“‘Cause we all act like animals.”
Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. Dobbin chatted to Rory Friers (guitar), Ewen Friers (bass) and Chris Wee (drums) of And So I Watch You From Afar at ArcTanGent 2024 on Thursday, just after their “by request” set the previous night. Photography © by Kieran C White, contact before any usage.
Dobbin: Last night you played a “by request” set list. Did you have any nerves about handing it over to the public to pick? I always wonder what’s going on in a band’s head when they do that.
Rory: We did, and we probably spent way longer than was necessary debating – if we’re gonna put our entire catalogue up, what sort of curveballs, what sort of crazy set’s gonna be decided? And then, of course, by the laws of averages, if you have enough people voting anything, it was pretty much the top 10 or 12 tracks from Spotify. The singles, the ones we play live, the crowd pleasers.
Dobbin: Were there any curveballs?
Rory: I think “Clench Fists, Grit Teeth…Go!” hasn’t featured as much in the recent years. Also, it’s maybe a testament to how good a tune this is, but “S Is For Salamander”, which isn’t even on Spotify.
Chris: We don’t know why it’s not on Spotify… In the grand scheme of the band, I’m a relative newcomer, to the on stage element at least. I’d never played “S Is For Salamander” live, so then we got Karina Palmer (of Souper and previously Bear Meets Ninja) to play guest drums. I was like, oh good, this will take the heat off me – and then she was just unbelievably good, and I was like, damn it!
Rory: I think the beauty of the fan voted set was that I don’t think we’ve ever played all of those in one set together. Even though some of them were tunes we knew well, to have them all in this mega-set together was really special. Plus, if you’re in a band that believes in democracy, that’s it in its most pure form. Give the people what they want!
Chris: This is democracy manifest!
Dobbin: I was pleased it was not overwhelmingly LP1. Are you sick of “Set Guitars To Kill”? Setlist.fm says you’ve played that over 200 times.
Rory: We’ve played well over 1000 shows, and we’ve played it at almost every show, not to mention rehearsals.
Ewen: I don’t think I am. I think I still enjoy it. It’s a sure-fire one that you’ll have a connection with the crowd.
Rory: It’s actually quite good for set pacing, it’s easy to throw in. We’ve opened with it, had it in the middle, and the end. Some songs can only go in specific places. An album version of something exists in one context, but once you take it to a room full of people who knows the songs… I think that’s why we never get stick of them, because the songs get recontextualised each night.
Dobbin: One song I would have wished for is “The Voiceless”. You’ve not played that recently – I saw you do it at the Koko about ten years ago. It’s unique in your discography, what’s its story?
Ewen: It’s the oldest song. We wrote that at Chris’ parents house during rehearsals. The bass line was actually from a punk song I had written, it came together really quickly. We had that fast little lick that went perfectly over the bass line. At the time, I’d first gotten a reverb and delay pedal, and was experimenting with this walking, ascending choral line over the top of it. Chris was throwing in the skipping beat, the half time beat, the thumping beat… we took all those elements and ran with them in lots of different songs. But that song is a great descriptor as the inception of us as musicians.
Chris: It was a timestamp of where we were, what our intention was. We’d done vocal bands before that, and that was the first line in the sand for all that.
Dobbin: Is that why it’s called “The Voiceless”?
Chris: Yeah, could have been…
Rory: A bit on the nose, isn’t it? I suppose it’s a really long song – as we were saying, some songs can go anywhere in a set list. “The Voiceless” is a good ender, but with all the songs we tend to add, it makes the set crescendo in a different way. It would have been good to play that one. It’s a song we love, and it’s interesting you say it’s an outlier, but a couple of people have said to me that “Years Ago” from the new record is kind of like the And So I Watch You From Afar of 2024’s “The Voiceless”.
Dobbin: Speaking of the newly released Megafauna, I think it’s cracking, and I’m only early into my listens. I wanted to pick out “Gallery of Honour” as an early favourite. It’s the first time, to my knowledge, you’ve used piano.
Rory: “Gallery of Honour” was definitely one of my favourite tracks too. A good friend of ours Michael Keeney, who also performed on Jettison, and I’ve worked with him outside of the band. He’s an incredible orchestrator, and in every aspect musically, he’s brilliant. We scored a few of those piano parts, but most of it was just running takes, us shouting down the mic: “Can you do a bit of this? Can you do a bit of that?” We wanted the second half to feel like you were being shot into technicolour space.
Ewen: Michael’s musical instinct is brilliant. We don’t have the technical terms to describe what we wanted, but he turned our words into those beautiful sounds.
Dobbin: All your records have a unique mix. That’s true of Megafauna – it’s very raw, very live, very “tone in your fingers”. What went into it?
Rory: The mix is really straightforward, actually. There’s a guitar in the left, a guitar in the right, and bass and drums straight down the middle. We allowed ourselves some strings and some piano in the second half of the record, but the mission was that it need to sound how it sounded when we were writing the songs in our rehearsal room. The songs had to be good enough in that form – we couldn’t take them in and make them better by layering, or putting vocals on – they needed to be complete pieces of work, and we needed to replicate a good version of us playing them. It helped that we were in an incredible studio with an incredible mix engineer, Tommy McLaughlin, with lots of lovely gear. The songwriting is quite complex for us, but in terms of the sounds and what you’re hearing, it’s probably the most simple album we’ve ever made.
Ewen: The other element was the rehearsing of the record. We tried it a million ways, performing it in the room until we settled on exactly how it would go. It’s nice that you say you can hear the fingering of the frets – that’s all stuff we carefully considered.
Rory: It was the album with the most preparation in it, the most time for the songs to bed-in. Previous times we were still trying to tweak things, but with that, everyone was very happy with how it sounded. The recording was just about getting the performance, take after take.
Chris: Even the way the guys were doing the guitars, they were doing it together, it felt much more like the recordings you make when you’re in your first band.
Dobbin: What’s the story behind the album cover? There must be 100 perfect pictures of you playing live, but the picture you chose was incredible. Did the “B-SECURE” guitar survive?
Rory: The guitar pretty much survived – it does have a bit of a chunk out of the back of it… we were playing a show in Ghent, Belgium. That was captured by a great photographer and a great friend, Ciara McMullan, who’s worked with us for years. I think it’s something to do with the mindset of how this record felt, how the four of us felt being in band together, and where we were at as people. I think, often with And So I Watch You From Afar, we’ve hidden behind these bigger concepts, fantastical worlds, and there’s something about the pandemic, lockdown, everything stopping, us not being able to see anyone… we came out saying, you know what, we’re a band, we’re here, we’re not a high concept thing. It’s just us four friends. Leaving our egos on the door. We have such a relationship with the people who come to our shows now, we kind of thought that we’ve got nothing to hide away from. You know us, we know you, you’ll recognise that when you see it.
Dobbin: On the subject of another cover, a theory I have about the cover of Jettison is that it resembles a pair of lungs. It came out during the pandemic. Is there any truth there?
Ewen: The ‘respiratory’ album… Well, the working title for the third track was “Lung”… we would never get in the way of any theory on anything to do with the band, we never have, so…
Dobbin: The Endless Shimmering, of course, has such a funny cover. I recently got the LP and the inner sleeve is even funnier. You’ve been to space on Heirs, fairy land with All Hail Bright Futures, the kitchen floor on The Endless Shimmering, high concept again for Jettison, and now back to the stage.
Rory: The design budget is getting smaller and smaller, I guess!
Dobbin: I’ve always regarded your albums as ‘growers’. I’ve had a first reaction to them that has always evolved a bit. When I see people discuss your work online, I think people experience that too. Particularly with All Hail Bright Futures, the reaction to that was quite a shock. Do you agree?
Ewen: I wholeheartedly agree – especially nowadays, I feel like we want to put out a record with a caveat, you’ve got to give that some time. You forget when you’re writing it, idea after idea, it’s just so dense. That’s just the type of space we get to. With All Hail Bright Futures, I don’t like to think we’re provocative for its own sake, but we’ve always felt we are an experimental band, and we like to find that space at the edge. We always put out a record presuming we’re going to piss off a load of people. But we always put a record out knowing that there’s actually people who, perhaps not ‘trust’ us, that’s too strong a word… they’re going to see it through. My favourite records are the ones that you go back to many times. Some of my favourite records I didn’t get past the first two songs for a year, but ten years later, track nine is the one that is on your desert island discs. I’d like to be in a band that does that. And you’ve got to try to not be sensitive, and be brave enough to do it.
Dobbin: Silly question time. “Binge, marry, kill” for ArcTanGent headliners: let’s do 2024, Explosions in the Sky, Meshuggah and Mogwai.
Chris: I’m just going to throw out, just an idea – Meshuggah are just so scary, so we’ve got to be ahead of the curve – we should kill them, in self defence.
Ewen: I feel like I’ve binged Meshuggah already, so… You’ve got to marry Explosions in the Sky…
Chris: …I agree, they’re the marry band. That means, Mogwai…
Dobbin: Ok, way back to 2015. 65daysofstatic, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and Deafheaven.
Chris: This is brutal…
Rory: You can’t kill Dillinger! … I fancy marrying Dillinger.
Chris: Yeah, and I think Deafheaven is a binge, like, a wild night out.
Ewen: But we can’t kill 65daysofstatic!
Chris: I guess that’s how it works, process of elimination…
Check out our review of Megafauna here.