Interview

Lanterns On The Lake

by Lizz 26 October 2016

It’s autumn, the season of mists and darkness, so what better time to get acquainted with Lanterns On The Lake, whose atmospheric, cinematic indie tunes will be blasting out of Open later this month? Formed in 2007, they’ve been through some line up changes, produced some amazing music and created some of the most artistic merch I’ve ever seen. I spoke to lead singer Hazel about Newcastle, their latest album Beings and playing with the Royal Northern Sinfonia.

Hazel, how did you initially start making music, and was it a dream of yours to do it full time right from the start?

I started as most people do - I was a teenager trying to write songs of my own on a guitar in my bedroom with the handful of chords that I knew. It was a dream to be in a band - I wanted to write songs and make music but I didn’t know if I could really be a singer. I joined a band with Ol and Paul because they were looking for a rhythm guitarist and a singer. I joined thinking that I could be their singer temporarily until we found a proper singer. We never found another singer so I’m still doing it but I wouldn't change anything now.

You’ve obviously a talented artist as well – is that a career route you have considered in the past, or might consider again in the future?

I love that side of things but I never considered it as a career. To be honest it started out as a means to an end, designing artwork and EP packaging for the band, because I had a real idea of how I wanted the aesthetics of the band to suit the music and what we were about.

I love the art you’ve created recently using your lyrics. In fact your merch is all very special. Is that a deliberate move, to offer extra special items for your fans, a sort of anti-digital thing?

Absolutely. That’s a big part of Lanterns On The Lake. I think you get bands who just chuck out cheap tacky merch to make some cash. We’ve always approached the merch side the same as we approach any other aspect of Lanterns - we want things to be unique and special and went to put good things out in to the world. The lyric art pieces have been hugely popular and I love doing things like that for people who like our band.

You signed to Bella Union six years ago, and have released three albums since then, as well as touring a lot. What aspect of being in Lanterns on the Lake do you most enjoy?

There’s different aspects of writing, record and touring that I love and get a lot out of personally - especially when you get to do all these things with your best mates. But my favourite thing is the feeling you get when you’re almost finished writing a new song; when you are excited and engrossed in that writing process, when you are trying to push the song to reach its potential and you know it’s almost there, when the world hasn’t heard it yet and it’s a kind of secret thing that exists in the room at that point in time. Yeah, that’s probably my favourite feeling.

Your music combines massive swirling walls of sound, delicate, steady and comforting vocals along with stirring peaks of emotion. When the band started did you have an idea of how you wanted to sound or has it been a natural development over the years?

It’s been a natural development. We didn’t sit down and write a description of how we wanted to sound, we didn’t even know what genre of music we played until we’d see reviews and stuff. We’ve just written and played what feels right to us.

When Beings came out you played with the Royal Northern Sinfonia at Sage Gateshead. What was that experience like?

As you can probably imagine, it’s a pretty surreal experience when such a renowned orchestra are playing songs you wrote on a cheap acoustic or on a piano one afternoon! The show itself was ace playing to over a thousand people in our hometown and the atmosphere was something else.

You added Bob on bass and Angela on strings in 2014 – was it a pretty seamless process?

Yeah it was - I mean you’d expect me to say that in an interview of course, but it really was! They are so super laid back and nice people. They are also luckily great musicians. We have a lot of fun touring together and I now can’t imagine it any other way.

Beings was recorded in your home town of Newcastle after you’d returned from being on tour. Was there a sense of coming home, and did any of that become part of the album?

I think there’s this this weird thing that can happen when you’ve been on a long tour and I don’t know if every one gets this when they tour but you feel kind of turned upside down and like you are glad to be home but that you don’t totally feel that you fit. You feel exhausted but restless at the same time. The album was born out of that upside down feeling. There were also lots of other things going on for us - two of our band members had just quit and we didn’t know what the future held. I think I’ve described it before as a drunken existential crisis. There was a lot of playing our hearts out in the rehearsal room and then going to the pub.

How would you say it differs from your previous two albums?

With the first two albums we were more self conscious, at least I know that I was. I think we also felt we had something to prove with those first two records. We wanted to be liked or at least understood at that time. With Beings it was different. Maybe it was because we’d been through a lot personally and as a band that it just felt like we just wanted to make something for ourselves. At that point, two members of the band had quit and we didn’t honestly know if we were going to keep going or how long it would all last. We were in this strange position because we were feeling more creative than ever but didn’t even know if anyone would ever hear the music we were making. So we were just making the record we wanted to make for ourselves. As Dylan sang, “when you ain’t got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose”.

What’s the scene like in Newcastle at the moment? Any local bands we ought to check out?

There’s some decent bands at the moment - A Festival, A Parade are pretty good, they’ve got a couple of EPs out. There’s band called Canyons too - Paul (our guitarist) recently produced their EP.

Your guitarist Paul also produces your music. Does it help having someone who’s fully understanding of the band’s sound and raison d’etre?

It’s very important to us. We love to be in control of every creative aspect of the band and the way Paul mixes is an art form in itself. He taught himself just as a means to an end because we couldn’t really afford to be going in posh studios and all that malarky. Paul is becoming an incredible mixer and producer in his own right now too. He’s done Minor Victories (the supergroup consisting of members of Mogwai and Slowdive), Douglas Dare’s new one (coming out on Erased Tapes) and Holly Macve (coming out on Bella Union). I think he’s really grown into a brilliant mixer and producer and it’s exciting to see it happening.

I read that Bella Union pretty much let you get on with it..what does having a label offer you, as these days so many bands don’t?

We don’t have a manager so they’ve offered support and strategic advice in that capacity. Although they are a small indie label they’ve also been able to contribute financially with things like getting music videos made and things like that. Then there’s all the stuff like PR and radio pluggers that they arrange for us. I can see why and how many bands don’t need or want to go with record labels but Bella Union suit us very much and it’s a comfortable home for us.

You play many instruments yourself and also write the lyrics to your songs. What’s your process for working with the band to put songs together?

Songs can come to life and evolve in lots of different ways for us. We don’t tend to stick with one approach but generally speaking we’ll spend a good bit of time trying the flesh out an idea that one of us has and then we might demo it, listen back and then continue playing around with it from there on. We’ve got lots of demos of songs at different stages of their evolution.

What have you got planned for the next year? Have you started work on the next album?

We haven’t started on anything new just yet. In the past I’ve always tried to plan things with certain goals in mind, like releases etc. But this time I haven’t done that and so far the diary is empty once we finish this tour. Maybe we’ll have a rest or maybe one of us will decide we should make a new record and we’ll get to work.

What can we expect from your show here in Norwich? What song in particular are you hoping to get into the setlist?

It’s actually our bass player Bob’s birthday so we’ll be in good spirits that night and we have a day off the following day for a look around. As for the show itself, we’ve never played Norwich so we’ll be enjoying playing to people who haven’t seen us live before. We’ve had a few requests for an old song of ours called Not Going Back To The Harbour so I think we’ll try to fit that in.

Lanterns On The Lake play at Open on 24th November. Tickets available from ueatickets.ticketabc.com.

2016