“Thank you for your patience, we’re sorry it’s taken this long to bring “Ellipses” to Australia but I can promise it’s going to be worth the wait.”
That’s what Biffy Clyro drummer Ben Johnston tells us as they prepare for a return to Australia in April for a 3 show run in support of their last album “Ellipsis” which has been their most successful album to date. Critics praised Ellipsis, nominated for “Best British Group” at the recent BRIT Awards as well as “Best British Group” and “Best Festival Headliners” at the NME Awards. We caught up Ben to discuss the upcoming tour and the success of Ellipsis.
Andrew: How’s your year been so far?
Ben: This year not much has happened I guess. So far we have been into the studio for I think 5 days and we did 15 songs of music that’s brand new stuff. So just keeping in shape and keep the juices flowing, 15 new songs but no vocals on there yet so that’s the work that’s been accomplished so far this year.
Andrew: Oh right so obviously you have a new album in the works for the future, maybe later this year or early next year some time?
Ben: Early next year I would of thought, we have some other things in the pipeline before then. We did an MTV unplugged recorded in London and that will be coming out I think May time and also we did a soundtrack for a movie which is really interesting because the soundtrack comes first and then the movie is shot kind of off the back of the music. It’s mostly kind of ad-libbed and off the cuff, a bit of a loose set and not very tight in terms of what happens in the storyline. So that’s really exciting for the fact that somebody is going to make a movie off the back of one of our albums and then after that we’ll do a new Biffy album number 8 so very busy.
Andrew: Yeah definitely and that is an interesting concept, to make a movie around your music like that. How did that idea come around?
Ben: Just the director Jamie [Adams], he’s a fan of ours. He’s done some movies before, where he’s showed up without a script and kind of points out more than anything. He just let’s people go off and points the camera and he usually makes amazing stuff. He’s just a fan of our band, he approached us and we just had a great idea or premise to do it backwards like that as opposed to being given something to write music to so it’s the other way around, it should be really exciting.
Andrew: Awesome, look forward to that! Obviously the big news for Aussie fans down here is that you guys are coming back in April so we’re excited that you are returning to the country again.
Ben: We can’t wait to be back, we always enjoy coming to Australia. I guess we’re sorry that the album has been out for so long before we’ve had a chance to come down there, we’ve just been so busy spending a lot of time in America over the past couple of years and we started finding a bit more success in Germany and Scandinavia and stuff like that. You guys certainly aren’t an afterthought, we’re just really glad that we get to come back on this campaign so it’s going to be awesome!
Andrew: Yeah I guess the last time that we had seen you was I suppose Soundwave a few years back, maybe 4 or 5 years ago right?
Ben: Yeah it was that long! I guess we did a couple of headline shows along with that but yeah basically we were there for Soundwave Festival. That was great fun, I really enjoyed that. Got to play with a lot of cool bands and kind of a relaxing schedule as well so we got to take in a lot of Oz which was cool. I’d like to do that again sometime but for the moment I prefer doing headline shows.
Andrew: That’s something I want to ask you as well because obviously there’s a big difference between a festival type show and doing a headlining show in clubs. Do you have a preference between the two types of shows at all?
Ben: I don’t know if I have a preference, they are both different animals. I guess with a headline show you know that everybody paid money for their ticket for Biffy Clyro and they’re on your side, they want you to do well and want to hear certain songs whereas a festival you are out there and you gotta bare your teeth and your back is against the wall when you’ve got everything to prove and nothing to lose. So they are very different, I relish both. I enjoy feeling the love from a Biffy Clyro headline show but I really like where you have to come out swinging at a festival and really force people to pay attention. I can’t choose, they’re both really fun to me.
Andrew: I prefer seeing a band in a more intimate club setting but I suppose there is something to be said about playing in front of a huge crowd at a festival.
Ben: Oh without a doubt and there’s so many people that most likely haven’t heard you before and you’ve got a real good chance to earn some new fans. Obviously headline shows, word of mouth spreads and more and more people come each time but at a festival, a big thing like Soundwave, you’ve got a chance to maybe gain a couple of thousand fans each day so it’s very cool.
Andrew: Now you mentioned that you’ve been busy since the latest album “Ellipsis” came out, from what I can see this album has been super successful for you guys and probably the most successful album to date. What’s the feeling between you guys regarding the reception and the critics feedback?
Ben: It’s been awesome! It was a big risk, at least we thought at the time what with changing producers and we spent a lot of time making this album and it doesn’t really sound like any of our other albums. Although it’s clearly still us playing, it has a different texture and feel to it coming down to mostly working with a new producer. So I guess we were pretty nervous with this one coming out, we managed to get number 1 with the last one and had great success with “Opposites”. So there was a lot of pressure on this one but we couldn’t be happier, like you say it’s been received well all over the world. We even got number 1 in Germany and we still can’t believe that it’s been doing this well in such far flung places. We couldn’t ask for anymore but it puts heaps of pressure for the next album [laughs].
Andrew: Well it does sound different to a lot of the stuff you’ve done before, certainly compard to the earlier albums you have. But it has a very dancey and lively feel to the songs, they must translate really well live then I guess.
Ben: Yeah they do. Possibly some of the songs on this album translate better live than any songs we’ve done before, a song like “Animal Style” off this record, it’s one of the songs that even in the studio we knew it was cool and good fun to play but it wasn’t a huge song and then you take it to a live situation and it just becomes this behemoth, it’s kind of a runaway train that song. There’s a few songs like that, a song like “Re-Arranged” which was recorded more or less in a R&B style with trap beats all over it. We’re using a lot of textures and more electronic stuff and not so much a band in a room type record. So it felt weird doing it but we’ve got to keep evolving, you have to keep yourself interested and motivated and I feel if a band keeps repeating themselves then how can they truly love what they’re doing. So you got to push the envelope and experiment a little bit.
Andrew: Sure obviously that’s important for you guys to keep things moving forward. Are we expecting any songs from the new album on the tour or do you like to mix the setlist up a little bit?
Ben: We’ll maybe throw one in but from Ellipsis, certainly but we won’t play anything brand new because that seems a bit crazy to come over having not played any songs from Ellipsis but start playing songs from an album that hasn’t come out yet! But yeah the set will be heavy with Ellipsis for sure and then generally after that we try and play at least 1 or 2 from every other album if we can, if time allows. I think we’ll play quite a long set in Sydney just because it’s been a while and there’s a lot of people who want to hear, there’s 7 albums worth of stuff there so I think we’ll try and play for an hour and a half and try and get a song from every album on there.
Andrew: That’s probably getting more difficult with each album, to put together a setlist.
Ben: [laughs] Yeah it’s getting really tough because you’ve got all these staples like “Who’s Got A Match?” off “Puzzle” so it’s a little bit of a problem. We can’t not play these songs, there are instances where we have to not play them and the set was super weird and you go out and ask people afterwards and everyone says it’s fine and sounded great and then you mention you haven’t played a certain song and, ‘Oh shit I hadn’t noticed!’ But that’s a good sign that we can do that but it’s definitely getting tough man, there’s singles that we’re not playing that did well when they came out as singles and we haven’t played them simply because we don’t have time. I guess we don’t want to do a Bruce Springsteen yet and play for 3 hours, that will happen in the future!
Andrew: Do you like to change the setlist from night to night or is it a rigid sort of thing when you go out on tour?
Ben: Not rigid but not entirely soft either. We’ll practice the set a few times before we head out on the road and maybe the first night if it’s not quite right we’ll tinker with it a little bit here and there and then get the main staple of the set locked down and then we may swap 1 or 2 songs a couple of nights just to keep us on our toes. Quite often in America and Europe a lot of kids will follow us around and you always want to do something nice for them, they’re putting their hands in their pockets to come to like 4 or 5 different cities so we like to throw in a different song in for them and look up on twitter and see what they want to hear and we’ll change it up a little bit.
Andrew: Awesome looking forward to all that then. So take us back to the very beginning for you personally when you were younger, what kind of bands were you listening to when you first started getting into music?
Ben: As a kid I was brought up listening to the Beatles I guess, around my house. My parents were musical, my dad’s a guitarist and there was always vinyl on. There was always Beatles stuff and Steely Dan, Dire Straits, lot of good melodic musical stuff and then from there personally I got into Guns N’ Roses for a bit and then it was Nirvana and Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and then Silverchair were one of my favorite bands back then. We were the only kids in Scotland that knew about Silverchair but we were crazy for that band, I think I heard Silverchair before I heard Black Sabbath. I had no idea Silverchair were ripping off Black Sabbath [laughs]. I loved that band, I love “Frogstomp” and then we used to cover songs at that time and we covered “Shade” when we were at school. So all that stuff we loved and then we moved onto I guess more underground American stuff like Karate and Braid, The Vehicle Birth, Burning Airline, The Box, the list goes on and on. It’s mostly been American through the years but there’s been the Aussie thing obviously and kiwi bands but apart from that it was mainly American, we didn’t like the British stuff like Oasis or Blur or any of those bands at the time but now I kind of appreciate how good they were and how good of a songwriter Noel Gallagher is. I also forgot to mention the proggy phase we went through like Rush and Yes and Dillinger Escape Plan and anything that took left turns.
Andrew: Was there a particular band or musician that sparked the idea that maybe you wanted to play music?
Ben: That would of been Nirvana because I think even though I liked Guns N’ Roses and those guys were all virtuosos on their instruments, Axl had a voice that you could never be like Axl and you could never play like Slash and I couldn’t be like Matt Sorum. And then I guess we all saw Nirvana on the MTV awards or something like that, I think they were playing “Aneurysm” and it just seemed achievable like something that we could do. It didn’t sound like people that were just incredible on their instruments, it sounded like people making everybody angstey noise and we thought we could do it! So then we started writing songs and before you knew it we were writing songs every week and it just got started from there I guess.
Andrew: Yeah they were one of those bands that were kind of relatable not just from the lyrics but just as a young fan watching them thinking, ‘That’s something that I could do’ so I know exactly what you mean. They were so inspirational for so many bands that it doesn’t surprise me that you name drop them as they were such a huge band at that time. So once you got into playing music professionally, was there anyone else that inspired you to become better at the job?
Ben: I would say Rush is a band who were also a 3 piece but if you listen to their records, you would never know that band was a 3 piece playing keyboards with their feet and stuff which was mental. And Neil Peart on the drums is just mind blowing all over that kit, overplaying it probably at points but that inspired me to overplay for me as well for the first 3 albums where I’m way too busy! But the simplicity and power of Nirvana, you can mix that with bands like Rush and Dillinger Escape Plan or Mars Volta and that sort of stuff, that’s kind of where we live. So those bands if you put them together you kind of end up in the ballpark of Biffy I guess.
TOUR DATES
Friday 27th April Forum Theatre, Melbourne
Sunday 29th Eatons Hill, Brisbane
Monday 30th April Enmore Theatre, Sydney
Tickets – www.xiiitouring.com
