Guy’s top 10
Following the announcement of Elbow’s new UK tour to coincide with their 10th album, singer Guy Garvey talks to Duncan Seaman about the band’s long rise to the top and his parallel career in broadcasting.
WITH a run of arena dates in his diary for next year, Elbow singer Guy Garvey is reminiscing with The Yorkshire Post about the kind of venues the band used to play back in their early days. Before their first album Asleep in the Back came out in 2001, he says, the four-piece from Bury would have been content to fill modest clubs. “In terms of our perceptions, they are different,” says the 49-year-old. “Filling venues like Leeds Cockpit and Sheffield Leadmill and The (Princess) Charlotte in Leicester was an enormous (task),” he says.
“I remember the first time people sang along to an Elbow song was at the Brighton Concorde 2,” he adds. “We reached the encore, and we’d come off and come on again although we didn’t really need to do that, but then we came off and literally hundreds of people started singing. We were going, ‘Did you hear that?’ We couldn’t believe it, that was extraordinary.
“Doves took us as their support, and we were such huge fans of theirs – and still are – but when we played the same venues the following year we couldn’t believe how small they felt. In our memories they were so enormous.
“Now we’ve got to do it all again, with these big rooms, the frisson of excitement coming towards these gigs is how can we put the best show on, can we fill this place with excitement, can we get people involved to the point where they’ll act like idiots? I’m already mulling it over.”
Given the intimate tone of many of Garvey’s lyrics, it is, he admits, a thrill to hear thousands of people singing them back to him. “You have to be careful because it also validates what you have written to hear people singing it," he says. “If whether or not I was any good was measured in people singing along then my feet would’ve left the floor a few years ago.”
He remembers once receiving a card from the playwright Alan Bennett, who it turns out, is a fan of the band. “He said ‘it must be good to have so many people singing your words back to you’, and I suppose by then I was already taking it for granted, but for somebody like him, such a great man of words, to envy that element of the job, it reminded me to keep in mind how special it is. It’s such a privilege.”
Elbow’s arena-filling status has been hard won. In the late 1990s, and again in 2005, they found themselves dropped amid record label shake-ups. It took their fourth album, The
Seldom Seen Kid, to transform their fortunes. Containing the songs One Day Like This and Grounds For Divorce, it sold a million copies and earned them the Mercury Prize and two Ivor Novello awards.
Garvey says a close bond, forged when they were teenagers, helped them to weather more difficult times. “Mark (Potter, Elbow’s guitarist) started the band and invited everybody into it. When Craig (Mark’s keyboard-playing brother) had produced six albums with the band, only then did Mark tell him their father Gareth wouldn’t let Mark use the car to transport his gear to the rehearsal room unless he let his little brother in the band. So it’s like we’re family, there’s no two ways about it,” he says.
“It’s not the usual slightly queasy thing when you hear a band say, ‘These are my brothers, man’; in fact we are literally closer than family. Gareth and Cilla Potter in particular have been so supportive from day one. I challenge any parent to do what they did, to give them their university fund for equipment.”
Elbow’s new album will be released next year. Although its title and release date is currently under wraps, Garvey believes it will “translate well” on stage. “I’m still working out what it is that we’ve done, but I know that it’s going to be fun to play live. We’ve made a punchy record which is full of groove and it’s also quite darkly humorous,” he says. The fact it’s their 10th studio record feels like a landmark, he adds. “It’s one of those things, it’s another achievement that once you’ve done it, it cannot be taken off you, like playing the Olympics closing ceremony or winning the Mercury (Prize), it’s done and it’s in history and that’s that. We got to 10 studio albums, that’s something I’m so enormously proud of – and we genuinely love each other and look after each other and most importantly we’re still alive.”
Thematically the new album finds Garvey at a different point in life in midddle-age. “I’m happily married (to the actress Rachael Stirling) and I’ve got a lovely little lad, but nobody wants to know how I’ve fixed the odd water feature by putting my thumb over the spout over and over again, so I’ve ended up pulling on past disastrous relationships and grinding parts of my character down and adding steroids.
“I’m very entertained when the frontmen of bands become maniacal, lonesome b ***** ds, and I imagine myself as one as the song gets darker and darker. And I’d say that’s probably true of a lot of the songs on the record – I’m taking truth and having fun with it, inflating it with steroids, so it gets pretty dark.”
Last year, Elbow performed at the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Concert outside Buckingham Palace. Garvey says “it was quite funny more than anything else” that the BBC had placed his band’s portable dressing room next to Duran Duran’s. It was, he says, “a mistake” because
“we really get on with them and we ended up having a massive laugh long before we went on”.
“Then you’ve got Hans Zimmer wandering around, Stephen Fry and George Ezra – you don’t get those people in the same place normally, so it was just really amusing, it was just fun. Then the aftershow was in the Palace and I think probably the most unusual thing about the whole day was if you wanted to go you had to wear trousers and shoes. To see the whole Elbow group in tuxedos was pretty wild. Actually, the hospitality at the Palace is brilliant; far from being stuffy, they’re really cool.”
Two months before the tour, Garvey will turn 50. He says it’s a milestone that he’s been anticipating for a while. “I’ve written so many songs looking forward to old age, now it’s actually looming I think, ‘Oh Christ!’" he jokes.
Aside from writing, recording and performing, Garvey continues to keep himself busy as a broadcaster. His Sky Arts show Guy Garvey: From The Vaults is due to return for a fifth series next year, but he credits its “very smart, funny, enterprising” director and producer Kerry Allison for doing all the donkey work sourcing archive music clips for the programme.
“She puts all those together and I take all the credit,” he says. The TV show, he says, is “like a visual representation” of what he plays on his long-running BBC 6 Music radio programme, Guy Garvey’s Finest Hour, now in its 16th year. He reflects: “It’s funny, I’m afforded my job on TV and radio because of what I do in Elbow, so I’ve never had to learn how to present. I think the fact that I make mistakes constantly, announce the wrong songs and that kind of thing, it never stopped John Peel, and people like that.”
Elbow play at First Direct Arena, Leeds on May 12 2024.