Interview: Everything Everything

Published on Wednesday 2 February 2011 11:26

As the NME Awards cross the Border, Andrew Eaton talks to Everything Everything about the influences which helped make them a band to watch

JONATHAN Higgs, frontman of Everything Everything, likens the line-up of this year's NME Awards tour to a randomly shuffling iPod. "If the Vaccines come on, then we come on, then Magnetic Man come on, then Crystal Castles; people will be like, 'Woah, what the hell?' It's like a night on shuffle. But that's how people listen to music these days."

He has a point. This year's touring showcase of on-the-up bands illustrates what a broad church "indie" music (if that term even means anything any more) currently is, offering everything from flavour-of-the-month dance music, in the shape of dubstep trio Magnetic Man, to exuberant but very much old-style punk rock, in the form of Ramones-esque bright young things The Vaccines.

Everything Everything, meanwhile, are something of a random iPod shuffle themselves, in their apparent determination to cram virtually every form of modern pop music into one band - sometimes even one song. Last year's exhilarating debut album, Man Alive, threw up so many reference points that it was often exhausting to listen to, from electronica to Afrobeat, from early 1980s synthpop (Tears for Fears in particular) to the edgier post-punk bands from the same era (from Josef K to Talking Heads), from Beyonc Knowles to Jeff Buckley, and from Pink Floyd to the playful, eccentric pop of Thomas Dolby. Most obviously, it somehow managed to blend Radiohead and R&B, Higgs crooning in a Thom Yorke-style falsetto yet spewing out a torrent of sometimes filthy verbiage as if secretly yearning to be a rapper.

"There's a lot of stuff Radiohead could learn from Destiny's Child and vice versa," says Higgs when I bring up this frequently made observation about the band's music. "There's a lot to be gleaned from American R&B. We shouldn't think that it's out of our realm just because we're middle-class white boys."

That applies to every other form of music too, he argues. "I don't think there's any difference between opera and pop, just in instrumentation. The more you learn about music the more you realise it's just the same old stuff - there's only 12 notes in the world and they only work together in a finite number of ways. If it's played on an oboe or tuba it's the same stuff as if it's played on a guitar. There's no mystery to it."

It was this "anything goes" musical magpie instinct that inspired Everything Everything's name, summing up, as the band explain it, the cultural overload of an era when every form of music is instantly available at the click of a mouse.

Unsurprisingly, it took some experimentation before Everything Everything found their voice.

Higgs began writing songs at the age of 13; ask him what they sounded like and his answer is straightforward and immediate. "Nirvana. It was the best music in the world I'd ever heard at the time and was very easy to play, so very easy to write in that quiet loud way with one finger and one string." How on earth do you get from Nirvana to Everything Everything? "Via Radiohead probably. That was a big moment for everyone and it kind of went from there."

Higgs went on to form three different bands, featuring various members of his current one. "It got better slowly. The first one was terrible, the second one was alright, the third one was alright but I was really bad at singing, and then this one. Overambitious, I think you could describe it - I was writing things way beyond my ability. We just weren't ready."

So have his abilities now caught up with his ambition? "We're still a bit behind the stuff I'd like to be able to do but I haven't really tried to learn how to get better, I've just let things happen a bit more. If you realised everything you wanted you'd end up like the Mars Volta or something - too much going on. We've got lots of little avenues that we can delve into now."

When we talk, Higgs is doing exactly that, recording rough demos on his laptop - he plays me a short burst of typically frenetic riffing over the phone - that may or may not end up on Everything Everything's second album.

"We're just grabbing every opportunity we have because we know things are going to get busy later in the year," he says - the band already have so many tour dates and festival gigs lined up that they're unlikely to find time to finish the follow up to Man Alive until 2012. In the meantime he's making the most of the attention they've had so far, in the wake of their appearance on the BBC's Sound of 2010 list, and numerous rave reviews for Man Alive: "We ended up being on the radio far more than we ever imagined in 2010."

Now he's faced with the task of making sure Everything Everything stay in people's minds during, as he puts it, "this magical January when everything in the music world suddenly changes".

How did he feel about the BBC Sound of 2011 list? Was it like being a second-year student watching all the freshers arrive?

"Yeah, definitely. We noticed the Joy Formidable were doing the NME Radar tour that we did last year, and just yesterday we were in Maida Vale doing the (Radio 1) Live Lounge and just as we came out they went in to do the session we'd done the previous year, literally passing us as they were going in.

"Words of wisdom? I don't think there are many ways you can mishandle being on that list. It's a very good boost. I suppose don't diss all the other bands, that's not a very good idea."There are certainly some bands thriving on doing just that, which is not going to work for them very well."

• The NME Awards Tour, featuring Everything Everything, the Vaccines, Magnetic Man and Crystal Castles, is at the 02 Academy, Glasgow, tonight.