Tellison Interview

Tellison from the South East of the UK have been making indie-pop waves for some years – generally regarded as one of the UK’s best kept guitar-wielding secrets; sharing stages with the likes of Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, Good Shoes, Hundred Reasons, Hell Is For Heroes, I Was A Cub Scout, Dartz! Dave House, TANAOU, Spy vs Spy, Walter Shreifels, Sam Isaac, Gallows and many more.

Andy Maddison from Inhaler Records talks to Stephen H Davidson from Tellison about gigs, fans and Stuart Lee!?

Q1. I have seen you play live quite a few times over the last couple of years and it has been great to watch you grow in stature as a band over that time. You still look like you are having an immense amount of fun, have things changed for the band much as your popularity and audience has increased?

To be symptomatically and frustratingly human about it, Yes and No. Yes things have changed, a few more people come to our shows, some know we released a small record and a few singles a while ago, stunningly some people even know some of the words to some of the songs on those records. Over the last few years we have gone from playing bottom of the bill to two of our dearest and most long-suffering of friends in the smallest and most horrible of venues on the outskirts of London to headlining to a few more people than two, some of whom we didn’t even know, at KCLSU in the middle of London. We’ve gone from no one knowing or caring about our band to having a small group of very kind people know and care about our band. So, in terms of numbers of people involved outside of Tellison there have been changes. Now every so often people generally thought of as ‘inside’ the Music Industry ask us to come to have meetings with them. They look at us curiously and wonder, I suppose, whether they can make any money out of us. That definitely didn’t used to happen, but, so far it hasn’t actually changed anything about Tellison. Inside the band things generally stay the same. Although we’ve had Ben Wood (also and more importantly of Encyclopedia fame) come and go and Matt Roberts replace him as the fifth member of the band we still rehearse every weekend in Henry’s basement in a tiny room dangerously filled to bursting with equipment, we still just mess around during those rehearsals with guitars and drums and voices and keyboards and glockenspiels and other things until we make songs we all like and enjoy playing.

We’ve grown up doing that and we enjoy doing that and it seems to me the very slight increase in popularity we’ve seen over the last 18 months hasn’t changed anything about that. Sometimes we get to travel in vans with seats in the back as opposed to begging our big sisters or long-suffering friends to drive us everywhere but we still carry all of those big heavy cases, we still read books on the way and still get terrified no one is going to ever come to any show we play.

Q2. What i have always liked and admired about the band is that you have seem to have achieved verything you have so far in a very organic way, building your reputation and audience through good old fashioned hard work, by touring extensively and to a lot of small towns and venues. A lot of bands give up on this quite early as they get disheartened by poor turnouts, sleeping on floors etc. Was this ever the case with Tellison?

- Well. We certainly did and do continue to get disheartened by poor turnouts, sleeping on floors etc sometimes. But not that often, being in a band is a pretty incredibly fun job and we’re ridiculously lucky that people sometimes come and pay money to see us play. Our terrifyingly talented friend (both musically and with words: melancholy and rib-splinteringly funny, much to my visceral jealousy) Stuart Lee, the man behind Jacob’s Stories, said this once (in fact you can watch him say it again on a video on his Myspace Page and marvel at the time it took me to type it all out) on the disheartening side of being a musician, its quite long so strap yourself in:

“One of the things about live music is that its pretty much 80% shit and things always go wrong and people think ‘Oh, its not as good as I thought it would be, I thought it was going to be really magical, a magical experience, like listening to my favourite album in my room’. Well its not like that, its like being stood in the armpit of hell listening to someone try to make the music that they like but that just goes wrong and then ts a wholeheartedly miserable, dissapointing, hollow experience for everyone involved. And people that make music always come away thinking ‘Why the fuck do I do it? Why on earth do I put myself through it? This isn’t what I signed up for, I signed up for something pure and good and it turned out to be some sort of… rape in an alleyway. An endless horrible rape that I can never get away from, I close my eyes and I’m in that alleyway now being raped. And I think to myself, ‘I’ll do this again in a few more weeks, I’ll do this again somewhere else, I’ll get raped in front of loads of people, and we’ll all come away being miserable’ So, with
that in mind… could the keyboard be any louder?”

So. There you have it. Sometimes it can be disheartening to drive to towns where you don’t know anyone and watch while people (if you’re very lucky there will at least be people there) fail to enjoy the music you put so much time and effort into. But really that’s ok when you remember that you’re not in a call centre, you’re not doing something you hate for minimum wage with lots of people you don’t like. We have toured and toured because we love doing it, we’ve never had any money thrown at us so we’ve just got on with trying to get ourselves into a position we want be in. If young bands are getting so disheartened by poor turnouts and sleeping on floors that they break up then I’d suggest they can’t really enjoy making music much, because that, for us is the reward. Everything else, audiences, reviews is just strange, often humbling peripheral stuff, the music has to be why you’re in a band otherwise you won’t be able to wade through the bad things that sometimes happen.

Q3. I remember when we first met in 2007 you mentioned that some labels had been showing some interest, reading between the lines I can only assume that the next album is to be released with a major? What has been your experience so far of the type of people that inhabit that world and do you all have any nagging reservations about making that leap?

- We still don’t know who will release the next album. We’ve spoken to all sorts of people and been told all sorts of things but, until the ink is dry, nothing is confirmed. Our experience so far of the people who inhabit the major label world seems to tally with what you’d expect. There are some people working for major record labels who genuinely love music, new and old, and are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to help get new music into mainstream consciousness, they’re kind, super helpful and friendly and I’m glad they’re involved in the industry. On the flipside there are some people who, for whatever reasons, behave like the music is the least important thing about a band – and its probably very important here to remember that the major label music industry is an industry, not a hobby or a vanity project like so many independent labels, its goal is to make lots and lots of money for everyone involved – like you’d expect it would appear that there are the proverbial cigar-chomping suits who look you up and down and decide whether you’d be suitable firewood to throw into the furnace of the major label industry. And that sucks. But it only sucks from an artistic point of view, in business the behaviour so often railed against by musicians is often the norm, the difficulty, the frustration comes in the commercialisation of art, and sadly its this commercialisation that pays the bills time and again. We’ll see what the future holds for Tellison label-wise, we’re fully aware of the pros and cons of different labels and different ways of doing things and the best we can do is try to find a home where we feel we can do as much as we want to and be rewarded for doing it.

Q4. Following the departure of Ben to concentrate on his own band Encyclopedia you have a new addition to the live line up in the form of Matt Roberts, how did Matt come to land the job and does it feel a little strange to take to the stage without Ben?

- I met Matt a couple of years ago when I came to University in Cambridge. He’s been kicking around the UK underground for a long time playing with bands like No Comply and Howard’s Alias and the overground playing sax for Foals. When Ben told us he wanted to go back to doing Encyclopedia we were all pretty gutted, he’s an incredibly talented musician and a best friend to all of us, but we’re all huge Encyclopedia fans too so it’ll be good to hear that second record. We spent months trying to think of someone we knew who could handle all of the stuff Ben was doing: guitars, percussion, keyboards, samplers, vocals and more and it took me ages to realise the answer was someone I was seeing everyday. Matt’s a stunningly talented guy too and he fitted right in, its always strange to have a personnel change but Matt really stepped up and we’re enjoying paying more than ever right now.

Q5. I saw you play at The Leadmill in Sheffield last year with Hot Club De Paris and there were some great new songs in that set, do you think they are representative of the songs that you are currently recording for the new album? and when will we be seeing the album hit the shops?

- We’ve been trying different bits and pieces out on the last couple fo tours, seeing what works and what doesn’t. I’m sure there will be some things you heard that night that will be representative if not actually on the album. At the moment we’re still demoing rather than recording proper but we are aiming to get the album out this year. What with me being at University and the rest of the band working full time we’ve had to be a part-time band for years and years but, come June, we’re going full-time for the first time in the band’s history. We want our output to reflect that and we’ll be working hard to get lots of new music out….

Q6. I personally think that the DIY scene in the UK is in very good shape at present and that there are some amazing bands around at the moment. Do you think that the time is right for some of these bands to overthrow what many see as the really poor, style over substance crop of bands that are currently dominating the press, airwaves and our TV screens at the moment?

- I think the UK underground has been in very healthy shape for a long time. I’d like to think more bands will make the leap out of it and follow in the Biffy Clyro / Gallows / Get Cape / Frank Turner mould but, having some small experience of the hurdles in the way of that happening, I’d be surprised if we see much more that the trickle of bands breaking through. The UK music press, radio and tv, which are the institutions that drive that process, just aren’t interested in UK bands to the extent they’d need to be for more UK talent to break through. For whatever reason American bands coming over here are seen as more glamorous or cooler or whatever (as well as the fact they’ve probably got a hell of a lot more money driving them into everyone’s faces) and as such bands on even the UK’s biggest underground labels have got an almost unachievable struggle to compete. I’d love it if the NME turned round and gave some bands that have been working their hearts out round this country for years even just equal coverage to bands who’ve just formed from thousands of miles away, but they won’t and they aren’t anywhere near doing that.

Q7. Great to talk with you Stephen, but before we say goodbye can you tell us if Tellison will be playing any of the Festivals in 2009? and if not why not dammit!!?

- As far as I know we’re booked for a couple fo the more minor festivals so far, obviously we want to be playing as many as possible so we’re angling for that. Again its hard because hype bands are always the ones getting the slots we’d be up for, but we’re doing our best, pluggin away and trying to make the best music we possibly can. Thank you for being interested. I hope I’ve not come off sounding too cynical or anything. We love playing music, we love being a band, its the only thing we want to do and I wouldn’t give it up for anything.

Myspace link: www.myspace.com/tellison
Official site
Andy Maddison