Interview with Blood Red Shoes

Listen to ‘7 Years’ from Blood Red Shoes’ latest, third album, and you’ll hear the line ‘A future perfect, with holes torn in the sides’. Stephen, one half of the two-piece admits that ‘7 Years’ is an almost allegorical tale of the band’s history, and you can see it. Three albums in, each of blisteringly good quality, they surely have built a future for themselves of musical success that only they can change the course of. But it’s true; they haven’t got here without taking chunks out of each other, all the same. 

Stephen, you’ve explicitly said that you’re only playing two UK dates this year – one is a huge headline show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and we’re delighted that the only other one is in Norwich, the day before. Why is that? Because Norwich has always been really fun for us! We’re doing the London show and we wanted somewhere as a warm up, somewhere smaller and when we were talking through places that we’ve been that are really fun, and before we even put a record out, Norwich was always really fun. We had some really cool shows in Norwich Arts Centre, and we were like, ‘fuckin’ let’s go back!’ 

That’s amazing! Especially because we didn’t even play Norwich; when our second record came out, we never even fucking played Norwich – it was like a total oversight! Then we were like, ‘we owe it to come back a bit more often!’ It’s fun and it’s got a special place in our hearts, especially the Arts Centre from the old days. We were like, ‘let’s go play there, it’ll be perfect.’ 

It’s a pretty bold move, saying they’ll be your last UK dates of 2013, because you’re a band who are intrinsically linked with the road really, aren’t you? Yeah, I mean the reality is that we’re probably going to be touring, just not in Europe. We’ll be doing a lot in America, but before we’ve tried to tour everywhere at the same time, like we tried to tour all across the UK and Europe; we’ve gone to Eastern Europe, we’ve gone to America, Canada, we’re going to Australia – it’s fucking hard to do all of it at the same time. So we were like, next year, we’re gonna focus on the US and take a bit of a breather from Europe and the rest. I think that’s cool, you know, we’ve played so much that I don’t think people are gonna miss us too bad. It’s only a year anyway, it’ll go fast.

Do you think you’ll get the chance to catch up on some stuff that you haven’t even had the time to entertain the idea of before on your heavy touring years? Maybe catch up on some daytime telly?! Haha, I don’t even live anywhere, so I won’t be catching up on any TV! In all honesty, we’re the kind of people that as soon as we’re not on the road, we’ll take a couple of days break max, then we’ll start working on songs, or doing something. We’re too restless; we can’t sit still. We’re always cooking up a plan for something, so there’s not much catching up that can be done. As soon as we stop touring next year, we’ll just be in a studio somewhere, trying to write songs, trying to come up with a new record.

I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing The Joy Formidable for this issue as well, and they were saying that they basically have no home; they have no address. It’s the same for you – you come off the road, and then what? Yeah, we’re just at home on the road, like right now I’m in my hotel in Brighton, and I come from Brighton! But I’m staying in a hotel while we do some studio work because I don’t live anywhere! It’s ridiculous, but to be honest, I don’t really miss having a home. I’ve just got so used to touring, and that being my home. When I come back to Brighton, I just grab a hotel – it doesn’t really bother me. Maybe if I grow up one day, I might start to want a home.

You might develop a need for throw cushions in your life, or something like that, which call for a sofa, which ultimately denotes the need for a living room and a house… [LAUGHS] Yeah, it could happen.

You’ve treated us to the stream of the new EP online, and it’s got some real balls, this new material. You’re still feeling really creative, it seems? Yeah, like I say, we find it hard to stop. This year, we started jamming a few songs over the summer, that kind of came out during soundchecks, like when we played all the festivals over summer, we had all the days off in the week ‘cause all the festivals are at the weekend, so we were kind of just jamming. We didn’t have a specific thing, like ‘let’s write a record’, or anything, we were just kinda fucking around, having some fun. A few songs came together and we’d been talking to this producer, who recorded it, for years going ‘at some point, when we’re in America, we’ll take a couple of days out and just try recording’, ‘cause we’ve never really used another producer – we’ve had the same one for all three albums. We were like, it’d just be cool to do an experiment and use a totally different guy. We had these songs that were really different to what we’d put on the record, so we thought, ‘OK, let’s try and record them with him and try and do something really spontaneous, do it in a really short time and try and make it as fucked up sounding as possible.’ So we went in, as soon as we’d finished our US tour, we took these songs that we’d barely finished jamming over the summer and just put them together. We were like, ‘done, let’s just put it out!’ Put something out, do a limited vinyl that’s cool and for free, just get it out there rather than wait around and say, ‘oh, do we put it on an album, or do this…’ It was like, ‘let’s just fucking do it!’

There’s a lot of aggression in it that I really like, but ‘In Time to Voices’ was such an accomplished album, and something different for you guys. There’s a lot of space in it, which kinda takes confidence, to allow that space to creep in… Do you feel like more accomplished musicians now? Yeah, yeah, I hate using words like that, like maturity or accomplished and things like that, but we are; we’ve been playing for 8 years, if we hadn’t got better then it’d be fucking wrong! I do, I feel like we’re better at writing songs and that record was a real songwriter-y record and the focus on that was about the songs working really well and about vocal parts. With the EP, the EP’s kind of more like we’ve done before; it’s about the riffs and about us just jamming out, whereas on the album we just wanted to explore songwriting and layers, and using the studio to create different atmospheres. Yeah, just experimenting and seeing where it went, you know.

You weren’t playing it safe either; I read a quote, which said you wanted to create an album that was only limited by your imaginations. That makes me think, translating that to a live show – has that been a headache for you? Yeah, we can’t play half the songs live, so we don’t! [LAUGHS] That might be a little drawback but that doesn’t bother me really, because we didn’t want to be restricted in the studio. We’ve got three records do draw on for what we’re gonna play live and we’re not gonna play for two and a half hours, because we’re not Bruce Springsteen or something, so we were like, ‘OK, we can play about five of these songs live – that’s fine!’ The quieter songs just wouldn’t work for us live; we play them in acoustic sessions and things like that, but it was a risk to do it. Some people got really pissed off that we didn’t just make a punk record, you know.

But we’ve all grown up with you really, we’ve all aged eight years, so we should be able to appreciate the slower moments in life now. Yeah, I mean we always have, we just haven’t explored them in this band. The music we listen to covers a lot of different grounds, and the stuff we made in previous bands as well. We just felt that it was time to fucking mess things about a bit, and explore things and test ourselves to see if we can even do these things that are in our imagination. You can’t always do things that you hope you can, so it’s kind of a challenge for us, as much as it is for anyone else who gets the record and thinks, ‘what the fuck? That’s not what I expected!’

But the first album, ‘Box of Secrets’ has a great legacy – I still listen to it all the time because it is so listenable. I’ve taken a quote kind of out of context, but I read that you felt you’d kinda fucked the first album up, but surely you must attach a lot of pride to that album? Yeah, you know we think we’ve fucked every album up, as soon as we’ve made it. We see flaws in everything immediately after finishing it, that’s the only way we know how to progress. I think if we ever make a record and we sit there and we’re completely satisfied with it, then I’ll want to break the band up, because otherwise what are you going to do then? I saw loads of flaws in the first record, which we tried to fix in the second record, then we saw loads of flaws with that, which we tried to fix with the third, then we immediately saw flaws in that and wanted to make an EP, which was totally different. Then the ideas we’ve got for what we’re gonna do after that are different, [LAUGHS]. I mean, I’m proud of those records, d’you know what I mean? I mean, those records are exactly the best we could have made in the time that we made them and I’m always proud of the songs we’ve written, but in terms of them as a recording, or the way we did it, I’m always like, ‘shit, that’s too fast’, or too slow, or ‘fuck, I wish I’d have sung that better. I wish we’d have made more of this song, or shortened this section.’ You’ll always find problems.