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Editors.
 Here I am thinking 9am is just a little early to be coherent enough to talk to a band on the other side of the world, but I at least had some warning. Outside The Custard Factory in Birmingham, interrupting a night seeing bands, Editors guitarist Chris Urbanowicz didn't even have that. "I had no idea this was going on, by the way," he begins apologetically; obviously surprised when our call is connected to his mobile.
Editors' debut album 'The Back Room' is an assured and very deliberate journey to the darker side of guitar pop. The Interpol comparisons are inevitable, and vocalist Tom Smith's baritone delivery means the ghost of Ian Curtis is never far away. Give the record some time, and what becomes apparent is the restrained energy just below the surface.
As Urbanowicz tells it, this energy can explode in the live setting. "The reason we formed a band was to do live gigs; so we're really intense, a bit aggressive, we kind of throw each other around a bit, and we sort of have a little bit of a brawl, get in the front row, slap people around and stuff... we just have a good time," he says. "There's a punk rock spirit to what we do and a lot of people don't see that from what we do on record, but it's another different dimension and it's like... we're a punk rock band live, and it's as simple as that. Even if we're not on the record."
Editors then, are a band that very much makes use of what the studio offers. "I think our producer Jim Abiss has done a wicked job. I spent a lot of time with him in the evenings with a bottle of Jameson's trying to work on the sounds and stuff, to make certain aspects of the record sound like nothing you've ever heard before, which is very tricky. I don't like my guitar to sound like a guitar; I like it to sound like a synthesiser or strings, or something strange like that. That was one of the main focuses on the album, to make it sound different from what you can normally hear on other stuff, if you know what I mean."
On stage, it's a different story. "I don't really give a shit, to be honest," he laughs. "When we play live it's more of a punk rock spirit, we like to take things down to its raw aggression and just bash it out how it is. We're not too worried about recreating what's on the album - we just take it back to its rawest form and go from there." That should see them win over new fans as they support Franz Ferdinand in the UK later this year.
Based in Birmingham, the band moved there from Stafford in Autumn 2003 ("It's a little town - a bit inbred. And there were no girls, and there was no music or anything happening, I just got a little bored"), and "...wrote the majority of the album in that year, though little bits were written beforehand. It was basically about a year that it was all done in. It was at that point where we had crappy jobs, and our escape was doing the band in the evening and whenever we had spare time, because we all lived together and we had time to work on new material and stuff. We have to change our writing technique for the next record, but it's something that we need to talk about."
Something else to talk about is the cricket, England having just gone 2-1 up when we spoke. "I didn't think you'd bring this up! I listened to the last Test in the van on the radio, and I sort of got told off because I ran into my house and watched Ashley Giles hit the winning runs as everyone else was unloading the rest of the van. I'm an Englishman; I'm a sceptic. We're English - we'll fuck it up, don't you worry. Cricket is the most English sport, and if there's one thing England can do, its fuck up a winning margin!"
Editors: listen to their music, but ignore their sports betting tips.
Wade Howland
 | 'The Back Room' is out now through Speak'n'Spell. |
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