Leeds Student chatted to ex-Leeds Uni students Alt-j!

 

Have you finally recovered from Reading and Leeds last weekend? I don’t feel like I have just yet…

Yeah just about, it was pretty crazy, it was all so overwhelming, especially thinking that so many people came to see us and the tent was pretty much packed out. It was so much fun though. I’d have to say Reading was a bit better than Leeds, the crowd were absolutely mental. It was the first time we’ve played at Reading festival as well, so it was more exciting. I also got pretty drunk at Reading and went a bit overboard, so I guess I was a bit hungover and more miserable when we played at Leeds.

 

How did you come to give yourselves the name?

It kind of happened by accident. At first we had a few different names and at one time we were called ‘Films’, then when we played at Live at Leeds, the organisers ending up getting us mixed up with an American band called ‘The Films’ in the programme, so people were turning up to see us, thinking that we were them. It was a shame, but our management told us that we should really change our name while we still could, we didn’t have an album out back then or anything, so I suppose it was the right move before we got more well-known, and would risk confusing even more people. We struggled to think of a name at first but then we were kind of messing around on a laptop and just came up with the symbol and thought Alt-j sounded like a pretty cool band name, there’s not really anything meaningful about it.

 

You’ve said that you don’t want to define yourselves with a genre, in that case, how would you persuade people that Alt-J are the band to be listening to at the moment?

Well I suppose the fact that we just make the kind of music that we want to make and the type of music we like the sound of. If we say a band that we’re like, or restrict ourselves to a single genre, then you have to deliver to that, even if it’s not what you want, and we don’t want that as a band. Sometimes the fact that we’re like that as a band, in itself, is a way of persuading people to listen to us. If you give them a list of influences that come from everywhere and every genre, then there’s something for everyone and people seem more intrigued by you as a band. Lots of people also think they will check it out, in a sort of ‘could be hilarious’ way, people do think we make weird music, but we made the music that we wanted to.

 

Have you had the success you’d wished for with the album?

Definitely, we hoped it would do well but at the same time we weren’t too worried, because we’d done what we wanted to do, and we enjoyed doing it. Luckily it went as far as it did, which was really humbling.

 

The BBC seem to have been pretty supportive in terms of giving you radio play, have you ever been lucky enough to just turn on the radio and hear one of your songs without warning?

I did recently actually! Its so exciting and really weird when it happens. I didn’t know it would be on and didn’t push for it to be on, but I turned on the radio and it was just there, its so strange to think that people are talking about us enough for our songs to be played on Radio 1. Its great that people are saying nice things about the tracks too, in a way it makes sense that we worked so hard at everything and its worked out for the better, but its still so surreal.

 

I know you met at Leeds University when you were studying, but how did you actually meet, were you all on the same course?

Kind of… 3 of us did Fine Art and Gus did English Lit. Joe lived with him in halls and said that we should go over because he had some songs written, so I took my drums over and listened, and it was actually all really amazing stuff. I didn’t really expect it to be honest, but even at such a basic stage, it was great. I agreed to sort of be in a band and we ended up meeting up 2/3 times a week and we’d play for ages. We’d tend to finish uni at 5ish and then play until about midnight.

 

Did your degrees end up becoming second to the band?

In a way, yeah, but it still worked and we still worked pretty hard towards our degrees because we loved it. I went to uni to do Art because I loved it and wanted to work hard at it, so I still tried hard with my uni work, even though I was loving what was going on with the band. It worked out alright anyway because Gwil went on his year abroad when we were going into our final years of uni, we still gigged, but it was a really slow year, playing without him, so that gave us a bit more time to focus on uni as well.

 

When you were doing lots of gigs when you’d first started out as a band, where was your favourite place to play?

Well the first gig we ever played was in Joe and Gwil’s living room to our friends. It was a great first gig, they had a house in Hyde Park, which had a massive living room, and we played in there, the room was really packed and we were all shitting it about playing in front of our friends, but they all loved it. Our first proper gig in Leeds was at HiFi, I think. Ones at HiFi were always really memorable anyway. We also played at smaller venues like The Library, but we were never really part of any scene in Leeds. I guess our favourite Leeds venue to play at would probably be Brudenell Social Club.

 

Have any particular gigs you’ve done since made you feel like you’ve really made it as a group? Has there been a particular live performance that you’ve been proud of?

Pretty much all of our tour actually. We were touring solidly, playing in Japan, USA, all across Europe and especially playing in the US where pretty much every night was sold out, to manage that before our album was even out, that was pretty amazing. Last summer we played at a festival in the south of France for upcoming bands, it was the first time we’d ever played abroad and that was kind of the point when we realised that the band must be doing pretty well. Also, playing at Maida Vale for BBC introducing was amazing. Reading last weekend too, it was probably one of the most important days of the year, it showed we had status as a band and the whole industry was watching us.

 

What are your plans for the rest of the year?

We’ll be touring even more. We go to Italy on Saturday, then Holland, then the US for a month, then Australia, then we’ll be back in Europe and then the UK for a headline tour. We’re going to be involved in a lot more DJ sets as well as hopefully writing some music for films and directing our own short films. As for new music, it’s really difficult to write when you’re on the road, maybe we will be focusing on that more next year when we’ve finished touring.