The bimonthly christian mag Relevant Magazine has a two page spread featuring Doves in their latest issue. They recently spoke to Jez about Doves career upto now and the upcoming hiatus. You wont learn a great deal new, but a different change of pace from the usual music press.
Norwich based Outline recently spoke to Jez about the upcoming Thetford Forest show. As well as talking about the Thetford gig, the interviewer asked some interesting questions for a change. There may be a hint as to what to expect in the future outside of Doves..
You recently announced a two year break from touring and recording and I wondered what your thinking was behind that?
The main reason is to get off the carousel of tour, studio, tour, studio, tour, studio which just got a bit boring. We’re gonna do some individual projects and then hopefully come back and do the Doves fifth album with something to bring to the table. I think we all need to do individual things for our own sanity really. We’ll come back revitalised ‘cause we’ll have been to different musical territories than we would with Doves so it’s gonna be a good thing.
Are you going to be doing individual music projects or will it be other stuff?
Well we’ll be doing music separately but I can’t tell you anything about it yet.
You were Sub Sub before you were Doves. Have you ever been tempted to release a dance track under an alter ego?
Well that might be part of one of our projects outside Doves, so you might see that, yeah.
There’s been a rumour floating around for a while that you’re going to be doing something with Guy Garvey. Is that still on the cards or has it gone on the back burner?
Yeah that could still be on the cards, absolutely. We’re good mates with Elbow so that could well be a reality.
To read the full interview, click here.
US based Under the Radar Magazine recently caught up with Jez, some interesting questions…
Hays Davis: You three knew each other back when you were playing with other bands in high school. What kind of music were you playing at that time?
Jez Williams: I suppose we just learned our instruments, really. I was in a band with Andy. Jimi was in his own band, so we were really in separate bands. I suppose Jimi was doing sort of mod covers, like The Kinks, and Quadrophenia, The Who. We were sort of doing our own stuff but the occasional cover crept in there, like Blondie, “Hanging on the Telephone.” You remember that one? And Bruce Springsteen, “Born to Run.” [Laughs] We were, like, 14, 15 at this stage, just messing around, just finding our feet, really. It was really cool: You’re in a band, you’re at school. It’s pretty good, man. Good times.
To read the full interview, click here.
Earlier this evening Doves chatted to BBC Radio 2’s Mark Radcliffe, they also played a couple acoustic numbers. A rather funny interview as always. Subjects covered, what the Cedar Room is about, dodgy music & insurance fraud!! ;) They played Pounding & Snowden.
Spinner conducted a short interview with Jimi, some interesting info..
Why release a best-of now?
I have to admit it wasn’t our idea to do it, but then we got over our reticence. We’ve cleaned out the vaults now, so whatever we do next, the slate’s clean. We’ve put three brand-new tracks on it, which sweetened the pill for me, and we wondered when was the right time to get nostalgic, because none of us are really and we haven’t listened to a lot of those tracks since we recorded them.
So how involved were you in compiling it?
Very involved — we’d never let anyone else do it. It took longer than we expected, but mind you everything always does in Doves. Hopefully, it stands up to things like ‘Songs to Learn and Sing’ by Echo And The Bunnymen, because I look at those as albums in their own right; you forget that they’re compilations.
Where did the title come from?
It’s inspired by a book by Rory Stewart, ‘The Places In Between,’ it just seems to fit because it bookends this part of our life. It’s closing the last 12 years. We’ve all read his story now, it’s an inspiring journey this guy did after the invasion of Afghanistan. He travelled on his own from village to village. The guy’s got balls.
How has working on this changed your perception of what you have achieved so far?
We were unanimous on the songs that haven’t aged so well that didn’t go on it, but on the whole, it’s a good run of music from three kids. ‘Sulphur Man’ was a moment for me — I was back there recording it, writing the lyrics in my front room with ’em both, bouncing ideas.
I think someone could cover that really well and I never earmark my songs for other people, but I think someone female could take it somewhere else. Someone huge, Lady Gaga because she’d make a mint. I need the dough [laughs].
And I look back fondly at the ‘Some Cities’ period, going to this old schoolhouse in Scotland with Ben Nevis out the window. I spent six weeks up there and didn’t want to come home; my mum had just died and I just wanted to be away.
Before this, you took four years to put out ‘Kingdom of Rust,’ which you have admitted was a frustrating time for the band. Did you come close to breaking up?
It was never said, but I’m sure it crossed everyone’s minds. There were weeks when we didn’t want to be there. I had a lot of family things going on, so did Jez, so did Andy, but we just couldn’t give up. We’ve never had out-and-out throwing things at each other. It’s just not the way we operate. Maybe it would be nice if we did sometimes, maybe we just brood with each other.
You have some live dates coming up this spring and into the summer, but what then? Can we look forward to another Doves album?We’re looking forward to going out and having some fun with existing material. It’s not about buying time, but it’s good not to go on this treadmill of album, tour, album, tour. These days there’s no rules and we’ve not decided … there’s been talk of people doing, not solo, but collaborations and songwriting with or for other people, then hopefully bring it back to the table at a later date.
For more, visit Spinner.com
A few things to catch up on. Lets start off with a cracking interview that was in today’s Sunday Observer. The band spoke to Luke Bainbridge last week whilst at Jodrell Bank performing a couple acoustic tracks for the Guardian website.
Highlights of the interview include the band talking about bouncing guitar riffs off the Moon like a giant delay pedal, as we reported on last year. Jez also confirmed that Hot Press misquoted him with regards to the coming tour being the band’s last.
Even given their habit of recording in strange locations –including under a flyover on the M62 and a deserted Benedictine monastery –Doves‘ wheeze last year was far-out stuff. Sitting in the shadow of the towering Lovell telescope in Cheshire, guitarist Jez Williams is telling the tale of the band’s cosmic rock experiment here. “I basically used the moon as a massive delay pedal…” he laughs. “It doesn’t get more prog rock than that!”
It’s not quite what Sir Bernard Lovell had in mind when he established Jodrell Bank observatory in the aftermath of the second world war. Lovell was primarily concerned with investigating cosmic rays, and the observatory has since played a key role in the research of meteors, quasars and pulsars. But last year Doves, who have a love affair with Jodrell Bank that stretches back over three decades –to when they visited the site on a school trip –came up with a slightly more rock’n’roll suggestion.
After Jodrell Bank had successfully bounced voice recordings of astronaut Buzz Aldrin and Professor Stephen Hawking off the moon (to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landings) the idea was hatched with resident astrophysicist Dr Alastair Gunn to do the same with a Doves guitar riff. Dr Gunn is a “huge fan” of the band whom he sees at “the pinnacle of British indie rock”, and when he’s not staring at the skies, he plays lead guitar in a local group who cover “Catch the Sun” by Doves (“Pretty well I think!”).
“He had a load of dials on a box. I plugged into it, he just dialled the moon, like you do,” explains Jez Williams, who it’s fair to say is a better guitarist than he is an astrophysicist, “and two and half seconds later it [the riff] comes back. It messes up the signal beyond recognition, it’s pretty wild. We’ve got a recording of it that we’ll definitely use at some stage.”
“Put that in your fucking pipe, Rick Wakeman!” laughs singer and bassist Jimi Goodwin.
The guitar signal was actually sent from Jodrell Bank’s control room, via ISDN, to its sibling radio telescope in Cambridge, which transmitted it to the moon, and then the Lovell at Jodrell Bank picked up the part of the signal that was reflected back off the Doves’ side of the moon… like a cosmic delay pedal.
“You should have been rocking a cape when you did it,” smiles Andy Williams, the drummer and Jez’s twin.
To read the full interview and see an acoustic version of Kingdom Of Rust, click here.
Also check out the video of the first ever interview by parabolic reflectors!
Then yesterday (Saturday) the band performed a couple acoustic tracks for BBC Radio 2’s Dermot O’Leary. They performed Andalucia & kingdom Of Rust, they also spoke for a little bit. To hear it it all, head over to the BBC iplayer link from here.
Andy Spoke to XFM Manchester’s Pete Mitchell on Sunday there. I managed to grab a wee minute of the interview (cheers to Slow Hands at Doves board for the heads up) which you can listen to here. The bit missing is basically just Andy talking about how somebody suggested they should revisit Blue Water for the Best Of. What you will hear is Andy talk about the origins of Andalucia and the band’s plans for the rest of the year.
To those who have asked about status of doves.net.. Not sure to be honest though I do know the site will have a fresh new look which should be going live any day now, so that may be why the site is down.
NME aired a interview they conducted with Jez before the Leeds Cockpit show last week. Liz was able to scribble down what was said. Some nice info, with regards to plans for next year:
He sounded in good spirits but speaking quite fast and despite my ninja notetaking skillz I can only paraphrase the thing.There was nothing really new, just a few snippets about next year.
The interviewer was asking when was the last time they had played the cockpit and Jez said in was in 2000 and he seemed quite surprised it was nearly 10 years ago, he also mentioned that they like playing in small places where you can see the ‘whites of eyes and the sweat drips off the ceiling’!He was asked about his highlight of 2009 and he said headlining the John Peel tent at Glastonbury,
The interviewer then asked about the making of KOR …and it was the usual about how long it had taken, and the different sounds …Sub Sub was mentioned, and how they’d enjoyed picking up keyboards again.
Also how they wanted it to sound like a good dj-ing set I think ..ie making sure all the tracks fitted together despite all sounding quite different and that it had taken them nearly 3 weeks to decide the order of the album.The last song to go on was Greatest Denier ….there was something here about writing a song specifically to fit in with the others that were already on the album , but I didn’t quite catch it.There was something about Norman Cook and masks, but again I didn’t quite catch that!
They talked about plans for next year and Jez said they were already pencilled in for some festivals in the summer but he wasn’t allowed to say which ones yet, and the compilation album, out in April, which will contain some ‘rarities’ and 3 brand new songs that they will be going into the studio to record in January.Finally, he asked whether, as they’d been together so long,whether Doves had any Christmas traditions and Jez said they always used to have a Christmas curry, but they hadn’t been for about 3 years, so he might have to ‘reinstate it’.
That’s about all I can remember/made notes about …hopefully it’ll be up on their site at some point as it’s a good listen and they played House of Mirrors in the middle of it
Thanks allot Liz! Some nice info there. Here’s hoping the best of is spread over two discs. Disc one with all the favourites and the second featuring all the new stuff/rarities. Though probably wishful thinking?
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