Elbowing our way to the top
Elbow frontman Guy Garvey talks about how his experiences have shaped band’s new album
ELBOW are on course for their third straight No1 album today. Twenty two years after forming in Manchester, their eighth album was always going to top the charts.
It’s been that way since their fourth album, The Seldom Seen Kid, in 2008 enjoyed mainstream success and reached No5 thanks to hits Grounds for Divorce and One Day Like This.
The band’s new release Giants of All Sizes addresses political turmoil and personal sadness.
But singer Guy Garvey, 45, has admitted this one is different.
Whereas 2014’s The Take Off and Landing of Everything and 2017’s Little Fictions had lyrics trying to be positive through the dark times, the new album echoes how many of us are feeling.
In Guy’s words, it’s a “bruised record, concerned with mourning, dissatisfaction, unrest and death. An angry, old, blue lament that finds ultimate salvation in family, friends, the band and new life”.
Here Guy talks death, marriage and the birth of his first child. How hard was it to write and record an album when your dad and two close friends died while making it?
I’ve felt like a punchbag. I knew this record was going to be a dark beast but music is so strange because we really loved making it and getting our guitars back out.
He was 84, my dad, and I was with him when he received his terminal cancer diagnosis.
But even in his darkest moment, he was still so cool.
The doctor giving him the diagnosis was this brilliant young woman who was shaking and all tearful. My father took her by the hand and said: “I expected something like this and I’m glad it’s you telling me because you are a wonderful girl and you’re taking such good care of me.” An amazing man, my dad. The album opener Dexter & Sinister is about your two friends who died just over a week apart? The title comes from heraldry – Dexter (right) and Sinister (left) represent the two sides of a shield. They are the nick names given to any two figures on a crest. Jan Oldenberg and Scott Alexander – Manchester rock ‘n’ roll bar owners and both old and very dear friends of Elbow – died suddenly and cruelly of unrelated causes at the end of last year. I delivered two eulogies and carried two coffins in eight days. I imagined the Manchester coat of arms without its lion and its antelope. Your last album had you writing about falling in love and getting married. How is being a husband? When I see her (Rachael Stirling of Tipping the Velvet) in a play, like I did the other week, alongside my motherin-law (Diana Rigg), I forget I’m married to her. Then I remember and it’s wonderful. Marriage is wonderful. I never had any structure in my life before, so this is still new to me. You are also a dad to two-year-old Jack. How has that changed your life? Most of the music I listen to is from bathtime with Jack. I don’t just play him kiddie-friendly music – he’s into Bowie, Prince and he really loves a singer called Adrianne Lenker. But there’s some stuff where I go, ‘Where did he pick that up from?’ He’s really, really into Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles. Weightless, the last song on the new album, is about him? It’s about how my son being in the world helped me deal with my dad passing and how it made me realise I’m part of something and not the point of something.
It’s me talking to my son about my dad, who died
during the recording of the album. It’s about realising that the love I received from my dad is the love I give to Jack. Elbow has always done sad-butuplifting very well. But how do you feel about what’s going on in the UK now? What’s happening in Britain right now is just appalling.
The UK leaving the European Union will signal the end of the European experiment.
You have these feelings of shame while abroad and then feelings of hopelessness at home. But it will eventually get better, because that’s what happens – I remember the threat of the nuclear bomb. There didn’t seem a way out of that then. But there was. Giants of All Sizes is out now. Elbow play Edinburgh Usher Hall, April 11, 2020, and Glasgow O2 Academy, April 13 and 14, 2020. For info and tickets go to elbow.co.uk