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Doves.
 It has been a long, hard month for Doves' Andy Williams. Eleven days away from releasing their third studio album, Doves are doing more promotional chores than ever before. By the time the Australian interviews had come around, Williams was already nursing a bad cold: and that's before his band starts rehearsals for their first big UK tour of the year. "I've just gone and gotten a Lemsip, so it's not too bad," he explains, suffering quietly.
However, Williams is elated by the positive feedback so far. "Thank God! It'll keep us out of a day job for a while more, hopefully. It's been a really good reaction, the reviews have been really good."
The biography accompanying the record refers to the band's origins, claiming that an album like 'Some Cities' could only have been dreamt up in the north of England. Williams agrees. "I'm sure that where everyone's from is a factor. It's your surroundings. Your environment does affect you. I mean, for instance Manchester [pronounced Munch-tar] and Liverpool are only thirty miles apart, but it's almost a different country. Not really in attitude, because they're great people, but because they're a port, and we're inland, there's been different influences. So I suppose people could say that Liverpool bands have a particular sound, although there are bands that go totally contrary to that, and Manchester is the same. But we grew up in the 'eighties, in Manchester, and bands like The Smiths and New Order definitely had a big influence on us. It wasn't just those bands, though, we were listening to bands all over the world."
For those of you that don't know, the Doves story starts well before the release of their superb 'Lost Souls' in 2000. In fact, throughout the 'nineties the trio were better known as the dance act Sub Sub. Williams tells me that there's still a lot of their dance heritage in the music they are making today. "The production values we had in Sub Sub we've all taken over to Doves. We're all very much obsessed with how records sound sonically and that goes right back to our background. We're never interested to have just a vocal and a guitar, we always want to have strange and hypnotic sounds going on."
Seeing as the worlds of dance and indie music are so polarised, I ask whether it is difficult to maintain credibility travelling from one universe to another. "I don't think there should be any boundaries. There are only ever boundaries between good and bad music. But there's good music in everything, I don't think you should ever cut yourself off from anything. Especially if you're a musician, I think you should be open to as many different types of music as you can."
There are many different types of music all featured on their latest album - for example, on a few tracks, notably centrepiece The Storm, there seems to be quite a classical influence. "We love orchestration, we do love classical music but no-one's ever studied classical orchestration, we wouldn't know where to begin. That song actually started out life as a sample, which we ended up recreating. So it's always had that vibe, that kind of orchestral sound... I think it's important for us to get a very different sound on each song, to make an album interesting."
There's certainly another sound filtering through first single Black And White Town, and apparently I'm not the only one to mention that it's a dead ringer for Martha and the Vandellas' 'sixties hit, Heatwave. "That was not a conscious thing, really. When someone actually mentioned it, we were like, 'oh, shit...'" he laughs. "We have this music up here, northern soul; it's like American motown and stuff, [and] we've never actually done it before. So... then someone in the studio said it had a kind of a Heatwave vibe about it. But that's cool, you know! It is different, but that's just the vibe it captures. No one's got a patent for the rhythm!"
And finally, what are the chances of seeing Doves in Adelaide when they tour the country this coming winter? "We'll go wherever we're offered. If someone said, 'Do you want to go to Adelaide?' We'd go, 'Yeah, definitely!' Quite often it's a financial thing, it's whether or not they think they can get enough people to the gig to make it financially viable. We'd love to come, so maybe this time... Maybe..."
Ben Revi
 | 'Some Cities' is out now through EMI. |
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