creation?

The underwater stuff was recording my voice to get sub sounds, kick drums and basses, we must have been doing it for about six hours. Half the kit sounds are made up of water shit: berrocas dissolving as hi-hats; matches extinguished in it as crash cymbals, drips as tuned percussion etc, most of the stuff you end up using are the sounds made by accident around the ones you’re going for. The other half of the kit is live drums I played in a beer cellar. The keyboards are mainly circuit bent one offs, and the bass synth is one of Foals’ rejects! It just being me has meant having a bit more time to try stuff out and indulge potentially bad ideas. It appeals to me to go about it this way because it’s not factory set and you have to go the long way around… as bands are slowly dying because of the financial pressures put on them by the industry, and more and more people are picking up samplers to go it alone and tour easily, I think it’s important to make sure in the midst of this technology you’re still putting in the time you normally would to master a traditional instrument, it doesn’t matter how boundary pushing a piece of equipment is if you’re just loading it up with drum and bass samples downloaded off fucking mediafire.

You’re heading out on your first live dates as Pet Moon as support for Foals’ Autumn tour. Are you looking forward to this and what can we expect from these performances?

Sure I’m looking forward to it. It’s always best to tour with friends, people in bands are usually total dicks, plus Foals get a lot of free liquor when they play nowadays, so I’ll be drinking that while they play. As far as the Pet Moon shows go, they’ll be sweaty and covered in gold.

Fans of yours will already be aware that you write poetry and have been known to partake in public readings. Do you view your music as an extension of your poetry or vice versa, or are they very much two separate entities to you?

I see it as the same thing. There’s this idea that if you think of the music you’re making as art that there’s pretension to that, I don’t buy into that notion and I think it’s had a really negative effect on popular music… the more people they can get to view it as just entertainment the more people can be centralised, rounded up and tied in a bow; I don’t want to live in that world. And if anyone thinks that’s pretentious they can suck my dick.

‘Songs Without Restraint’ is your new book, which includes chronicles of band life, some of your own poetry and interviews with prominent figures in the industry. How did this come about and what would you hope readers take away from it?

It started as a tour journal for myself, it’s good to have something to bury yourself in when you’re in a van for 6 hours at a time, and then began to feel like something more. At it’s most arrogant it’s a guide for bands just starting out, to try to help them to avoid some of the mistakes I, and people I know made in the early days. There’s no real ‘how to’ on the nitty gritty shit to being a band, and I would definitely have appreciated it if there was someone around us talking us through some of the realities of touring and which characters in the industry are stereotypes and sharks. There’s a lot of bullshit that flies around that you’re more or less left to filter yourself; you tend to learn by fucking up. It’s pretty unromantic, and honestly barely scratches the surface. A lot of it though is accounts of situations we ran into and so on; I don’t think it’s a book just for kids in bands.

What’s next for you? Are you going to tour the Pet Moon stuff independently after your book release and Foals dates?

For sure, I’m going to be touring a bunch. I have another book scheduled after that too called ‘The Spiritual Temperature’. I’ll also be releasing some records from the current Oxford scene, some of that shit’s about to go global. Also look out for tattoos of parallel lines on wrists, 50 and counting.

What’s your guilty musical pleasure?

I’ve never really liked the idea of guilty pleasures, I’m not ashamed of any of the things I like regardless of what they may represent within the confines of being ‘indie’ (whatever that means now). I’m sincerely into power ballads – John Farnham’s a current favorite, I’m also really into a lot of commercial R’n’B, the misogyny’s a shame, but I really dig The Dream, D’angelo, Amerie, Beyonce… blah blah, sounds trite, doesn’t it? I’m really into virtuosic singing and snappy playing, I don’t like the idea that anyone would assume there’s some kind of irony to that. Irony has become a fucking disease in modern music.

Finally, three songs you wish you’d written…

All female singers…
Stillness Is The Move – Dirty Projectors
Aikea-Guinea – Cocteau Twins
You’ve Got The Love – Candi Staton

This interview was originally published on www.culturedeluxe.com