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INTERVIEW - French Wives
Since their inception in 2008, Glasgow’s French Wives have been working intensively to build a strong fan base in Scotland. Now, after a steady rise, the band is ready to release their debut album Dream of the Inbetween. We caught up with Jonny Smith (drums and vocals) last week for a quick chat about their upcoming album and tour.
So how did all of you get together?
As much as I wish this was a fascinating story of us meeting, it's a fairly mundane one! Stuart and Scott met over the internet (the shame!) and the rest of us kind of joined through mutual friends.
How did you come up with the band name? Was it a "names in a hat" situation, or is there some significance behind it?
The name was actually only supposed to be a temporary one as we had our first gig coming up and still hadn't come up with anything (despite some horrendous suggestions). It was kind of 'borrowed' from a friend of the band and after a few weeks it really stuck, or maybe we were all just too lazy to change it! There's also an adult movie called French Wives, which I've heard is great.
Your debut album is due out in early May. How does it feel to finally have the release date in sight after all that hard work?
Amazing. It's taken us an incredibly long time to get to this point and I cannot describe how good if feels to be safe in the knowledge it is out soon. It's been such a great experience working with our producer Tony Doogan and we've all learned so much from it.
Is there a definite artistic leader in the group, or is it a collaborative experience? How do you approach songwriting as a whole?
It's very much a bit of both. Our guitarist Scott or singer Stuart brings most of the initial ideas to the table, and then we spend time in our studio playing about with them as a band. We approached the album a little differently as we wanted it to be a singular body of work, rather than just a bunch of our songs thrown together. With that in mind, we took out the first half of 2010 writing it in our tiny, dirty studio in Shawlands. We should have had the label fork out for 6 months in Spain!
Is there an artist/performance you've experienced that's shaped the way you approach music?
This probably isn't the best question for me given the range of ridiculous gigs I've been to over the years. However, we were lucky enough to be asked to play Connect festival in 2008 when we'd only been together for a few months. Sigur Ros played the Sunday night and we were all properly blown away by it. I guess that's one performance that really brought us together as a band. Franz Ferdinand came on afterwards and our bassist inexplicably left to go and sleep in his tent - he still gets pelters for that! In terms of an artist shaping how we actually approach our music, I would say bands like Pulp and The Smiths are huge influences for us. Despite the fact they're largely considered indie bands, both still ostensibly write pop music, which is something we're very much dedicated to.
You've got quite a busy tour schedule in 2012. What shows are you most looking forward to?
We're heading to America and Canada in March for South by Southwest and Canadian Music Week respectively so we're super excited for that. It's first time we've even left the UK as a band, so it should be great. Either that or we'll want to kill each other. The official SxSW showcase is usually a big one, so hopefully that goes well!
Finally, a meteorite is about to crash into the Earth, wiping out everything, and you have one hour left. How do you spend the hour (running around screaming while waving your hands in the air doesn't count as an answer)?
We've just been to London for our US Visa meeting, which involved hours of train travel. None of us really slept at all over the two days and the most rational thing we could think to do on the way back up was drink loads of cans of beer. So, yeah, probably drink loads of cans of beer and if possible try to facilitate a pre-apocalyptic game of Fifa.
French Wives release their debut album, Dream Of The Inbetween via Electric Honey on 7th May 2012.