All of my magical memories come from there…
Elbow’s Guy Garvey shares his childhood ‘forbidden place’ with Danny McElhinney
ETHE BAND COMES FIRST – ABOVE EVERYTHING ELSE – APART FROM MY FAMILY
lbow’s recently released 10th album Audio Vertigo gave the much-loved Lancastrians their fourth UK No.1. I’m willing to bet that such highlights as Balu, Lovers’ Leap and Her To The Earth will be as warmly received as old favourites One Day Like This and Grounds For Divorce when they take to the stage for the Summer Series of shows at Trinity College in July.
Singer Guy Garvey says of another album highlight, Things I’ve Been Telling Myself For Years, ‘We referenced the Beastie Boys, Sly And The Family Stone, The Meters, Jimi Hendrix, Arctic Monkeys, Queens Of The Stone Age, Marc Bolan, Tom Waits, Public Enemy and Alison Moyet… and that’s just the opening song.’ I tell him I also hear Scritti Politti in there. ‘Yeah… and all of our influences, all five of us all at once. Whatever anybody is into, it works,’ the 50 year old vocalist replies.
It is the sound of a band who were able to meet up to rehearse and write in the same room unlike for 2021’s Flying Dream 1 album, which was composed and recorded remotely during the pandemic. I suggest to him that being together again gave rise to the joyful, maximalist approach. ‘Maximalist? I’ve never heard that before. I shall be passing that off as my own!’ he laughs.
‘We wanted it to groove, to have hips and attitude. We wanted it to be dark and fun at the same time.’
Although Garvey is the best known member of the band due to his show on BBC Radio 6; acting in BBC TV’s Peter Kay’s Car Share, and presenting
Sky Arts’ music series Guy Garvey: From The Vaults, Elbow has never been a Garvey dictatorship benign or otherwise. Craig Potter, the band’s keyboard player has produced most of their albums since they formed in 1997. His brother Mark plays guitar and it is he and Craig who are pictured as kids boxing on the cover of Flying Dream 1. Bassist Pete Turner makes up the line-up
‘I’ve got such respect for them and we all have our different roles in Elbow. One of mine traditionally is to keep everybody buoyed and geed up. This time I wasn’t doing that as much as Pete or Craig were. We’ve changed the way we work each time. In terms of how I divide my time, it’s the band that comes first above everything else, apart from family, apart from my son… I wake up at seven for the wee man.’
Guy is married to actress Rachael Stirling, the daughter of Diana Rigg. Their son Jack has just turned seven. As our chat closes, he tells me that he has placed Jack
in the narrative of the beautiful closing song From The River.
‘In my mind as I was writing it, it was me singing to my son,’ he says. ‘I grew in post-industrial Lancashire in a housing estate… there was nine of us… There was a field next to the house, with a motorway beyond it and at the bottom of the field there was a ruined mill, all overgrown…
‘When you’re a kid you don’t see the f***ing waste of a post-industrial landscape, you see the site of a broken temple. It’s Angkor Wat.
‘All my magical first memories come from this place. Beyond that was a dip and you were out of earshot. When we would go out as kids, Mum would always say, “Stay within earshot”. So there was something forbidden about going down this dip and I return to it as a writer again and again.
‘I put Jack in that landscape. I have him running beyond that dip. I sing the line, “Double the farthest I’ve ever run”. When I came in with that line, one of the lads went, “Well, that’s not very hard, Guy!”’
Elbow play Trinity Summer Series on July 1. Audio Vertigo is out now.